Two things I don't understand. How could anyone not hatch the chicken regardless of what their ethics said? And if it works for a chicken, why won't it work for an emu?
I assume the answers to these questions are 1) they can't and 2) it will and that we'll not find out until after some poor homeless guy gets sent to the psych ward when complaining about his foot being bitten off by a bird.
Is it just me, or is there no indication in the linked article that that picture is an illustration? I couldn't find one but I'm lazy. Anyway, that seems sketchy to me if true.
Well, they say that they never hatched the chicken embryos and so I think you can assume from that, but it really isn't clear.
Nobody ever creates a genetically-modified dinosaur chicken and doesn't hatch it.
3 gets it right. They're no fun: I really want to see photographs of a fully-grown chicken-dinosaur.
This needs to happen. My a live dino-bird can be an item on the UofC scavenger hunt.
So, hen's teeth just got less rare.
And if people don't do this to ostriches and train them as guard animals, Halfordismo isn't what I thought it was.
This thing doesn't know my name anymore? Man, you go away for a few years...
Everyone remembers dinosaurs. There's probably a lesson here.
Also, what's the potential for developing, say, antelopes with beaks? We've got the gene cluster, can't we put it in other things?
Do it to a lion, you've got 2/3 of a griffin right there.
I don't think the wings and the beak should count equally when determining griffin-ness.
Fair enough. Is it supposed to have a snake for a tail as well, or am I getting confused with manticores?
Velociraptors had feathers? On my way to Wiki
Even if we're just sticking with birds, chickens seem unenterprising. I want something bigger and more colorful -- a big parrot? I bet they'd be hell on rats.
Not that being colorful helps with hunting rats, I admit. Or that having a beak seems to slow raptors down at all.
I just want a parrot with fangs.
The eight year old kid in me wants you to know that the awesome killer dinosaurs from Jurassic Park are Utahraptors, not Velociraptors. Now, if they had feathers, that changes everything.
I forgot how really young you are sometimes.
1.2: Have you heard about cassowaries?
21: Enh, sure, but it's not like I'm not going to squander my relative youth. And we'll all be dust in the end.
Now, if they had feathers, that changes everything.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deinonychus#/media/File:Deinonychus_ewilloughby.png
Awwwww.
That is the cutest giant killer otter-bird ever.
I feel cheated that they didn't just go for it. In China they'd just do it, I bet.
I think that dino-snout would be much cooler on something like a hawk or a kestrel. Or maybe a frickin' eagle.
Ultimately, I expect it will be necessary to breed such creatures, to aid us in our battle against the robots.
27: or, per the above, the cassowary, emu, or ostrich
Utahraptor: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utahraptor#/media/File:Utahraptor_updated.png
Although 27.2 is obviously correct, the whole project just has doom written all over it. It's like they've never even heard of any science fiction plotlines.
Especially when they come back with robot dinosaurs.
I am so mad about whatever ethics rules bullshit is preventing these dino-chickens from hatching that I am freaking the fuck out. What the fuck?? Let these things hatch, you z-grade philosophical dickweeds. Seriously, I will help provide lawyers, guns, money, whatever is necessary to make dino-chickens a reality.
They probably hatched one and it died in horrible pain so they went and found "ethics."
Let these things hatch, you z-grade philosophical dickweeds. Seriously, I will help provide lawyers, guns, money, whatever is necessary to make dino-chickens a reality.
What its going to take is a tropical island lair. Perhaps someplace in the Turks and Caicos?
Its not like the vast majority of chickens that hatch don't have shitty lives.
That's probably not a very good basis for a general ethical system.
This is like literally the only good thing that Harvard University has done in the past 50 years. I would like to move this lab to a private island with unlimited funding, and would do so for real if only I were a billionaire. Hopefully at least all the lab members are living together in some kind of group home/castle with lots of secret unauthorized birdosaurs running around.
Even if it's the size of a chicken, I'm not putting makeup on a dinosaur.
You could practice by putting lipstick on a pig.
At last, the answer to the question "How many fanged Struthioniformes and Accipitriformes would you need to take down a woolly mammoth?" is almost within our grasp.
You give a raptor species teeth and how long before it's earth's apex predator? Like, a day. Just looking at the killer-chicken picture, you start to get a sense of why dinosaurs were so dominant for so long.
Also, far be it from me to ethnically stereotype, but here's the PI, and there's no way he doesn't have a dinobird alive somewhere.
They wouldn't even have to change his name for the Bond movie.
I'm not even ethnically stereotyping. Put the combination of that goatee and that smirk on a man of any ethnicity, and I'd start suspecting him of harboring a dinobird.
The smirk, mostly. It's a very "I have a genetically engineered predator and you don't" smirk.
I don't know what kind of advantage teeth would give a raptor, since their beaks can already inflict serious damage. If they don't occupy the apex position, I think that's just a failure of will.
They'll get you for that crack someday, once they learn to read.
I love it how silicon valley idiots think they're changing the world by creating Uber for dog walking, while these guys are creating the parents for the dinobird armies that will dominate the future, before they inevitably revolt.
I'm assuming that there's a loophole in animal fighting regulations that will allow the use of genetically engineered and recreated prehistoric species. The business model I'm drafting right now depends on it.
The NFL rulebook does actually say that kicker can't be an emu with teeth.
