Clipsapoppin’

FUNNY, he doesn’t look Canadian. Justin Trudeau Wore ‘Brownface’ at ‘Arabian Nights’ Party | Heavy.com In the photo published by Time, Trudeau, then 29, is wearing a turban, a robe and he has his face, neck, and arms covered in what appears to be body paint or a similar cosmetic substance. Time reported that the image is from the West Point Grey Academy 2000-2001 yearbook.

Summertime: George Gershwin’s Life in Music by Richard Crawford    All the essential elements of the Gershwin legend are present: his precocious beginnings in Lower East Side poverty; his rise as a gifted all-purpose mechanic on Tin Pan Alley in the 1910s; his signature success (burnished by his eventual partnership with lyricist brother Ira) among a burgeoning tide of Broadway songwriters in the 1920s; his breezy assault on the heavily guarded fortress of classical music (and its fusty gatekeepers) with “Rhapsody in Blue”; his immense popularity on radio and the concert stage; his game-changing political satires for the musical theater in the 1930s; his jolly indifference to the formulaic conventions of the Hollywood musical; his famous friendships (he was as at home showing Fred Astaire a dance step as he was playing tennis with Igor Stravinsky); his bold venture on the operatic stage with “Porgy and Bess” (a multicultural challenge of enormous proportions); and inevitably, lamentably, his unfathomable death at the age of 38 in the wake of an operation to remove a brain tumor.

The War on Vaping  |   The respiratory illnesses connected to vaping are due to black-market THC vape inserts, and have nothing to do with the legit vaping capsules, so let’s ban all the legal stuff and create a new black market! The prohibition argument says teens are using the flavored vapes, so adults can’t have them — an argument you could apply to every flavored vodka on the market, if you wished.

ENSO: Life is too short to finish everything you start. You’re probably not going to “finish” life itself. I like the ensō to symbolize this ethos. You draw a circle with a single brush stroke, with no corrections or do-overs, and it doesn’t really matter if you complete the circle. You can make another ensō if you like, or just go have a beer instead. Very wabi-sabi. An effort that embraces its own irreversibility, mortality and temporality.  Mediocratopia: 8

Once upon a time in North America  77 million years ago ” flew the “Frozen dragon of the north wind” An artist’s conception of Cryodrakon boreas (Greek for the moniker in the headline), a new species of pterosaur just identified in what is now called Alberta, Canada. It could reach up to 13 feet tall with a wingspan of 30 feet, making it one of the largest flying animals ever. Since it was unable to chew, its diet consisted of whole lizards, mammals, and baby dinosaurs.

A Visual Compendium of Glowing Creatures  I’ve always been into biology and design, so I’m taking a year off after college to see if I can combine the two with at least marginal success.

The After-Monkey Blues – The walls inside are a riot of color: old posters and t-shirts and glittery decorative bunting and road signs and neon lights, nearly every surface covered, though in places black plastic garbage bags are visible, tacked to the wall beneath it all. Mismatched tables are topped with mismatched vinyl table clothes, and surrounded by mismatched plastic chairs. Atop the visual assault came an auditory blow—the music was always booming and loud—and then a physical sensation, too: deep bass rocking the plywood floors, the sheer density of dancers cranking the heat too high. It was all sweat and bodies, making the beer taste cool and clean, making the chirping summer moonlight outside feel like a release, when you stepped out there for a break, despite the dense, Mississippi summer heat.

This would be an honest sales pitch for climate change.  But no one would buy that…so we have to pretend the planet is in crisis.

I find it awful that Trump has withdrawn us from the climate change talks, and I will support candidates who pledge to reinsert us into those talks, because I know this is about a shift of power and money. I like the idea of pushing nations into a socialist economic model, I like the burdens and obligations that are being heaped upon developed nations and I like the perks and the exemptions and the benefits that are being directed to developing nations. I think developed nations are bad and developing nations are good. That’s because I think of developed nations as western evil rich white people and I think of developing nations as third-world good poor non-white people.

Meet the Man at the Controls of the World’s Largest Steam Locomotive – Their mechanical engineers teamed up with the American Locomotive Company to design a brand new type of steam locomotive: a 4-8-8-4, with four wheels in the front, two sets of eight driving wheels in the middle (the large ones connected to the pistons that make the locomotive move), and four trailing wheels, all under a single boiler. They weighed more than a million pounds and were 132 feet, 9 inches long.

Hemingway chose places like Key West to be away from the unwholesome babble of politics and fame. But also, to be close to the essentials of life – friends, family, nature. The house is licensed as a zoo to protect the many polydactyl cats, some of which we pet in the garden shade. I think of my own cats, Maple and Django, and how they are my children, and how Hemingway felt about his, and know that whatever his faults, in this he was a good man, a true man, an admirable human being. All the Nobel Prizes in the world couldn’t give him the pleasure, and the sorrow, of his cat Boise and a good day’s work. Eric D. Lehman on Key West – Berfrois

It should be possible to build a pagoda of crispbread, to think of nothing, to hear no thunder, no rain, no splashing from the gutter, no gurgling around the house. Perhaps no pagoda will emerge, but the night will pass. — Max Frisch, Man in the Holocene

Best Juicy Lucy Cheeseburger Recipe –  Most food holidays may be faintly ridiculous, but we’ll celebrate any one of them if it means an excuse to eat something delicious (like we need one of those…). September 18 is National Cheeseburger Day, and that means it’s the perfect time to make the ultimate cheeseburger: the Juicy Lucy. Invented somewhere in Minnesota (exact origins continue to be debated), the Juicy Lucy—or Jucy Lucy—is a cheeseburger that deceives you when you first behold it. Looking for all the world like a plain beef patty with nary a crumble of blue cheese or shred of cheddar in sight, it actually contains a gooey molten core of cheese stuffed right into the burger that oozes into (and out of ) every bite.

Self-Checkout Machines Now Programmed To Make Awkward Small Talk About Your Purchases