On September 19th, 1973, Gram Parsons, Flying Burrito Brother co-founder, briefly member of The Byrds and one of the founders of “country rock” died in a desert motel room in the Joshua Tree Inn at the age of 26.
Below, one of the very few clips you can find of the Flying Burrito Brothers with Parsons. Even if they are just lip-synching, it’s still great to watch him in action.
“Faces” from Vimeo user Arturo. This is totally badass. Tons of potential here.
Real-time face substitution. Made with Kyle McDonald’s ofxFacetracker + Jason Saragih’s facetracker library, a C/C++ API for real time generic non-rigid face alignment and tracking.
Inspired by Kevin Atkinson’s image clone code.
I like when he goes from being Michael Jackson to Dali to Obama at the end. That’s the best part.
Via The Daily What
David Lewis, a (primarily) Washington DC-based anti-abortion lobbyist, is challenging Speaker John Boehner in the Republican primary of Ohio’s 8th Congressional District.
“What made me want to run against Speaker Bohener, was that I found out that his words were empty rhetoric,” the evangelical Christian activist said. “I want to let the voters have an alternate choice, because it was completely in Speaker Boehner’s power to de-fund ‘Obamacare’ and Planned Parenthood.”
Lewis called Planned Parenthood “the largest killer of unborn babies in America.”
“I’m not delusional. I don’t know if I have a chance at beating the Speaker of the House,” Lewis said Friday. “But what I can do is show the Ohio voters that Boehner has a box full of empty rhetoric. He doesn’t really vote for his convictions. He’s an establishment Republican. He doesn’t believe in the tea party. He doesn’t really believe in the pro-life issues.”
He also told the Cincinnati Enquirer: “There is a saying that people will not reject abortion until people see abortion” and now RightWing Watch is reporting that Lewis is a “plant” in cahoots with Randall “Look at Me!” Terry, founder of the Operation Rescue organization. Terry, whose 15 minutes were up in 1991, is a man so desperate to have the media’s attention on him again that he’s planning to run against Obama in order to show aborted fetuses on television:
Back in 2010, anti-choice zealot Randall Terry discovered that he could get graphic anti-abortion ads to air on television by exploiting a loophole that prohibits broadcasters from refusing to run or censor campaign ads. As such, he has been recruiting other anti-choice candidates to run for office, not because they have a chance to win, but simply as a means to air graphic ads on television. In fact, Terry himself is running his own primary challenge against President Obama for the same purpose.
Lewis quit his job last year to become a full-time anti-choice activist and admits that he has no chance of actually beating Boehner ... in fact, he doesn’t even live in the correct district.
Confusing isn’t it? So far most of the reporting has focused on Lewis being a Tea party candidate, but it seems that’s not quite accurate (although who could have told the difference???). Is this an act of far Reich political cannibalism… or what? You can see one of his goofy, yet disturbing, ads below:
Since I couldn’t have a dog when I was a child, it became my ambition to become a werewolf. Vampires were dull and foolishly superstitious. Frankentstein’s monster whiney and self-pitying. Though the Invisible Man appealed, he was too cracked and not much company. So, it was the werewolf that clicked, for here was a creature driven by things that could not be so easily explained.
This fascination led me to Oliver Reed and The Curse of the Werewolf. I’d already seen Henry Hull in The Werewolf of London, which was running as favorite, putting Lon Chaney jnr’s The Wolfman into second, that was, of course, until I saw Reed possessed by the cast of a silver moon.
It was a metaphor I liked - life usurped by genetic code, oddly confirming Philip Larkin’s belief we are but dilutions of dilution. In its way it was an easy metaphor for Reed, that instinctual, soft-eyed actor possessed by a brilliant talent and a greater thirst for life.
There was great sense of joy about Reed, no matter how drunk or sober he always exhibited a relentless joy for living. It may have damaged his career, and limited his talents, but it was part of who he was - like Leon Corledo or Larry Talbot and lycanthropy. It made him always worth watching, even in his shittiest of films, for Reed was a life force, the like of which we have rarely seen since.
