James Garner, Steve McQueen and James Coburn at a private screening of The Great Escape — via Steve Niles Tumblr
The NSW government has been working with Optus, Telstra, and Vodafone to install more than 10 kilometres of cabling to provide reception for mobile phones, tablets, and laptops.
The service is undergoing live testing, and will be switched on as early as Monday, Transport Minister Gladys Berejiklian said.
The lack of coverage in our CBD tunnels has been an ongoing concern for customers over many years, and quite frankly an embarrassment for our city,
she said — via redwolf.newsvine.com
These 6 Gauge (4mm) Plugs have been made from real Octopus Tentacles in Sterling silver. Each piece has been handmade, textured and finished so you can have a unique piece of art in your ears — via Etsy
— via PickleDish
A plug-in that was pulled from the official WordPress plug-in directory has been restored, but will be monitored closely, after the plug-in’s owner claimed a rogue contractor introduced malicious code into the popular web publishing add-on.
Social Media Widget, a free plug-in for the WordPress blogging platform with more than a million downloads, was restored to the WordPress.org official plugin directory on Thursday, days after it was found injecting WordPress websites with spam links to web sites offering Pay Day Loans. In a post on a support forum for Social Media Widget, Samuel Wood, a WordPress administrator, said that WordPress.org was willing to give the owner and the plug-in, Brendan Sheehan, a second chance — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Following an uncertain start to life, Chai, a Red Panda cub born at Mogo Zoo on the South Coast of New South Wales, will be making her first public debut. Born on 3 December, the baby was rejected by mum at just six days old. It was necessary for the Zoo’s veterinarian, Dr Sam Young, to intervene and hand-raise the cub — via ZooBorns
There is a not insignificant population for whom David Lee Roth is the ur-rock star, the embodiment of everything splendorous and stupid about that term, as responsible as anyone for establishing, defining, and cementing the debauched libertine, hotel room-trashing, groupie-defiling caricature that is cliché and passé and lionized. Roth is a little less famous for having parleyed that caricature into a life that’s rich and weird and singular and driven by very particular and exotic enthusiasms ranging from mountain climbing to martial arts to tending to gunshot victims in the Bronx. But this is something he’s actively trying to change. He owes this movable feast to leaving — quitting, getting kicked out of: pick your version of the legend — what was, at the time of his messy exit, the biggest, most over-the-top band in the world. If not for that, he might not be someone who, at 57, would train to be a master swordsman or to speak fluent Japanese.
I wonder who I might have been had I stayed in the band,
he says. Not as interesting, not as involved. I probably would have followed the more traditional, long, slow climb to the middle. Enjoying my accomplishments, living off my residuals. I wouldn’t have half the stories to tell.
And if not for the fact that Roth rejoined Van Halen in 2007, thus ending rock’s most enduring will-they-or-won’t-they soap opera, he wouldn’t be in the position to try to channel that experience into a sprawling one-man video series and podcast that aspires to do nothing less than tell the history of modern culture through the eyes of someone who has been everywhere, done everything, met everyone, and hired a couple of midgets to be his security detail along the way. He’s going to use the internet to save us from the internet. He does not harbour any illusion that his life is easily replicated — celebrities, they aren’t just like us — but he would like to, as humbly as one can do such a thing, offer it as an example of what a life can be — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Recently a troop of Russian photographers surreptitiously scaled the Great Pyramid of Giza and documented the unseen vistas from its summit. How’d they do it? Seems like the group waited several hours after closing time, hiding from guards until they saw their chance. As one of the photographers would later point out, climbing the Pyramids is a punishable crime and can carry sentences of up to three years — via Architizer
Sulu and Skywalker make toast — via Steve Niles Tumblr
This Sumatran Tiger cub, born at the San Francisco Zoo on 10 February to mother Leanne, has had its first vet check this week and it was determined that it’s a girl. To minimally interrupt mother-cub bonding, the exam was done in less than 5 minutes, revealing that the five-week-old is in excellent health and thriving under her mother’s care. And since this is a solo cub and there is no competition for milk, the baby has a nice big belly and weighed in at 8 pounds. Her next exam will take place around 10 April, when she is 8 weeks old — via ZooBorns
— via Steve Niles Tumblr
Algae may still be years away as a source for road and jet fuel. But could it power whole buildings before long?
If you think that’s crazy, then look at this recently completed five-story residential building in Hamburg. It is covered by panels filled with algae, a fast-growing form of biomass. The building pumps water, nutrients, and compressed CO2 between 129 bioreactors
. When the sun shines, the algae multiplies as a result of photosynthesis. The system collects the residue, then converts it to biogas, which is burned in a boiler. Together with a heat recovery system and solar panels on the roof, the building is completely energy independent, according to its creators.
The panels are 98 inches by 28 inches, 0.78 inches thick, and cover about 2,150 square feet, on two south-facing sides. Known as the BIK, the building, which has 15 apartments, is an entry to the International Building Exhibition and was completed last month. It will open to the public soon — via redwolf.newsvine.com
A Wiki page about a French military base has gone viral after Gallic spooks tried to censor it.
French internal spies at the Direction Centrale du Renseignement Intérieur called in a volunteer Wiki editor to their Paris office and ordered him to spike an entry about the Station hertzienne militaire de Pierre-sur-Haute, a military radio base in central France.
