Brazilian commercial for Flying Horse energy drink.

Glass Gem Corn

Seeds Trust has this to say about it:

Seedsman Greg Schoen got the seed from Carl Barnes, a part-Cherokee man, now in his 80’s, in Oklahoma. He was Greg’s “corn-teacher”. Greg was in the process of moving last year and wanted someone else to store and protect some of his seeds. He left samples of several corn varieties, including glass gem. I grew out a small handful this past summer just to see. The rest, as they say is history. I got so excited, I posted a picture on Facebook. We have never seen anything like this. Unfortunately, we did not grow out enough to sell. Look for a small amount for sale starting in August 2011.

Seeds Trust was not, in fact, listing any Glass Gem corn seed for sale. They did have Golden Bantam, an old-time favorite variety which my father swore by. I grew some myself in our backyard one year as a kid. Golden Bantam takes forever to mature. Everybody else is eating fresh sweet corn and you have weeks and weeks and weeks yet to wait, but it really does taste better.

Geekologie has some more photos of Glass Gem.

Via Theo.

From Steve Bodio, a photo essay on hunting foxes with the Kazakh Tazy (or Tazi or тазы), the local version of the saluki or Persian greyhound, a hunting dog which pursues its quarry by sight.

The tazy is regarded as a Kazakh national symbol. This essay tells us that there was an old Kazakh saying that one tazy could feed an entire village. Tazy are described as capable of running down prey at speeds up to 80 kph (49.7 mph).

According to the Russian text, there are only 300 thoroughbred Kazakh tazy left: “300 Spartans.” I’m afraid that I don’t buy into that “only 300 left” stuff. Steve Bodio and I both own Kazakh tazy.

Our Uhlan looks a lot like those “thoroughbred Spartan Kazakh” dogs to me.

The L interview:

I’ve never worn sneakers or sweatshirts in my life. And I wore blue jeans—pretty much the same pair of blue jeans—every day, throughout college. And I decided the moment I graduated from college that I would never wear blue jeans again. And I have never worn blue jeans again.

Unlike Whit Stillman, I have worn sneakers and sweatshirts: exclusively while working out in health clubs, never on the street or at home. I think I was just very slightly older than him when I too came to the conclusion that there was no place in adult life for blue jeans and switched permanently to khaki slacks for informal wear.

From The Passive Voice via Karen L. Myers.

Winner of most un-PC product for the first half of 2012 has to be the sly marketer behind the now-vanished “Hiller Armament Company,” which ran off a batch of silhouette targets referencing the Trayvon Martin shooting controversy featuring a faceless figure wearing a hoodie and carrying Skittles and a can of ice tea.

Shooters like novelty targets featuring amusing contemporary news references, and they love black humor items like this one specifically calculated to offend the left. The targets sold out in two days, Hiller Armaments pocketed its money and went away laughing, and lefties generally had a cow.

Daily Kos‘s reaction was classic.

The silhouette on the paper target is faceless. But the hoodie, the Skittles and the iced tea leave nothing to the imagination. This is meant to be Travyon Martin, the unarmed 17-year-old shot to death in February in Sanford, Florida. The unidentified internet merchant told Mike DeForest, a reporter for Orlando television station WKMG, that he sold out the silhouettes in two days. The targets come in packages of 10.

The twisted cretin who had these printed said: “My main motivation was to make money off the controversy.” Just business, man. Nothing personal.

Even Mark O’Mara, the attorney for George Zimmerman, the 28-year-old neighborhood watch volunteer who has been charged with second-degree murder in the shooting, found it disgusting:

“It’s this type of hatred — that’s what this is, it’s hate-mongering — that’s going to make it more difficult to try this case,” said O’Mara.

“I hope there is a crime that we can charge that person who made that with. I’m not sure what it is, but we need to come up with one.”

DeForest conducted an email exchange with the merchant who would not say how many of the targets he had sold, only that the response had been “overwhelming.” …

It’s not hard to imagine what buyers of the Trayvon targets say to each other when they’re on the firing line. And when they say “fucking coons,” they don’t mumble.

Change.org is running a petition demanding that Hiller Armanents be prosecuted.

Matt Taibbi, a loudmouth hipster douchebag who writes for Rolling Stone, resembles the late Pauline Kael, who couldn’t understand how Richard Nixon could possibly have won the election, when she knew absolutely no one who voted for him. He sees Romney as completely boring and no threat to Obama whatsoever, but he at least puts it colorfully.

[T]his campaign, relatively speaking, will not be fierce or hotly contested. Instead it’ll be disappointing, embarrassing, and over very quickly, like a hand job in a Bangkok bathhouse.

When you come right down to it, isn’t life in general characteristically “disappointing, embarrassing, and over very quickly” for certain kinds of trendy scribblers?

Here is a neat item. A Russian police facial reference sheet used for identifying male subject’s probable nationality.

(click on picture for larger image)
Top row from the left: Russian, Ukrainian, Tatar, Jew, Gypsy, Kyrgyzian.
Middle row from the left: Belorussian, Lithuanian, Georgian, Armenian, Kazakh, Uzbek.
Bottom row from the left: Latvian, Estonian, Azerbaijani, Moldovan, Tajik, Turkmenian

From Galina Sokolovska via Viktorija Ruškulienė.