Here, Reed interviews himself on French TV, in a bizarre publicity package for The Return of the Musketeers in 1989. In it Reed asks himself questions other interviewers would never dared ask - that his career owed everything to Ken Russell, like Eliza Doolitlle to Henry Higgins in the play Pygmalion; and why did he drink? His answers range from the unfocussed to the honest, but underneath, there is the growl of a beast waiting to get out.
Previously on Dangerous Minds
The Incredible Friendship of Oliver Reed and Keith Moon
Redditor “Picklemick” spotted this perfect little “nugbunny” in his bud. He says: “Guys, I just saw this and made it in paint.” I’m still waiting for the herbal image of Jesus or the Virgin Mary. Maybe if I smoke enough?
(via reddit)
Rolland “Rolly” Crump is a Disney legend. Originally working as an assistant animator under Uncle Walt himself in the early 1950s, Crump performed “in betweener” work on Disney classics like Peter Pan, Lady and the Tramp, 101 Dalmations, and Sleeping Beauty.
In 1959 Crump joined Walt Disney Imagineering, becoming one of Walt Disney’s key designers for Disneyland. He worked on the Haunted Mansion, the Enchanted Tiki Room and the Adventureland Bazaar. Crump served as key designer on the Disney pavilions featured at the 1964-65 New York World’s Fair, including “It’s A Small World.” When that attraction was given a permanent home at Disneyland, Crump added the iconic puppet children clock at the entrance. He was also one of the lead designers on a Disneyland attraction that was shelved after Disney’s death, The Museum of The Weird.
During his long and illustrious career, Crump contributed to the designs for Walt Disney World, Busch Gardens and the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus World, before returning to Disney to project design “The Land” and “Wonders of Life” pavilions at EPCOT Center. Now in his 80s and still going strong, in 2004 Crump was given a Disney Legends Award.
But back in 1960, Rolly Crump made a series of whimsical and delightful posters depicting Beatniks and their predilection for drugs. Made for poster pioneer Howard Morseburg’s Esoteric Poster Company, Crump worked for Morseburg until 1964, also turning out posters satirizing Communism, Cuba and the Soviet Union. Some of these posters were discovered again and are for sale via Crump’s Zazzle store.
Thank you Taylor Jessen!
Jeesus K. Reist… I’ve long said that Christian schools are simply pushing an organized system of ignorance, but this fourth grade textbook published by Bob Jones University, and highlighted in a ScienceBlogs post by PZ Myers, a biologist and associate professor at the University of Minnesota, really takes the cake in the dumb department.
As Myers points out, “[W]e can use [electricity] to build hair dryers and Large Hadron Colliders; to make the argument that we are mystified by it is lying to the kids.” I’ll go one further, to subject children to this sort of “education” is anti-intellectual child-abuse:
That second paragraph is a horror of gobbledygook. Apparently, they think electricity is something like oil, a substance lying in large deposits that must be harvested and poured into your hairdryer to make it work. A current, as mentioned above, is produced by the movement of charged particles, nothing more or less. The sun produces moving charged particles, so it is a source of electricity, and the movement of the earth generates an electromagnetic field, but I can also do the zombie shuffle across the carpet to build up an excess of charged particles and touch the cat to allow them to flow, creating electricity myself, like unto a God. I do not have to create particles to make electricity, I just have to make them move.
Also, if that little girl did not use electricity, she would be dead. All of the cells in your body create charge imbalances by pumping charged ions across their membranes, and using the flow of ions back across those membranes to create chemical energy — they are machines that convert chemical energy into electricity that is used to power little dynamos that create stored chemical energy. We also use the gated movements of charged ions to generate electrical currents in our nerves and muscles, which is how we think and move.
Isn’t it nice how clearly religion is shown to be a science-stopper? Just take common questions, declare them a mystery and that no one has an answer, and presto, religion becomes an authority. An authority stuck at a dead end.
Christian parents who willingly sign their kids up to be taught this sort of malarkey deserve what they will eventually get when their children are either A) too poorly educated to compete in a workforce where for most entrants electricity is not a fucking mystery or B) want nothing to do with Christianity after they realize that it’s something on the level of believing in Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny…
Read a sample chapter here. How do they explain the moon?
