Good Reads

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Straight White Male: The Lowest Difficulty Setting There Is

Great piece and has absolutely no chance of being read, or understood, by the people that need to read it the most.

*reads*

Ayrton Senna: The inside story of the Formula One legend's death at Imola

Special feature: On the 20th anniversary of Ayrton Senna's fatal crash Oliver Brown travels to Imola to hear how events unfolded on that tragic weekend

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http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/mo...25/ayrton-senna-death-inside-story-imola.html


http://i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/02896/senna_2896715b.jpg

Sean said:

Straight White Male: The Lowest Difficulty Setting There Is

Great piece and has absolutely no chance of being read, or understood, by the people that need to read it the most.

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Forgot to credit who shared this, eh?

His twitter is awesome as well, if you are into that sort of thing.

Laurel said:

http://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--wApni32Q--/obpaadifdwlwtzs09flf.png

If you have Celiac, this obviously doesn't apply to you. Don't eat gluten. But if you don't have Celiac—and that's 99% of the human population, mind you—there's no reason to be gluten free. You're wasting your time. Even the scientist who started this gluten free craze thinks it's useless to be gluten free. Seriously. People, the father of gluten free think it's bullshit.

Peter Gibson, a professor of gastroenterology at Monash University and director of the GI Unit at The Alfred Hospital in Melbourne, Australia, conducted an experiment in 2011 that linked gluten to screwing with people's gastrointestinal distress. That published paper has served as one of the strongest pieces of evidence for the non-celiac gluten sensitivity that everybody suddenly developed existing.

But Gibson wanted to repeat the experiment and see if he would reach the same conclusion. He couldn't. According to Real Clear Science, Gibson had subjects with 'gluten intolerance' but weren't Celiac take part in an experiment that fed them a high gluten, normal gluten, low gluten and placebo diet for a week and found that there was "absolutely no specific response to gluten."

What happened was that everybody reported pain, bloating, nausea and gas to similar degrees. No matter what they ate—gluten or placebo—they felt sick. The problem wasn't with gluten, it was with their brains. Basically, it's the nocebo effect. People psych themselves out and start believing they're sick.​

- read the full article Being gluten free is dumb because gluten intolerance may not even exist (from Sploid)​

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*like* I know several people who have cut out gluten, and they can't even explain why, they just "heard somewhere" that it was healthier.

Gluten is a funny word.

JohnnySavage said:

Gluten is a funny word.

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My gluten feel a little tight today. They probably need some stretching.

The Handmaid's Tale
- Margaret Atwood

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/38447.The_Handmaid_s_Tale

Offred is a Handmaid in the Republic of Gilead.
[ The Republic of Gilead is a totalitarian and theocratic state that has replaced the United States of America.]
[Everyone fears the Eyes, Gilead’s secret police force. No one is safe from prison, torture, and execution.]

Offred may leave the home of the Commander and his wife once a day, to walk to food markets.

The signs [to guide her] are now pictures, instead of words because women are no longer allowed to read.

She must lie on her back once a month [and endure a ritual rape] and pray that [ her] Commander makes her pregnant. In an age of declining births, Offred and the other Handmaids are valued only if their ovaries are viable. [The Commanders are complete hypocrites. They are old sterile men, and they use the men under their command to hide their sterility. The lesser men get their Handmaidens pregnant. Handmaids who are willing to cooperate with their Commander's secret venture, are allowed to stay out of labor camps and prison. The venture involves providing places where men can secretly indulge in alcohol, drugs, pornography, prostitutes, and sexual violence against women.The Commanders enjoy pressuring the Handmaids into providing "the Girlfriend experience." The children produced from the Handmaid's former life, are used by men who have a proclivity for molesting and raping. There is an underground movement to free women from Christian slavery. The Commanders use a hypocritical and sadistic ruse to execute male members of the rebellion. The Commanders pretend that the rebels are rapists, and force the Handmaidens stone them to death.]

Offred can remember the years before, when she lived [in freedom and liberty] and made love with her husband, Luke; when she played with and protected her daughter. When she had a job, money of her own, and access to knowledge. But, all of that is gone now...

