Move to Amend: coalition to abolish corporate personhood

A new coalition called Move To Amend is working to abolish corporate personhood in the US; they're working at the local and state level to pass laws to undo the work of Citizens United, the Supreme Court ruling that equated money with speech.

Boulder is not alone in this fight, nor is it the first community to consider such a resolution. In April, voters in Madison and Dane County, WI overwhelmingly approved measures calling for an end to corporate personhood and the legal status of money as speech by 84% and 78% respectively. Similar resolutions have been passed in nearly thirty other cities and counties. Resolutions have also been introduced in the state legislatures of both Vermont and Washington...
Move to Amend is gaining momentum rapidly in communities throughout the country precisely because the problems of corporate power are most evident locally. Developers seeking special favors pour money into elections. Big polluters avoid investigations and litigation by hiding behind their illegitimate "rights." Bad employers lie to the public about unfair labor practices with no legal consequences. People see it every day. They get it and they're ready to fight back. Move to Amend is here to help them do that with a strategy for long-term success.

Movement to Abolish Corporate Personhood Gaining Traction (via Reddit)

Thanks, BoingBoing

Beastieography

for your back from holiday enjoyment. This is a great, 1998 produced, 90 minute or so, eMpTyV special made on the Beastie Boys, good watch.




















Thanks, Caprice!

"Rebuild The Dream" - Launch Event Video

Watch highlights from last night's Rebuild the Dream launch event--then share it with everyone you know by using the sharing links on the right. And don't forget to sign up to host a house meeting (just click the "host" button), so that you can bring your friends and neighbors in to the movement.

See the full livestream of the launch event below with a great performance by The Roots:

check out REBUILD THE DREAM's website.

Van Jones seems like he's the man for 2016.


This is Van Jones on it! American Dream Movement speech:

"Picture us cooling out on the fourth of July, and if you heard we were celebrating, that's a world wide lie! "

(I actually edited this video for Brett Ratner,
the day they tried blowing up the WTC, the first time)

NYC FIREWORKS BONUS:

GREAT, Wikileaks' MasterCard "priceless" ad parody

"A spoof of the fact that major credit card and online payment companies have withheld over $15 Million in donations to WikiLeaks. The parody advert shows the effects of the financial blockade."



thanks, BoingBoing

CAT Aquatic Car Is the Water Taxi of the Future.

from Inhabitat

We already have water taxis and gondolas available for rent in various parts of the world today, but designer Cal Craven envisions a future in which these CAT aquatic water taxis will make gondolas truly seem a quaint throwback. The CAT car is a personal water taxi that people will be able to rent to take out on waterways and pilot themselves.

The CAT, or City Aquatic Transportation, is designed to carry 4 passengers and features panoramic views through its bubble glass top. No word on the propulsion system behind this cute concept, though we would expect it to be an electric boat with range-extending engine if produced in the near future, or solar-powered electric hybrid if made a few years down the road. We think the Boston Duck Tour buses just met their match.

10 Most Secure Locations on the Planet

from SAFEKEEPING

They say safety is relative. Some people go their entire lives and NEVER feel safe. Others take incredible precautions to protect both themselves and their loved ones from anyone and anything that may seek to cause them harm (babyproofing anyone?).

Where are you most safe? Are you thinking about places where you can retreat and hide from the world? If so, here are the 10 Most Secure Locations on the Planet that are considered the safest, for various reasons.

1. Fort Knox

Located in Kentucky south of Louisville, Fort Knox is home to the United States’ monetary assets, said to hold tons of gold – 5,000 tons at last estimate (equal to about 2% of ALL Gold ever mined from the Earth). To make it safe enough (if the location surrounding by the military camp isn’t enough) there is a bank vault within a deep basement of the building that has a 250 ton door marking its entrance.

Source

2. Cheyenne Mountain

This is also in the United States, located just outside of Colorado Springs, CO. It is the command center and control, communication and the intelligence center for both the United States Space Command missions and the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD). Built at the height of the Cold War, the facility is said to be sturdy enough to survive a multimegaton nuclear detonation within 1 nautical mile (1.9km) of it’s center. It has blast doors that each weigh, individually, 25 tons.



Source

3. Haven Co

Located in the Sealand in the North Sea, about six miles off the coast of Britain, this location is a company base founded in 2000. The company provides data protection. The only way you can get in is if you are an authorized staff member, an investor in the company or you are a Royal Family member. Although services for HavenCo ceased without explanation in 2008, it’s an example of the type of “island data haven” that is very secure do to it being SO HARD to get to traditionally.



