my dream job is Jeff Goldblum in Jurassic Park
like some billionaire calls you up, all “hi, I’m looking to fly a seductive genius out to my tropical island to say some really oracular shit”
and you’re like “well can I witness and real-time critique the predictable reward of man’s hubris and then walk off into the sunset?”
and he’s like “hellll yeah”
Forested area in the United States.
Over six years, researchers assembled the national forest map from space-based radar, satellite sensors, computer models, and a massive amount of ground-based data. It is possibly the highest resolution and most detailed view of forest structure and carbon storage ever assembled for any country.
Forests in the U.S. were mapped down to a scale of 30 meters, or roughly 10 computer display pixels for every hectare of land (4 pixels per acre). They divided the country into 66 mapping zones and ended up mapping 265 million segments of the American land surface. Kellndorfer estimates that their mapping database includes measurements of about five million trees.
Empire Strikes Back was released closer to World War II than to today.
You know what this “Women’s March on Washington” suddenly reminded me of? Louis Farrakhan’s “Million Man March” of 1995.
Which came in the wake of the “angry white men” election of 1994 that broke the decades-long Democratic lock on Congress
Around the time of those Promise Keepers rallies
Golden age of maleness as a base for mass action I guess
Click through to watch all the videos of the operetta about corporate tax inversions as sung by a cabal of tax lawyers. This is not a sentence I ever thought I’d type.
meanwhile in Japan…
So this is the Japanese equivalent of Pounded by the Pound, pretty much? Our cultures aren’t as different as one might think.
in the sequel the post office girl drops a package into a lake, which becomes a riff on The Honest Woodcutter only it turns out the package was a masturbation sleeve and what’s she going to do with gold and silver ones of those so the goddess gives her a dick to use them with
so yeah, it’s kind of shitpost porn
At the appointed hour, Deaver knocked on the door. Reagan grunted and Deaver heard him roll over, so he knocked again, saying: “It’s eight o'clock. You’re going to be inaugurated as President in a few hours.”
“Do I have to?” Reagan called back. Then he laughed.
Trying to make his beaten and bitter predecessor feel more comfortable, he rolled out old Hollywood stories, a couple of them about his days at Warner Brothers studios under Jack Warner.
“He kept talking about Jack Warner,” Carter said later to his communications director, Gerald Rafshoon. “Who’s Jack Warner?”
Led by former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, the party’s elders came within minutes of persuading Reagan to take Ford as his running mate, not so much as Vice President but as a kind of co-president in charge of foreign affairs and budgetary matters. A joke, which took notice of Reagan’s supposed laziness, made the rounds on the floor of the Republican convention: “Ford will be president before nine, after five, and on weekends.”
In the weeks before his inaugural, with staff and press concentrating on who would man the new government, the President-elect spent his own time outlining the inaugural address. To him, the words were more important than the men who served him, aides he usually just called “the fellas,” often because he could not remember all their names. He was helped this time by a fellow named Ken Khachigian, a Los Angeles lawyer who had written for President Nixon and done a good deal of the heavy word-lifting on the 1980 campaign speeches. As he always did, Reagan began by chatting for twenty minutes or so about his ideas and gave Khachigian a six-inch pile of the four-by-six index cards he had used and edited for speeches over the years. In his transition meetings with Carter, Reagan had not taken a note nor made a serious comment during the President’s long and complicated issue briefings, but at the end of the first and most important session - use of nuclear weapons was one topic - he noticed that Carter used three-by-five cards listing the subjects of the hour-long talk. “Can I get copies of those?” Reagan asked as he stood up to leave.
With his writer taking notes, Reagan began dictating themes:
He also told Khachigian to find the script of a World War II movie. “It was about Bataan,” he said. An actor named Frank McHugh, Reagan remembered, said something like: “We’re Americans. What’s happening to us?” The writer found the line, which was somewhat different from what Reagan recalled, and used it as a finale in the first draft of the speech he brought to the President-elect on January 4: “We have great deeds to do…. But do them we will. We are after all Americans.”
They were watching television. Steve Bell of ABC News was talking about the crisis, about Carter and his men working on the details of transferring money to the Iranians. The image of an Iranian mob appeared; the President-elect pursed his lips and muttered: “Shitheels!”
my Hollywood sources tell me the new M. Night Shyamalan movie
It’s like we’re picking up right where the Bush years left off
You know Signs was filmed in my hometown? Which isn’t nearly as rural as they made it look. I was driving down by Del Val one night, came over a hill and there was a giant glowing white orb on a crane, just hanging out in the middle of a field I guess to simulate moonlight, scared the shit out of me
Honestly if it came out he went as “M. Night” in tribute to O. Henry I’d discover a bunch of respect for the guy
Do I know of such a list? No.
I’d be a little suspicious of the impulse to take this as something to be conclusively resolved through “More Information” tho, because “what are the ideals of this revolution” is itself a site of contest to which any possible answer is cold and congealed power more than prior-to-human truth.
Like, what were the ideals of the American Revolution? What was the Civil War fought over?
I’m aware of several answers to these questions, affiliated with several different factions, that have jostled and eclipsed each other and waxed and waned just within my lifetime, and more dramatically still before.
There was a fluff a few years ago over a fucking Assassin’s Creed game, of all things, the one set in the French Revolution. Because the game - which for most of the world is the most prominent representation of the Revolution this generation - had the revolution starting with popular unrest, then manipulated by bloodthirsty Jacobin schemers, with opportunist cynic Napoleon Bonaparte putting things back together again. Which is the standard Anglophone interpretation, taught as a given in UK and America but civic sacrilege in France, where these aren’t seen as distinct and rivalrous successions but part of a continuous process of realizing the Revolution’s ideals.
(That this was a Quebecer studio pushing the Anglosphere over the Francophonie take was a source of further cultural anxiety.)
And this was taken, well, seriously enough, because “what did the French Revolution mean” is one of the most important ideological disputes of the modern era. The Revolutions of 1848… hell, the Cold War was fought to a significant extent over “what did the French revolution mean”. So if you’re trying to work things out by analytically matching them with a list the first step is to resolve all that and good fucking luck.
this is like an Animorphs where a real gun becomes a cartoon
Army just announced its new pistol, based on the Sig Sauer P320. It’s modular, with a “fire control unit” like an AR-type lower reciever that can be mated and remated to various caliber barrels and grips.
The Army’s old service pistol, the 1911, was probably the most iconic handgun in the world but the M9 never really caught even as “black” AR-type long guns filtered from the military to be an American symbol. Part of it’s 9mm still has a reputation as training wheels, I think part of it’s the sleek Italian ‘70s style clashed with everything else in American gun culture these days.
So this has the potential to become an iconic design piece. Sig Sauer’s got a whole product line of the basis model already, versions preloaded with reflex sights and “TACOPS” extended mags so the kids can match their favorite Call of Duty loadout.
And as an icon, I think it looks pretty great. If you’d asked me to picture “a 2017 pistol” I don’t know it’d be far off, hitting the classic cyberpunk notes – blocky but not square with details breaking up the profile of the forward barrel. The combination of the sawtoothed Picatinny rail and that slide milling give it an aggressive muzzle; add in the trigger finger depression on the grip and it’s got just enough style to balance against the authoritative solidness of those slab sides and squared-off trigger guard.
This is a jaunty French Revolutionary filk song about the Day of the Rope that riffs off a Benjamin Franklin line, for example
The fuck does that mean today?
If the “always fighting the last war” thing holds up (it does) the imperative now is to take everything we learned from Iraq and Afghanistan and throw it out the window