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/38447.The_Handmaid_s_Tale

gsgs comment- Just as Europe looked at America as backward, brutal, and un-enlightened, for keeping slavery alive- Europe looks at the Republic of Gilead in the same light.

The Christian religion, the military forces, the military-industrial complex, the government, the international banking system, the press, communications, and the police, all ride in the same cart.

The whole nation has been transformed into a gulag, and corruption reigns supreme.

Sean said:

Straight White Male: The Lowest Difficulty Setting There Is

Great piece and has absolutely no chance of being read, or understood, by the people that need to read it the most.

Click to expand...

If being a straight white male is the lowest difficulty setting, which is debatable, it is because of the efforts of a lot of straight white males over thousands and thousands of years. Nobody gave straight white males anything. Unless you think God did.

http://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/newsroom/img/mt/2014/06/4269882957_03fc8b819d_b/lead.jpg?n72jkk

http://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--8zs17-4u--/tx399p0tgmzuei0szbcc.jpg

http://i.somethingawful.com/u/ctstalker/2014/dude.jpg

Half the people who play video games are female. Maybe ten percent of all games feature women as playable characters. That figure could go as high as eleven percent if the protracted lawsuit to canonize my Tetris fan fiction pans out.

Making more games that are explicitly about women, or that give players the option to choose their gender and appearance seems like a good thing for everyone. More variety, more inclusiveness. More walking atrocities when we are given the ability to adjust individual facial features. There is no downside. Every year the white dude with a gruff voice seems increasingly obvious and ridiculous as a go-to protagonist.


http://www.somethingawful.com/news/games-female-playable/

lovetoread said:

http://i.somethingawful.com/u/ctstalker/2014/dude.jpg

Half the people who play video games are female. Maybe ten percent of all games feature women as playable characters. That figure could go as high as eleven percent if the protracted lawsuit to canonize my Tetris fan fiction pans out.

Making more games that are explicitly about women, or that give players the option to choose their gender and appearance seems like a good thing for everyone. More variety, more inclusiveness. More walking atrocities when we are given the ability to adjust individual facial features. There is no downside. Every year the white dude with a gruff voice seems increasingly obvious and ridiculous as a go-to protagonist.

http://www.somethingawful.com/news/games-female-playable/

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This is why I stick to games like pong.

Always hungry? Here's why.

FOR most of the last century, our understanding of the cause of obesity has been based on immutable physical law. Specifically, it’s the first law of thermodynamics, which dictates that energy can neither be created nor destroyed. When it comes to body weight, this means that calorie intake minus calorie expenditure equals calories stored. Surrounded by tempting foods, we overeat, consuming more calories than we can burn off, and the excess is deposited as fat. The simple solution is to exert willpower and eat less.

The problem is that this advice doesn’t work, at least not for most people over the long term. In other words, your New Year’s resolution to lose weight probably won’t last through the spring, let alone affect how you look in a swimsuit in July. More of us than ever are obese, despite an incessant focus on calorie balance by the government, nutrition organizations and the food industry.

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http://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/05/18/opinion/sunday/always-hungry-heres-why.html?_r=0&referrer=

That's the mobile link, but I'm hoping it'll just redirect those on PCs.

Why Americans suck at Math(s)

...for starters we don't abbreviate mathematics as the plural it is.

For example, if you are trying to decide on the best problem to teach children to subtract a one-digit number from a two-digit number using borrowing, or regrouping, you have many choices: 11 minus 2, 18 minus 9, etc. Yet from all these options, five of the six textbook companies in Japan converged on the same exact problem, Toshiakira Fujii, a professor of math education at Tokyo Gakugei University, told me. They determined that 13 minus 9 was the best. Other problems, it turned out, were likely to lead students to discover only one solution method. With 12 minus 3, for instance, the natural approach for most students was to take away 2 and then 1 (the subtraction-subtraction method). Very few would take 3 from 10 and then add back 2 (the subtraction-addition method).
Continue reading the main story

But Japanese teachers knew that students were best served by understanding both methods. They used 13 minus 9 because, faced with that particular problem, students were equally likely to employ subtraction-subtraction (take away 3 to get 10, and then subtract the remaining 6 to get 4) as they were to use subtraction-addition (break 13 into 10 and 3, and then take 9 from 10 and add the remaining 1 and 3 to get 4). A teacher leading the “We” part of the lesson, when students shared their strategies, could do so with full confidence that both methods would emerge.

