Run-DMC the Musical

why are YOU buggin?

They helped bring hip-hop to the mainstream, revitalized the career of Aerosmith and now, Run-DMC could be headed to Broadway.

Paula Wagner, the veteran Hollywood producer, said that her Chestnut Ridge Productions company was working with the rappers Joseph Simmons (known as Run) and Darryl McDaniels (DMC) as well as the estate of Jason Mizell (Jam Master Jay) to produce a stage musical about Run-DMC, the seminal hip-hop group.

“Their work speaks to everybody,” Ms. Wagner said in a telephone interview, “and the story of their rise to fame is innately theatrical.”

Remember Krush Groove?:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjImcCetzFo

and who else could get away with rhyming "why you buggin'" with "I need your hugging"

IT'S CAPSLOCK DAY EVERYONE!

cappy, cappy, cappy!!!!! every year we get together and make salmon for toast
every year we get a crockety bloat
every year we get drunk on the docks
and every year we have sex with our caps locks!!!!!!




bLACK sANTA

(I HAVE NO IDEA WHY, SO DON'T ASK...AND STOP YELLING!)

Gmail Users Have Better Credit Scores

 Online credit-checking service Credit Karma displays what average credit scores look like by email domain. Yahoo is the worst, Gmail is one of the best, and Hotmail falls somewhere in between.

Never Mind the Pity: How a dying teenager’s dream turned into the making of a miraculous album.

During the two weeks Killian spends in the hospital recovering, he meanders around the corridors in his scrubs playing his uke for other patients. At one point he finds himself thinking back to the moment during his uke lesson with Ralph, just two days earlier, now seemingly a lifetime away. He has an idea. “I want to record with Ralph,” he tells his mother, “but I don’t want to do it with friends.” Smiling, but serious, he adds, “I want to play with famous people.”

“I thought I was on a kind of playdate, right? Then Killian starts playing, and I was like, Oh, really? The kid was totally schooling me.” “The fact that he was a kid, the fact that he was sick—I forgot about that in two minutes,” Sebastian says. “He was a pro, someone who knew how to express himself fully with an instrument.”

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The AV Club Interviews Alton Brown

Chef:  it’s not a title, it’s a job. It’s a position in a kitchen. It comes from an old German word that means “boss” or “head of the shop.” In which case I am the chef of my operation, but it’s a production company. It’s not a kitchen, even though we do have a kitchen. That’s the closest thing to chef I am. All the good chefs that I know say that they are cooks employed as chef. All the people that say, “I’m a chef,” generally aren’t. The good ones will say, “I’m a cook.”

Once people start saying, “I’m Chef Bob!”—yeah, whatever. I’m Captain Kangaroo. Have a nice day...

...they’re not gonna let me do a show about rabbit, because they don’t want to think about killing the little bunnies. There probably won’t be a Good Eats episode on, you know, anything glandular. We’ve always kept the show very much about what people can get at a regular grocery store...

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Goofus, Galant, Rashomon

Shawn, high-school classmate of Goofus:
Goofus—my God, what a bad-boy poseur. I could tell he had picked up his Nietzscheism from a comic book. He would talk about the "Will to Power." But there was also some G. Gordon Liddy mixed in there. He loved doing the candle trick, moving his hand through the flame and pretending he didn't mind the pain. Then I did the same thing with my finger, showing him how full of shit he was.
 
Natalie, Gallant's high-school friend:
Gallant was one of the few mature guys in our high school. Sensitive. We used to talk about James Taylor during lunch. I thought him the perfect gentleman, and of course my parents loved him. But when someone is polite to the point of having that Moonie quality, it gets to you. Finally it dawned on me that he used that politeness as a way of controlling me. That was what it was all about—he followed the rules because it gave him the advantage.  


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Sabotaged From the Future: The Large Hadron Collider and a Fantastic Theory.

This December, The Large Hadron Collider in Geneva will once again be revved up by CERN and start smashing atoms together in the search for the forces and particles that participated in first trillionth of a second of the Big Bang.

Then it will be time to test one of the most bizarre and revolutionary theories in science. I’m not talking about extra dimensions of space-time, dark matter or even black holes that eat the Earth. 

No, I’m talking about the notion that the troubled collider is being sabotaged by its own future. A pair of otherwise distinguished physicists have suggested that the hypothesized Higgs boson, which physicists hope to produce with the collider, might be so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it could make one, like a time traveler who goes back in time to kill his grandfather.

 This malign influence from the future, they argue, could explain why the United States Superconducting Supercollider, also designed to find the Higgs, was canceled in 1993 after billions of dollars had already been spent, an event so unlikely that Dr. Nielsen calls it an “anti-miracle.”

Seriously?!  Wow.

"Picture a child walking alone in the world" that is Hen kerlien

The Chinese expression that means...not just sad, not exactly pathetic...Always with a bowl haircut: Hen kerlien!

From the LiveJournal Zarinov:

All it means literally is 'very (hen) sad (kerlien),' but it also has connotations of 'pathetic' without any of the judgment or scorn. I don't think there is an English equivalent, so at this juncture I will ask you to picture a child walking alone in the world. Hen kerlien!

Here are some examples of hen kerlien in action:

1. One time as a kid, I asked my dad if he wanted to play catch, and he said he was feeling too lazy at the moment; I said this was okay. I had a bowl haircut.