Source

4. Area 51

The famed stories be true or not, this area in the remote deserts of Las Vegas is more than just strange. It is also one of the most secure locations on the planet. It is a United States military base ( a detachment from Edwards Air Force Base in CA) where no one knows what’s occurring, except those that work there and the President. Known by many names (Groom Lake, Dreamland, Paradise Ranch, etc.) Area 51 is believed to be a testing ground for advanced and experimental aircraft.

Source

5. Air Force One

One of the most well built planes in the world and what many consider the world’s most secure moving location, Air Force One has plenty of security. The United States President travels in a modified Boeing 747-200B series aircraft. It has the world’s most advanced flight avoidance, air-to-air defense, and electronics technology packages available anywhere in the World, all for the protection of the Commander-in-Chief and his entourage.



Source

6. ADX Florence Prison

The Administrative Maximum Facility (ADX for short) is a supermax prison (for men) in Colorado housing the baddest of the bad. These criminals are considered the most dangerous cons in the US and has earned the prison the nickname of “Alcatraz of the Rockies.” Described by one former ADX warden as “a cleaner version of hell”, security measures at the prison include attack dogs guarding the area between the prison walls and 12 ft. high razor wire fences, 1,400 remotely controlled steel doors, motion detecting laser beams, pressure pads and cameras. Current residents of the prison include infamous “Shoe Bomber” Richard Reid, 9/11 terrorist mastermind Zacarias Moussaoui, and Oklahoma City bombing conspirator Terry Nichols among many, many others.



Source

7. The 1960’s Bar

Located 100 feet underground within Britain’s secret subterranean Burlington bunker complex in Wiltshire, England, the 1960’s Bar is a recreation of a pub popular with British Government officials. This top secret base was first constructed during the Cold War and designed to be a refuge for the higher-ups to reconstruct Britain in the event of a nuclear attack…needless to say they figured they would need a few pints to wait out the radiation.



Source

8. Bold Lane

Located in Derby, England, this car park is multi-story stronghold for 440 cars. First conceived and designed by an agricultural engineer after he had the window of his car smashed and his radio stolen while in an airport parking structure. Sophisticated security measures include CCTV cameras, panic buttons, bar-code scanning entry doors, and advanced sensors controlled by a central computer that detect any and all movements of each car. Although, at over $30 dollars an hour, keeping your auto safe in the UK isn’t cheap.

Source

9. Deposed Iraqi Leader Saddam Hussein’s Baghdad Bunker

The 2,150 square-yard bunker was originally designed to withstand the blast of a nuclear bomb and house 50 people. Located nearly 100 feet underground, security measures for the Dictator’s refuge included three-ton Swiss-made doors, 5ft-thick walls, a 6ft-thick steel-reinforced concrete ceiling, and two escape tunnels. The bunker survived seven American dropped bunker busters and 20 cruise missles during the war. Unfortunately, it couldn’t survive looting and was picked almost completely clean during the last days of the war by Iraqi soldiers.

Source

10. Granite Mt. Mormon Church Records Facility

The records storage of the Mormon Church is a massive vault encased in rock at Granite Mountains, Utah first opened in 1965. Armed guards waving metal detector wands usher visitors into a concrete bunker before swinging open metal gates to a tunnel entrance. Excavated 600 ft inside the mountain, the vault features state-of-the-art environmentally controlled document storage chambers as well as administrative offices, shipping and receiving docks, a processing facility and a restoration laboratory for microfilm.



Source

These are just a sampling of some of the world’s most SECURE locations. With the near daily unrest that occurrs even in developed countries today, there has been a lot of discussion about how secure any location really is. However, chances are good that if you are deep within these systems, you will be safe at least for some time.

Matt Taibbi on Michelle Bachmann's Holy War

from Richard Metzger at DangerousMinds

Matt Taibbi takes on goofball far-right Minnesota Republican Congresswoman Michele Bachmann in the pages of the new Rolling Stone. It’s everything you want it to be, trust me:

The Tea Party contender may seem like a goofball, but be warned: Her presidential campaign is no laughing matter

Close your eyes, take a deep breath, and, as you consider the career and future presidential prospects of an incredible American phenomenon named Michele Bachmann, do one more thing. Don’t laugh.

It may be the hardest thing you ever do, for Michele Bachmann is almost certainly the funniest thing that has ever happened to American presidential politics. Fans of obscure 1970s television may remember a short-lived children’s show called Far Out Space Nuts, in which a pair of dimwitted NASA repairmen, one of whom is played by Bob (Gilligan) Denver, accidentally send themselves into space by pressing “launch” instead of “lunch” inside a capsule they were fixing at Cape Canaveral. This plot device roughly approximates the political and cultural mechanism that is sending Michele Bachmann hurtling in the direction of the Oval Office.

Bachmann is a religious zealot whose brain is a raging electrical storm of divine visions and paranoid delusions. She believes that the Chinese are plotting to replace the dollar bill, that light bulbs are killing our dogs and cats, and that God personally chose her to become both an IRS attorney who would spend years hounding taxpayers and a raging anti-tax Tea Party crusader against big government. She kicked off her unofficial presidential campaign in New Hampshire, by mistakenly declaring it the birthplace of the American Revolution. “It’s your state that fired the shot that was heard around the world!” she gushed. “You are the state of Lexington and Concord, you started the battle for liberty right here in your backyard.”

I said lunch, not launch! But don’t laugh. Don’t do it. And don’t look her in the eyes; don’t let her smile at you. Michele Bachmann, when she turns her head toward the cameras and brandishes her pearls and her ageless, unblemished neckline and her perfect suburban orthodontics in an attempt to reassure the unbeliever of her non-threateningness, is one of the scariest sights in the entire American cultural tableau. She’s trying to look like June Cleaver, but she actually looks like the T2 skeleton posing for a passport photo. You will want to laugh, but don’t, because the secret of Bachmann’s success is that every time you laugh at her, she gets stronger.

In modern American politics, being the right kind of ignorant and entertainingly crazy is like having a big right hand in boxing; you’ve always got a puncher’s chance. And Bachmann is exactly the right kind of completely batshit crazy. Not medically crazy, not talking-to-herself-on-the-subway crazy, but grandiose crazy, late-stage Kim Jong-Il crazy — crazy in the sense that she’s living completely inside her own mind, frenetically pacing the hallways of a vast sand castle she’s built in there, unable to meaningfully communicate with the human beings on the other side of the moat, who are all presumed to be enemies.

Bachmann’s story, to hear her tell it, is about a suburban homemaker who is chosen by God to become a politician who will restore faith and family values to public life and do battle with secular humanism. But by the time you’ve finished reviewing her record of lies and embellishments and contradictions, you’ll have no idea if she actually believes in her own divine inspiration, or whether it’s a big con job. Or maybe both are true — in which case this hard-charging challenger for the GOP nomination is a rare breed of political psychopath, equal parts crazed Divine Wind kamikaze-for-Jesus and calculating, six-faced Machiavellian prevaricator. Whatever she is, she’s no joke.

Michele Bachmann’s Holy War (Rolling Stone)

Videos: Michele Bachmann's Craziest Moments

Do You Have A Problem In Your Life?

Easier said than done, but good to keep in mind!

from BoingBoing

When Woody Allen met Billy Grahm

Militant agnostic and general pessimist Woody Allen spars good-naturedly with Rev. Billy Graham during this engaging interview from The Woody Allen Show, on September 21, 1969. Topics of discussion include the meaning of life, pre-martial sex and marijuana.

Allen reminisced about the encounter in an interview with Commonweal in 2010:

Whatever Works
WOODY ALLEN’S WORLD
by Robert E. Lauder

Woody Allen is a writer, a comedian, and the maker of over seventy films. He recently spoke with Fr. Robert E. Lauder about the function of humor, film, and “the overwhelming bleakness of the universe.”

Robert E. Lauder: From the earliest days of your career as a stand-up comedian and filmmaker, you have dealt with philosophical and religious questions—the existence of God, life after death, the meaning of life. Can you remember when these questions first became important for you?

Woody Allen: These were always obsessions of mine, even as a very young child. These were things that interested me as the years went on. My friends were more preoccupied with social issues—issues such as abortion, racial discrimination, and Communism—and those issues just never caught my interest. Of course they mattered to me as a citizen to some degree…but they never really caught my attention artistically. I always felt that the problems of the world would never ever be solved until people came to terms with the deeper issues—that there would be an aimless reshuffling of world leaders and governments and programs. There was a difference, of course, but it was a minor difference as to who the president was and what the issues were. They seemed major, but as you step back with perspective they were more alike than they were different. The deeper issues always interested me.

RL: Frank Capra said that he used humor as a device to make his audience sort of receptive to his themes. I don’t think you use humor as a device. It seems to me to be more integral to your vision of life and art. Would you agree?

WA: Yes. I think Capra was a much craftier filmmaker, a wonderful filmmaker. He had enormous technique, and he knew how to manipulate the public quite brilliantly. I was just doing what I was doing because it interested me, and in fact obsessed me. I was not doing it with an eye to manipulate the public. In fact, I probably would have had a larger public if I had gone in a different direction.

RL: When Ingmar Bergman died, you said even if you made a film as great as one of his, what would it matter? It doesn’t gain you salvation. So you had to ask yourself why do you continue to make films. Could you just say something about what you meant by “salvation”?

WA: Well, you know, you want some kind of relief from the agony and terror of human existence. Human existence is a brutal experience to me…it’s a brutal, meaningless experience—an agonizing, meaningless experience with some oases, delight, some charm and peace, but these are just small oases. Overall, it is a brutal, brutal, terrible experience, and so it’s what can you do to alleviate the agony of the human condition, the human predicament? That is what interests me the most. I continue to make the films because the problem obsesses me all the time and it’s consistently on my mind and I’m consistently trying to alleviate the problem, and I think by making films as frequently as I do I get a chance to vent the problems. There is some relief. I have said this before in a facetious way, but it is not so facetious: I am a whiner. I do get a certain amount of solace from whining.

RL: Are you saying the humor in your films is a relief for you? Or are you sort of saying to the audience, “Here is an oasis, a couple of laughs”?

WA: I think what I’m saying is that I’m really impotent against the overwhelming bleakness of the universe and that the only thing I can do is my little gift and do it the best I can, and that is about the best I can do, which is cold comfort.

RL: In Everyone Says I Love You, the character you play gets divorced, and as he and his former wife review their relationship near the end of the film, she says, “You could always make me laugh,” and your character asks very sincerely, “Why is that important?” Do you think what you do is important?

WA: No, not so much. Whenever they ask women what they find appealing in men, a sense of humor is always one of the things they mention. Some women feel power is important, some women feel that looks are important, tenderness, intelligence…but sense of humor seems to permeate all of them. So I’m saying to that character played by Goldie Hawn, “Why is that so important?” But it is important apparently because women have said to us that that is very, very important to them. I also feel that humor, just like Fred Astaire dance numbers or these lightweight musicals, gives you a little oasis. You are in this horrible world and for an hour and a half you duck into a dark room and it’s air-conditioned and the sun is not blinding you and you leave the terror of the universe behind and you are completely transported into an escapist situation. The women are beautiful, the men are witty and heroic, nobody has terrible problems and this is a delightful escapist thing, and you leave the theatre refreshed. It’s like drinking a cool lemonade and then after a while you get worn down again and you need it again. It seems to me that making escapist films might be a better service to people than making intellectual ones and making films that deal with issues. It might be better to just make escapist comedies that don’t touch on any issues. The people just get a cool lemonade, and then they go out refreshed, they enjoy themselves, they forget how awful things are and it helps them—it strengthens them to get through the day. So I feel humor is important for those two reasons: that it is a little bit of refreshment like music, and that women have told me over the years that it is very, very important to them.

RL: At one point in Hannah and Her Sisters, your character, Mickey, is very disillusioned. He is thinking about becoming a Catholic and he sees Duck Soup. He seems to think, “Maybe in a world where there are the Marx Brothers and humor, maybe there is a God. Who knows.” And maybe Mickey can live with that. Am I interpreting this correctly?

WA: No. I think it should be interpreted to mean that there are these oases, and life is horrible, but it is not relentlessly black from wire to wire. You can sit down and hear a Mozart symphony, or you can watch the Marx Brothers, and this will give you a pleasant escape for a while. And that is about the best that you can do…. I feel that one can come up with all these rationalizations and seemingly astute observations, but I think I said it well at the end of Deconstructing Harry: we all know the same truth; our lives consist of how we choose to distort it, and that’s it. Everybody knows how awful the world is and what a terrible situation it is and each person distorts it in a certain way that enables him to get through. Some people distort it with religious things. Some people distort it with sports, with money, with love, with art, and they all have their own nonsense about what makes it meaningful, and all but nothing makes it meaningful. These things definitely serve a certain function, but in the end they all fail to give life meaning and everyone goes to his grave in a meaningless way.

RL: That brings us to the end of Crimes and Misdemeanors. Your character and an ophthalmologist named Judah are having a conversation, and Judah pretends he’s talking about a screenplay but he’s really talking about his own life. He says people do commit crimes, they get away with it, and they don’t even have guilt feelings. And your character says this is horrible, this is terrible, and then you cut to a blind rabbi dancing with his daughter at her wedding, and we hear a voiceover from a philosopher your character admires. He says something like, “There is no ultimate meaning but somehow people have found that they can cope.” The philosopher didn’t really cope; he committed suicide. When I first saw the film I thought you were offering the audience several views of life and leaving it to them to decide which is closest to the truth—Judah’s, Cliff’s, the philosopher’s, or the rabbi’s. (He’s the one who seems to be the happiest and most fulfilled character in the film, despite his blindness.) But in an interview you said that really the ophthalmologist is basically right: there is no benevolent God watching over us at all, and we embrace whatever gets us through the night. Is that right?

WA: I feel that is true—that one can commit a crime, do unspeakable things, and get away with it. There are people who commit all sorts of crimes and get away with it, and some of them are plagued with all sorts of guilt for the rest of their lives and others aren’t. They commit terrible crimes and they have wonderful lives, wonderful, happy lives, with families and children, and they have done unspeakably terrible things. There is no justice, there is no rational structure to it. That is just the way it is, and each person figures out some way to cope…. Some people cope better than others. I was with Billy Graham once, and he said that even if it turned out in the end that there is no God and the universe is empty, he would still have had a better life than me. I understand that. If you can delude yourself by believing that there is some kind of Santa Claus out there who is going to bail you out in the end, then it will help you get through. Even if you are proven wrong in the end, you would have had a better life.

RL: Seven or eight years ago the New York Times asked you to name a favorite film and you picked Shane. It seems to me that the character of Shane is a Christ figure. At one point, Chris Callaway, the guy Shane has beaten in a fistfight in the saloon, changes sides. He leaves the villains and joins Shane and the good guys. When Shane asks him why, he says something has come over him. Shane has had some mysterious impact on him. Shane does not ride off into the sunset as heroes usually do in old Westerns. He rides off into the sunrise, and as he does so the director does this strange thing: he holds a dissolve of a cross from the cemetery, and he keeps it on the screen for about five seconds. Do you remember that at all?

WA: I do remember it. Yes, now that you bring it up, I do.

RL: So the film seems to end with resurrection imagery.

WA: I didn’t see him as a martyred figure, a persecuted figure. I saw him as quite a heroic figure who does a job that needs to be done, a practical matter. I saw him as a practical secular character. In this world there are just some people who need killing and that is just the way it is. It sounds terrible, but there is no other way to get around that, and most of us are not up to doing it, incapable for moral reasons or physically not up to it. And Shane is a person who saw what had to be done and went out and did it. He had the skill to do it, and that’s the way I feel about the world: there are certain problems that can only be dealt with that way. As ugly a truth as that is, I do think it’s the truth about the world.

Thanks to Richard Metzger at DangerousMinds

Love Skateboarding...

Transparent Pontiac for sale

from BoingBoing

This beautiful, skeletal Pontiac was built for the GM pavilion at the 1939 New York World's Fair. It's up for auction in Plymouth, Michigan, with an estimated sale price of $275,000 - $475,000.

As of yet, RM doesn't have any detailed information about the Pontiac, but from an article in Special Interest Autos #34, we see that GM built two - possibly three - transparent cars for the New York World's Fair of 1939-1940, one of which was a Deluxe seven-window touring sedan (B-body), the other of which was a Torpedo five-window touring sedan (C-body)...

Visitors to General Motors' "Highways and Horizons" pavilion at the 1939-40 New York World's Fair came away awed by a vision of the future. The work of renowned designer Norman Bel Geddes, GM's "Futurama" exhibit foretold the communities and transportation systems of 1960, many of which came to pass. Other peeks at the future included "Previews of Progress," inventions that seemed like magic: "Yarns made of Milk! Glass that bends! The Frig-O-Therm that cooks and freezes at the same time! The Talking Flashlight transmitting speech over a light beam!" exclaimed the exhibit's guidebook. Sharing top billing with the Futurama and Previews of Progress, however, was the "'Glass' Car - The first full-sized transparent car ever made in America."

The Tin Indian that wasn't: RM to offer see-through Pontiac

THE RAMONES: GERMAN TV SPECIAL 1978

Kicking off with “Rockaway Beach” this is The Ramones performing live on the classic German TV show Musikladen, in a special recorded on September 13 1978, in Bremen.

Track listing:

“Rockaway Beach”
“Teenage Lobotomy”
“Blitzkrieg Bop”
“I Don’t Want You”
“Go Mental”
“Gimme Gimme Shock Treatment”
“You’re Gonna Kill that Girl”
“Don’t Come Close”
“I Don’t Care”
“She’s the One”
“Sheena Is a Punk Rocker”
“Havana Affair”
“Commando”
“Needles & Pins”
“Surfin’ Bird”
“Cretin Hop”
“Listen to My Heart”
“California Sun”
“I Don’t Wanna Walk Around With You”
“Pinhead”
“Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue”




from: DangerousMinds

"Optimist's Tour of the Future": inspiring and funny look at the evidence for a bright future

from BoingBoing

Mark Stevenson's An Optimist's Tour of the Future is a hilarious and inspiring romp through some of the most promising directions in technology -- from permaculture success stories in Australia who are beating the drought and sequestering carbon to nanotechnology boosters who are showing off successful prototypes for effective energy generation, water filtration and desalination, and other cool and world-changing applications. Stevenson, a former standup comedian, writes with enormous warmth and humor, and he fast-talks his way into the presence of some hard-to-reach scientists and theorists who really represent the cutting edge of their fields, from Eric Drexler to Nick Bostrom. Stevenson does an admirable job of presenting these findings in a lay-friendly way without eliding too much important detail.

Stevenson presents his book as a curative for "pessimism." Stevenson looks at the evidence for humanity's impending doom and finds it wanting: even in the poorest places on earth, lifespans are longer, affluence is up, violence is down from most of human history. He doesn't discount all the problems that others have identified, from climate change to war to starvation, but he believes we can and will overcome them with technology. Stevenson looks at the ethical and philosophical dimensions of these technologies, signposts some of the problems they may give rise to, and brings it all off with a flourish that's sweet and upbeat, as befits his title.

If you're someone who believes that there's no possible, conceivable way to solve contemporary problems with technology, then Stevenson's argument is probably one you should be exposed to. But where I found his analysis wanting was in the presumed inevitability of technological triumph over social ills. Humanity may develop or possess the technologies to fix its problems, but capacity isn't political will. Humanity has previously possessed the knowledge and tools to address many of its problems, but failed to bring them to bear for extremely long periods (we had a 500 year interregnum as the result of one such failure, commonly known as the Dark Ages).

Those of us on the policy side of technology are often optimistic about technology's transformative potential, and pessimistic about its inevitable triumph. This isn't a counsel of despair: it doesn't mean we're doomed. Rather, it's a call to action: if technology can solve problems, then we should figure out how to midwife the right kind of technology and the right kind of society.

The di-polar world that Stevenson establishes -- "technology can't solve our problems" and "technology will solve our problems" -- doesn't admit of a third pole: "technology can solve our problems, if we fight to keep it free and open."

Which is a shame, because if there's one thing we need, it's optimists who believe that the net and the PC and their many spinoffs can improve the world, and who use their optimism to pursue a mission of free, fair and universal access to the world's systems. Optimist's Tour is fine as far as it goes, but I wish it went further. An Optimist's Tour of the Future

Hot Wheels!

Tanner Foust, an American professional racing driver and stunt driver, broke the world record for a distance jump in a four-wheeled vehicle at the Indianapolis 500 on May 29th, 2011. Watch as Tanner Foust drops 10 stories down 90 feet of orange track and soars 332 feet (101 meters) through the air.



quick replacement for the deleted video below

Thanks, Presufer

Got A Kid?

"Ice Loves CoCo" (this is some crazy shit)

The first non-leather glove ever used in major league baseball

from Carpenter Trade (the people who made my own incredible custom and cruelty free 100% vegan glove - see above and bottom).

