Archive for November, 2010
South Park Sued For ‘What What (In The Butt)’ Parody
You have to love the way that Trey Parker and Matt Stone keep getting themselves into legal trouble for the scripts of South Park. Keep up the good work gentlemen! From the Hollywood Reporter:
Less than a month after South Park creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker were forced to apologize for lifting material for a spoof of Inception from the website CollegeHumor, the show is again facing accusations of content theft. The producers of the animated hit, including Viacom and Comedy Central, are being sued for allegedly ripping off a copyrighted music video for the viral phenomenon What What (In the Butt).
The video was produced by Brownmark Films based on a song by Samwell. Released in 2007, it became a massive hit and was featured on PerezHilton.com and VH1’s Best Week Ever, and has been downloaded over 33 million times on YouTube. According to the site, it’s one of the…
Vending Machine Uses Facial Recognition Technology To Recommend Drinks To Customers
No other country is better known for their array of vending machines as Japan. Over 2.5 million machines sell beverages and even more offer cooked meals, produce and live crabs, to name a few. The newest vending machine not only gives you a refreshing drink, but can suggest one for you as well. From Reuters:
A new Japanese canned drink vending machine uses facial recognition technology to “recommend” drinks based on the customer’s age and gender — and sales have tripled over those from regular vending machines as a result.
The machines, developed by JR East Water Business Co, a subsidiary of railway firm JR East Co, use large touch-panel screens with sensors that allow the machine to determine the characteristics of an approaching customer.
“Recommended” labels will then appear on specific drink products. Suggested products may also change depending on the temperature and time of day.
“If the customer is a man, the…
Polish Singer Uses Bikini Photos In Election Campaign
"Beautiful, independent, and competent."
Katarzyna Szczolek, known as singer Sara May in Poland, is campaigning for a seat in the Warsaw district council. It seems she thinks that if sexy sells albums it will get votes. From The Huffington Post:
A Polish singer says she is determined to break out of pop music and into local politics — so much so that she’s taken to distributing scintillating photographs of herself posing in a bikini to ensure her campaign isn’t overlooked.
The Toronto Sun reports that Katarzyna Szczolek, who is better known in Poland by the stage name Sara May, is hoping a series of sizzling campaign images will help her nab a spot on the Warsaw district council as a representative of her native district, Bemowo.
On her official blog, the curvy Szczolek touts herself as “honest, consistent, ambitious, hardworking and independent.” She goes on to note that she “wants to change the world and help…
NASA Reveals Youngest Black Hole
NASA made a major announcement today, revealing what it terms “the youngest known black hole in our cosmic neighborhood.” Photo and official text of the announcement below:
This composite image shows a supernova within the galaxy M100 that may contain the youngest known black hole in our cosmic neighborhood. In this image, Chandra’s X-rays are colored gold, while optical data from ESO’s Very Large Telescope are shown in red, green, and blue, and infrared data from Spitzer are red. The location of the supernova, known as SN 1979C, is labeled. Source: NASA
Astronomers using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory have found evidence of the youngest black hole known to exist in our cosmic neighborhood. The 30-year-old black hole provides a unique opportunity to watch this type of object develop from infancy.
The black hole could help scientists better understand how massive stars explode, which ones leave behind black holes or neutron stars, and the number…
Seeing Meat Makes People Significantly Less Aggressive
From LiveScience:
Frank Kachanoff was surprised. He thought the sight of meat on the table would make people more aggressive, not less. After all, don’t football coaches feed their players big hunks of red meat before a game in hopes of pumping them up? And what about our images of a grunting or growling animal snarling at anyone who dares take their meat away from them? Wouldn’t that go for humans, too?
Kachanoff, a researcher with a special interest in evolution at McGill University’s Department of Psychology, has discovered quite the reverse. According to research presented at a recent symposium at McGill, seeing meat appears to make human beings significantly less aggressive. “I was inspired by research on priming and aggression, that has shown that just looking at an object which is learned to be associated with aggression, such as a gun, can make someone more likely to behave aggressively. I wanted…
Aleister Crowley for President 2012 – Red State Update
There’s a new front-runner in the 2012 presidential elections, dead Victorian occultist Aleister Crowley. This ad makes a good case for why you should write in for Uncle Al.
If you want to learn more about this strange figure, check out our film Aleister Crowley: In Search of The Great Beast 666, available instantly through iTunes and Amazon On-Demand.
