- Since when did Britain become such a nation of prudes? A
country that embraces porn in its newspapers proved this week that its
tolerance only extends so far when the trustees of a village hall dropped a ban on a
bondage and spanking workshop complete with tea and cookies. The event, described
as a "relationship support meeting" on the booking form, was to be
held at the 108-year-old town hall in Trumpington, a sleepy community north of
London. Most weeks, the hall is the site for bingo for geezers, women’s groups
and even Girl Scouts. How a spanking and bondage group doesn’t fit in there is
a mystery, especially since the hall has had been used to hold "quite a
number" of secret bondage classes in the past. "The premises were
booked under false pretenses," a spokesperson for the hall explained. "They
said it was a relationship support group but it turned out to be something else
that we didn't know about. We have canceled all future bookings." Wait a
minute…..who’s to say the conversations, instruction and support folks received
at these secret meetings weren’t beneficial to their relationships? A group called
Peer Rope Cambridge ran the secret spanking meetings, which cost $16 and
came complete with a guide to meeting other "kinksters" and a class
in caning. The group’s website, which has since been scrubbed clean, had
contained messages about canes and group discussions about pain and pleasure. Peer
rope is a type of bondage that sees participants tie someone up so they lose
complete control, which sounds disturbing and is. Town hall manager Barbara
Fernandez is clearly no fan of it and said she is seeking legal advice to
determine if the hall has any avenues for recourse against Peer Rope
Cambridge……..
- Jack White has come back up for air in between his 8,751
musical projects and taken time to speak about digital versus analog recording. White,
who is active each year in Record Store Day to promote the non-digital music
world, is not surprisingly lukewarm on digital music as a means to preserve
tunes going forward. White noted that digital formats have "proven to be
anything but fail-safe" when it comes to the preservation of music and
suggested a need for alternatives. "A lot of the digital formats in the
last 20 years have proven to be anything but fail-safe. The tapes break or the information
can't be retrieved,” White said. To back up his words, White recently donated
$200,000 to the National Recording Preservation Foundation, a non-profit group
that seeks to preserve and make accessible the recorded history of America.
White also looked back to the past of music recording in the United States and
talked about how people dismissed the masters of early phonograph recordings. "There
are stories of early phonograph companies taking apart the masters used to
press wax discs so they could be sold as roofing shingles,” White said. “They
didn't think a recording was a document of anything cultural. It was just a way
to sell phonographs." To round out his diatribe, White spoke about his
fondness for sheet music and told a story about his mother growing up in the
1930s and buying sheet music at the local department store. White’s Third Man
Records will co-release Paramount Records' back catalogue on vinyl beginning in
October, so White clearly is speaking at least partially in the interest of
self-promotion. The busiest man in rock and roll is currently working on new
songs with his band The Dead Weather, which consists of White, The Kills'
Alison Mosshart, Dean Fertita of Queens Of The Stone Age and Jack Lawrence of
The Greenhornes and The Raconteurs……..
- Google’s quest for world domination rolls on and the
search giant has unveiled an upgrade to the way it interprets
users' search requests. The improved search is based on a new algorithm,
codenamed Hummingbird, and is actually the first significant upgrade to the
search process in the past three years. Anyone wondering if it will cause
problems for them shouldn’t worry because it has already been in use for about
a month, meaning everyone has probably used the new search. The algorithm
affects about 90 percent of Google searches, but the company is refusing to
give out too many details about how it works. During an official presentation
this week, Google said Hummingbird is especially useful for longer and more
complex queries. It added that Hummingbird is necessary as users expect more
natural and conversational interactions with a search engine. It centers on the
ability to speak requests into mobile phones, smart watches and other wearable
technology. The algorithm also focuses on more accurately ranking information
based on a more intelligent understanding of search requests, unlike its
predecessor, Caffeine, which was targeted at better indexing of websites. By
better understanding concepts and the relationships between them rather than
simply words, Hummingbird can supposedly yield more efficient interactions. It
fits neatly with Google's "Knowledge Graph" concept, introduced last
year and aimed at making interactions more human. A Google spokesman displayed a
voice search through her mobile phone and asked for images of the Eiffel Tower.
She then asked how tall it was and Google delivered the correct answer. Of
course, most users are still going to rely on Google as their go-to search
method for porn, so as long as it remains effective for finding hot
girl-on-girl action, then most Internet users should be happy……..
- Hay there. Minnesotans wish there was more hay there, here
and everywhere because their winter is about to suck even more than it normally
sucks. A year of drought and disease have left the state in something of a hay crisis,
with stockpiles shrinking and prices skyrocketing. Horse owners are already
feeling the effects of the increase and various animal rescue groups are
preparing for a tough few months. The biggest culprit appears to be a down year
for alfalfa crops, which doesn’t exactly shake the world for most people but
can have dire consequences for the hay eaters of the world. “It is a perfect
storm of winter kill of alfalfa, dry conditions most of the summer, which has
now led to shortage of quality hay,” said Stacy Bettison of the Minnesota Horse
Welfare Coalition. “And that has led to much higher hay prices.” Winter hasn’t
even hit yet and already hay prices are as high as twice last year’s levels in
some places. Farmers are facing the option of paying more or feeding their
animals lower-quality hay, neither of which is an appealing choice. Cheaper hay
can lead to digestive problems and even death in extreme cases. Horses can
consume an entire bail of hay in a matter of 2-3 days, making their grocery
bills bit too high to stomach with the current hay prices. No alfalfa is
growing in the state at this point, so whatever hay supply exists right now is
all Minnesota will have for the winter unless it undertakes the costly endeavor
of importing more. Horse owners are already planning out their hay use for the
months ahead, knowing that life will likely be very difficult in that respect
when Minnesota’s eight-month winter drags on into March and April……….
- Can we have an undeserved break from the harsh judgment of
the most hypocritical governing body in all of American sports? After the NCAA
handed out a completely indefensible easing of its sanctions against Penn State in the wake of the
Jerry Sandusky child sex-abuse scandal, it took all of five seconds for USC athletic
director Pat Haden to petition the organization about the potential of
gradually reducing the penalties that have plagued the Trojans' football
program since 2010. Haden said he and USC officials met with NCAA president
Mark Emmert and other officials in Indianapolis after the NCAA decided to
reduce sanctions against Penn State, including returning scholarships the
Nittany Lions had lost and considering a reduction of the program’s bowl ban. "During
our meetings with the NCAA's leaders over the last two days, we discussed
enforcement and sanction issues impacting both the NCAA membership at large and
USC specifically," Haden said in a statement. "We proposed creative
'outside the box' solutions to the scholarship issues resulting from the
injuries and transfers experienced by our football team over the past three
seasons.” Haden made it clear he
believes USC has made the same sort of "progress" Penn State was lauded for by the NCAA in
regard to athletics integrity. "Since the Committee on Infractions [COI]
issued its sanctions in 2010, USC has been held up as a model and praised for
its integrity and commitment to compliance, a fact often mentioned by the NCAA
itself," Haden added. At this point, we’ll pause for you to laugh heartily
at Haden’s suggestion and recall that the NCAA slapped USC with scholarship
reduction penalties put in place after former running back Reggie Bush was
found to have accepted tens of thousands of dollars in illegal perks and
benefits while playing for the Trojans. Nice try, USC………
No comments:
Post a Comment