We had this plastic elephant that lobbed baseballs at you with its trunk, so minutes later I was seen carrying the elephant and a TV tray into the backyard. I guess at this point I became visible in the window of the living room, where my dad sat reclining on the couch. Thus framed, I proceeded to arrange the elephant on the TV tray, turn it on, and run away to hit the first ball with my whiffle bat. I repeated this process every fourth ball, because that is how many balls I had. I was not too far into it when my dad appeared in the backyard with my baseball glove, citing that the spectacle was too kerlien to bear. Hen kerlien!

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30 Years Ago Today: The birth of hip-hop in NYC

Rapper's Delight, by the Sugarhill Gang, the first hit rap song entered the US Billboard charts in October of 1979.

Here, photographer and paramedic Joe Conzo - who took pictures of the early hip-hop scene in the Bronx - takes us on a tour of the New York borough, recalling the early days and explaining how the area has changed.

See the video here...

Schrödinger’s Rapist: A Helpful Guide to Approaching Women Without Getting Maced

This is great:

...you want to become acquainted with a woman you see in public. The first thing you need to understand is that women are dealing with a set of challenges and concerns that are strange to you, a man. To begin with, we would rather not be killed or otherwise violently assaulted....

if you speak to a woman who is otherwise occupied, you’re sending a subtle message. It is that your desire to interact trumps her right to be left alone. If you pursue a conversation when she’s tried to cut it off, you send a message. It is that your desire to speak trumps her right to be left alone. And each of those messages indicates that you believe your desires are a legitimate reason to override her rights.
 
For women, who are watching you very closely to determine how much of a threat you are, this is an important piece of data...

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Family Guy Corn Maze

Bob Connors, owner of Connors Farm in Danvers, is a big fan of “Family Guy.’’ How big? He mowed his corn maze into the shape of “Family Guy’’ characters Stewie and Brian. 

I love this country.

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View 902 Letters From and To Vincent Van Gogh

View lall of his surviving letters by period, by correspondent (i.e.: Theo, his Parents, Gauguin, etc.), by place (i.e.: Amsterdam, Arles, The Hague, etc.) with sketches...

Ever since Vincent van Gogh’s letters became widely known with their first publication almost a century ago they have garnered the interest and admiration they deserve. They were eagerly seized on as a rich source of information about Van Gogh’s gripping life story and exceptional work, and there was broad recognition of the intrinsic qualities of his writing: the personal tone, evocative style and lively language. The combination of these factors prompted some people who were in a position to know to accord the correspondence the status of literature. The poet W.H. Auden, who published an anthology with a brief introduction, wrote: ‘there is scarcely one letter by Van Gogh which I, who am certainly no expert, do not find fascinating’...

Visit the Archive...

Jamie Oliver: Putting America’s Diet on a Diet

We sat at the dining-room table. “The key to life is to know what you’re good at and stay away from what you’re bad at,” he said. Well, the pasta was certainly delicious. As for the bad part, we talked about school. He said he recently ran into his “special needs” teacher, Mrs. Murphy, and actually blushed as he told me, “I gave her a big hug and kiss, and she said she was really proud of me.” 

Oliver has often recounted the story of being one of five children out of 150 pulled from regular classes each week to learn how to read and write, as the other kids taunted them, singing the phrase “special needs” to the tune of “Let It Be.

I love Jamie Oliver.

Homeless Man Leaves Behind Surprise: $4 Million

Every day on NPR, listeners hear funding credits — or, in other words, very short, simple commercials.

A few weeks ago, a new one made it to air: "Support for NPR comes from the estate of Richard Leroy Walters, whose life was enriched by NPR, and whose bequest seeks to encourage others to discover public radio."

NPR's Robert Siegel wondered who Walters was. So Siegel Googled him.

An article in the online newsletter of a Catholic mission in Phoenix revealed that Walters died two years ago at the age of 76. He left an estate worth about $4 million. Along with the money he left for NPR, Walters also left money for the mission.

But something distinguished Walters from any number of solvent, well-to-do Americans with seven-figure estates: He was homeless.

End of The World: Financial Crisis Hits Dubai’s multi-billion dollar property deal

England is deserted, Australia and New Zealand have merged, and the man who bought Ireland has killed himself.

They were designed to make Dubai the envy of the world: a series of paradise islands inhabited by celebrities and the super-rich reclaimed from the azure waters of the Arabian Gulf and shaped like a map of the Earth. It was called The World.

As millions of tonnes of rock were dumped into the sea for the foundations, timely leaks suggested that Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie were to buy Ethiopia, Sir Richard Branson was tipped to occupy England, while Rod Stewart would border him in Scotland.

U.S. Government Gold Manipulation Document Declassified

Not sure what it means but in the 1970's, granted it was during a period of high inflation,the Federal Reserve, had a secret agreement with the German government whereby the German government agreed not to buy gold in the open market, or from other governments, at a price above the then-official U.S. government price of $42.22 per ounce, despite the fact that the open market price for gold was then trading between $160 to $175 per ounce.

Why? Why don't I understand the monetary system? And is gold something that we shoulld still be talking about? It's a common metal right?

Chicken Nugget Lemon Tooty

Chicken Nugget Lemon Tooty is a Dad's blog that features drawings made by his three kids: Isaac age 10; Grace age 9; and Lily age 6. Recently, to celebrate the 3 year anniversary of the blog, their Dad asked his readers to submit 'fan art' using past CNLT drawings as inspiration. Here are the AMAZING submitted art works, accompanied by the original drawings that inspired them.

(Illustration: Matt Mangus)

The Doers Club

How a teenager from Malawi built his first of several windmills to provide his family with electricity and irrigation and how he plans to help transform Africa.

The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind