(via UnionVersity)
Floyd Mayweather Hitting the Mitts
This is beautiful, and absolutely mesmerising.
(Also worth a watch: Manny Pacquiao shadow-boxing.)
(via The Rumble)
So you think they can break-dance?
Ignore the terrible headline. This article, by Jeff Chang, is by far and away the best article about breaking I have ever read in a mainstream publication. On the whole, it gets it right, and describes the dance and surrounding culture well.
But still, the passages where Chang actually describes the dance are terrible. The prose is awkward*, and worse than this, his use of terminology is incorrect throughout. One particular example: “The Russian takes a wide berth, flings off his light blue shirt, does a six-step, then launches into a spectacular one-armed move known as an air chair.” This doesn’t even come close to describing what is performed**.
Considering Chang’s bona fides, this is bizarre and, as a b-boy, it’s infuriating to read, especially bearing in mind that—as I mentioned—this is the absolute pinnacle of the way our art-form is portrayed in the media.
(via More Than A Stance)
* Although in his defense, I have never read any that isn’t. I’m not sure if it’s even possible to describe such intricate body movements elegantly.
** Six-step is footwork, one of the first things you’d learn in a beginners’ breaking class. An air chair is a freeze. What Flying Buddha actually does is some basic toprock, followed by a couple of power combos. I’m not just being overly picky here. Imagine if you were to read an article about football where every goal were described as a “tackle”, or an article about public transport which called buses “trains” throughout. Chang’s description of breaking is literally that bad.
Wales vs France
Below lies the third installment in my notliveblogging of the Welsh campaign at the Six Nations. As in previous episodes, I am normal, and [Tom is all like this.]
As the national anthems play, I can feel the adrenaline. This despite the fact that again, I already know who is going to win, having failed—like the Likely Lads—to make it home uninformed.
Your commentators: Jonathan Davies and Nick Mullins. Wales give away a penalty within the first couple of minutes, and their lineout is tested for the first time. Jonathan Davies’s attempts at pronouncing French names are hilarious. [What is also impressive is that he never mangles these names the same way twice - he has infinite variations of the word “Jauzion”. I’m pretty sure he also describes the French No.8 as “Harry Nor-Donkey” at one point.]
The Bechdel Test
A film* passes the The Bechdel Test if:
It has at least two women in it, who,
Talk to each other about,
Something besides a man.
It’s named after Alison Bechdel, who popularised the rule—apparently formulated by her friend Liz Wallace—in the comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For.
Subsequently, it has had additions made by Alas! A Blog, that the two female characters must have names, and by Charles Stross**, that the conversation must also not be about marriage or babies.
Think about how many films you’ve seen recently that pass the test. Depressing, huh?
Further reading:
Talk to Her is a film review site which puts its subjects to the test, and the Bechdel Test Movie List is a site that lists movies that pass, fail, or get some way towards passing the test.
* Or, in fact, any piece of fiction.
** Stross also links to several interesting related articles in his follow-up post.
Avatar - The Metacontextual Edition
The Baftas were on last weekend, and I happened to catch the award for best film. Avatar was among the nominees, which reminded me that I never got around to posting the link to this very funny Mad-style parody.
I enjoyed Avatar a lot, but this thorough skewering pretty much sums up why I don’t think it should be winning any “Best Movie” awards.
(via Sore Eyes)
NO ONE’S TO BLAME!
…yelled the front of the Daily Mail this morning. “That’s odd,” I thought to myself. “Normally the Daily Mail is all for blaming people.”
I got closer, and realised that it was of course being sarcastic: “Up to 1,200 needless deaths, patients abused, staff bullied to meet targets… yet a secret inquiry into failing hospital says NO ONE’S TO BLAME”
Last night my Sky HD box failed to record Lost 6x03
Now the torrent is doing 300kb/sec and will be here in about another hour.
There’s a lesson here, TV broadcasters. You should at least be more convenient and reliable than pirate downloads.
At some point in the near future I intend to cancel my Sky subscription and replace it with DVD box-sets and stealing off the internet. For exactly this reason.
Wales vs Scotland
Here’s WYWG’s down-but-not-out-blog of the Wales vs Scotland match in the Six Nations this Saturday. As in the England vs Wales roundup last week, my comments are in normal, and contributor Tom’s [look like this.]
Unlike last week, I’m actually watching this match live, and, not already knowing the result in advance, I’m feeling pretty excited.
Stephen Jones kicks off and Wales immediately give away a penalty.
