If you haven’t seen this incredible Thai ad for a push-up bra yet, you’re in for a trick and a treat. A totally unexpected and clever marketing approach which I will not explain in detail because… well, you just gotta watch it!
Measuring 1,200 feet (366 meters) in diameter, I had to ask myself: “What in the goddamned hell is a giant pentagram doing in an isolated area of Kazakhstan?”
Pretty much only viewable on Google Maps, archaeologist Emma Usmanova gets down to the nitty gritty and explains why this inexplicable pentagram isn’t really all that inexplicable after all. Via LiveScience:
It is the outline of a park made in the form of a star,” Usmanova told LiveScience. The star was a popular symbol during the Soviet era (Kazakhstan was a part of the former Soviet Union until its dissolution in 1991). Stars were often used throughout the Soviet Union to decorate building facades, flags and monuments. (Indeed, several online comments had suggested the site is an abandoned Soviet-era campground.)
The star in the lakeside park is marked by roadways that are now lined with trees, Usmanova explained, which make the star shape even more distinct in aerial photos. Additional images of the site, now abandoned and overgrown with weeds, can be seen at englishrussia.com.
Boo hoo! I was really hoping for a super crazy Kazakhstani devil worshipping story!
Via Zee News
Even if you’re not a Doctor Who fan, you have probably by now, been reminded at least 100 times today alone that Peter Capaldi has been cast as the new Doctor. The news is on every goddamned website and blog, so I won’t bore you with it.
What I will show you though, is a fabulous fanmade trailer featuring Peter Capaldi in his career-making role as the political “fixer” “Malcolm Tucker” from The Thick of It recast as a rather foul-mouthed Doctor.
It works, IMO. It works great!
Below, a Malcolm Tucker “best of” compilation from The Thick of It:
Yes, a “fatberg,” which is new to my vocabulary and the sorta thing that needs to be seen to be believed. What is a “fatberg” you ask? Well, it’s wrongly flushed fatty foods, wet wipes, sanitary napkins etc. that form into grotesque giant blob monsters in sewers.
Gordon Hailwood, waste contracts supervisor for Thames Water said:
“While we’ve removed greater volumes of fat from under central London in the past, we’ve never seen a single, congealed lump of lard this big clogging our sewers before.
“Given we’ve got the biggest sewers and this is the biggest fatberg we’ve encountered, we reckon it has to be the biggest such berg in British history.
“The sewer was almost completely clogged with over 15 tonnes of fat. If we hadn’t discovered it in time, raw sewage could have started spurting out of manholes across the whole of Kingston.
Luckily part of the fatberg was successfully removed. However, serious damage was done to the sewers and it will probably take over six weeks for the repairs to be completed.
Gee whiz, talk about a clogged artery…
Via Nerdcore
Shaker Aamer is a Saudi citizen who was living in South London with his British wife and children up until he was imprisoned in Guantánamo Bay detention camp eleven years ago. He was cleared for release in 2007 and has yet to be even charged with a crime. Despite having worked as a translator for the U.S. Army during the Persian Gulf War, the US has refused to send him back to the UK, despite his requested delivery multiple times. There are also concerns the US may deport him to Saudi Arabia instead of back to his family in England. Aamer has recently reported sexual assault from prison guards and regular violence. He has been on a hunger strike for the past four months.
PJ Harvey makes no bones about deromanticizing the glories of war. Her 2011 album, Let England Shake was a brutally disheartening examination of Britain during wartime—she actually did extensive research on the Gallipoli Campaign and sought out first-hand accounts of soldiers and civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan for inspiration. It’s one thing to speak on the horrors of war (even the most bloodthirsty of hawks do that) and quite another to object to a specific political injustice in defiance of powerful institutions.
Aamer’s lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith, told The Guardian:
“We hope people listen to this song and think about Shaker Aamer’s plight: detained for 11 years, without charge or trial – despite having been cleared for release by both Bush and Obama.”
