Emma Watson as Belle.
Emma Watson will be starring in Disney’s live version of Beauty and the Beast. Oh, baby. Not normally something I’d watch, but along with Ms. Watson, the cast also includes Dan Stevens playing Beast, and Ian McKellen, Ewan McGregor, Emma Thompson, Stanley Tucci, Audra McDonald, and Gugu Mbatha-Raw will be featured as the many household items we’ve come to know and love.
Via Pride.
The Economist Intelligence Unit ranked victory for Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump at 12 on an index where the current top threat is a Chinese economic “hard landing” rated 20 (AFP Photo/Jim Watson).
…Buoyed by his support from deeply religious voters during the Republican primary, the thrice-married Trump has been meeting privately in Manhattan’s Trump Tower with top members of the evangelical community for months, peppering the conversations with fundraising appeals.
At one recent meeting with Trump, evangelical leaders noted how he often flashes a signature hand gesture, with a thumb out and a finger point to the sky, as he enters and exits rallies.
“You see athletes do it all the time and it’s their chance to point to the sky, to thank God for their success,” said Pastor Mark Burns, CEO of a Christian television network based in South Carolina. “Trump does this all of the time, too. He’s giving reverence to the man upstairs.”
“Even with Mr. Trump’s billions of dollars, he too still submits himself to God,” said Burns, who has become a top Trump surrogate and a staple on the campaign trail, frequently introducing the candidate at rallies. “We should all chip in to help him out. You know, even a billionaire needs some cash flow.”
[…]
“Preliminary discussions” are happening within evangelical circles to help Trump raise money—particularly in new age evangelical circles, where many of the leaders have become best-selling authors, top-selling Christian musicians and even minor-celebrities in their own right, Burns said.
And Trump is even beginning to make inroads with more traditional evangelical donors who backed religious conservative candidates who have now dropped out of the presidential race.
Foster Friess, the billionaire who supports Christian conservative causes, told Bloomberg Politics that he predicts conservatives will eventually rally behind Trump.
I could not manage all four minutes of this douche weasel’s ranting, but I listened to enough to hear him yell about men in dresses / pedophiles being allowed into the little kid’s bathrooms. Little [cisgender] kids have their own public lavs now?
He was ultimately escorted out by police while shouting, “Jesus Christ was not friends with any homos! I’m sorry to tell you guys that!”
I’d use Ken Ham’s gotcha here: “Were you there?”
Grackle (Quiscalus quiscula).
© C. Ford. All rights reserved. I have so many bird photos, once a week just isn’t working, so it’s going to be the daily bird, at least for a while. Photo is 1500 x 996, click for full size.
Images courtesy Allure Art.
Making art and making love have a lot in common—hard work is vital, for one thing—but Latvian creatives Elina Vaivode and her partner Toms Grinbergs have united the two with a project called the Allure Art Kit. It’s everything you need to make a completely original artwork by banging on top of a canvas while covered in paint.
The Allure Art Kit comes with a cotton canvas, washable and safe paints with your choice of color, a protective plastic floor cover, two pairs of disposable slippers and a shower sponge. That covers everything from setup to wash down. All you have to do is a bit of creative cuddling, a quick rinse, and then some picture frame shopping.
Via The Creators Project. Allure Abstract Art Kits. Check it out, a fun way to spend an evening. Or morning. Or afternoon.
Also known as Möbius strip bagel. More room for cream cheese!
The real question is: is it worth it? How much more spreading room do you actually get? Mathematician Antonio R. Vargas has done the calculations, and they get quite complex, veering into calculus. On a webpage hosted by Dalhousie University, Vargas concludes that “the ratio of the surface area exposed by cutting along the two-twist Möbius strip to the area exposed by cutting the bagel straight in half is approximately: 1 + 1/6 (heights/width-height)2.”
To make a long story short, the amount of spreading surface you get depends on the size of your bagel, but it will always be more than if you had cut it in half.
Science Explorer has the full story and instructional photos.
Second Skin (2015), Esmay Wagemans. All images courtesy to the artist.
Instagram itself is quite clear about it: nudity is in no way allowed. Yet there’s still a lot of discussion going around this policy. A question that often arises, for example, is: Why are male nipples allowed while female ones aren’t?’ Last year, the #freethennipple movement unexpectedly took surface. Woman from all around the globe took to Instagram and Facebook, and shared selfies of their nude bodies. They still got censored, but the motivation was clear. Advocates of the movement accused the Western world in general (and the platform itself) of a sexist double-standard. Instagram subsequently defended their policy by stating they wanted their platform to be suited for all age groups (the app has a 12+ rating in the App Store). And children, so it seems—according to their general opinion—shouldn’t see any female nipples.