You would think Silicon Valley could at least contribute some cybernetics technology, or something. Cyborg dino-birds trump regular dino-birds every time.
55: Regular dino-birds don't need tech support. Plus, my mammoths will crush even dino-birds with titanium skeletons.
54 -- in the future, there will be a movie about a football-kicking emu with teeth, co-starring a cryogenically-restored Don Knotts.
57: I look forward to the scene in which it tears apart the Tom Brady character.
I feel like it's just some weird accident of evolution that humans are on top and birds/dinosaurs should beat mammals every time. The corvids are already close to being smart enough to take over and they can fly. Give them powerful teeth and a snout and nudge their brain development along a bit and there's no way that powerful intelligent dinobirds aren't the future.
Incidentally, any ethical reservations you might have about recreating mammoths will vanish if you go to the Royal BC Museum in Victoria, where they have a very realistic replica. You turn a corner and WHOA FUCKING MAMMOTH, just like our ancestors thought. We need to make more of those.
60 -- keep telling yourself that when a supersmart rook with teeth is chewing on the neck of your great-great grandson in an inaccessible-to-humans mountain techno-nest.
GO AHEAD AND MOCK WHILE I TEAR OFF YOUR PUNY THUMBS WITH MY POWERFUL HALLUCES
"You are a big posh sod with plums in your mouth, and the plums have mutated and they have got beaks. You make pigs smoke. You feed beef burgers to swans. You have big sheds, but nobody's allowed in. And in these sheds you have 20ft high chickens, and these chickens are scared because the don't know why they're so big, and they're going, "Oh why am I so massive?" and they're looking down at all the little chickens and they think they're in an aeroplane because all the other chickens are so small. Do you deny that? No, I think his silence speaks volumes. "
This seems à propos: http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-30703082
"A farmer in Devon has been forced to slaughter half his herd of Heck cows after they repeatedly tried to attack his farm workers.
Farmer Derek Gow said that the Heck cow descended from cattle specifically bred by Nazi scientists between the world wars. The Heck cow was renowned for its fearsome horns and extremely aggressive nature.
Fearing for his life, Mr Gow said that he had no choice but to destroy 20 of his most aggressive cattle."
Haven't got the opportunity to look this up but Heck cows are part of the long and ongoing effort to reconstitute and essentially recreate primeval species by selective breeding. "Park cattle" are another example. The Dutch are taking this even farther and intend to create parkland for primeval species.
The Auroch is the holy grail of this effort, which has been going on for decades. DNA has given the effort new impetus.
Primeval horses are another focus of these efforts.
There have been HUGE advances in Auroch back-breeding beyond the Heck Cattle (which really weren't very close) so that guy in Devon should have gone for some more advanced models.
This is your go-to source for back-breeding news. I hadn't looked for a while but check this out:
It seems that aurochs enthusiasts involved in some rewilding projects have, looking for primitive landraces in Poland, discovered a really remarkable population of cattle. Farmer Julius Woźniak from Łódź is the owner of a herd of about 20 cattle that show significant similarity to the aurochs: they are comparably large (bulls reach about 165cm at the shoulders, so they are about the size of Sayaguesa or a little larger), the horns are nearly completely aurochs-like just slightly thinner and rarely some deviant shapes show up, and the colour is perfectly aurochs-like - bulls are black with an eel stripe, light muzzle ring and dark, prominent forelocks. Cows are of a reddish-brown colour with darker shades just like in some Maronesa and Heck cows. Occasionally there are black cows, just like Anton Schneeberger reported in the 16th century. Deviant colours do not appear - only some calves show a ashy grey tone that disappears later on. Those cattle are kept in a very traditional manner - they wander around freely all the year round, where they thrive in clear forests and sometimes also visit the mountains. Only when the owner wants to seize them, he goes into the forest and looks for them with a his dogs and gathers them together.
I think we'll get an Auroch or near-Auroch in my lifetime.
The guy in Devon probably wants Nazi cattle to make it easier to get vegetarians interested.
But did you click on the photos at your link, TRO?
God damn it. We WILL get a fucking Auroch in my lifetime. We MUST.
You would think, with all this science, they could make a perfect red heifer.
Can anyone suggest an online diploma mill that will certify me as a doctor of avian dentistry? I want to get in on the ground floor.
Maybe I'm missing something obvious, but what good is an aurochs?
I mean, maybe there's some genetic reservoir that could be useful to feed back into the current strains of cattle or something. But I'm not seeing the functional benefit of having what would essentially be restricted to a new animal for zoos (they don't really have a useful natural habitat anymore - those ecosystems have moved on). Is it just a neat sort of aesthetic hobby? An attempt to apologize to them for their disappearance? What?
72: AIPMHAOP, a guy from my home town was trying to do that. I think he hit financial difficulties and figured working toward the end of the world wasn't a bad thing.
Say what you want about the tenets of National Socialism, Dude, at least it's an ethos.
"Heck Cattle" is clearly a euphemism for "Hell Cattle." We should introduce them into the Great Plains. Constant death matches between them and bison would invigorate both species, and ticket sales could make the Buffalo Commons economically viable.
Recreating extinct animals is the most pointless scientific thing imaginable.
Is it just a neat sort of aesthetic hobby?
Yes.
My assumption is that this has always been another one of the expressions of peoples' endless perversity in seeking out strange new pursuits and dedicating themselves to it, spending hours and hours making strangely pointless things that are kind of neat but clearly nowhere near enough to justify the time involved. So if it's that then I get it. But is that all of it? It seems to be a pretty serious kind of project involving more work than you normally see from that kind of thing.
Should have known that the loser patrol would show up on this one. The reason to re-create an Auroch is that at the end of the day you have a fucking Auroch.
79: haven't you read Tristram Shandy?
The use of aurochs is clearly bull-dancing. I was never lithe enough, but I will wear my bodice backwards and grip snakes in support.
Recreate the mammoth, and you can harvest enormous pieces of ivory, thereby saving the elephants, plus huge quantities of meat and hide, plus opportunities for rich bros to pay top dollar for prehistoric hunt reënactments. From a rational economic standpoint, it would be wrong not to.
Isn't one of them an aurochs?
I agree that the collective noun, once they are developed, should be "awesome."
Ladies and Gentlemen, if you'll look just over to the right, there's a small awesome of aurochs. No sudden movements please.
Over to the left, the treacherous Lavaca River. Watch for the giant crocodiles sunning themselves on the far bank.
This is the best unfogged thread I've read in quite a while. Thx quipsters.
I look forward to entire fraternities from eastern Montana to Texas getting trampled in the running of the aurochs or mammoths or whatever massive animals we get out of this.
78 should be cross linked or somehow indexed to the makeup subthread re the loser castle. If you think Inga's makeup hobby crimps your style, wait til you meet her Heck Cattle!
I'm not sure what makes an aurochs so awesome though, but I think it's just the name. "Aurochs" is a pretty great name, and distracts nicely from the fact that what it describes is just an unpleasant cow. And there are still way more badass mean spirited cow-like things in the world, they just have names like "Cape Buffalo" as opposed to "Aurochs."
Anyway, I just don't see the advantage of a sustained project to bring one back when you could just as easily buy a big cow and then taunt it a bunch. And you can do that right now!
another one of the expressions of peoples' endless perversity in seeking out strange new pursuits and dedicating themselves to it, spending hours and hours making strangely pointless things that are kind of neat but clearly nowhere near enough to justify the time involved
"Dude, you're spending way too much time on your aurochs breeding project. Seriously, when was the last time you read an entire Unfogged thread? Priorities, man, priorities."
Aurouchs are basically forest-cows. I'm not sure how different they are from just turning some Holsteins loose in the woods and letting them go to seed.
Now aurouchs with dinosaur heads, that would be cool.
This seems the appropriate time to throw this out there:
Am I the only one who's biggest complaint about Beasts of the Southern Wild was the fact that their aurochs looked nothing whatsoever like a real aurochs? I mean, a giant pig with horns? What the hell was that?
This is all just making me pine for the Swiss Brown Cow and companion donkey that in a just world would be mine.
Now don't get me wrong--a giant pig with horns would be really cool. But maybe you could ask the ghost of Gary Gygax to come up with a unique name for the thing?
94.2 -- I 100% honestly and for real almost walked out of that movie at the beginning (which I thought was overall great) because of that. If I'd been alone I totally would have.
94.2, 97: The rationale for that choice strikes me as even stupider than the choice. I had a few other quibbles, too, but still loved it.
This NYT piece about de-extinction is pretty interesting and includes photos of the mammoth I mentioned above as well as the intriguing possibility that de-extinction may belong in the arsenal of class warfare: "Do you think that wealthy people on the East Coast are going to want billions of passenger pigeons flying over their freshly manicured lawns and just-waxed S.U.V.s?" Release the condor-sized, fanged passenger pigeons!
If you're not even curious about what an Auroch tastes like than what the hell is wrong with you?
Ban-worthy, I know, but how many of you people were saying, back when they were talking about bringing the wolf back to Yellowstone, 'hey, how about if we just get a bunch of the tourists to let their dogs run off leash?'
I'm having after work drinks tonight with one of the foremost authorities on large scale bison reintroduction. (Eg to the CMR).
Aepeornys, bird the size of a car. 300-lb primeval lemur.
Deployed in a supergiant hovercraft
If you're not even curious about what an Auroch tastes like than what the hell is wrong with you?
I'm guessing it tastes a whole lot like beef. Prolly not as moist and juicy, though.
back when they were talking about bringing the wolf back to Yellowstone, 'hey, how about if we just get a bunch of the tourists to let their dogs run off leash?'
Bad idea. They'd get eaten by the wolves.
Just had an epiphany--a solution to one of the great problems of our time.
Let's change the name of the Washington Redskins to the Washington Aurochs.
Yes, Redskins fans, we know you have a deep emotional attachment to your team name and mascot, an attachment that transcends petty concerns like blatant racism. But it's time to let go. But guess what? We've got something even better for you. Check this out--this is an aurochs. Now I ask you, is this not the most badass animal you've ever seen? It is, isn't it. How would you like that for a mascot? You would? Hell yeah, you would.
Can you imagine the revenue from petting zoos featuring wombats the size of minivans and other Australian megafauna? Someone with venture capital will soon, I guarantee.
* The most important reason you can't have dogs in Yellowstone is that a griz would love to chase the dog, which will run right to its people for safety.