Goldman CEO Dodges Boxing Match With Journalist
Goldman Sachs bankers are the deserved target of a lot of Wall Street bashing by regular Americans whose jobs have been lost and homes foreclosed due to the many crimes (yes, crimes) perpetrated by the banks, insurance companies and ratings agencies. New York Post columnist John Crudele has challenged Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein to go up against him in a Wall Street boxing match:
Lloyd Blankfein, the chairman of Goldman Sachs, would probably like to see me hurt. And I’d like to see him investigated for insider trading.
So I figured a boxing match was in order. The only hitch, I can’t seem to get Blankfein to do it.
Let me tell you anyway how I almost became a pugilist.
A few weeks ago someone from a gym downtown was looking for some publicity and mentioned that there is a charity boxing match with Wall Street types going against each other scheduled for Dec. 10.
It’s…
TSA to Punish Passengers who Opt-Out of Virtual Strip Search with Non-Virtual Groping
Jeffrey Goldberg at The Atlantic has published a piece on his experience opting-out of the back-scatter body scanners at Baltimore-Washington International:
At BWI, I told the officer who directed me to the back-scatter that I preferred a pat-down. I did this in order to see how effective the manual search would be. When I made this request, a number of TSA officers, to my surprise, began laughing. I asked why. One of them — the one who would eventually conduct my pat-down — said that the rules were changing shortly, and that I would soon understand why the back-scatter was preferable to the manual search. I asked him if the new guidelines included a cavity search. “No way. You think Congress would allow that?”
I answered, “If you’re a terrorist, you’re going to hide your weapons in your anus or your vagina.” He blushed when I said “vagina.”
“Yes, but starting tomorrow, we’re going…
The Forgotten Stars of 1970s Terrorism
In their never-ending quest to tweak the sensibilities of anyone dumb enough to take them too seriously, the “hipsters” at VICE profile ’70s terrorists, from the Tupamaros to the Red Brigade:
In Hollywood they’re making yet another film about Carlos The Jackal, and Bernhard Schlink’s writing books about the Baader-Meinhof gang again. From Spielberg’s Munich to Soderbergh’s Che, the last decade’s been happy to fete the terrorists who were at large in the 1970s. In contrast to the amorphous and utterly unquenchable threat currently hanging over our Western heads, everyone knew what figures like Guevara and The Black September group wanted: suitcases crammed full of cash and choppers to Cuba. They had a negotiable quality to them that’s largely missing from today’s suicide fanatics. Here are some lesser known terrorists from the 1970s that pop culture’s yet to turn into stocking-clad, cemtex-strapped, hostage-garotting rock stars.
FRONT DE LIBERATION DU QUEBEC
The FLQ’s Mario Bachand. Thin…
Catholic Church Seeks Exorcists
Giotto's depiction of St. Francis exorcising demons.
Apparently America is overwhelmed by demons and a Catholic bishop says “each diocese should have its own” exorcist. Facing a shortage, the Church held a special training workshop in Baltimore this past weekend to teach clerics the esoteric rite, reports Reuters:
The church has signed up 56 bishops and 66 priests for the two-day workshop that began on Friday, seeking to boost the small group of just five or six American exorcists that the church currently has on its books.
“There’s this small group of priests who say they get requests from all over the continental U.S.,” Bishop Thomas Paprocki of Springfield, Illinois, was quoted as saying.
“Actually, each diocese should have its own” exorcist, he added.
Paprocki did not say why there was increased demand for exorcisms, which he noted were rarely performed.
While solemnly regarded by the Catholic Church, exorcism is a staple of Hollywood fright films…
Geraldo’s ‘Mind is Opened to 9/11 Truth’ by the BuildingWhat? Campaign
“It is an intriguing topic, I certainly am much more open minded about it than I was, and it is because of the involvement of the 9/11 families and all of these engineers and architects…
Obama Is President of Extra-Judicial Killing, Says Ex-Guantánamo Inmate
Moazzam Begg. Photo: JK the Unwise (CC)
From the Irish Times:
US President Barack Obama’s attempts to reach out to Muslims have been an “utter failure” given his broken promises on several issues including closing Guantánamo Bay detention facility, former inmate Moazzam Begg has said.
Begg, a British national who spent two years in Guantánamo before being released in 2005, fears the detention centre may become permanent.
“People who were released from Guantánamo after Obama came to power told me that conditions had improved slightly but nobody there was under the illusion that [it] was going to close,” Begg said during a visit to Dublin.
“It is like a town now and every thing around it has continued to expand. It seems that this is a permanent facility and they intend to keep it as such.”
