But go ahead, keep glorifying the Islamic Regime and Radical Islamists who want to shove women inside a burqa where they aren’t seen, heard or acknowledged except to bear children.
A snake fell out of the sky and landed on a woman mowing her yard.
The bizarre incident didn’t stop there. Peggy Jones was then attacked by a hawk.
Jones was on her tractor mowing at her home in Silsbee, near Beaumont on Tuesday afternoon. She describes how suddenly a snake fell on her, wrapping around her arm.
“The snake was squeezing so hard, and I was waving my arms in the air. And then, this hawk was swooping down clawing at my arm over and over,” explains Peggy Jones. “I just kept saying, ‘Help me, Jesus, Help me, Jesus.’’
The hawk eventually ripped the snake off of her arm and flew away with it. Jones thinks the hawk came down on her at least four times trying to get the snake. She says blood was everywhere. Her husband heard the commotion and came running.
“I was yelling and screaming. He didn’t know what I was saying. I thought I was bit by a snake.”
Her husband took her to the emergency room where she was treated for cuts from the hawk and bruising from the snake squeezing on her arm.
There was no snake bite, but she was monitored for a bite just in case. Jones also discovered how close she really came to being bitten by the snake.
“I discovered the lens on my glasses was broken and there was snake venom on my glasses.”
For many in northwest Greenland, the iconic flavor of winter is that of fermented meat, perhaps most iconically kiviaq, a dish made by packing 300 to 500 whole dovekies—beaks, feathers, and all—into the hollowed-out carcass of a seal, snitching it up and sealing it with fat, then burying it under rocks for a few months to ferment. Once it’s dug up and opened, people skin and eat the birds one at a time.
Plates of these small fermented seabirds are a staple at many kaffemiit—big communal gatherings celebrating anything from holidays to birthdays—during the winter, especially among the Inughuit, a distinct Inuit culture indigenous to the region.
“Kiviaq is a special dish to the Inughuit,” Hivshu, an Inuguhit culture keeper, tells me. Originally from Siorapaluk, one of the major towns in Greenland’s northwestern Qaanaaq area—and the island’s northernmost permanent settlement—Hivshu grew up hunting local game and practicing Inughuit foodways. In fact, he’s not aware of any other Inuit cultures with a longstanding history of making kiviaq.
But beyond Greenland, kiviaq is notorious as an object of disgust and ridicule. Just over a decade ago, it became a staple of the world’s “weirdest” or “most repulsive” food lists. A few articles also suggest it’s dangerous, noting that kiviaq may have killed famed Inuit-Danish explorer Knud Rasmussen in 1933, and that botulism linked to a bad batch definitely killed two locals in 2013. …
Kiviaq can challenge the palate of anyone unfamiliar with the potent flavors of fermented meats. (Mike Keen, a chef-adventurer based in the United Kingdom and big kiviaq fan, describes its taste as akin to a strong blue cheese with salami or parma ham notes—and as “a good smash in the mouth.”)
A consulting architect on UCSB’s Design Review Committee has quit his post in protest over the university’s proposed Munger Hall project, calling the massive, mostly-windowless dormitory plan “unsupportable from my perspective as an architect, a parent, and a human being.”
In his October 25 resignation letter to UCSB Campus Architect Julie Hendricks, Dennis McFadden ― a well-respected Southern California architect with 15 years on the committee ― goes scorched earth on the radical new building concept, which calls for an 11-story, 1.68-million-square-foot structure that would house up to 4,500 students, 94 percent of whom would not have windows in their small, single-occupancy bedrooms.
The idea was conceived by 97-year-old billionaire-investor turned amateur-architect Charles Munger, who donated $200 million toward the project with the condition that his blueprints be followed exactly. Munger maintains the small living quarters would coax residents out of their rooms and into larger common areas, where they could interact and collaborate. He also argues the off-site prefabrication of standardized building elements ― the nine residential levels feature identical floor plans ― would save on construction costs. The entire proposal, which comes as UCSB desperately attempts to add to its overstretched housing stock, is budgeted somewhere in the range of $1.5 billion. Chancellor Henry Yang has hailed it as “inspired and revolutionary.”
McFadden disagreed sharply with what the university has described as “Charlie’s Vision” for the benefits of a “close-knit” living experience. “An ample body of documented evidence shows that interior environments with access to natural light, air, and views to nature improve both the physical and mental wellbeing of occupants,” he wrote. “The Munger Hall design ignores this evidence and seems to take the position that it doesn’t matter.”
So far, McFadden continued, the university has not offered any research or data to justify the unprecedented departure from normal student housing standards, historical trends, and basic sustainability principles. “Rather,” he said, “as the ‘vision’ of a single donor, the building is a social and psychological experiment with an unknown impact on the lives and personal development of the undergraduates the university serves.” …
[I]n the nearly fifteen years I served as a consulting architect to the DRC, no project was brought before the committee that is larger, more transformational, and potentially more destructive to the campus as a place than Munger Hall.” This kind of outlandish proposal is exactly why the committee exists, he said.