** The CMR is just shy of 1 million acres, a lot of it good bison habitat.
But with bison and wolves there's some justification, namely that they're still around (just in smaller numbers), and more importantly that the ecosystems haven't adjusted around their absence yet (we just started trying to fill up the gaps by killing a lot of things in the areas, or ploughing all those grasslands into corn rows). So you can just kind of reintroduce them with a reasonable ecological justification. And with mammoths usually there's at least some attempt to give a scientific justification for bringing them back (not necessarily a good one, but...).
An aurochs is just going to be an unpleasant pet.
I do see the we're not done killing them yet, even if they are all dead! reasoning that seems to be involved, but it sounds like enough nonsense that it's not obviously worth it to me.
If the aurochs re-breeding program is ever successful, I'm gonna ask to borrow one, just so I can hear them say, "Sure, aurochs is your ox."
If any species is going to be de-extinctified, it ought to be the Haast's eagle.
112: Holy crap. And extant until as late as c. 1600, not long before the death of the last known aurochs.
113: Did you write that? I see similarities in the style.
I'm not sure that guy is enthusiastic enough about that bird.
The sad, but real, truth is that some of my style is an "homage" to that guy's style.
Wow @ 12! We must start asking for funds from zany rich people and make this happen. Someone here must have the expertise, right?
MHPH @ 89:
"Aurochs" is a pretty great name, and distracts nicely from the fact that what it describes is just an unpleasant cow.
At least it's not a mad cow... yet.
LizardBreath @ 47:
Put the combination of that goatee and that smirk on a man of any ethnicity, and I'd start suspecting him of harboring a dinobird.
But sex/gender stereotyping is Okay in your book!???
You're absolutely right. A woman with that goatee and that smirk would be equally suspicious.
Swiss Brown Cows just naturally look like they are wearing false eyelashes and eyeliner. The luxurious lashes of the shaggy donkey need no introduction, of course.
My view has always been that: while these ideas have little practical value, the tradeoff isn't mammoths or teacher salaries, it's mammoths or more money for the NSA.
Honestly, who could resist this face http://www.brownswiss.org/images/11.jpg ?
And their milk is delicious, excellent for cheesemaking.
I'm in the theatre for mad max fury (rated R) their is one 6 year old in here)
HONESLY, I WAS NEVER REALLY THAT ANGRY
126 I am glad my departure was delayed the week giving me a chance to see Mad Max: Fury Road this morning.
(Though I'm saddened to be missing Tatsuya Nakadai in person at the Masaki Kobayashi retro at MoMI which starts tonight. I'm going to have to stop looking at NYC art house film schedules.)
One, no no no no Haast Eagles thank you very much, yours, I live there now and I quite like not worrying about being carried off by a terrifying flying monster from my nightmares.
Two, we actually had a senior opposition MP muse about recreating moa in the run-up to the last election. Pretty sure Trev would be down with the haast eagle as well, so, you know, opportunities.
Trevor Mallard continues to push his idea that moa may one day roam in Wainuiomata, despite his leader saying the "moa is not a goer".
Keir, can you put up some kind of recording of you saying this in a NZ accent?
I say we could have both Moas and Haast Eagles back. Frankly if we have to write off a few dozen NZ children a year to get those Haast Eagle bad boys flying through the sky again then I say it nets out positive.
129 Stahl and Tarkovsky in loads of gorgeous prints all through June and July at the PFA ...
It may not be as sexy as recreating extinct species, but the reintroduction of wood bison to Alaska has been going quite well.
Andrei Rublev is playing at BAM in two weeks. And I've never seen Stalker on the big screen.
And for the Kobayashi retro they're doing the full Human Condition trilogy. And the rarely screened Inochi bo ni furo, and the haunting and beautiful Kwaidan.
I need to go to cinephilia detox.
Last year when Tatsuya Nakadai was here I ran into him outside waiting for his car after the screening (Teshigahara's The Face of Another), he saw me break out into a wide smile when I spotted him and walked over, offered his hand and spoke with me for a few minutes. A charming man.
teo, does the reintroduction of dino-birds frighten you. They sound much scarier to me than most of the birds around today.
135: I guess, but it's not like it's actually going to happen.
To think that a world teeming with herds of aurochs and prides (flocks?) of griffins that prey on them is within our grasp.
134: I'm sure those are great, but have you ever considered spending a month or two watching no shows except The Rockford Files? It makes a whole new you.
In my quest to dress like Jim Rockford, I hit a snag. He never wears t-shirts under his shirt-shirt. That feels weird to me, plus I'd have to wash the shirt-shirt more often.
I did spend a large part of my day trying to hunt down those special cooling t-shirts. All of my under shirts seem to thick for the 120°+ weather I'm about to experience.
How can anyone wear a real shirt multiple times. Mine are so very wrinkled after just one.
Mine are wrinkled after ten minutes so I figure another six days won't matter.
Ok, so it's just a standards thing. Fair enough.
Uniqlo for all shirts.
Rockford and rubles are two sides of the same coin, at least Rockford when ms Bartlett is in charge.
Rublev not rubles fucking autocorrect, worse than gps no lie.
I keep on thinking you are moving to regiN, Barry, because I can't manage to decipher the clues you leave and because I heard from someone once that when the temperature in regiN falls below like 90 parents put little wooly hats on their infants so they don't catch a chill.
