Anne Hathaway Impersonator Lobbies the Academy for an Oscar

Girl Dancing in Front of Painting

Found this wonderful photo on The Mudflats Facebook page, which bore the caption: this is why we need art in our schools. Absolutely.

Doctors: Junior Seau's Brain Had CTE

ESPN has the story regarding NFL great Junior Seau's autopsy, showing that he was suffering from CTE brain damage at the time of his suicide. Yet another shoe drops. See the story and video here. And in a follow up story, a teammate describes the damage done during practices: click here for the ESPN story.

KKK Child and African American State Trooper (1992 Photo)

Poynter has the background on the photo HERE. [click to enlarge]

Islamist Extremists Ban Ali Farka Toure's Music in His Hometown

The bastards: from the BBC last month: 6 December 2012 Last updated at 12:24 ET Blues for Mali as Ali Farka Toure's music is banned By Thomas Fessy BBC News, Bamako After making northern Mali's "Blues" music famous around the world, Ali Farka Toure is a legend in his home town of Niafunke, where he was mayor until his death in 2006. The memorial to him is still intact but his music is no longer heard in the town's streets. "The town has gone silent," says 28-year-old farmer Ousmane Maiga (not his real name) over the phone. "It's way too quiet". Islamist fighters have taken over Niafunke, which sits on the banks of the river Niger 100km (60 miles) south-west of Timbuktu. They have introduced a strict social code: Women and girls must be covered, young men cannot wear loose trousers and all forms of music are banned. Residents say two young men were whipped last month after they were caught smoking tobacco. Toure was just one of a host of stars who have turned music into one of Mali's best known exports. "Music is so much part of our culture," says Mr Maiga. "It's everywhere here, I miss listening to it over tea with my friends on the weekend. I miss attending wedding ceremonies and baptisms." All time great It was the music of northern Mali that Toure took to the world, its lilting, mournful tones reaching an international audience when he teamed up with his US soulmate, Ry Cooder, to produce the Grammy-winning album Talking Timbuktu in 1994. He was ranked by Rolling Stone magazine as among the 100 great guitarists of all time and starred in the Martin Scorsese documentary, Feel Like Going Home, which traced the roots of the blues back to West Africa. But these roots are now threatened. Niafunke and other towns in northern Mali have been plunged into a cultural darkness. Islamist militants linked to al-Qaeda have banned everything they deem to be against Sharia, or Islamic law. "They are destroying our culture," says another of Mali's most famous singers, Salif Keita. He is currently back home in Mali, preparing for a world tour to accompany the release of his latest album. "If there's no music, no Timbuktu, it means that there is no more culture in Mali," he adds, sitting in the grounds of his home on the small island he owns on the river Niger outside the capital, Bamako. Keita is referring to the destruction in June of the ancient shrines in Timbuktu's mosques. The buildings were Unesco World Heritage Sites but considered by the Islamists to be idolatrous. Dozens of musicians have fled south since the crisis began, among them Khaira Arby "the Voice of the North". She cannot return to her home in Timbuktu because Islamists have threatened to cut out her tongue, according to members of her band who have also fled south. She first stayed with a cousin but has resigned herself to renting a house in Bamako after she realised that she could be displaced for longer than she thought. "Islamists have jammed radio airwaves," she tells me while her guitarists and percussionist adjust their instruments for an evening rehearsal in her small living-room. The two guitars are plugged into one small amplifier producing a heavily distorted sound. The band's equipment was looted when rebels marched into Timbuktu. Arby sits on the edge of her sofa. She looks sad, but soon her eyes close and her voice climbs and falls with the guitar riffs. Ringtones banned Song completed, she tries to make sense of what is happening to her country. "They're even confiscating mobile phones and replacing ringtones with Koranic verses," she laments. From Timbuktu to Gao, telephones have become the only way to listen to music lately. Those who have risked turning a stereo on have immediately attracted the attention of the Islamist police. Their equipment would be either seized or smashed. Read the full story and additional information HERE.