McFadden draws striking comparisons between Munger Hall and other large structures to illustrate its colossal footprint. Currently, he said, the largest single dormitory in the world is Bancroft Hall at the U.S. Naval Academy, which houses 4,000 students and is composed of multiple wings wrapped around numerous courtyards with over 25 entrances.
“Munger Hall, in comparison, is a single block housing 4,500 students with two entrances,” McFadden said, and would qualify as the eighth densest neighborhood on the planet, falling just short of Dhaka, Bangladesh. It would be able to house Princeton University’s entire undergraduate population, or all five Claremont Colleges. “The project is essentially the student life portion of a mid-sized university campus in a box,” he said.
The project is utterly detached from its physical setting, McFadden goes on, and has no relationship to UCSB’s “spectacular coastal location.” It is also out of place with the scale and texture of the rest of campus, he said, “an alien world parked at the corner of the campus, not an integrally related extension of it.” Even the rooftop courtyard looks inward and “may as well be on the ground in the desert as on the eleventh floor on the coast of California,” he said.
I found this completed needlepoint project, depicting “Cedarhurst,” our recently-acquired Deep South retirement house, on Ebay.
The same seller is offering another of these depicting “Walter Place.”
Holly Springs, despite being a small town of 7000 souls, has over sixty surviving Antebellum mansions, and evidently, back in the 1990s, some needlepoint firm was selling canvases featuring a number of its more notable houses.
I am naturally impressed with myself for owning a house that people portray in needlework.
Philip Patrick, in the London Spectator, marvels at just how differently the Japanese finds ways of doing things.
The late A.A. Gill, in his notorious ‘Mad in Japan’ essay, concluded that the only way you could make sense of Tokyo was to think of it as a vast open-air lunatic asylum, with inmates instead of residents. Gill would have loved Arisa.
I don’t think I’ve ever encountered anything more stereotypically Japanese than Arisa. She’s a multilingual robot concierge at Nishi-Shinjuku station in central Tokyo, one of the thousands of new automatons installed in the city ahead of the Olympics next month. She has a rather creepy Doctor Who look to her — she could be Davros’s girlfriend — and she’s there to assist tourists. I considered testing Arisa by asking how to get to the famous Budokan concert hall, in the hope that she’d answer ‘Practise!’; but I’m not sure she’s programmed for humour.
The eccentricity of Japan is all-enveloping and inescapable: the frighteningly shrill screamed chorus of ‘Welcome’ whenever you enter a shop; the bizarre Japanese–English on packaging and billboards, hastily ‘translated’, presumably by non-native speakers, and apparently never checked. (‘The Day Nice Hotel’ and ‘Soup for Sluts’ are my personal favourites.) Then there are the council rose-bush pruners who wear crash helmets to do their work; the incomprehensible address system that makes a new location impossible to find (even with a robot assistant); the dangerous food, the highly prized but poisonous fugu pufferfish which kills a handful of people each year but is still sold as a delicacy. I could go on.
But Gill’s problem may have been that he didn’t stick around long enough (he hated the food). …
As Dikko Henderson, James Bond’s man in Japan, says as he fixes 007 a drink:‘I’ve been in Tokyo 20 years and I’m only beginning to find my way around.’ I imagine he wasn’t merely referring to directions.
So eventually you come to understand that the crash helmets of the rose pruners are not for safety, but part of a formal uniform. And you realise that Japanese-English is decorative and designed to get your attention, rather than be meaningful (you’ll never forget ‘Soup for Sluts’). And you suspect that addresses may be purposefully confusing to deter casual visitors and reward the truly committed with a sense of accomplishment. And you sense that perhaps the irritatingly inflexible and time-consuming etiquette and the vagueness of so much written information keeps us on permanent edge, always slightly anxious and uncertain, thus warding off complacency, laziness, decadence. And eating the pufferfish adds a certain Russian roulette excitement to a meal.
But it’s another mistake to imagine that the locals understand their own peculiarities or have consciously engineered them. The Japanese are self-absorbed but not necessarily fully self-aware. Nihonjinron — the study of Japanese things by the Japanese — is a life’s work and an end in itself, undertaken by the majority in some form or another but never truly completed.
‘You are an eternal student. You never master anything — you just become progressively less bad,’ said an acquaintance about her 30-year flower-arranging career. Process is more important than product.
As Donald Richie, the great writer on Japanese aesthetics, said: ‘A Japanese person understands Japaneseness in the same way a fish understands water. They are surrounded by it, but have no idea what it is.’ Strange customs evolve over long stretches of time and survive because they serve some often obscure purpose and contribute in a small way to the greater good. There’s method in the quirkiness.
“A jug of rice wine infused with two hundred baby rodents; a dessert made of millions of crushed flies. Jiayang Fan spoke with the creator of the Disgusting Food Museum, in Sweden, which is located in a shopping mall and is designed with an eye for Instagram. But the playful surroundings belie the museum’s more serious messages about who gets to decide which foods are “disgusting,” and how, if we want to live more lightly on the planet, we need to broaden our palates. Just maybe don’t start out with cans of surströmming, a fermented herring. The museum director informed Fan that these fish have induced more vomiting than any other item at the museum.”