Your Nakadai story is lovely. I hope all your internet connections are excellent, otherwise I will really miss you.
145.2 and 146 are truly not the most comprehensible of comments.
And for that, lw, I would like to thank you sincerely for forging new standards of incomprehensibility! I revel in my new status as comparatively-limpid.
Thank you dq, that put a smile on my face.
It's in the Persian Gulf.
Rublev and Rockford are both lost souls drifting through and also part of worlds that they, repsectively, never made.
Also, both of them are filmed with some sensitivity outdoors.
Big difference: rain is a part of Rublev, not Rockford.
I thought lucidty rather than flakiness was the goal of writing for others.
139 & 140-- no shit, Uniqlo is great-- they sell light shirts in Spring for summer, warm ones in Fall for winter. BF, go now before you leave. I think there's a big store in bklyn.
lw
I leave Sunday night. Getting pretty excited and nervous and can't really sleep. All the packing is done but for odds and ends.
I met with an old professor of mine today, a really important mentor in my life who I fell out of touch with for about 15 years. He gave his latest book to take with me which was nice.
I went through a lot of my stuff in preparation for this move. Culled a lot and gave a lot away.
I thought I'd lost all of my CDs, turned out I put them in an old locker in my parents garage. I used to keep them in these large CD wallets in my car but when I moved to Queens I figured keeping them there would be an open invitation to having my windows broken. They amount to a few hundred so I'm glad I found them in time to ship over there.
The absolute best find though that really made me happy was my grandfather's music. He was a violinist, mostly Broadway pits and the NBC Symphony Orchestra famously conducted by Toscanini. But his usual day job was as a clerk for Western Union. When he was in his 60s he went to Julliard. He was the wider world and art and culture for me when I was a kid. He wrote this great Neapolitan bel canto song that I thought I had the only copy of and I was certain in was forever lost in the aftermath of my messy divorce. I was overjoyed to find it among papers I'd thought were long gone.
152 Shit. No time to go to Brooklyn. I leave Sunday. Wait. They're at a mall near me. Which I was at earlier today. Shit. (If only I'd asked the Mineshaft about this before).
Surely there's at least one store in Arrakis that sells climate-appropriate shirts.
Toscanini is a HERO to my kid for catching major flak when he had an orchestra play the Internationale as well as the Star Spangled Banner at the end of some post WW2 concert. Your grandfather sounds awesome.
156 I think they'd frown on a Westerner in a Fremen stillsuit.
I never read Dune, so I'll defer on that one.
157.1 I didn't know that. Now he's a hero of mine as well. I wonder if my grandfather was playing on that but my vague impression was that he played with NBC from the late 40s to the early 50s
156 158 was in jest. You must be right, of course. Right now I'm feeling like those travelers/immigrants in stories who take blankets to the countries they're going to because surely they don't have blankets there.
Mine are wrinkled after ten minutes so I figure another six days won't matter
Braggart.
158: David Lynch ought to go back, George Lucas style, and insert a bunch of CGI in Dune.
Firesteel ==> Fire Steal ==> Prometheus
They should give the original footage of Prometheus to Frederick Wiseman to recut.
There are too many hipsters and not enough really good sandwiches in this world.
Speaking of cinephilia, I guess -- and heat -- my kid had a fever this afternoon and ended up getting me to explain "The Dark Crystal" to her, in its entirety, for something like two hours straight, using mostly online plot summaries and sparse visual aids, all because I quoted a line to her father and then said something offhand to her about a movie I liked as a kid that was scary. WHAT HAPPENED IN THE SCARY FILM? OH. WHY? HOW DID IT WORK? We had to get everyone's motivation straight, then I had to block scenes, then I had to explain the metaphysics, then...
dq, I can also report that after you recommended the Nutcracker production to us she became an avid fan of the entire E.T.A. Hoffman story and Pirlipat and the Hard Nut, to which I finally had to appeal because the questions about the mouse king did not end.
Barry, I feel you on the Kobayashi, but I guess I'll be spending the summer watching Stalker and so on w00t
Also, Agnes Varda should remake Fight Club.
165 She was just here! (Couldn't go though, too busy packing and stuff).
And BEAKS. Speaking also of nightmare beaks.
162.2, right on! Just saw the kid's ex school spring recital, it was epically impressive. They did the *entire* second act of Giselle and far from being painful it was great. Kid totally appreciated it and was also completely fine at no longer dancing there. BH was super enthralled and utterly confused. I told him to just avoid the gloomy chicks and water bodies in the woods. First tap performance tomorrow! And new ballet studio performance next week.
Didn't we have a thread once about which movies made you cry? The end of Andrei Rublev, basically from the sounding of the bell, totally does it for me.
[tl;dr: I am a total sap.] In college I lost my shit completely during a Doc films/class-required screening of the Hungarian film "Land of Angels." The professor greeted me on the way out and seemed a little surprised by the fountain eyes; years later, when I was in grad school, she introduced me to her husband as "my student who was so moved by 'Land of Angels'." It was completely situational; it's just kind of an odd New Wavey marxist film. I should try to track it down again.
I've probably told the story of shaking hands with Béla Tarr after the screening of Werckmeister Harmonies in the same place. He was very gracious, had very little English; just a long handshake while I tried to express how much I had loved the movie and how sorry I was about the idiots during the Q&A. I cry at a lot of movies, not just the Hungarian ones, but that may be one reason why I'm not a huge cinephile: it really is too intense for me.
