London-based comedian James Veitch has done something we’ve all thought about, but never followed through on – he spent the last two years replying to spam emails and compiling the amazing conversations that ensued. “Dot Con,” a book of these interactions, was published this year and is available on Amazon.
“I set up multiple pseudonymous email accounts and began replying to spam,” Veitch told Mashable. “This must have put me on some sort of list because the spam came in a torrent and I replied to as much as I could.”
The game is all about you … and your friends! You’ll get to say what you think! Are you SASSY enough to share your secrets?
Sassy was a teen girls magazine that folded in 1994, never quite able to summon the advertising strength of other teen mags. Maybe that’s because it was different. Sassy assumed that the girls reading it were smart and worldly; articles about alternative music trends and edgy fashion were set among pieces about alcoholic parents and dealing with STDs. Sassy, according to Kara Jesella and Marisa Meltzer, the authors of How Sassy Changed My Life, had a smart, strong feminist message, giving them more than advice on how to land the boy of your dreams or how to starve yourself until you are loveable. How that great magazine translated to this hard-to-find boardgame (in which there is no board) is a little more complicated. The rules are hard to discern (though the drunken, foul-mouthed team from Beer and Board Games make an effort at it), but the goal seems to have been to be the first player to collect awards in the categories of Awareness, Brains, Confidence, Love, Sensitivity, and Talent. The other players vote on whether or not each girl’s answer to questions on those topics is deserving of a Sassy or Non-Sassy point. There is no telling the amount of women, many who’ve grown from Sassy girls to women with the brains, power, and ferocity to shape culture and society, would delight in the re-issue of this game.
With the same trademark compassion and erudition he brought to The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Oliver Sacks explores the place music occupies in the brain and how it affects the human condition in Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain. He will be sadly, deeply missed.
On my morning bike ride to Battery Park, I heard music as I approached the tip of Manhattan, and then saw and joined a silent crowd who sat gazing out to sea and listening to a young man playing Bach’s Chaconne in D on his violin. When the music ended and the crowd quietly dispersed, it was clear that the music had brought them some profound consolation, in a way that no words could ever have done.
Music, uniquely among the arts, is both completely abstract and profoundly emotional. It has no power to represent anything particular or external, but it has a unique power to express inner states or feelings. Music can pierce the heart directly; it needs no mediation. One does not have to know anything about Dido and Aeneas to be moved by her lament for him; anyone who has ever lost someone knows what Dido is expressing. And there is, finally, a deep and mysterious paradox here, for while such music makes one experience pain and grief more intensely, it brings solace and consolation at the same time.
Stunning and gorgeous, but be careful, though. After baking/frying the marbles, they may break if dropped onto a hard surface, like a tile floor. These are not suitable toys for young children, and they shouldn’t be doing this without close adult supervision. Get out your safety goggles when taking these out of the oven and putting them into the water. The marbles can shatter from this process, so be careful and keep your face away from the orbs when they’re popping.
Selena Gomez stopped into The Cruz Show to talk about her new album “Revival” and the emotional roller coaster she went through while creating it. She also touches upon the body shaming she faced by ridiculous trolls earlier this year, her thoughts on the paparazzi, and her take on social media.
“You have to understand that I dealt with a lot of body shaming this year, and I’ve never experienced that before. I don’t care about that stuff, but I did start gaining weight and I didn’t really mind it. I enjoyed it. But, mman, that hurt. That was really hurtful. I’ve experienced people who have tried to control that stuff before. It’s not even about my weight. It’s just not that I’m not going to give a fuck what people, sorry, I’m not going to care. I’m not going to let them get to me. I can do what I want. At the end of the day, this is not even going to be a subject once the album comes out. The music is going to take over because that’s how confident I am about it.”
Don’t invite drummer Kwon Soon Keun to your next gig. Actually…you should invite Kwon to your next gig. The song, by the way, is called “You’re Too Much [or Unkind]” first sung by Kim Suhee in 1976 and written by Yang Cheon-gang.
Flynt and Orelsan introduce themselves to America by putting themselves in these classic movie scenes, while these French rappers introduce themselves to classic film characters. Brilliant.
US Patent number 3005282 A, issued October 24, 1961, for a design for a “Toy building brick,” later known as LEGO. For the complete look, check out the full Patent.
Rocking the Cradle: Egypt 1978 is a live album by the Grateful Dead, consisting of two CDs and one DVD. It was recorded at the Gizah Sound and Light Theater in Giza, near Cairo, Egypt on September 15 and 16, 1978.
Most of the tracks on the DVD also appear on the two CDs. Besides the concert material, the DVD includes a 15-minute feature called The Vacation Tapes, containing footage, shot on 8 mm film, of the band and crew visiting tourist attractions in Egypt. A bonus disc of additional tracks recorded at these dates was included with early shipments of the album.
Bassist Phil Lesh was instrumental in arranging the concert. Describing the planning he said “it sort of became my project because I was one of the first people in the band who was on the trip of playing at places of power. You know, power that’s been preserved from the ancient world. The pyramids are like the obvious number one choice because no matter what anyone thinks they might be, there is definitely some kind of mojo about the pyramids.” Lesh contacted promoter Bill Graham in January 1976 but found that he was too busy. Through an introduction to Joe Malone, a professor at the American University of Beirut, Lesh made contacts with the Egyptian government. Lesh did not want the band to take any money from Egypt, and asked that proceeds from the concert be donated to the Department of Antiquities, the charity preferred by Jehan Sadat.
The Grateful Dead only played three concerts in Egypt in their thirty-year history — September 14, 15, and 16, 1978. The shows were performed very close to the Sphinx and the Great Pyramid. A total lunar eclipse occurred during the third concert.
The second season of “True Detective” was supremely dark and almost entirely devoid of car chases. Wouldn’t it be radically improved if it took some lessons from the cheesed-out action (and marvelous soundtrack) of 1970s cop shows like “Starsky and Hutch”? Vulture thought so.