Marcel Leyat was a French automobile manufacturer, born in Die, established by Marcel Leyat in 1919 in Paris. The automobiles were built on the Quai de Grenelle.
Leyat was a biplane designer before World War 1 broke out, but turned his hand to automobile designs, feeling that the aviation world had a thing or two to teach car designers.
First off, he saw early car designs as far too heavy and aerodynamically inefficient, problems that the aviation world had been working hard to solve. Secondly, he felt that driven wheels were another power-sapping exercise in needless complexity, requiring transmissions and clutches and drive shafts and differentials and all sorts of other bits and pieces.
Aircraft, on the other hand, were designed to be aerodynamic and lightweight from the get go, and a propeller could mount more or less directly to the engine’s crankshaft. So why not a wingless airplane for the road? These were early days for the automotive industry, and all sorts of different technologies were being thrown at the wall to see which would stick and which would slide.
Horsepower was a fairly scarce resource back in 1913 when Leyat built his first Helica, which used an 18-horsepower, 1,000cc Harley-Davidson v-twin engine in a lightweight plywood body that weighed just 550 lb (250 kg). His goal was to extract motion from that power in the most efficient way possible. In that respect, he did pretty well; a subsequent Helica recorded a top speed of 106 mph (171 km/h) in 1927, a terrifying speed for the time.
In other respects, Leyat’s propeller car, and several other designs not dissimilar to it, were a roundly awful idea from the beginning, because, well, they had great big propellers on the front of them. While this example is wire mesh shielded, that doesn’t appear to have been a feature of the original designs, so errant pedestrians and wayward pigeons alike could end up getting fed through a several thousand-rpm blender, showering driver and passenger with an exuberance of gore.
What’s more, the spinning mass of the wooden prop could turn into a highly energetic constellation of airborne shrapnel in the event of a rear-ender. When it wasn’t exploding in an accident, it was making one more likely by obscuring the driver’s view and blowing wind directly into his face at high speed. And if that weren’t enough, Leyat had also taken an aircraft-inspired approach to the steering, eschewing the complexities of a steering rack for a very simple, cable-operated rear wheel steering system that threw the back end out sideways to turn the car.
The resulting vehicle looks, shall we say, rather exciting to drive, and thanks to the contemporary footage below assembled by Diagonal View, we can get an idea of how it handled. In even a slow-speed u-turn, the inside rear wheel lifts merrily off the ground, its front wheels wobble around like pin-fixed discs on a toy car, and the whole contraption does little to make us think propeller cars were ever the automobiles of the future.
A $189 Chinese Bluetooth Chastity Ring designed for Domination games, or mere assured fidelity, has been shown to be vulnerable to hacking, and can be permanently locked by third parties, requiring the use of an angle grinder or other heavy power tool to cut the device off. A drastic solution, to say the least.
Additionally, its security flaws allow the hacker to steal the user’s passwords, birthday, location, and other sensitive data.
Alison Flood, of the Guardian, interviews a very knowledgeable book dealer and authority.
Edward Brooke-Hitching grew up in a rare book shop, with a rare book dealer for a father. As the author of histories of maps The Phantom Atlas, The Golden Atlas and The Sky Atlas, he has always been “really fascinated by books that are down the back alleys of historyâ€. Ten years ago, he embarked on a project to come up with the “ultimate libraryâ€. No first editions of Jane Austen here, though: Brooke-Hitching’s The Madman’s Library collects the most eccentric and extraordinary books from around the world.
“I was asking, if you could put together the ultimate library, ignoring the value or the academic significance of the books, what would be on that shelf if you had a time machine and unlimited budget?†he says.
Following up anecdotes, talking to booksellers and librarians and trawling through auction catalogues, he came across stories like that of the 605-page Qur’an written in the blood of Saddam Hussein. “If that was on a shelf, what could possibly sit next to it?†he asks. “I mentioned it to a bookseller and they told me about a diary that they’d had, from the 19th century, written by a shipwrecked captain who only had old newspaper and penguins to hand. So Fate of the Blenden Hall was written entirely in penguin blood.â€
There’s the American civil war soldier who inscribed his journal of the conflict on to the violin he carried. There’s the memoir of a Massachussetts highwayman, James Allen, which he “requested be bound in his own skin after his death, and presented to his one victim who had fought back as a token of his admirationâ€. Or the diary of the Norwegian resistance fighter Petter Moen, pricked with a pin into squares of toilet paper and left in a ventilation shaft; although Moen was killed in 1944, one of his fellow prisoners returned to Oslo after it was liberated from the Nazis and found the diary. Or the entirely fabricated book An Historical and Geographical Description of Formosa: its author George Psalmanazar, a blond-haired, blue-eyed, pale-skinned man with a thick French accent, arrived in London in about 1702 and declared himself to be the first Formosan, or Taiwanese, person to set foot on the European continent. (“Obviously no one had been there and nobody knew what Taiwanese people looked like, and he became the toast of high society,†says Brooke-Hitching.)