Wales win their first lineout. That means they’ve won 100% of their lineouts so far today! Better than last week’s record of 7/12.
Wales squander a good chance inside the Scottish 22.
We’re five minutes in, and so far the quality of rugby has been pretty bad.
“
Ultimately, I still feel cheated by Vince Carter and his career with nights like this reminding me just of that when I thought it was behind me. Did Vince owe the fans and me a different story arc to his career? Not really. Maybe you could argue he owed it to himself but if he’s happy fading into “what could have been” obscurity then that’s on him.
I just could have done without the diabolical casualness of his career. And I could have done without the 48-point reminder that he was an Allen Iverson heart away from burning this place to the ground.
”A year and a half after I described Vince Carter as “somewhat of a joke these days” he has posted a 48-point game, dragging the Magic from behind to beat the Hornets. An impressive achievement, but it just made Hardwood Paroxysm sad. That last paragraph gave me chills.
(via True Hoop, who dubbed it Vince Carter’s maddening night.)
“ Whilst traditional news reporting jobs are decreasing, jobs reporting celebrity news are expanding. We need to train our journalism students to be employable in this changing market. ”
—Sarah Rowlands, the head of the Journalism Department at Staffordshire University, defending its new course in Celebrity Journalism.
Depressing.
(Hat tip to diodesign)
Some more commentry on the Facebook login fiasco here, here, and here.
I offer two alternate hypotheses on the conventional wisdom that these people are all just terminally confused.
These people really can’t login to Facebook. Because they’ve forgotten their passwords, or had their Facebook accounts whipped from beneath them by phishers; they don’t actually think that RRW is Facebook. They’re just hoping that there’s someone there—or reading—sufficiently connected to help them with their grevious plight.
Seriously, this must be a hoax. Are we sure that 4chan aren’t behind this? There’s some ongoing scam to write asinine comments on any webpage you can find in google containing the words: Facebook login. It’s the only plausible explanation.
In general, I do tend to agree with Gruber’s take on this. It’s a fascinating glimpse into how little people understand the technology they use and indeed how difficult it is to understand it.
“ Policemen have started carrying guns – big, visible, frightening guns – quite widely. And I don’t remember us discussing that. Did I miss a meeting? The last conversation I remember was all about the pride we take in our unarmed British force. You know, the ones whose weapons (a truncheon, a whistle, who knows?) are tucked discreetly on to their belts, under their long jackets, beneath those slightly silly hats that make them taller than everyone else, because they are supposed to be reassuring figures, easily identifiable in a crowd, representing more of a help than a threat.
Somehow, they have been reborn as a tooled-up army of Schwarzeneggers. And I don’t think we did discuss it. I think we gradually noticed it happen and we subconsciously thought: “Well, yes, terrorist threat, 9/11, 7/7, WMD, homegrown assassins in our midst, few more armed police about, hope I get to Tesco before the semi-skimmed milk runs out.”
But that’s not a reason. Even if you believe the country is riddled with terrorists waiting to explode, that shouldn’t spell official, widespread guns. When I was a kid, the newspapers fuelled our fear of IRA bombs. The impression was, you could hardly walk down Oxford Street without getting blown up. But I remember, I remember, how proudly people spoke about our unaffected lives. We shopped there anyway. We carried on as normal, assuming we wouldn’t get unlucky.
Not now. We accept, somehow, even though we must understand how vast are the statistics against our being at a bomb scene, that we will queue for three hours at the airport, won’t carry water, won’t carry toothpaste; we will fill in extra forms and hand out extra personal information whenever we hear the words “heightened security”; and we will see armed police on the street. Why? How will that help? Unless we put 20 armed police on every street, they’re never going to be in the right place at the right time – and if the right place at the right time is an underground train carriage where a man unexpectedly blows himself up, a gun wouldn’t stop him anyway. That’s just firing bullets into the stable door after the horse has detonated.
And he stood there, Tony Blair, he stood there, well, he sat there, and he made that little church-and-steeple out of his fingers and he said the Iraq war had “made the world a safer place”. Really? Really? If it’s so much safer, how come we need all these hired gunmen that we didn’t need before? ”
Victoria Coren: He stepped out of the dark with a gun… | The Observer
Wow. Brilliant writing from Coren. The last paragraph is fantastic.
I could not agree more with the article, and with penllawen’s assessment of it.
Robot Snowplow from Japan Eats Up Snow, Poops Out Bricks
I cannot wait for Wandsworth Council to put an order in for some of these guys.
