Pop Culture

Ingenious. From the website: ••••••••••••••••••••• Cubby is the ultimate anywhere hook with an inner surface that lets you store items like sunglasses, cellphones, wallets, spare change, gloves, etc. The outer surface allows purses and scarves to be hung and offers a wider, more collar-friendly support for coats. Attach them linearly or randomly. Cubbyies are great for entry-ways, mudrooms, pool rooms, garages, and kids' rooms. A single Cubby would look and work great on the wall in an office or dorm room, while a group of them is perfect for the whole family. Parents and kids each have their own storage space, and Cubby can even be hung at different heights to accommodate the little ones. Details: • 100% recycled polypropylene plastic • 6.5" x 6.5" x 6.5" ••••••••••••••••••••• Set of two: $39.

Children of the 80's, take a stroll down memory lane with this YouTube clip by thepeterson and see if you remember 1986.Hit play or go to Link [YouTube] - via Neatorama's Facebook page (where you'll find tons more neat stuff)

http://vimeo.com/65576562 Here's a beautifully made video accompaniment to "This is Water," an excerpt from a David Foster Wallace commencement address to Kenyon College in 2005, in which Wallace exhorts his listeners to empathize with the people around them, using examples and languages so beautifully chosen that they just about break your heart. But most days, if you're aware enough to give yourself a choice, you can choose to look differently at this fat, dead-eyed, over-made-up lady who just screamed at her kid in the checkout line. Maybe she's not usually like this. Maybe she's been up three straight nights holding the hand of a husband who is dying of bone cancer. Or maybe this very lady is the low-wage clerk at the motor vehicle department, who just yesterday helped your spouse resolve a horrific, infuriating, red-tape problem through some small act of bureaucratic kindness. Of course, none of this is likely, but it's also not impossible. It just depends what you what to consider. If you're automatically sure that you know what reality is, and you are operating on your default setting, then you, like me, probably won't consider possibilities that aren't annoying and miserable. But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down. Not that that mystical stuff is necessarily true. The only thing that's capital-T True is that you get to decide how you're gonna try to see it. Transcription of the 2005 Kenyon Commencement Address - May 21, 2005 (via Lifehacker)

The RIAA has submitted its latest Form 990 tax filing to the IRS, which details the organization's precipitous shelving off in budget and employees (though the execs gave themselves fat raises): The drop in income can be solely attributed to lower membership dues from the major music labels. Over the past two years label contributions have dropped to $23.6 million, and over a three-year period the labels cut back a total of $30 million, which is more than the RIAA’s total income today. The cutbacks are not immediately apparent from the salaries paid to the top executives. RIAA Chairman and CEO Cary Sherman, for example, earned $1.46 million compared to $1.37 million the year before. Senior Executive Vice President Mitch Glazier also saw a modest rise in income from $618,946 to $642,591. ...The reduction in legal costs is even more significant, going from to $6.4 million to $1.2 million in two years. In part, this reduction was accomplished by no longer targeting individual file-sharers in copyright infringement lawsuits, which is a losing exercise for the group. Looking through other income we see that the RIAA received $196,378 in “anti-piracy restitution,” coming from the damages awarded in lawsuits against Limewire and such. RIAA Makes Drastic Employee Cuts as Revenue Plummets [Ernesto/TorrentFreak]

Detroit is finally getting a statue of its legendary hero, RoboCop. But according to Wolf Gnards, there are other great pop culture heroes worthy of their own statues. For example, San Dimas, California should erect a statue in honor of Bill and Ted of Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure. Well, they will establish a great new civilization.You can read his other suggestions at the link.Link

The Atlantic's Hugo Schwyzer has a theory: that masturbation, as the most common sex act, is the heart of modernity's war between Christianity and secularismMany progressives were bewildered by Antonin Scalia's blistering 2003 dissent in Lawrence v Texas, in which he warned that state laws against evils such as "adult incest, prostitution, masturbation, adultery, fornication, and bestiality" might be invalidated as a result of the decision. Why, liberals wondered, was masturbation included on that list? The answer is simple: masturbation remains not only a grave sin in the eyes of the Catholic Church to which Scalia belongs, but its acceptance as benign and healthy is perhaps the foundational error of modern sexual culture.

An advertising agency is suing the creators of Cartoon Network's The Annoying Orange, accusing them of ripping off a character they created for a 2005 public information ad. [Mercury News]

Drusilla's Park is a zoo in East Sussex, England. On April 26th, there was a breakout when two raccoons escaped into the surrounding neighborhood. Turpin was found in another area of the park a week later and returned to her enclosure. But her sister Bandit remained at large until she suddenly was seen back in her enclosure when a zookeeper made an evening nose count. She has returned on her own!Claire Peters, of Drusillas Park, said: “We were incredibly surprised to see Bandit return. Obviously we longed for her safe return but no one expected her to turn up. It is thought the sisters escaped after being spooked by a noise or unexpected movement, leading them to flee up the perimeter fence and through the electric deterrent. Thankfully neither appears to be injured.”Bandit's identity was confirmed by a scan of her embedded microchip. She apparently found that the grass was not greener on the other side of the fence. Link -via Arbroath(Image credit: Drusilla's Park)

Canadian artist Howie Tsui redesigned a pinball machine to turn it into a crude simulation of a musket-ball rattling around a soldier's guts for a War of 1812-themed exhibition currently running at the Agnes Etherington Arts Centre at Queens University in Kingston. It's meant to demonstrate the way that repetition and concentration can inure you to the horrors of war: The first part of his exhibition is a re-themed pinball machine, which now, having been Tsui-ed, is called Musketball! Tsui repainted the front glass panel and it now shows a British soldier reeling back as his guts explode from a musket shot (no rolling around inside for this one). The playing surface is painted with organs, tissue and bone, with the words “mangled viscera” at midfield. It would all be tame in a modern shooter video game, but it’s shockingly graphic on a vintage board. I step up to the game and fire my first ball, which gets back in the gutter faster than I thought possible. I fire the second ball — which I note are gold, not silver, to which Tsui says, “I kind of blinged it up a little bit.” This ball stays in play just long enough to hit a few bumpers and set off sound effects of rifle shots and artillery blasts. I fire my remaining three balls, and my final score is slightly less than one-tenth of Tsui’s high score. “It’s your first time playing. I had to do a lot of testing,” Tsui says, showing he’s also talented in the art of diplomacy. “After a while,” he says, “you sort of get hooked on the game, and the whole idea for me is that it distances the player from the idea of violence.” Pinball, bones and animal skins: Howie Tsui’s wonderful horrors of the War of 1812 [Peter Simpson/Ottawa Citizen] (via Kadrey)

A little girl dressed as famed comic book artist Stan Lee at the Motor City Comic Con has captured the hearts of of the people of the internet. Here's a photo of her (right) with the great man himself (left).Link -via Fashionably Geek(Photo: Vincent James Cracchiolo)