If it’s up to Esmay Wagemans, a fourth year at the Willem de Kooning Academy in Rotterdam, this will soon change. For her project Second Skin, she worked out a way to bypass Instagram’s nudity censorship. By using a self-developed special kind of latex, she actually managed to show her nipples without showing any skin.
I spoke to Wagemans about the creation of Second Skin, how people reacted on it, and why she thinks it’s important to revolt against any patronizing platform.
[…]
Why do you think it’s important to put your breasts on Instagram?
To me, Instagram is a very important platform to share my work as an artist. And I’m not going to change the essence of my work just because it would be too shocking for other people, or because it wouldn’t fit the social norms. Sure, I get that pornographic images shouldn’t be on it, but then again Instagram should focus on creating a different, less sexist and more refined nudity and censorship policy. Apart from all of this though, I do think Instagram’s strict nudity policy is sustaining the idea of a woman’s body as a sexual object.
How do you mean, “sustaining the idea of a female body as sexual object?” Don’t you think it’s a good thing children are restricted from seeing naked breasts?
I myself don’t think nudity should be such a taboo, because it feeds objectification. Look, if you’re not portraying breasts in an erotic or pornographic way, I think everyone should be able to see them, even children. By withholding those kinds of “normal” nudes from young teenagers, you’re still presenting the female body as something sexual. That’s simply not beneficial for anyone. Within that abstinence, the idea of the body starts being seen as something separate from the woman. It’s right there, where the objectification starts.
Vision Maker Media website.
Vision Maker Media (VMM) has announced financial support for six new projects for production by and about Native Americans.
With funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), Vision Maker Media’s Public Media Content Fund awards support to projects with a Native American theme and significant Native involvement. […] “The goal of the Public Media Content Fund is to increase the diversity of voices available to PBS viewers,” said Shirley K. Sneve (Rosebud Sioux), executive director of Vision Maker Media.
The final slate of documentaries funded this year represents Native voices and stories from across the United States, including Alaska, California, Illinois, Montana, Oklahoma and Washington, some documentaries will cover stories coast-to-coast. In this funding cycle, 66 percent of the filmmakers are women, 33 percent are male; 66 percent are enrolled in a federally recognized tribe.
Funding was awarded as 75 percent production, 19 percent post-production and completion and 6 percent new media.
The projects are:
ATTLA
Catharine Axley
Production | 100,000
ATTLA tells the gripping story of George Attla, an Alaska Native dogsled racer who, with just one good leg – childhood tuberculosis left him with a lame leg – and a determined mindset, became a legendary sports hero among both western and Native communities across the country.
Kendra (Working Title)
Brooke Swaney (Blackfeet/Salish)
Production | 100,000
What does blood have to do with identity? Kendra Mylnechuk, an adult Native adoptee born in 1980 at the cusp of the enactment of the Indian Child Welfare Act, is on a journey to reconnect with her birth family and discover her Lummi heritage.
The Blackfeet Flood
Ben Shors, Lailani Upham (Blackfeet/Sisseton Wahpeton/Gros Ventre)
Production | $73,484
More than a half-century after the worst disaster in Montana history, two Blackfeet families struggle to come to terms with the 1964 flood. While one family held on to their rural lifestyle, the flood scattered the other family across the U.S.
Words From A Bear: The Enigmatic Life of Author N. Scott Momaday
Jeffrey Palmer (Kiowa)
Production | 115,000
Words From A Bear examines the enigmatic life and mind of Pulitzer-Prize-winning author N. Scott Momaday. The biography delves into the psyche, ancestry and writings of one of Native America’s most celebrated authors of poetry and prose.
Keep Talking
Karen Weinberg, Kartemquin Films
Post-Production | 100,000
Kodiak Alutiiq Elders of Alaska’s Gulf Coast are victims of systematic assimilation and abuse, first by Russian occupation, then by the United States government. Now with less than 50 fluent Native speakers of Kodiak Alutiiq remaining, three young Alutiiq women battle the resulting historical trauma and discover that saving their language is truly a matter of life and death.
In the Beginning was Water and Sky
Mackenzie Gruer (Tyendinaga Mohawk), Ryan Ward (Métis)
New Media | $30,000
In the Beginning was Water and Sky is a short-form New Media project that tells two parallel stories about a Chippewa boy who runs away from Indian Boarding School in the 1950s and a Chippewa girl who runs away from her village in the 1700s.