Via Reddit
Some controversial remarks made by Andrew Breibart at a Boston Tea party meeting recently are getting a lot of attention, on blogs both right and left. In the clips below, Breitbart (inadvertently?) lays bare his psyche, specifically his liberal killing daydreams, when asked about the “Days of Rage” protests on Wall Street:
“I must say, in my non-strategic… ‘cuz I’m under attack all the time, if you see it on Twitter. The (unclear) call me gay, it’s just, they’re vicious, there are death threats, and everything. And so, there are times where I’m not thinking as clearly as I should, and in those unclear moments, I always think to myself, ‘Fire the first shot.’
Bring it on. Because I know who’s on our side. They can only win a rhetorical and propaganda war. They cannot win. We outnumber them in this country, and we have the guns. (laughter) I’m not kidding. They talk a mean game, but they will not cross that line because they know what they’re dealing with.
And I have people who come up to me in the military, major named people in the military, who grab me and they go, ‘Thank you for what you’re doing, we’ve got your back.’
They understand that. These are the unspoken things we know, they know. They know who’s on their side, they’ve got Janeane Garofalo. We are freaked out by that. When push comes to shove, they know who’s on our side. They are the bullies on the playground, and they’re starting to realize, what if we were to fight back, what if we were to slap back?
Well…. to look at Breitbart, even if he DID have a gun in his hand, a rich well-fed Republican lardass like him could probably do very little harm. At the rate his waistline seems to be expanding, he’ll have to be fork-lifted out of his La-Z-Boy chair when the Liberals vs Tea party war breaks out, like most of the other “patriots” who um, “have his back” but can’t tie their own shoes or see their dick when they piss…
As for the military supporting the Tea party in the event of a civil war, whereas I do believe that most soldiers probably skew to the right of the ideological spectrum, the notion of Navy SEALS and special forces divisions coming to the aid of the likes of Breitbart, Rush Limbaugh, Scott Walker, Michele Bachmann and a bunch of cranky, confused senior citizens seems rather far-fetched to me…
Breitbart doesn’t seem concerned in the least here that he himself lives in the liberal stronghold of Westwood in Los Angeles, a place where there is probably one Republican to every five thousand Democrats. In the event of a new American civil war, it could be reasonably predicted that his fat, arrogant, shit-filled head would be one of the very first to end up on a pole.
Breitbart continues telling the Tea party activists about his “dreams” after the jump…
The Keene Supremes, $45.00
I’m digging these Supremes and Tiny Tim candles by Los Angeles-based artist and rock photographer, Vicki Berndt. They’re available for purchase on Vicki’s website or over at her Etsy page.
The Coronation of Tiny Tim Candle, $15.00
It’s being reported in The Guardian and elsewhere that Rupert Murdoch’s News International has offered the family of slain teen Milly Dowler a £3 million settlement over the phone hacking scandal, plus another £1 million donation to charity:
It emerged in July that Milly Dowler’s mobile phone had been hacked after her death. Voicemails were accessed on behalf of the News of the World, and messages left for her were deleted to make room for more recordings. This gave the family false hope that she was still alive, because messages were disappearing.
—snip—
Other lawyers bringing phone-hacking cases are privately indicated that they would be advising many of those bringing actions to try and reach a settlement rather than take their cases to lengthy and expensive trials. A handful of cases have been taken forward as lead actions by Mr Justice Vos, to establish a benchmark for settlements in future lawsuits.
Murdoch met with the Dowler family in July, shortly after the original story about hacking into her phone broke, making what the family’s lawyer, Mark Lewis, said was a “full and humble” apology. The News Corporation chairman and chief executive “held his head in his hands” and repeatedly told the family he was “very, very sorry.”
I’ll bet that old vampire is sorry…
This settlement now sets a big money precedent for other victims of Murdoch-funded phone hacking. The attorneys representing the celebrities and 7/7 families who might have had their phones hacked by the News of the World must be smelling blood in the water right about now. Fantastic!
P.S. I updated this post and headline as the amount now being reported that the Fowler family was offered has subsequently been revised one million pounds higher. Nicely extracted!