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Hate to do it, but right now, more than ever, it needs to be seen:

http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/07/israel-provoked-this-war-109229.html#.U9HliaVECZY

From the article: "Israel’s assault on Gaza, as pointed out by analyst Nathan Thrall in the New York Times, was not triggered by Hamas’ rockets directed at Israel but by Israel’s determination to bring down the Palestinian unity government that was formed in early June, even though that government was committed to honoring all of the conditions imposed by the international community for recognition of its legitimacy."

Another gem: "'Israel is pursuing a return to the status quo ante, when Gaza had electricity for barely eight hours a day, water was undrinkable, sewage was dumped in the sea, fuel shortages caused sanitation plants to shut down and waste sometimes floated in the streets.' It is not only Hamas supporters, but many Gazans, perhaps a majority, who believe it is worth paying a heavy price to change a disastrous status quo."

Out and About in the East Village, Part 1

In this weekly feature, East Village-based photographer James Maher provides us with a quick snapshot of someone who lives and/or works in the East Village.

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-5jZtutHxJU0/U9focBYrt5I/AAAAAAACJlI/rIkXPHWDRuQ/s640/-7.jpg

Name: Melissa Elledge
Occupation: Musician, Subway Performer
Location: East 9th Street and 1st Avenue
Date: Friday, July 25 at 5 pm.

I grew up in very rural North Carolina, in the middle of nowhere. Where I grew up was called Rockfish. My address was a route number and a box number. It was a 45-minute bus ride to school each day. I left North Carolina when I was 13, when my mom and I moved to Nashville, and then I moved to New Orleans for six years. It’ll be 10 years next month in New York.

I grew up really, really poor. Nobody in my family went to college, much less grad school. My mom worked in the service industry her whole life in hotels and restaurants and my dad was a machinist in a slaughterhouse. My mom used to pick cotton actually. This was the South, man. You can say hi to her for me because she’s proud of everything I do and loves me.

I started playing music when I was 5. I started with piano lessons and I went to undergrad in New Orleans. I came to New York in 2004 to get my Master’s in classical piano at NYU. I got out in 2006 and I wasn’t doing a lot of gigs. The whole classical piano world is pretty competitive and I always felt mediocre at it. I’ve been playing piano since I was 5 and I’m 34 now and I never felt that good at it even though I had a Master’s degree.

Classical music is such a competitive field, and the piano especially. I could have gone on to get a doctorate and done various things like teaching at the university level and research, but the money, you know. I already took out so much in loans and it was kind of a lost cause. Eventually you get to the point where you can’t take out any more loans, and I’m at that point, so I couldn’t do that if I wanted to.

I lived on campus my first year and I hated it so much. I had the most boring roommate in the world. It was the opposite of what I thought I would have. When I moved here I had all those grand ideas about having that crazy New York roommate, the transvestite doing drugs off of a midget's ass in the bathroom or something. I was like, ‘Oh man I can’t wait for that, a real New York roommate experience,’ and I didn’t have that. I had this sad roommate. She never left the dorm and just watched reality TV shows constantly. I don’t know why that annoyed me, but even though I could have stayed on campus for another year I had to get out of there and I moved to the East Village.

When I was going to NYU I would hang out in some really, really awful places around there. I had a lot of law student friends, who were awesome, but they went to these various, terrible places, so I kind of went out on my own and discovered the East Village and the Lower East Side and it reminded me a lot of where I used to hang out in New Orleans. I wanted to live here because I thought I would be less homesick.

When I first got my Master’s it was pretty depressing. I wasn’t playing a lot. I was teaching adults who didn’t care about playing. I was getting some random gigs but I was also doing anything to pay the bills. I started doing nude figure modeling and I still do that part-time.

