Put The Bstds Where They Belong ...

Threadless Tees design by Tom Burns.

Made with "talent, love, and plastisol ink and a chino additive for softness."

Thomas Edison and the Universal Exposition, Paris 1900

Hat Tip: Nick Wallace Smith

Music: "Claire de Lune", by Claude Debussy

"Twenty Ten", by Lloyd Marcus

"The Government Can"

Time Hawkins' Comedy channel on YouTube

Tim Hawkins Comedy website

Home Made Satire: "I Will Follow Him" (brainless twits!)

An Angry Mob Production by: Joe Dan Gorman Media

Hat Tip: "Mobs R Us" - Sign up also for Conservative social site for Conservatives, KicSpace

"Walking in Memphis", Cher

Hyperinflation: Money to Burn

Der Spiegel: "Germany in the Era of Hyperinflation",  by Alexander Jung

During the hyperinflation in Germany of 1920s, the country's currency, the mark, went crazy. The government of the Weimar Republic may have been able to clear its debts, but it came at the cost of the citizens' savings. It's an era that is still part of the national psyche today.

Editor's note: During the global economic crisis, politicians and economists in the United States and Britain often criticized Berlin for its reluctance to initiate the kinds of expensive stimulus programs promoted by Washington. One of the most oft-cited reasons in Germany for racking up more debt than necessary to revive the economy was the fear of hyperinflation. From 1922-1923, hyperinflation plagued Germany and helped fuel the eventual rise of Adolf Hitler. The following article about this national trauma has been translated from a special issue of SPIEGEL on the history of money.


You could say journalist Eugeni Xammar had a stroke of reporter's luck when the Barcelona daily La Veu de Catalunya sent him to Berlin in the fall of 1922, a pivotal moment in the country's history. In the months that followed, it was the most exciting place in the world to report from. Germany's financial structures collapsed, and the mark began its descent into near worthlessness. (...) >>>

Related:

The Captain's Comments: "The Looming Threat"

Hot, Fresh and Soooo Amazing!

Amaze.fm is a community of music makers and lovers hoping to restore some of that lost quality to what we call "popular" music.

Artists upload their music to be listened to, rated, reviewed, and tagged.

Fans choose the songs that make it to the radio by listening to and rating songs weekly.

Each week the highest rated song from Amaze.fm gets played on nationally-syndicated radio.

We give you ... "Warm Breeeze" played by ...

Fusion Juice

Genre: 'Jazz'

Contemporary Jazz has a new sound in Denver Colorado. " Fusion Juice ” is comprised of some of Denver's finest musicians. This quintet delivers groove oriented Jazz with an emphasis on smooth sexy guitar sounds. "We really felt that the time was right for a more guitar oriented Jazz group here in Denver" says Fusion Juice guitar man Jimmy Schoettle.

Playing original contemporary Jazz, plus wonderful interpretations of classic Jazz fusion hits, this group knows how to satisfy the soul. If you are tired of the same old sounding jazz, then sample Fusion Juice and see for yourself why it's the freshest sound in Denver Colorado.

The current line up for Denver's Hottest New Jazz Group includes Jimmy Schoettle on Guitar, Matt Brodie on Sax and Flute, Carl Sorenson on Keyboards, Scott Fitzgerald on Bass, and David Young on the Drums.

My Sites: Fusion Juice

The Gregory Brothers: Auto-Tune the News #6

The Gregory Brothers present: auto-tune the news

MP3 at Amie St.

Play List on YouTube

Picture of the Month in the #IranElection Collection

Messy Properties

Der Spiegel: "Chocolate Company Promises Melt-Free Revolution"

Chocolate is just as much a part of Switzerland as the Alps. Now, global market leader Barry Callebaut has developed the product that competitors have been hopelessly puzzling over for 60 years -- chocolate that doesn't melt and is low in calories.

Serious mountain climbers know the problem all too well: Packing chocolate in your rucksack only ends in frustration when you reach the summit. If you're walking in freezing cold temperatures, the chocolate bar becomes a rock-hard block that's impossible to bite into without breaking your teeth. But, then again, if the sun is beating down, it won't take long before the chocolate melts into a gooey mess. In the worst-case scenario, you reach the mountain top, finally at your destination, and it's completely liquified.

And even if the temperature is just right, there's still the problem of weight gain. As most of us have finally realized, chocolate is not one of the staple foods of the skinny minnie.

But one Zurich-based chocolate manufacturer thinks it has a solution that could make these problems a thing of the past. Barry Callebaut, whose annual output of over 1.1 million tons of cocoa and chocolate products makes it the world's largest producer of chocolate, has developed a type of chocolate with completely new properties. According to the company's head developer, Hans Vriens, the chocolate has up to 90 percent fewer calories than regular chocolate.