Brian Gordon is the first player ever to use a non-leather glove in major league baseball. Ever since Doug Allison first wore a glove in 1870 all major league baseball gloves have been made with leather. Until now.

Gordon used this groundbreaking glove on June 16, 2011 as the starting pitcher for the New York Yankees against the Texas Rangers. Gordon converted to pitching after spending his first ten years as an outfielder. Now, in his 15th year of professional baseball, he has been brought up by the Yankees, having led AAA baseball with the lowest ERA of 1.14. His long journey gave him several years’ experience with gloves, and Gordon chose Carpenter as the best. He says of his Carpenter glove, “For the first time in my career I felt comfort and control on the field. I love it.” Gordon was born in West Point, NY and he is the only NY player using a glove made in NY.

The idea of a non-leather baseball gloves defies expectations of the traditional smell and feel of glove leather. However, synthetic materials have already been a growing trend for several years. Star players such as Roy Halladay and Alex Rodriguez have already been using gloves that have some synthetic parts. Synthetics offer greater strength than leather while also being remarkably lighter. Carpenter synthetic gloves average 10 ounces lighter than comparable leather gloves, giving players a considerable performance advantage where speed is essential. Carpenter gloves are the lightest gloves used in professional baseball today.

(photo © Rob Tringali)

"This is probably the first real innovation since the Wilson A2000 in 1957. The baseball glove has never seen a re-engineering like this before. Not only are the materials better and more practical, but never before has a glove been built specifically for one hand,” says Jason Friedman, a writer and moderator of the popular Glove-Works baseball glove forum.

This glove was made for Gordon by Scott Carpenter of Carpenter Trade Company in Cooperstown, NY. Carpenter’s alternative approach to his business is as unique as his innovative baseball gloves. The market is dominated by large corporate brands who have a tight grip on players who are paid to wear their logos. It is telling of the quality and performance of Carpenter gloves that so many professional players are refusing money from larger established brands to wear Carpenter gloves. Scott Carpenter has never paid players and has never done any advertising or marketing beyond his website: CarpenterTrade.com. He makes all Carpenter gloves himself. The baseball glove is an American icon; Carpenter is proud to be the only glove brand used in major-league baseball that has never imported, never outsourced, and has always produced their own gloves in the USA.

Scott Carpenter began his glove business in Cooperstown in 2001. Cooperstown is known for its history and for preserving the rich traditions of baseball. However, this is an account of a Cooperstown local breaking with tradition and pioneering a trend that will shape how baseball is played in the future.

Here's a great AP story about the big day, with additional pic's.

By the way... You want to inquire about buying one of these? Well you can't! This year Scott has changed his policy, and just as I acquired my latest personal glove, you can too by TRADE only no cash exchange for 2011, you make your offer and they will see how it works for them, and remember these gloves take a lot of time and are a labor of love, so be ready to give for what you get.

They Are Trying to Build A Pool In the River, and They Need Your Help.

Looks pretty cool to me...

"+ Pool is our initiative to build a floating pool for everyone in the rivers of New York City, and we need your help. With your support, we can make it possible to swim in clean, natural river water here in the city."

Here's the main web presence + POOL

And here on KickStarter

Awesome People Hanging Out Together

I'm the last one to usually care about pictures of celebrities and famous people hanging out together, but these are some pretty cool snap shots found on this public tumbler page :
http://awesomepeoplehangingouttogether.tumblr.com

Frida Kahlo and Josephine Baker


Steve Jobs and Bill Gates


Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, Warren G. Harding, and Harvey Firestone, Maryland, 1921.


Prince William, Kanye West, Prince Harry and P.Diddy


Woody Allen and Michael Jackson


Charlie Chaplin and Albert Einstein


Steve McQueen, Paul Newman, Barbra Streisand, and Sidney Poitier


Barack Obama and Willie Mays on Air Force One


James Brown and Mick Jagger


Snoop Dogg and Martha Stewart


Lou Gehrig and the Marx Brothers


David Bowie, Iggie Pop and Lou Reed


Pee-Wee Herman, Rodney Dangerfield and David Lee Roth


Salvador Dali and Coco Chanel


Eartha Kitt and James Dean taking Katherine Dunham’s dance class


Bob Dylan and Muhammad Ali


Salvador Dali & Walt Disney


Andy Warhol and Alfred Hitchcock


Charlie Chaplin and Helen Keller

BONUS: Famous People Hanging Out With Their Vinyl