- Hipster cool remains the defining characteristic of
Canadian indie rock favorites Arcade Fire and their performance on the final day of
the first weekend of the Coachella
Valley Music and Arts Festival in Indio, Calif. cemented that fact.
After a rollicking set that included a guest appearance from Blondie’s Debbie
Harry, who joined the band to perform Blondie’s 1979 single “Heart of Glass,”
shared vocals with Régine Chassagne while Win Butler played piano. "Cruise
on, motherf*ckers," Harry shouted to the crowd as the track faded from an
old-school rock classic into “Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains),” on which
Harry provided backing vocals before dancing with Chassagne holding
multi-colored streamers. Butler saluted her with a profanity-enhanced nickname,
but it was the other portions of the show that affirmed Arcade Fire’s
hipster-ish pomposity. They were introduced by a man wearing a suit made of
shattered mirrors and played their first track, “Reflektor,” with Chassagne
shining mirror discs strapped onto her hands into the crowd. After that, Butler
took aim at the establishment and the highbrow attendees who dared to accept
VIP passes to the festival and rub elbows with the performers at backstage
parties. He decried the VIP areas at such festivals and fired off a few salvos
at those who occupy them. "I just want to say that there's a lot of fake
VIP room bullsh*t happening at this festival, and sometimes people dream of
being there – but it super sucks in there, so don’t worry about it,” Butler
snarked. He later fired a wholly valid salvo at all of the dance and electronic
bands playing the festival, giving a "shout out to all the bands playing
instruments this weekend" at the end of the set. It took clean-up crews
quite a while the wash all of the righteous condescension from the stage………
- Where are people the happiest? If you guessed that the
community found to be the most satisfied with their city in a Gallup poll were
residents of some location in Colorado, you are both correct and a diligent observer
of the blatantly obvious. The weed-loving denizens of the centennial state
clearly have an edge on the rest of the country when it comes to satisfaction,
much like stoners have an edge when it comes to finding tasty food because most
anything tastes good to someone who is baked out of their mind. As such, it
makes perfect sense that Fort Collins rated as America’s most-satisfied city,
with a whopping 94.9 percent of residents saying they are content with their
city. Fort Collins has been a strong performer in the survey since Gallup
launched it in 2008 and it more than outdid runner-up San Luis Obispo-Paso Robles in California.
The veracity of the results is dubious, though, as Gallup found that 85 percent
of Americans say they are satisfied with the city they live in and a majority
of respondents believe their community is headed in the right direction. Asking
residents of Detroit, Cleveland, Pittsburgh and most any city in West Virginia
– just kidding, West Virginians! – would do enough damage to the negative end
of the spectrum to push that mark below 60 percent at a minimum. Still, Gallup
claimed it surveyed at least 300 adults – it did not specify living or dead -
in each of the 189 metropolitan areas it studied. On the opposite end of the
spectrum from Fort Collins and San Luis Obispo was Rockford, Ill., which rated
as the country’s least-satisfied city. Next at the bottom of the list were
Stockton, Calif., Bakersfield, Calif., and Flint, Mich. A mere 39.7 percent of
Rockfordians said they felt their city was getting better. The fast riser to
watch for next year’s survey is clearly Memphis, which ranked last in the 2008
survey with 68.8 percent satisfaction but rose to 79.7 percent in 2013………
- Thieves are treated harshly in many countries around the
world. It becomes very interesting to see how citizens of various cities, towns
and villages deal with sticky-fingered criminals caught five-finger-discounting
clothes, groceries and other merchandise for which they are either too poor or
simply too morally bankrupt to pay. Villagers in the remote Bolivian town of Ayopaya
have to be near the top of the cruelty heap after allegedly pushing two young
men to death’s door by using venomous fire ants to torture them for stealing
three motorcycles. According the local authorities, the Amazon villagers seized
the two men after accusing them of theft and tied them to a tree before
unleashing their killer ants. The venomous ants, of the pseudomyrmex
triplarinus species, have a symbiotic relationship with the triplaris tree and
their venom has anti-inflammatory properties and is used a traditional cure for
arthritis. However, it can also be lethal when administered in large doses.
