?

 
200-plus years of colonialism in 3.5 minutes, “The data refers to the evolution of the top 4 maritime empires of the XIX and XX centuries by extent. The visual emphasis is on their decline.”

 
(via Seed, via 3 Quarks Daily)

This guy is like the Christian Bale of Winnebago sales. NSFW if you work in a rectory. GET THE F*** OUT OF HERE YOU FLIES!

 
“Bloody, barbaric, free-for-all,” or the must-see ticket for the 2012 London Olympics?  Welcome to the wonderful and frightening world of Buzkashi, a sport which, thanks to our prior scrubbing of the Taliban from Afghanistan, is now bigger than ever:

Is the world ready for a sport played with a headless goat carcass?  Haji Abdul Rashid thinks it is and has big plans: corporate sponsors, television rights and beyond.  “We want it to become an Olympic sport,” says Rashid, who heads the Buzkashi Federation.

To understand how ambitious ?

Der Spiegel Online reports on the upcoming trial of a German spy who betrayed state secrets to his lover. The whole thing begs to be made into a movie, and we’re not even fully into the second act yet. Serious drama:

An explosive trial about to start in Munich involves a spy accused of betraying state secrets to his gay lover. It promises to expose the shadowy world of Germany’s foreign intelligence and may end up damaging the service…

The defendants are Anton K., a BND agent for many years, and his interpreter. The trial revolves around money and the betrayal of secrets. Love, sex and a betrayed wife are also part of the checkered tale, which takes place against the seedy backdrop of Kosovo’s criminal underworld. In other words, the case that the federal prosecutor general is now preparing is the stuff of a larger-than-life drama, the sort of material that would normally be found in the movies or in bestsellers.

While the outcome of the trial remains uncertain, it is already clear that there will be at least one loser: the BND. If the prosecution wins its case, the agency will face the embarrassment of having to admit that one of its agents was out of control for years, and that a career spy gave away state secrets in the height of passion while on assignment in Kosovo. But an acquittal would be just as embarrassing for the agency, because it would show that the BND had expended tremendous resources pursuing one of its employees.

(Der Spiegel: Trial of Gay Spy Threatens to Embarrass German Intelligence)

Iceberg Slim is well-known as the literary progenitor of gangster rap (Ice-T, Ice Cube and Jay-Z have all listed him as a formative influence), mostly for his groundbreaking autobiography Pimp. Check out this great tribute to Slim by Josh Alan Friedman:

Like the painter Grandma Moses, Iceberg Slim was reborn an artist after age 40. His third, and harshest prison sentence - 10 months in steel solitary at the Cook County House of Corrections - finally crushed the pimp right out of him. Vilifying past predatory values, he exorcised his demons into folklore, leaving a seven-book legacy. Pimp: The Story of My Life, contained bookend warnings against the life. But Iceberg’s masterpiece only bolstered pimp liberation amidst the blaxploitation movie craze. In Times Square, for instance, a hundred fur-coated Superflys lorded over a thousand streetwalkers, taking renegade control of 8th Avenue. For them, Pimp declassified the sorcery of whore control, became a textbook for wannabe’s, and lent ethnic pride to the hideous profession.

Pimp still holds as perhaps the greatest chronicle ever written on male-female relations. In the flush of literary success, white feminist-journalist types sought out interviews like intellectual groupies. Pimp philosophy, Iceberg believed, might be adapted to mainstream relationships. “My theory is that some quantum of pimp in every man would perhaps enhance his approach to women,” he told the Washington Post. “Because I think it’s a truism that women gravitate to a man who can at least flash transient evidence of heelism. . . Women are prone to masochism, anyway. I think if you are able to manufacture a bit of ‘heelism’ in your nature and give them a sense of insecurity as to whether some voluptuous rival might come along and steal you, then you are a treasured jewel.”

I read Pimp when I was 13. I’m not sure it exactly uh helped my skills with women, but it certainly gave me a new vocabulary to irritate my friends with.

However, nothing compares to Slim’s readings of his own work on the album Reflections. Hearing Iceberg Slim’s renditions of key points in his life?

Pope Benedictus
 

Lady Di
 

Dalai Lama
 
From Lost At E Minor:

The latest innovation in the world of the puppet toys are the unsettling dolls of celebrities that are manufactured by the German company ?ج

 
Naughty WTF video from French electronic band Flairs. Ummm… Err…

Truckers Delight animated video clip directed by newcomer wunderkid J?ɬ

I hear the sound of heads exploding all across the vaunted land of Nerddom. Porn star and Darklord of the IXth Dimension Sasha Grey is set to star as Molly Millions in a six hour stage production of Neuromancer at the New Museum in NYC. R. U. Sirius at h+ Magazine says:

It’s a play… no it’s a reading… no it’s… hard to tell.  But on November 22, from noon to 6 pm, the New Museum in NYC is doing some sort of cool six hour Neuromancer thing that they describe thusly:

“An ambitious new work by Brody Condon, Case is a contemporary adaptation of the classic cyberpunk novel Neuromancer by William Gibson. Combining Gibson?

 
If you live or find yourself in Paris this holiday season, you must visit the first big Paris show of artist Paul Laffoley at the Palais de Tokyo through Jan 17, 2010. There is also a new Laffoley poster from the event and it’s amazing, I got mine in the mail yesterday. Proceeds from the poster sales are 100% dedicated to the costs of completing photography and printing of the Paul Laffoley Catalogue Raisonne currently being put together by Douglas Walla at Kent Gallery in New York. There is a lot of work so it’s a huge undertaking that will be spread across several volumes. I think it’s what’s needed before the public at large finally catches on about what a genius we have in our midst.

You can buy a Paul Laffoley poster here. Makes a great Christmas present!

Paul Laffoley in Paris.

The gallery at Palais de Tokyo.