We did our PTA 5K fun run today. Rilee won girls 8 and under, and Noser got 3rd boys 8 and under. We managed to go in just about 36m even!
Sadly, they both had soccer games after that this morning, so they're a bit overextended for today. I anticipate a greater than usual amount of strife about bed time.
I once passed George Takei in a motel hall.
I am in a complete meltdown every single night. I work at it and need it.
There is talk around about collateral damage and the latest Avengers.
There is an anime in my queue, not atypical, about you know a typical 16 yr old Tokyo schoolgirl finding out she is the lost princess and heir to the throne. Neato, like Anne Hathaway! Her parents were murdered by the evil whoever and they seek her death at any cost. Now she and her story are public and the nation being about evenly divided, she gets to hoist her tiara, stand on the hill...and watch the unstoppable, even by her own suicide, civil war kill tens of thousands in her name.
Fucking American fascist power-fantasies where tragedy and guilt are subject to some level of fucking choice.
173 reads like the best Larry King column ever.
I don't believe anybody under 70 has read a Larry King column.
The kids today are all about My Space and princess-related civil war.
Larry King the CNN interviewer guy? He wrote/writes columns?
Looking it up, it was cancelled 13 years ago, and ran in USAToday, which I'm not sure still exists. Let's see if I can find a sample.
OK, it really was this crazy when it ran, the link is not an exaggeration. Not in allcaps though.
And this was the classic parody. Still maybe my favorite thing from the Onion.
Martha once busted me crying at the end of Osmosis Jones.
I hope USA Today still exists. My parents expect to find it at their hotel whenever they travel.
179: Wait, he actually wrote that? That's not a parody?
And they paid him money for that? How does one get that gig?
USA Today definitely still exists. TRO is just a decadent coastal elitist out of touch with Real America.
Not only does USA Today exist, but Atrios uses it to catapult the liberal propaganda.
USA Today has also had an unusually good track record on global warming, and did some good investigative reporting on things like the Wegman report.
187 --
Republicans just like punching hippies because they can ... It's another nice day here in the urban hellhole ... Memo to economists: you don't know as much as you think -- I know because I'm one of you ... There will never be another band like Superchunk ... I'm a horrible blogger, except when I'm not ... say what you will, and I have, Digby is a great American ... Why does America keep bombing brown people, feel like we've been down this road before ... Remember "it's OK if you're a Republican"? Well, it is, no matter what "it" is ... two words: train system ... It takes a village, but not this village ... Rock on ... I hate CNN.
I would read that. In fact, I often do.
187: Counterpoint: they also publish Inst/apundit.
Reminds me of Chuck Grassley tweeting
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I haven't had sex in seven months. I had basically a sure thing in the bank for tonight based on how date one went but I postponed it supposedly to work on this poster. I have been on a procrastination binge all day, not working on my poster and doing barely anything else productive, either and just now made myself type like three words before coming over here to leave this comment. It now feels especially wasteful and lonely that I am not canoodling. I am still not working. Gah.
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The work-habits part of that is horribly familiar. My sympathies.
Procrastinate, procrastinate, masturbate, procrastinate.
The work-habits part of that is horribly familiar.
Ditto. (The sex part too.) My sympathies as well.
One of you two must fly to the other one's city so you can have sex! Now! Do it now! Action principle! Execute your will! Act!
[says someone procrastinating, but that doesn't stop me from Exhorting!]
Who says you have to stop procrastinating?
basically a sure thing
You can tell by the way he used his walk.
Not sure if he came up with the term, but I guy in my history grad school used the word "procrasturbation" to describe Tia's scenario.
Typing that helped me start working. It's late enough that I only have mental energy for the soothing work of lining up little boxes in PowerPoint. Science!
soothing work of lining up little boxes in PowerPoint
Is that what you're calling it these days?
Now you have to list "Sexlessness" as a sponsor of your research.
TRO, I am totally willing to share my island lair with you so that it can be defended by aurochs and killer emus. and narnia has the least bio-ethics per bio-ethicist employed in all the world. they've decided that chip fab production and such is passé, and they need to get ahead of the next big thing. so they have hired away a bunch of famous people from harvard et. al, luring them here with a combination of dolla dolla bills and the total lack of any restrictions on genetic engineering of human stem cells, of which commodity they also offer endless supplies. they have a fucking campus thing called "biopolis." for real.
sorry tia, that...sucks and blows both seem inappropriate here. that's meager.
Hmm, tempting, but I don't want to incur LB's wrath.
Okay people, if Smearcase and I are gonna watch one Mad Max movie (not the current one), which one should it be?
208: The second one, Mad Max 2, aka The Road Warrior. Many people's favorites and the one that's the best background for the new one.
I love that he says "what a puny plan" and not "pitiful plan" or "pathetic plan" or "stupid plan". No, it's puny, and he is Humungus, and he will crush it liek bug.
It's long been my pet theory that the Humungus is actually Bubba Zanetti from the first film.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dq4aOaDXIfY
Also, clearly, The Feral Kid and Savannah Nix have to hook up at some point subsequent to Thunderdome
The Middle Toe of the Right Foot retold with cats in all the roles in an anime, scored with old Leadbelly songs would be pretty creepy, wouldn't it?
