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23 May 2009 21:16

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World: India’s elections are huge ordeals in need of huge pictures

Fortunately for us, The Boston Globe had the same idea and gathered huge photos for us. Hooray! source

23 May 2009 20:55

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Offbeat: An ironic two-sided video analysis of the evolution debate

23 May 2009 20:33

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Culture: Archie is finally ready to choose his lady. Great. Now we don’t care.

  • Betty or Veronica? Who gives a crap? After 68 years of keeping comic book fans vaguely interested in their boring misadventures, Archie Comics has finally decided that, in August, its main character will propose to either Betty (the blond one) and Veronica (the black-haired one). Personally, we think Archie should actually make us interested in his stupid comics again by marrying Jughead. It’d be so modern and unexpected! source

23 May 2009 20:18

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Culture: Sans Ah-nold, “Terminator Salvation” opens pretty well

  • $13.4 million on Friday for the latest cyborg flick source

23 May 2009 20:10

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Politics: We don’t work with our hands, so we watch it on TV instead

  • The weird fascination of these shows must lie partly in the fact that such confrontations with material reality have become exotically unfamiliar. Many of us do work that feels more surreal than real.
  • Matthew B. Crawford • In a lengthy essay on the evolution of American society from blue-collar to white-collar, adapted from his book “Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work.” As a result, we’ll watch TV shows such as “Dirty Jobs” with reverence because it’s become more adventurous since the average person doesn’t do that kind of work anymore. Part of this Crawford blames on the decline of manual labor education such as shop class and the increase in office jobs. • source

23 May 2009 19:33

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Politics: Waterboarding for charity: Keith Olbermann gives Mancow props

  • $10,000 Amount Olbermann gave the charity Veterans of Valor after radio host Mancow was waterboarded for 10 seconds – it’s like a dunk tank for terrorism source

23 May 2009 19:24

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Tech: Like the new Safari? Well, you won’t like what it leaves behind.

  • A huge collection of crud gets dumped into an obscure folder. Look, we love the new Safari, Apple, but we’re never going to clear out pages and pages of information inside a folder called something like “/private/var/folders/et/etuAKaR1GTeV9DVeRGfst++++TI/-Caches-/com.apple.Safari/Webpage Previews/”. And you save screenshots of every web site we go to, in case they make our Top Sites in the future. So, Apple, you may want to fix that. Jerks. source
 

23 May 2009 19:10

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Biz, U.S.: GM keeps needing money and the U.S. Treasury keeps giving it

  • $4 billion more in another bandage prior to bankruptcy source

23 May 2009 19:04

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Politics, U.S.: The Republicans finally have a wedge issue: Guantanamo Bay

  • Where are we going to send them? That decision I would have made before I’d announced the closure.
  • Sen. John McCain • Who may have lost the election but was 100% correct on the Guantanamo Bay closure when he said this during a Fox news interview back in January, days before the inauguration. Four months later, Barack Obama’s facing dissent on Guantanamo Bay from his own party. Now, if only the Republicans can translate winning on this one issue to all of their other problems, they may have a chance of being relevant again. • source

23 May 2009 18:38

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Music: ShortFormBlog Saturday Mixtape: Much love for indie rock

  • 1. St. Vincent could easily get placed into the same bargain bin as indie femme fatales like Feist or Bat for Lashes, but Annie Clark is way more subversive than that, plus the girl can rock out as much as the guys – see “Actor Out of Work.”

    2. We’re on an female indie superstar kick this week, so it’s only fitting that Neko Case, she of New Pornographers and awesome solo career, get a mention for “Your Control,” a near-perfect meshing of vocals with Crooked Fingers’ Eric Bachmann. *

    3. This cover gives us goosebumps. A b-side off of Iron & Wine’s killer new rarity collection “Around the Well,” Sam Beam’s cover of “Waitin’ for a Superman” somehow matches and exceeds the hushed desperation of the Flaming Lips’ original.

    4. Ben Gibbard and Feist may as well be the king and queen of indie rock to mainstream audiences, and this cover of Vashti Bunyan’s “Train Song” from the “Dark Was the Night” compilation doesn’t become either of theirs. They share in the beauty. *

    5. The Appleseed Cast, a long-running post-rock band, likes to build slowly then go huge. It takes nearly six minutes for vocals to show up on the epic “As the Little Things Go,” and we wouldn’t have it any other way. *

    * – Thanks much to friend of the site Davey Jones for these picks.

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