Texas State Board of Education District 9 candidate Mary Lou Bruner (WFAA/screen grab)
Mary Lou Bruner. Again. Ugh. This woman makes most extreme Christians seem downright liberal. She is running, once again, for the state school board in Texas. She doesn’t care for her competition, Keven Ellis, who is of the opinion that religious instruction should take place at home, not school. Mary Lou probably thinks that makes him a demon in disguise.
During a Sunday face-off between Ellis and far-right opponent Mary Lou Bruner on WFAA’s Inside Texas Politics, both candidates made their case to voters for the May 24th runoff for the GOP nomination.
Ellis argued that schools needed to be properly funded, but that the district had a responsibility to see that money was spent wisely.
Bruner, who has warned that pre-K programs indoctrinate children into the “homosexual agenda,” called for slashing “special programs” and early childhood education.
[…]
“Ms. Bruner has said that she wants creationism taught in science class,” Inside Texas Politics host Bud Kennedy noted. “And that her views represent those of the district. Are you Christian enough to represent this district?”
“Yes, I am,” Ellis insisted. “I’ve taught Sunday school and Bible quiz in my church in 20 years. And I believe it’s my responsibility to teach my faith to my children. The catch of when you get religion in school is whose religion is going to be taught?”
Bruner disagreed: “When we only teach theory — it’s a theory, theories are unproven — but in the science class, if only one theory is taught then we’re teaching a religion. It is the religion of atheism.”
Via Raw Story.
Photographer Michael Massaia has created some amazing work with chewing gum. Yes, you read that one right.
Broken Heart-2016
42″x60″ Pigment Print
Transmogrify#2 – Chewed Gum Sculptures-
All of the images are created from a single piece of chewed gum. I mold all the shapes by using my hand, tongue, and teeth ( the shapes are not created digitally). The sculptures range from anatomical organs, flowers, sea creatures, clothing, and abstractions. After I mold them, I mount them onto black plexi glass (or face mount them to regular glass), and photograph the sculpture using either a Creo scanner or a large format camera.
The rest of the series can be seen here, and WOW is about all I have. I have used a good number of unusual things to create art pieces, but chewing gum never entered my mind.
Cara Barer has found old, discarded books to be a great medium.
“Nightshade” 2015 48″ X 48″ Ed./9, 36″ X 36″ Ed./9, 24″ X 24″ Ed./9
“Morpho” 2014 48″ X 48″ Ed./9, 36″ X 36″ Ed./9, 24″ X 24″ Ed./9
I transform books into art by sculpting them, dyeing them and then through the medium of photography presenting them anew as objects of beauty. I create a record of that book and its half-life.
Books, physical objects and repositories of information, are being displaced by zeros and ones in a digital universe with no physicality. Through my art, I document this and raise questions about the fragile and ephemeral nature of books and their future.
I arrive at some of my images by chance and others through experimentation. Without these two elements, my work would not flow easily from one idea to the next. A random encounter on Drew Street with a Houston Yellow Pages was the primary inspiration for me. After that chance meeting, I began to search for more books, and more ways to recreate them.
I realized I owned many books that were no longer of use to me, or for that matter, anyone else. Would I ever need a “Windows 95 Manual”? After soaking it in the bathtub for a few hours, it had a new shape and purpose. Half-Price Books became a regular haunt, and an abandoned house yielded a set of outdated reference books, complete with mold and neglect. Each book tells me how to begin according to its size, type of paper and sometimes contents.
As I begin the process, I first consider the contents of each volume. I only spent a few seconds on the “Windows 95 Manual”. The “New Century Dictionary of the English Language,” was a treasure. Its fascinating illustrations and archaic examples saved it from taking on a new form.
This transformation and photographic documentation led to thoughts on obsolescence and the relevance of libraries in this century. Half a century ago, students researched at home with the family set of encyclopedias, or took a trip to the library to locate information. Now, with computers, tablets and/or smartphones, an Internet connection and cloud storage, a student has the ability to amass knowledge and complete a research paper without ever going near a library. I have fully embraced all this technology, and would not want to be without it, but fear the loss of the beautiful record of books common over the last two centuries.
Have a look. *Thinks about the stacks of old manuals in the house*. I’m just going to have to play around a bit.
© C. Ford.
No, these aren’t portraits showing the extraordinary beauty of Grackles, this is what happens when you put butter cookies out for them. Butter cookies, a leading cause of temporary grackle insanity. All images 1500 x 996, click for full size. I rather like the disembodied talon in the last shot.
© C. Ford.
Oh, so cool.