Sound/Visual Artist Daito Manabe

Pretty amazing stuff: and story here.

Illustrated PBS Interview with Maurice Sendak

Just touching and lovely:

Sexy Female Cyborgs/Androids/Robots

Classic Movies: Star Wars Parodies

Movies and the 98%: It's a Wonderful Life

I just finished watching It's a Wonderful Life for the umpteenth year (I try to make it a holiday tradition every December), and like Dickens' A Christmas Carol, as heartwarming and inspirational as the film is, the implicit message of the film seems to echo the political campaign we just experienced this year.
This scene was one that really stood out as local tycoon Henry Potter attempts to shut down the Bailey Building and Loan that has housed many working class families in Bedford Falls. With Peter Bailey recently deceased, Potter looks to dissolve the institution during the Great Depression and at a time when Peter Bailey's son George is hoping to finally leave the small hometown that has been confining his dreams for years. As Potter ridicules the idea of decency and fairness, George Bailey speaks up for the values of his father:

Mr. Potter: Peter Bailey was not a business man. That's what killed him. Oh, I don't mean any disrespect to him, God rest his soul. He was a man of high ideals, so-called. But ideals without common sense can ruin this town. Now, you take this loan here to Ernie Bishop...you know, that fellow that sits around all day on his brains in his taxi, you know. I happen to know the bank turned down this loan, but he comes here and we're building him a house worth five thousand dollars. Why?

George Bailey: Well, I handled that, Mr. Potter. You have all the papers there. His salary, insurance. I can personally vouch for his character.

Mr. Potter: A friend of yours.

George Bailey: Yes, sir.

Mr. Potter: You see, if you shoot pool with some employee here, you can come and borrow money. What does that get us? A discontented, lazy rabble instead of a thrifty working class. And all because a few starry-eyed dreamers like Peter Bailey stir them up and fill their heads with a lot of impossible ideas. Now, I say...

George Bailey: Just a minute. Just a... Just a minute. Now, hold on, Mr. Potter. You're right when you say my father was no business man. I know that. Why he ever started this cheap penny-ante Building and Loan, I'll never know. But neither you nor anybody else can say anything against his character, because his whole life was... Why, in the twenty-five years since he and Uncle Billy started this thing, he never once thought of himself. Isn't that right, Uncle Billy? He didn't save enough money to send Harry to school, let alone me. But he did help a few people get out of your slums, Mr. Potter. And what's wrong with that? Why...here, you are all businessmen here. Doesn't it make them better citizens? Doesn't it make them better customers? You...you said that uh...what'd you say just a minute ago... They, they had to wait and save their money before they even thought of a decent home. Wait! Wait for what? Until their children grow up and leave them? Until they're so old and broken-down that they...Do you know how long it takes a working man to save five thousand dollars? Just remember this, Mr. Potter, that this rabble you're talking about...they do most of the working and paying and living and dying in this community. Well, it is too much to have them work and pay and live and die in a couple of decent rooms and a bath? Anyway, my father didn't think so. People were human beings to him, but to you, a warped, frustrated old man, they're cattle. Well, in my book, he died a much richer man than you'll ever be.

Mr. Potter: I'm not interested in your book. I'm talking about the Building and Loan.

George Bailey: I know very well what you're talking about. You're talking about something you can't get your fingers on, and it's galling you. That's what you're talking about, I know. Well, I, I, I've said too much. I... You're, you're the Board here. You do what you want with this thing. There's j-just one thing more though. This town needs this measly one-horse institution if only to have some place where people can come without crawling to Potter.