The volunteer, named in the French media (en Francais) as Pierre-Carl Langlais, a 30-year-old curator at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, quickly agreed to their demands even though he did not write the original entry.
However, despite his warnings on a discussion thread that anyone who reposted it would be engaging in criminality
, the page was quickly uploaded again by another Wikimedia volunteer before being translated into several languages.
The page, which apparently contains very little (or nothing) in the way of sensitive information, had been almost unvisited up to that point.
Following its reinstatement by enraged French Wiki users the page received 120,000 views over the weekend of 6/7 April, according to some reports — via redwolf.newsvine.com
When I was a kid, Thatcher was the headmistress of our country. Her voice, a bellicose yawn, somehow both boring and boring — I could ignore the content but the intent drilled its way in. She became leader of the Conservatives the year I was born and prime minister when I was four. She remained in power till I was 15. I am, it’s safe to say, one of Thatcher’s children. How then do I feel on the day of this matriarchal mourning?
I grew up in Essex with a single mum and a go-getter Dagenham dad. I don’t know if they ever voted for her, I don’t know if they liked her. My dad, I suspect, did. He had enough Del Boy about him to admire her coiffured virility — but in a way Thatcher was so omnipotent; so omnipresent, so omni-everything that all opinion was redundant.
As I scan the statements of my memory bank for early deposits (it’d be a kid’s memory bank account at a neurological NatWest where you’re encouraged to become a greedy little capitalist with an escalating family of porcelain pigs), I see her in her hairy helmet, condescending on Nationwide, eviscerating eunuch MPs and baffled BBC fuddy duddies with her General Zodd stare and coldly condemning the IRA. And the miners. And the single mums. The dockers. The poll-tax rioters. The Brixton rioters, the Argentinians, teachers; everyone actually — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Goggle Up! Science is about to happen…
In one of the most significant gifts in the history of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the philanthropist and cosmetics tycoon Leonard A. Lauder has promised the institution his collection of 78 Cubist paintings, drawings and sculptures.
The trove of signature works, which includes 33 Picassos, 17 Braques, 14 Légers and 14 works by Gris, is valued at more than $1 billion. It puts Mr Lauder, who for years has been one of the city’s most influential art patrons, in a class with cornerstone contributors to the museum like Michael C Rockefeller, Walter Annenberg, Henry Osborne Havemeyer and Robert Lehman.
The gift was approved by the Met’s board at a meeting Tuesday afternoon — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Hours earlier, Davis had been navigating dense traffic in Lahore, his thick frame wedged into the driver’s seat of a white Honda Civic. A city once ruled by Mughals, Sikhs and the British, Lahore is Pakistan’s cultural and intellectual capital, and for nearly a decade it had been on the fringes of America’s secret war in Pakistan. But the map of Islamic militancy inside Pakistan had been redrawn in recent years, and factions that once had little contact with one another had cemented new alliances in response to the CIA’s drone campaign in the western mountains. Groups that had focused most of their energies dreaming up bloody attacks against India were now aligning themselves closer to Al Qaeda and other organizations with a thirst for global jihad. Some of these groups had deep roots in Lahore, which was why Davis and a CIA team set up operations from a safe house in the city.
But now Davis was sitting in a Lahore police station, having shot two young men who approached his car on a black motorcycle, their guns drawn, at an intersection congested with cars, bicycles and rickshaws. Davis took his semi-automatic Glock pistol and shot through the wind shield, shattering the glass and hitting one of the men numerous times. As the other man fled, Davis got out of his car and shot several rounds into his back.
He radioed the American Consulate for help, and within minutes a Toyota Land Cruiser was in sight, careering in the wrong direction down a one-way street. But the SUV struck and killed a young Pakistani motorcyclist and then drove away. An assortment of bizarre paraphernalia was found, including a black mask, approximately 100 bullets and a piece of cloth bearing an American flag. The camera inside Davis’ car contained photos of Pakistani military installations, taken surreptitiously.
More than two years later, the Raymond Davis episode has been largely forgotten in the United States. It was immediately overshadowed by the dramatic raid months later that killed Osama bin Laden — consigned to a footnote in the doleful narrative of America’s relationship with Pakistan. But dozens of interviews conducted over several months, with government officials and intelligence officers in Pakistan and in the United States, tell a different story: that the real unravelling of the relationship was set off by the flurry of bullets Davis unleashed on the afternoon of 27 January 2011, and exacerbated by a series of misguided decisions in the days and weeks that followed. In Pakistan, it is the Davis affair, more than the Bin Laden raid, that is still discussed in the country’s crowded bazaars and corridors of power — via redwolf.newsvine.com
see, la is a random city. or, rather, a city of randomness. and random things. and a twisted unicorn spaghetti approach to cohesion. and because la is random i believe it would be odd to make any attempt to either shoe-horn or force any notions of cohesion onto it. even if involving dangling participles. like the last sentence. sorry.
now, this building. house. bunker. it’s a random house in a random setting. it’s modern and kind of brutalist and boxy. it’s also grey, with dark windows. all well and good, but it presents a whole host of questions — via Moby Los Angeles Architecture
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