I have a tiny apartment. It’s on the fourth floor of a walkup and I don’t have room for a piano. I do work with a theater company occasionally and I get some light musical theatre gigs playing the piano, but I hate playing keyboard in a band. I was always kind of a piano snob. Playing the keyboard is not cool. Frank Zappa said a long time ago, ‘The guy that plays keyboard in a band does it because he doesn’t know how to do anything else.’ I just always hated how it looked. I know that’s really snobbish but, like, ‘Oh I’m going to stand here and hit this one key.’ That doesn’t do it for me. The accordion is a lot more physical and involved and it feels like I’m actually working.

I didn’t start playing accordion until about seven years ago. I don’t know exactly how it happened. People ask that, but I still don’t know how I got started. I asked my mom for one for Christmas in 2002, just as a joke really, but she got it for me. I didn’t know what to do with it. I had no idea how to play it. I didn’t touch it for like five years. And then it was like, ‘Oh I have this accordion, maybe I should try and play it.’ Suddenly I felt like a musician for the first time in my life.

I’ve only been playing for six or seven years, but I think there’s something psychological about having your instrument on your back all the time. A piano, you never have it with you. You have to rely on the pianos at concert halls or wherever and you just hope that they will be in tune. If you go to somebody’s house and they’re all like, let’s all jam, you don’t have anything with you. Having your instrument and being able to carry it around all the time, it’s weird but I just felt like I got it for the first time. It took me two decades to figure that out.

I do what I call non-traditional music on a traditional instrument. Probably 95 percent are my own arrangements of things that you wouldn’t expect to hear on an accordion. I don’t do the traditional Polkas or French or Italian music because I’m not Polish, French or Italian. I’m just an American redneck who grew up in the ‘90s. I do covers of Gangster’s Paradise or Radiohead or Johnny Cash. I do everything from Beethoven to Ginuwine.

I started busking in 2009 — out of necessity. I thought about doing it but I never had the balls to do it and definitely not solo. Then one day I needed to pay the rent in a few days and I said, ‘I’m just going to try this now.’ I was terrified. I didn’t even have music memorized. I knew about four songs solo because I played with a lot of bands to begin with. I just kind of played them over and over again. I had my little music stand. I played like two hours and made like 25 bucks, which wasn’t that bad.

I started out playing at Union Square in the mezzanine because that’s where I saw people playing, but then the cops told me to leave after five minutes. It took me a few years to get confident enough for the platforms. After the cops said I couldn’t play there, I went to another station and I’m glad I did because that’s how I’ve handled cop situations ever since. It was good money and it got better once I got more confident. The more music I learned and the more confident I became. Once I stopped using a music stand my money doubled probably because you don’t have that barrier between you and the people. It makes a difference.

I just love it. I thought it was illegal when I started to do it. Sometimes the cops would tell me to leave and I would leave but then I learned one day that it’s not illegal. You can look it up online. It’s section 1050.6C. Playing in the subway is permitted, there are just certain rules you have to follow. You can’t use an amplifier on the platform; you can’t play on a train; you can’t sell CDs; you can’t play within 25 feet of a turnstile. Of course you see a lot of those rules being broken multiple times, but I try not to.


Next week, Melissa discusses finishing her solo CD and getting robbed while busking.

James Maher is a fine art and studio photographer based in the East Village. Find his website here.

http://evgrieve.com/2014/07/out-and-about-in-east-village-part-1.html

THIS is beautifully written.

Out and About in the East Village, Part 2

In this weekly feature, East Village-based photographer James Maher provides us with a quick snapshot of someone who lives and/or works in the East Village.

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-X01CJn2jZtk/U-E4IWcd0ZI/AAAAAAACJ64/5iGGl3o0x0E/s640/-9.jpg

Name: Melissa Elledge
Occupation: Musician, Subway Performer
Location: East 9th Street and 1st Avenue
Date: July 31, Second Avenue F stop

I just finished a solo CD a few months ago for a suggested donation. I’ve met so many people and I’ve gotten a lot of gigs from it too. You’re a walking business card. That’s the reason why I’m in probably half the bands I’ve been in.