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We're out of town at a wedding, and left the kids with a babysitter. We just got woken up by a phone call from the police. Some neighbor phoned in a strange male, and so a ton of cops showed up on our doorstep at 8 am on a Sunday. Our babysitter is a black male, in case you were wondering. Good times!
(He's a very self-effacing type, and we're having a weird text conversation back and forth where he's not letting on that this bothers him on any level - "I'm just glad the kids are safe!" - and I'm totally furious at the meddlesome neighbor.
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Me: I'm so sorry about my neighbor being a suspicious jerk.
Babysitter: It's ok. It scared me that I didn't know why there were so many cops at the door, but as long as the kids are okay then I guess it works.
Me: The kids were never in any danger, and I'm fairly angry on your behalf, at the jackass neighbor.
Him: It's ok.
Me: On the small level, I'm glad everything is ok, too.
Him: Yes Ma'am. I'm glad it all worked out. It's storming pretty bad here but hopefully the sun comes out soon.
So someone called the cops on him in the pouring rain. They must have...seen him through the window? Seen him taking a bundle of trash to the trashcan? It's 8 am in the morning!
ALSO. We didn't have any cell reception at the wedding last night. We didn't have any contingency way to get ahold of us, and it never crossed my mind to worry about it. But jesus christ, what if someone had called about a Saturday night intruder, instead of a Sunday morning intruder. Good lord that could have been really incredibly bad.
219-221: That's scary.
No one ended up getting tazed or shot, so there's that.
Just because I'm being nosey: awkward conversation with the neighbor, or pretend it never happened?
No idea which neighbor it was. So unless they come forward, we'll never know.
222: Well, there's also the angry confrontation option.
Were the cops at least polite and apologetic? I hope? Or would the babysitter paper over that if they weren't?
You could give your babysitter a gun.
"Kids, you know the Mauser is not for you to touch unless mommy or daddy is there, right?"
Paper the immediate neighborhood with flyers advertising his babysitting services (with photo). "For references, please contact Heebie and Jammies."
Glad it wasn't worse.
228.1: Maybe a neighborhood screening of The Hand That Rocks the Cradle?
228.2 is right.
225: no idea if the babysitter would soft play it for us. The officer on the phone definitely needed a little placating and convincing, though.
I'm also glad it wasn't worse.
The police should get, and then give out, the names of people who call non-emergent suspicions in. And should ask a lot of questions: What exactly is he doing? You say he's taking the garbage out -- what is suspicious about how he's acting? You sound like a racist -- are you only calling because the person is black? Are you familiar with our local ordinance about harassing people based on race?
When the caller doesn't want to give his/her name with 'I don't want to get involved' then it's 'thanks for calling, then.'
Obviously, an emergency call would go differently.
Seeing a black person isn't an emergency, though, any more than seeing a sleeping toddler in a car seat in a gas station while the mom is in paying.
I liked* this thread of cops complaining about racist 911 calls.
*for certain values of "like"
171 Great Bela Tarr story. Have a story to add to that (not about Tarr) but just no time right now. But I hear what you're saying.
As it is I'm having a hard time as it is getting my ass off of the Twitters and finishing up the last minute packing details. I leave tonight so time to shut things down here and I'll see you reprobates on the other side.
Start randomly calling the cops on your neighbors.
I'm so sorry, heebie. That makes me really sad.
235 Just saw that and seconded. Also outraged. (Now I really have to go. )
Bon voyage Barry! À très bientôt!
|| We watched the first episode of Les temoins last night -- it seemed well enough done. Does anyone know how it holds up? |>
Somebody in Missouri is reading it and think of how to monetize racist 911 calls.
Wow that's shitty. Do you know your neighbors well enough to gossip loudly about how some racist asshole called the cops on your babysitter, and you cannot believe you have to worry about that kind of dimwitted lunacy. Whoever the idiot was put your kids at risk of being frightened or hurt if the police had made some kind of mistake, let alone the effects on the babysitter -- you're just terribly angry about the whole thing. It's a pity you'll probably never know who the culprit is.
Deliver a speech along those lines to three or four of your neighbors, and there's a shot it'd get back to the right person. I don't know if there's any value to it, but I think I'd feel better making my opinion known.
241.2 seems like what Marilla would do, so it's probably right.
What creeps! Strongly endorse LB's mode of action.
So, we got the full story. We live next to college students, and someone shot up their car this morning. The students heard the gun shots, came out in a panic, and saw our baby-sitter in the kitchen.
They were super apologetic about it being the baby-sitter, and the car really does have bullet holes.
the students heard the gun shots, came out in a panic...
How fucking dumb are these students?
So did the cops not mention the gunshots to you, or did the students not mention them to the cops? Either way that seems like a weird part of the story to omit.
"If the second act you have gun shots, then in the previous one it should be hung on the wall."
Bet the sitter owes his life to the cops not knowing about the shots.
It was raining super hard, and the cops thought the loud noises must have been thunder or something. It wasn't until the afternoon that the students discovered the bullet holes and called the cops back.
246: I don't technically know that they came out, just that they saw our babysitter in the kitchen through the window, after hearing the shots.
249 is pretty awful to contemplate.
I'm glad they were apologetic.