Writing on Christmas Eve 2012 after a brutal election season, Chris Powell gets to the heart of it:
"Of course this is Capra's metaphor for politics and the world: that there is progress when everyone is given a chance, a little capital and credit; when people play by the rules, look out for each other, and don't take too much more than they need; and that selfishness is the ruin of everything. Something like this -- more or less a policy of helping to make middle-class everyone who aspired to it and would indeed play by the rules, a policy of democratizing capital and credit -- made the United States the most prosperous country and the most successful in elevating the human condition. But for a few decades now the price of obtaining and maintaining those "two decent rooms and a bath" and the middle-class life to go with it has risen as real wages have fallen for most, largely under the pressure of government's unrelenting taxes in the name of services that have not really been rendered, a welfare system that has subsidized what somehow is not permitted to be called the antisocial behavior it is, and a plutocracy that has gained control of both major political parties. There seem to be more people who, if too confused or demoralized to be dangerous, are still closer to being a "rabble" than the country saw even during the Great Depression. Even at its best now Christmas is seldom more than an itinerant charity that, necessary as it may seem, tends to suppress the great political question of the day after Christmas, the question of how things can be organized to ensure that everyone has a good chance to earn his way in decency. But the great joy of Christmas is that the answer has been given, that we are not lost, that the country has been shown the way and can recover it -- that society can work for all, that it really can be a wonderful life if enough selfless people make it a political one."

Amen, Chris. Amen.

Happy (Featuring Derek Martin)

C2C - Happy Feat. Derek Martin (official video) from On And On Records on Vimeo.

Una Furtiva Lagrima (Enrique Caruso and a Fish)

Una Furtiva Lagrima from Carlo Vogele on Vimeo.

Landfillharmonic: Paraguayan Orchestra Made Out of Trash

I feel inspired and humbled at the same time:

How a Fake Internet Friend Helped Write a Real Novel

And interesting read by Richard Cox posted in the Weeklings: Hello, This is Veronika Richard Cox Wednesday, November 21, 2012 DURING THE COURSE of writing my latest novel, I became acquainted with a young woman named Veronika, who makes a brief appearance in its pages. Thomas World is the story of an everyman who begins to suspect his life isn’t real, and may in fact be a game or simulation in which he’s the main character. The novel documents Thomas’ journey through madness as he searches for answers to existential questions, and ends with a world-bending confrontation in Berkeley, California with a Creator who may or may not be Philip K. Dick—himself a well-known science fiction author who struggled with paranoid schizophrenia and turned his own madness into solipsistic thrillers about artificial reality. I first crossed paths with Veronika on MySpace in 2007, back when it still reigned supreme over Facebook (remember that?). By the time she found me, I had been blogging on the site for eighteen months, and had acquired thousands of readers. New visitors were common, and I knew from experience that not all of them were who they claimed to be. The nature of MySpace made it the perfect breeding ground for aliases and fake identities. Veronika was presumably a 21 year-old blonde bombshell from Sweden, and her detailed online profile lent unusual credibility to her claim: hundreds of pictures, scores of friends, including her boyfriend Shane, her cousin Elin (a former police officer in Sweden who served in the army and trained as a military law enforcement specialist in the Livgardet), a roommate, classmates from her university, etc. Her profile also told the story of her arrival in theUnited States, of recent great tragedy (her mother’s death), and featured a voice recording of Veronika reciting her favorite quote: “Hello, this is Veronika. Welcome to my MySpace page! Remember, in the words of Ernest Hemingway: The world breaks everyone, and afterwards many are strong in the broken places!” Even considering the staggering amount of detail on her profile, however, I was highly skeptical of her identity from the beginning. The comments she left on my blog seemed to indicate a vast amount of life experience and wisdom not normally found in such a young adult…to say nothing for her Playboy bunny exterior, which, stereotypically speaking, doesn’t match well with the intellectual type. These suspicions, however, fueled a burning curiosity in me. The effort to create a profile with so many pictures and details would consume hours. Days, really. In addition, the person would be forced to create the fictional profiles of Veronika’s boyfriend, cousin, friends, etc., and then go to the trouble of occasionally signing into MySpace as these characters and leaving comments on her fictional page. In retrospect these suspicions and my subsequent investigation are similar to the plot of Catfish, though my experience occurred three years before that film was released. In any case, whoever Veronika really was, why had she (or he) contacted me? read the essay HERE.

Cvalda by Bjork from Dancer in the Dark (2000)