What's more, high temperatures can't touch it (...) >>>

More chocolate ... Wiki ... the movie

"The Stoning of Soraya"

The director of the movie, Cyrus Nowrashteh talks to Roger L. Simon and Lionel Chetwynd on PJTV.

Topics of discussion are the origin and background of the film,  the making of, the attitude of Hollywood, feminists and the Left in the face of the savagery of Sharia law towards women.

Starring James Caviezel, Mozhan Marnò and Shohreh Aghdashloo.

The Official site.

Watch the slideshow on IMDb.

Page on IMDb.

Update:

Below is the director sitting down with Natalie Foster:

Your Choice: Liberty or Tyranny

You're watching an interview with Mark Levin, author of “Liberty & Tyranny” which debuted as No. 1 on the New York Times Bestseller list and has retained that position for five straight weeks.

Art Without Objective Value

The process in which our world is being deconstructed is the following. It is best made visible in art and culture, but through its anti philosophy it slowly permeates every walk of life, until one day we find ourselves plunged into the black hole of nihilism.

Narrative: "Morality is relative and depends on your point of view; the same is true of beauty and any other value; our values are middle class; values are evil, Western constructs; objective art (science, music (tones), drama, literature (language, letters) ballet (movement), culture, education, gender, family, religion, etc.) must be liberated from the constraints put upon it by evil, Western, objectivists; old culture must be attacked and destroyed."

This process of the hatred of the good for being good cannot go on forever without consequences.

City Journal: "Beauty and Desecration - We must rescue art from the modern intoxication with ugliness", by Roger Scruton

At any time between 1750 and 1930, if you had asked an educated person to describe the goal of poetry, art, or music, “beauty” would have been the answer. And if you had asked what the point of that was, you would have learned that beauty is a value, as important in its way as truth and goodness, and indeed hardly distinguishable from them. Philosophers of the Enlightenment saw beauty as a way in which lasting moral and spiritual values acquire sensuous form. And no Romantic painter, musician, or writer would have denied that beauty was the final purpose of his art.

At some time during the aftermath of modernism, beauty ceased to receive those tributes. Art increasingly aimed to disturb, subvert, or transgress moral certainties, and it was not beauty but originality—however achieved and at whatever moral cost—that won the prizes. Indeed, there arose a widespread suspicion of beauty as next in line to kitsch—something too sweet and inoffensive for the serious modern artist to pursue. In a seminal essay—“Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” published in Partisan Review in 1939—critic Clement Greenberg starkly contrasted the avant-garde of his day with the figurative painting that competed with it, dismissing the latter (not just Norman Rockwell, but greats like Edward Hopper) as derivative and without lasting significance. The avant-garde, for Greenberg, promoted the disturbing and the provocative over the soothing and the decorative, and that was why we should admire it. (...) >>>

Related:

- Stephen Hicks: "Why Art Became Ugly"

You Just Hate to Break It to Them ...

... wouldn't know how ...






The Obama Prints

Huge, Stinking, Shapeless Phallus About to Climax

Voila, the apotheosis of the Amorphophallus Titanum!

Apparently the tension at Leiden's Hortus Botanicus is getting unbearable.

On the run for 24/7 wall-to-wall coverage of the untimely demise of the king of pop? ...

... disillusioned with the Left for leaving the people of Iran at the mercy of evil old men and the bloodthirsty dungeon inmates they unleashed on to the city of Tehran (the so-called 'under-the-bus' effect)? ...

... then perhaps you can find some solace watching this rare horticultural sprout come to a short, but dramatic bloom.

Here's a link to the Hortus' webcam.

Bring your own coffee and sandwiches (but for heaven's sake, don't hold your breath!).

The Twitter Revolution

© Copyright John Cole

Amorphophallus titanum! Que?

... the huge, (stinking) shapeless phallus ...

Dutch News: "Titum arum set to bloom in Leiden"

One of the world's strangest plants, the giant titan arum (amorphophallus titanum), is expected to bloom at Leiden's botanical gardens on Sunday night. The botanical gardens are open on Sunday evening as part of midsummer celebrations. The titan arum produces the world's biggest flowers after eight to 15 year's of growth. The flowers, which have a terrible stench like rotting meat, last just two nights. A second plant is set to flower in about three weeks time (...) >>>

High resolution photos

This Hortus Botanicus page contains a link to the webcam. Perhaps nice to watch towards opening time.

Watch one on an earlier occasion at the Brooklyn Botanic.