“The UK government must do everything it can to bring Shaker back home to his wife and kids in London, where he belongs. PJ Harvey has written a wonderful song – I know Shaker will be deeply moved by it, and I only hope that, with the support of the public, he will one day be able to listen to it in freedom.”
PJ Harvey was recently awarded an MBE on the Queen’s Birthday Honours list.
Aamer with daughter, Johninh, and son Michael. He has two other children, one of whom, born after his detainment, he has not met.
Via The Guardian
I’m assuming this news telecast of a mysterious pigeon sportin’—with what looks like—a stylish tiny hard hat is from Russia. I don’t know. I can only hope he or she—the pigeon, that is—makes an appearance in America. Because, well, you can never have enough of pigeons wearing tiny hard hats.
Via Arbroath
18-year-old Kendra Gill (center above), a contestant in the upcoming Miss Utah beauty pageant was nabbed by Salt Lake County authenticates on Saturday after admitting to participating in a nihilistic joyride and helping to make and throw makeshift explosives at people and houses.
FOX 13 TV reported that beauty queen Gill—recently crowned “Miss Riverton” and given a $2000 college scholarship—and three of her friends bought household chemicals, aluminum foil and plastic bottles at Wal-Mart to make the make the crude bombs.
“We call them chemical reaction bombs,” said Captain Clint Mecham with Unified Fire Authority. “They’re a cocktail of reactive chemicals, that when they react with each other and when you put that large volume of gas in a closed container, it ruptures the container and creates an explosion.”
Late Friday night, cops found several water bottles with aluminum fragments and chemical residue at two homes near 13800 South and 4100 West. The suspects reportedly threw these homemade bombs onto driveways then sped off.
“All of us were surprised when we not only had one occurrence but up to 10 occurrences of this happening,” Mecham said. “They were actually throwing these at people with the intent to cause harm, with the intent to cause harm to either people or property: This goes well beyond a teenage prank.”
And even if they don’t get charged with felonies (that’s up to the District Attorney), there’s the jail time, coming up with bail, criminal records, Internet infamy, humiliation for their families and never being able to get a job—let alone winning another beauty contest—and that kind of stuff to worry about!
Popular YouTube vlogger Boogie‘s heartfelt speech about what’s more important in life: quantity (years lived) or quality?
This isn’t preachy or anything like that, just one man’s sincere, no bullshit, straight-to-the-point thoughts about his life now that he’s pushing 40. Worth your time.
h/t reddit
Before “Jessie’s Girl” and General Hospital, there was Zoot. Zoot was a bubblegum pop band in Melbourne, Australia from 1965-1971 that included bass player Beeb Birtles (later of The Little River Band), singer and guitarist Daryl Cotton, and future actor and teen idol Rick Springfield, then called “Ricky,” who replaced guitarist Roger Hicks in 1969. Early in their career they wore head-to-toe pink satin, which apparently caused much homophobic harassment to be directed their way throughout Australia. Girls loved them.
In 1970 they ditched their pink Zoot suits and pop music in favor of hard rock and a tougher image. This cover of “Eleanor Rigby” reached #4 in Australia in 1971, was voted Best Single in the Australian Acts category in in Go-Set, the country’s first pop music newspaper, and resulted in Ricky being voted Best Guitarist (he was #2 in 1970).
Of course, as soon as he was tapped for a solo career, Springfield was marketed as a teenybopper idol once again. Obviously his musical career would have taken a much different path had he resembled Angus Young or Lemmy Kilmister.
Nelow. Zoot performing “Eleanor Rigby” on Australian TV in 1971:
Ah, this is a good one. But, before we dive deep down into this wondrous legend, let’s get one thing straight: In the Jazz community no one calls Louis Armstrong “Satchmo.” It’s Pops, got it? You know, as in the local friendly neighborhood patriarch and titular head of the Jazz family. Pops
As for this legend, it should be noted that, like all legends, little details that were not initially explained or transmitted may get explained, or embellished, in later tellings. These latter variations may or may not have much to do with what actually happened, but tracing the sources of this particular legend, it’s pretty likely that something did actually happen, and that something is pretty hilarious.