Those doses tend to reach said lethal levels when the victims are tied to a
tree for three days and repeatedly attacked by fire ants, which a sister of one
of the two accused thieves alleged to have happened. According to a doctor
treating the two men, one remains in intensive care while the other had
required dialysis for kidney failure. The only reason the two men were
eventually released is because their relatives paid $3,700 as compensation for
the motorcycles. With their bloodlust and thirst for revenge satisfied, the
villagers let the two men go. Otherwise, witnesses said, they would have been
killed for their crimes in one of the more prolonged and just plain heinous
ways to shuffle off this mortal coil. One suspects both men might live the rest
of their lives – however long that may be – with a can of RAID and a rolled-up
magazine close at hand……..
- Two weeks in, Major
League Baseball's expanded replay system is making friends and influencing
people…to get themselves thrown out of games. Boston Red Sox manager John
Farrell showed himself to be no fan of the system, which was instituted with
the aim of mitigating the human element in umpiring decisions. Replay fulfilled
that role over the weekend by taking two missed calls in the Red Sox-Yankees
series….and turning them into completely blown calls that so infuriated Farrell
that he got himself ejected arguing them. "It's hard to have any faith in
the system,'' Farrell said after Boston's 3-2 loss to the Yankees. Farrell made
history by becoming the first manager in the major leagues to be ejected for
disputing a play that was reviewed on replay because he lost his sh*t after
umpires reversed their call on what would have been an inning-ending double
play in the fourth inning. The reversal ripped an out from the Red Sox and gave
the Yankees a run that would not have counted had the original call stood. The
fact that the run proved to be the final margin of victory for the Yankees
underscored the depth of Farrell’s rage. First base umpire Bob Davidson
initially called the Yankees' Francisco Cervelli out at first after he grounded
to third baseman Ryan Roberts, who threw to second to force Kelly Johnson, with
second baseman Jonathan Herrera throwing to first baseman Mike Napoli. Yankees
manager Joe Girardi challenged the call and crew chief Brian O'Nora digitally
pow-wowed with MLB's replay center and announced the call had been reversed. An
enraged Farrell came hurtling out of the dugout and went berserk in a way that
would make Eminem proud. "We felt that it was clear that the replay was
inconclusive,'' Farrell said, "and the frustrating part is that when this
was rolled out and explained to us, particularly on the throw received by the
first baseman, we were instructed when the ball enters the glove -- and not
that it has to hit the back of the glove -- is where the out is deemed
complete.” This came one day after Farrell asked umpires to review a call at
second base, the umpire refused to overturn their decision and MLB admitted
after the game that the call should have been changed. Ah, the joys of
technology………..
- This cannot possibly end well. Any story hinging on
Microsoft “squeezing” its world’s-worst operating system into devices with
limited storage is bound for disaster and the journey isn't going to last long.
This particular attmept involves the house that Bill Gates Built trying to fit
its Windows
8.1 onto devices with storage space as small as 16GB. The company is doing so
in order to live up to a promise it made earlier this year about producing
low-cost tablets and laptops. To faciliate this fool’s errand, Microsoft will
use a technology it has dubbed "WIM" for "Windows Imaging.” It
is a file-based disk image format introduced in Windows Vista, the colossal
operating system flop that debuted in 2007. WIM split off from Vista and was
dubbed Longhorn. Longhorn was originally designed to produce an operating
system in 2004 and a mere decade later, it sort of, kind of has hit its mark.
In order to jam a Windows 8.1 update on devices with tight storage constraints,
Microsoft has applied the decade-old technology to free up more space for
applications and user content. "This new deployment option, called Windows
Image Boot (or WIMBoot), takes a different approach than traditional Windows
installations," Michael Niehaus, senior product marketing manager in the
Windows Commercial group, wrote in a company blog post. "Instead of
extracting all the individual Windows files from an image (WIM) file, they
remain compressed in the WIM. But from the user's perspective, nothing looks
any different: You still see a C: volume containing Windows, your apps, and all
of your data." The über-compressed WIM file contains all the files
necessary to run Windows 8.1 in all of its incompetent glory and does so by
freeing up space in a process based on moving Windows to its own partition and
then compressing it into a WIM file. So users can boot and run the world’s
worst operating stem, a set of pointer files are stored on the C: drive which,
in turn, aim at a file index within the WIM file. Windows then operates solely from
the compressed, read-only WIM file. If this bass-ackwards fix actually works,
it would eliminate the need for device makers to find a way to provide 64GB of
memory in order to run windows……..
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