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21 Feb 2010 10:04

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Offbeat: Yitta Schwartz’s Hasidic family extended, and then some

  • 2,000+ living descendants of Yitta Schwartz, who died last month at 93
  • 18number of kids the Satmar Hasidic Jew had directly; wow
  • 75 her eldest daughter’s age; a new relative is just six days old source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

21 Feb 2010 09:54

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World: The Portuguese island of Madeira drowning in huge flood

  • 40+ people have died in Madeira’s flooding, and many more are missing
  • 120+ people are injured as a result of the resort island’s natural disaster source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

21 Feb 2010 01:43

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Biz: The AP’s using Twitter to link to stories on Facebook. WTF?

  • What they’re doing The AP has been linking to all of their stories on Twitter through their Facebook page, which is something Sarah Palin would do. But the world’s largest news organization?
  • Why it’s smart Because it allows people to easily comment socially on the stories Facebook posts. It centralizes an often-decentralized presence in online media.
  • Why it’s stupid Dudes, you realize that you can easily do something similar on your own site using Facebook Connect and Disqus, right? Then you get to keep all the ad money! source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

21 Feb 2010 01:08

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Politics: Point and laugh, guys: Ron Paul won the CPAC straw poll

  • 31% of CPACers think libertarian Ron Paul is the freaking MAN!
  • 22% support rapper-punching airplane passenger Mitt Romney
  • 7% think Sarah Palin is still actually kinda cool somehow source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

20 Feb 2010 17:16

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Music: Saturday Mixtape: Adam Green makes a pretty good Lou Reed

  • 1. Expect Local Natives to become like catnip like blogs like ours for the next twelve months or so. They have all the elements of every big indie act here – the multi-voice harmonies of Fleet Foxes, the scale and trauma of The Arcade Fire, Vampire Weekend’s ability to ride a groove, and the garage swagger of just about everybody else. And that’s all in one song, “Camera Talk.”
  • 2. Adam Green has a lot to atone for, what with the calling card of the Moldy Peaches (and all the good and bad that entails) on his resume. But “What Makes Him Act So Bad?,” along with the Velvet Underground sparkle of new album “Minor Love,” goes a long way.
  • 3. Speaking of Fleet Foxes, Mumford and Sons may be the first band to be directly inspired by them, if “Sigh No More” is any indication. That’s a lot of vocal harmony.
  • 4. Phantogram has more than a little trip-hop influence in their sound, as the big fat beat at the beginning of “Running From the Cops” emphasizes. The calm female “Ooh…” in the mix has the effect of making the blunt effect of the rough beat seem a lot less blunt.
  • 5. A pretty awesome compilation that came out this week, “The Minimal Wave Tapes: Vol. 1,” focuses on very minimal electronic from post-punk movement, as curated by Minimal Wave label-runner Veronica Vasicka and released on Stone’s Throw records. From the comp, Crash Course in Science’s “Flying Turns” has a lot of edge, a lot of simplicity and a dark groove.
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

20 Feb 2010 16:25

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Offbeat: A new kind of folk hero: Watch “Epic Beard Man” do his thang

  • (* note: graphic video *) It’s perhaps a great commentary on our society that a video of an old dude beating up another dude can become a phenomenon of the first order. But this clip isn’t even the first for Thomas Brusso, who was also involved in a tasering incident at an Oakland A’s game last Summer. Spike TV also has an interview with the dude. If nothing else, the beard lives up to the legend.  source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

20 Feb 2010 16:01

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Tech: Authors all scared eBooks about to ruin the book economic model

  • I’ve got news: It takes about a year to write a book, you have to travel extensively, you have to do a lot of fact-checking. What Amazon and Apple are trying to do is significantly decrease the amount of money that publishers, and specifically authors, can make.
  • The Register writer Dan Goodin • Regarding the possibility of making profits off of eBooks via Kindle or iPad. We think the point he’s trying to make is pretty weak. Why’s that? Well, it completely discounts the things that eBooks make obsolete: The high costs of printing and distribution, which are no longer an issue. We’re not geniuses, but we’re guessing that if you take those two things out of the equation, it more than makes up for the $5 less that an eBook version of your average novel costs. Not convinced. Blame publishers for damaging the model by taking more than their fair share of the pie, not e-readers. source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink
 

20 Feb 2010 15:55

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Offbeat: WILLLLMA! A lot of Texans think humans and dinosaurs coexisted

  • 41% of Texans don’t think that humans coexisted with dinosaurs
  • 30% think that humans and dinosaurs lived at the same time
  • 30% aren’t sure about that, or if “The Jetsons Meet the Flintstones” is a good movie or not source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

20 Feb 2010 15:36

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Tech, U.S.: Pennsylvania school district learns spying on students a bad idea

  • 42 number of times the school turned on the webcams to check on behavior (they did)
  • one student was nailed by the school for reportedly selling drugs in his home (he didn’t)
  • one class-action lawsuit was filed as a result of the privacy-infringing app (oh boy) source
  • The result? Students are totally up in arms about the violation in privacy, with some students noting the laptop is open in their bedrooms even when changing. Dear Lower Merion School District of Rosemont, Pa.: You guys are idiots. We don’t live in a nanny state.
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

20 Feb 2010 12:41

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Tech: From MP3 blogs to phone support, Google learns they’re not golden

  • Google isn’t to blame for the DMCA, one of the most spectacularly abused pieces of digital legislation  ever created. But it does seem to be getting more aggressive about DMCA enforcement.
  • Robert X. Cringely • Regarding Google’s year of screw-ups, most publicly with Buzz and Nexus One (Lack of phone support for a mobile phone? LOL!), but specifically in this case with the closure of a number of popular music blogs on its Blogger site, which Cringely notes has been underreported by the media. Which is why we’re doing our part by reporting it here. Many of the sites got no notification before they were straight-up taken off the Internet. “If at this point you’re drawing the conclusion that neither the IFPI nor Google know exactly what they’re doing in these matters, you’re not alone,” says I Rock Cleveland founder Bill Lipold, whose site was taken down based on a handful of broken links. source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink
 
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