But the leap to point at the guy they saw at your house! Do they realize how bad it could have been? (Also, if the cops thought it was storm noise, why did they go to your house anyway?)
...just that they saw our babysitter in the kitchen through the window
That's probably a problem the architect should have considered when placing the windows.
Wow, that's horrifying.
Agree that 241 would have been the way to go. The whole thing seems like a narrow escape from what could have been awful (on all counts, for your kids and certainly for the sitter).
I knew a guy who had insisted that he be introduced to the neighbors before his HOUSEsitting gig, to head off precisely these kinds of calls. Granted, that was in a stunningly white suburb (he was a dark-complexioned Hispanic immigrant).
I'm ready for the US to be the kind of country where we don't do this.
My focus on this story has changed to why is someone shooting up your neighbors' car? And is that some kind of an ongoing safety problem?
In the rain, they were probably just aiming for a road sign and missed.
Quoting myself from LJ out of laziness:
The college students suspect a specific person. A few months ago, they found some guy in their front yard, wielding a machete. Or hiding the machete behind his back. Or maybe there was an altercation. It's unclear. The college students ended up pressing charges, though, and the guy got sent to jail for a little bit.
The machete-wielder just got out of jail, and lives down the street. So they think he now peppered their car. The cops dismantled the door and retrieved the bullets. Our kids were fascinated. I think I shall spare my parents the story of the time the neighbor's car got shot up and the cops got called on our very gentle, sweet babysitter.
That actually makes it even weirder that they called the cops on the babysitter.
The fact that they suspect a specific other person of doing the shooting, that is.
259: Did you tell your parents the machete-wielder story?
Well, I don't know that they realized they/their car was the target of the bullets - they could have heard shots coming from our house.
Heebie, I hate to be the one to tell you this, but this isn't a racism-sucks-we-should-be-scared-of=the-cops-let's-share-this-with-my-liberal-friends story. It's an OMG you're living in a horror movie story. There's some machete wielding possible Jason Voorhees type living down the street from you and he DOES NOT GIVE A SHIT about shooting up cars. Get out now! Don't be that fool who sticks around the house for Jason to find.
She may be living in a horror movie, but she's an extra. The psycho killer is clearly targeting the college students, in accordance with genre conventions.
In fact, as the suburban family don't we remain blissfully unaware as we traipse through the scenes and everyone conceals the horror in order to spare our parental sensibilities?
Every iteration of this story is improbably more horrifying than the last. I look forward to finding out that the dude with the machete was Jammies, and one of his "long business trips" was actually a jail stint.
Jammies probably does his victims "Christine"-style, with a killer driverless car.
265: so they're okay as long as they don't have sex?
I guess? I don't actually watch horror movies.
Further in "what the actual fuck, Texas?"
That does put heebie's situation in context, somewhat.
271: Pretty good outcome, all things considered.
The gunfire erupted about 12:15 p.m. outside a Twin Peaks Restaurant, where members of the motorcycle clubs had gathered.
But I always thought Twin Peaks was in Washington state?
(This lame joke brought to you after 15 minutes of fruitlessly googling for the Roadhouse fight scene from one of the early episodes)
The gunfire erupted about 12:15 p.m. outside a Twin Peaks Restaurant, where members of the motorcycle clubs had gathered.
But I always thought Twin Peaks was in Washington state?
(This lame joke brought to you after 15 minutes of fruitlessly googling for the Roadhouse fight scene from one of the early episodes)
Just in case you didn't get it the first time
IIRC Twin Peaks (the restaurant chain) is a Hooters knockoff featuring buxom waitresses in skimpy outfits. You can see how it would appeal to biker gangs.
IIRC Twin Peaks (the restaurant chain) is a Hooters knockoff featuring buxom possessed midget waitresses in skimpy outfits.
As predicted: http://www.unfogged.com/archives/comments_13738.html#1695435
This is Texas. Shouldn't the guy have been brandishing a chainsaw instead of a machete?
255: Not in my scope of work! The vast majority of windows I put in face the river, not the neighbors.
But I now realize that, while I did make sure to meet Texas wind resistance standards for the glazing, I didn't check the bullet rating. It looks like, in Heebieville, you need .22-rated glass; in Waco, it's .45 (in Austin it's 9 mm, because they're effete liberals).
9mm is the part of the metric system conservatives don't mind.
281 almost convinced me that this was an actual building standard.
Further to 238, two more episodes last night. Check this one out, folks.
French producers have to think through what it means to play for an international audience, maybe just a little. One character was asked which cop he'd been questioned by, and said it was the one with the Belgian accent. It was clear enough, from other context, who they meant. But kind of striking to remind a subtitle reader that they're missing something of dramatic import.
I'm not going to pretend that I wouldn't watch Marie Dompnier read from a phone book, because I totally would. But they've done a fair job so far with the twists and turns.
Several locations in Texas announced they were postponing Monday's planned bikini contest and offered prayers to those affected by the shooting.
In that sentence is contained America.
284, see here:http://www.unfogged.com/archives/comments_12522.html#1511303
The only thing that can stop a bad guy with a gun is a bikini model with a gun.
I thought "surely there is a bikini made out of guns tied together" but it's actually surprisingly hard to google an image because there are so many pictures of women in bikinis posing with guns.
Two more episodes last night; we have house guests tonight, or we'd watch the sixth and final.