Begg, whose organisation, Cageprisoners, recently expanded its work to include the highlighting of extra-judicial killings, particularly the use of drone…
U.S. Government Report Confirms America As ‘Safe Haven’ For Nazis
A fascinating front page story in the New York Times today details some of the more outrageous instances of the United States harboring refugee Nazis following World War 2, including scientists recruited for the notorious Operation Paperclip. Read the whole thing: it’s eye-opening for those who might think the “land of the free” would never do something like this:
A secret history of the United States government’s Nazi-hunting operation concludes that American intelligence officials created a “safe haven” in the United States for Nazis and their collaborators after World War II, and it details decades of clashes, often hidden, with other nations over war criminals here and abroad.
The 600-page report, which the Justice Department has tried to keep secret for four years, provides new evidence about more than two dozen of the most notorious Nazi cases of the last three decades.
It describes the government’s posthumous pursuit of Dr. Josef Mengele, the so-called…
Cee-Lo Green Changes ‘F-You’ Lyrics To ‘Fox News’ on “Colbert Report” Performance (Video)
On air, Cee-Lo Green changed the F-You to Fox News in this song from his third album The Lady Killer so here’s the unchanged version as the artist intended (via Colbert’s website):
Would Henry I Have Castrated Goldman Sachs?
Bad money drives out the good” – Gresham’s Law
Even primitive medieval economies understood the importance of guaranteeing the integrity of currency; Henry I of England imposed the penalty of castration on counterfeiters.
Gresham’s Law is the formal name economists give the common sense notion that counterfeiting is a bad thing and should not be encouraged. The upshot is that the phony money undermines your confidence in all the money in circulation, even if the bogus bucks are a relatively small portion of the total ‘dollars’ in circulation.
You need to KNOW for a fact just how much real, tangible value you can expect to receive in exchange for those ‘dollars’, and that’s entirely independent of any action on your part. At least in the short term that’s entirely dependent on how your fellow market participants perceive the value of that currency. Even if you accept some shiny beads as payment in a real estate deal,…
Albert Gonzalez: America’s Top Hacker?
The New York Times Magazine devotes its cover and many, many column inches to a profile of the man Times’ writer James Verini describes as “America’s most notorious computer hacker”:
One night in July 2003, a little before midnight, a plainclothes N.Y.P.D. detective, investigating a series of car thefts in upper Manhattan, followed a suspicious-looking young man with long, stringy hair and a nose ring into the A.T.M. lobby of a bank. Pretending to use one of the machines, the detective watched as the man pulled a debit card from his pocket and withdrew hundreds of dollars in cash. Then he pulled out another card and did the same thing. Then another, and another. The guy wasn’t stealing cars, but the detective figured he was stealing something.
Indeed, the young man was in the act of “cashing out,” as he would later admit. He had programmed a stack of blank debit cards with…
Did Literacy Steal Brain Power From Other Functions?
Warning: Reading this may cause parts of your brain to become powerless. From Ars Technica:
The human brain contains many regions that are specialized for processing specific decisions and sensory inputs. Many of these are shared with our fellow mammals (and, in some cases, all vertebrates), suggesting that they are evolutionarily ancient specializations. But innovations like writing have only been around for a few thousand years, a time span that’s too short relative to human generations to allow for this sort of large evolutionary change. In the absence of specialized capabilities, how has it become possible for such large portions of the population to become literate?
The authors of a paper that will be released by Science today suggest two possible alternatives to explain this widespread literacy. Either reading is similar enough to something that our brains could already do that it’s processed by existing structures, or literacy has “stolen” areas of the…
Twitter Uproar Over Airport Bomb Joke
Do virtual social networks, such as Twitter, push the law of free speech too far? Or does the digital generation have a bad sense of humor? BBC News reports:
Tweeters have joined forces to support Paul Chambers, the man convicted and fined for a Twitter message threatening to blow up an airport.
The Twitter community is angry that the 27-year-old accountant has failed to overturn his conviction.
A day after his appeal failed, two “hashtags” to highlight his situation remain top topics in the UK.
Free speech advocate Index on Censorship said the UK judiciary was out of step with social networks.
“The verdict demonstrates that the UK’s legal system has little respect for free expression, and has no understanding of how people communicate in the 21st Century,” said the organisation’s news editor Padraig Reidy.
Continues at BBC News …
Jon Stewart Explains His Critique of The Media to Rachel Maddow (Video)
I caught the televised version of this yesterday, here’s the entire uncut interview below. I know the folks at MSNBC weren’t too happy to be compared to Fox News at Stewart’s “Restore Sanity” rally, so he takes some time on that network to clarify his intended message.