I also decided to tryout to get a permit for Music Under New York (MUNY). They give you a permit to play. There are certain stations that you need a permit to play in, like Grand Central and Union Square. It’s kind of hard to get a permit. About 300 people apply every year. When you apply you send in a CD or DVD and they choose about 50 to audition and, of those, about 25 get permits.

So I got one in 2012, but I don’t really play in those spots a lot. I tend to stick to 2nd Avenue on the downtown F and at 14th Street and 6th Avenue. The MUNY spots are not actually lucrative. Times Square is just a million people walking by and they have all these different paths. On a platform they have to walk by you. It’s a captive audience. I feel closer to the public down there. People think that I get most of my tips from tourists, but it’s really not. It’s people who work and live in the neighborhood.

There are people who give me a dollar every single time they see me. And tourists appreciate it like it’s part of their tour package. You’re constantly looked at like you’re in a fishbowl and I’m like, ‘No, I’m doing this for a living.’ I’m not just a statue. People sometimes see me down there and they think, ‘Oh she’s so mysterious, where does she live?’ I want people to know that I’m not a mole person. I actually live somewhere. I live in the East Village. This is my job.

I did actually get robbed and assaulted when I was busking once. This was two years ago. It was bizarre because even that was under the guise of being loved. It was this crazy crackhead lady. I saw her the day before and even that was weird. She was like, ‘Oh, you are so great, you go girl’ and just chatting me up and everything. She was like, ‘Hey I just have a $5 bill, I’m just going to get change.’

I had this weird feeling that day that she took more than she put down and I kind of made a mental note that it was time to stop letting people do that. So the very next day I was in the same spot at the same time and I saw her again and once again she was like, ‘Oh man, you’re so great, I love it when you’re here’ and she was chatting up everybody on the platform. I was watching her and she started standing closer and closer to me and the train comes up and then all of a sudden her hand plunged into my case. I stopped playing and pushed her hand away and said, ‘What are you doing?’ She was like, ‘Oh, I just dropped a $20 in there and I’m just getting change.’ There wasn't a $20 in there.

The train was there but nobody was noticing. There were hundreds of people around and it was like 2 p.m. on a Tuesday. I’m trying to attract attention. She was huge, like twice my size, and she’s trying to push me back. I’m just grabbing at her and then she just turns around out of nowhere and just punches me in the mouth. I’ve never been hit in the face in my life. It was like a dream until I felt the taste of blood in my mouth. I didn’t know what to do and so I just kicked her as hard as I could and then she turned around and punched me in the nose as hard as she could. But the funny thing was that the whole time she was taking her time to get into the train. She was not running down the platform or into the train. She was still obeying the law of etiquette where you let people off the train. She was waiting in a line of people to get on ... You can rob people, but you’ve got to follow the rules of the train. It’s been enough years where I can forgive her and say at least she knew that part.

I spent the rest of the day with the cops and they asked me, 'So are you going to keep doing this? Are you going to be back tomorrow or next week?' I was sitting there covered in blood and tears and sweat in early July, and I said I didn’t know. I felt very differently about what I was doing but they all said independently of each other that 'this is just an isolated incident. You can’t let this keep you from doing this. This is what you love to do and the city likes subway musicians.' I took a week off and then went back to the same spot.

There are people who come to this city and they expect something from it. They expect the city to give them something. I’ve never taken that viewpoint. I always felt like if I wasn’t giving something, I felt bad.

There were a couple of dark years after I got my master's and before I started playing the accordion and I would look at people collecting the trash or doing construction and I would envy them because they were actually putting something back into the city. I wasn’t doing that. I was just checking coats at Don Hills. I never want to feel like that, to feel like I wasn’t contributing, and for me that is playing in the subway. It’s a small thing to do. It’s not like I’m building places for the homeless but it’s my contribution.

James Maher is a fine art and studio photographer based in the East Village.

http://evgrieve.com/2014/08/out-and-about-in-east-village-part-2.html

http://evgrieve.com/www.soundcloud.com/melissa-e

http://www.jamesmaherphotography.com/