As the legend goes, some time in the early 1950s, Louis Armstrong and Vice President Richard M. Nixon were riding the same plane together back to the US from Japan (this seems to be the most plausible version). Apparently, Nixon was a big Armstrong fan and noticed the musical great struggling with a number of heavy cases including, of course, that of his trumpet. Nixon asked Pops if there was anything he could do to help him.
Armstrong reportedly said something like, “Oh that would be a great help, because you know, I’m starting to get pretty old. Do you think you could carry my trumpet case? It’s quite heavy.” So Armstrong gave Nixon his trumpet to carry and, since it was with the well-known and easily identifiable jowly Richard Nixon, Vice President of the United States of America, Nixon and the case sailed right through customs. (There are variations of the tale that make the destination a European country and also Russia, but apparently Armstrong never played there)
Now unbeknownst to Nixon, the trumpet case he was carrying… also contained Pops’ stash. Armstrong was, of course, a “viper”—a lifelong smoker of “the gage,” as they called it back then (and if it’s not obvious, we’re talking about marijuana here).
I heard this through my own father who had in turn heard it from the cats in Armstrong’s band during a NYC run he played in Pops’ band circa 1970. Since my own pop wasn’t a regular, he didn’t hear the story from Armstrong himself, but some of the older regulars told him that Pops relished telling the story and that they’d heard it it many, many times over the years.
As far as I’m concerned that’s just about enough for me to believe it, but some web-based clicking doesn’t reveal a lot in the way of published articles or stories. Indeed, there are lots of different versions of the story that put the event in Paris, Ghana, London, Russia and elsewhere. But stumbling across the “Snopes” message board, there seems to be a fairly reliable source for the story from the late Arvell Shaw, who was in Armstrong’s band in the late 40s and early 50s.
Given Pops’ legendary love of weed, this seems not only plausible but quite likely.
What is equally fascinating is that there may have been a second act to this story…
In 1954 (after the drug mule event), Armstrong’s wife Lucille was busted for cannabis possession. Having returned from Japan, she was in a beachfront hotel room in Waikiki when the cops burst in, searched the place, and carted her—and what was almost certainly Pops’ pot stash—off to jail. Clearly, a tip-off had occurred. Although Lucille Armstrong was eventually released and ordered to pay just a $200 fine, this prompted Pops to write a stunning letter to his manager about getting hassled for ganja:
“Mr. Glaser, you must see to it that I have special permission to smoke all the reefers that I want to when I want or I will just have to put this horn down, that’s all, I can gladly vouch for a nice, fat stick of gage, which relaxes my nerves, if I have any ... I can’t afford to be ... tense, fearing that any minute I’m going to be arrested, brought to jail for a silly little minor thing like marijuana.”...
“Can you imagine anyone giving Lucille all of those headaches and grief over a mere small pittance such as gage, something that grows out in the backyard among the chickens and so forth,” Louis emoted in his letter to Glaser. “I just won’t carry on with such fear over nothing and I don’t intend to ever stop smoking it, not as long as it grows. And there is no one on this earth that can ever stop it all from growing. No one but Jesus – and he wouldn’t dare. Because he feels the same way that I do about it…. Gage ain’t nothin’ but medicine,”
(You can find more details about the bust here...I linked to the cached version because there seems to be some spamware in the ‘real’ one.)
So the obvious question here is, who tipped off the cops in Hawaii? Did, somehow, the Vice President hear about his having been used to move Pops’ weed stash and then had one of his gang phone in a “tip”? That kind of petty revenge is certainly not outside the scope of Nixon’s character. I guess we’ll never know for sure if Tricky Dicky behind this, so deem this “act two” speculative.
But the “drug mule” bit? I’d wager this is true. It’s simply too outlandish not to be: Louis Armstrong got Richard Nixon to move his pot stash across an international border—and that alone deserves all the respect we post-modern ironic types can muster.