The setting for this cleavage shot by New York artist Bethany Jean Fancher is a tad unusual, but something else about the photo, from a newly published book of similar images, seems slightly off. To find out why, follow this link, but be prepared to confront and perhaps reconsider your own notions of sexuality and female objectification. Hat tip: Daily Dish....
At the D8 conference, via the New York Times, Apple CEO Steve Jobs muses about the future of the personal computer: Mr. Jobs also predicted that the ongoing shift in technology away from the PC and toward mobile devices will continue. But rather than disappear, the PC will become a niche product, he said. Mr. Jobs compared the role of the PC, the workhorse of computing for the past three decades, to the truck, when America was primarily an agrarian nation. “All cars were trucks because that’s what you needed on the farm,” he said. Now trucks are one in 25...
No sensible person would go see Sex in the City -2 after reading (or even hearing about) the appalling reviews. But one good thing has come out of it: this delicious review, by Lindy West in Seattle alternative paper, The Stranger. The lead: We've been thinking it for two long years. All of us. Gnawing our cheeks at night, clutching at sweaty sheets, our faces hollow and gray, our once-bright eyes dimmed by the pain of too many questions. Sometimes we cry out, en masse, to a faceless god and a cold, indifferent universe that holds its secrets close. What...
The velvet-voiced Max MacDonald leads the cast of the Cape Breton Summertime Revue in a chorus of "Everybody's Going to the Bungalow" Tuesday night at Glace Bay's Savoy Theatre. The revival of the anthemic show, which ran from 1986 to 1998 and launched the careers of many of Cape Breton's best known performers, is playing five nights to packed — and rapturous — houses. Like its namesake, the revival combines poignant lyrics and melodies, like those of Leon Dubinsky's heart-wrenching, "Remember the Miner," Remember the miner; have a thought for the one Who's working the back shift while this song's being sung. His blood...
Some Nova Scotia submissions to the website OneMillionGiraffes.com, where Stavanger, Norway, resident Ola Helland is using crowdsourcing to try and win a bet that he can assemble one million images of giraffes in a year. He is currently at 800,000. Left to right, top to bottom, first two images by Taylor, age 15, Halifax; then Peter Merideth, 24, Antigonish; Taylor again; Alina, 17, Halifax; next two by Dalbtron3000, 29, Antigonish; Joshua, 31, Sydney; and the last two images...
Anand Girisharadas of the New York Times addresses a weighty issue that threatens to become a regular topic on Contrarian: use of conjunction "so" to begin a sentence. He notes a National Public Radio interview in which fully one quarter of the sentences began with "so." While Girisharadas dredges up a 14th century poem in which Chaucer begins a sentence with "so," he cites scholars who trace the recent boom in introductory so's to Silicon Valley, or perhaps to Microsoft employees. In the software world, it was a tic that made sense. In immigrant-filled technology firms, it democratized talk by replacing a world of...
Salon's Glenn Greenwald notes the lead paragraph in a New York Times story Saturday: WASHINGTON — The 48 Guantánamo Bay detainees whom the Obama administration has decided to keep holding without trial include several for whom there is no evidence of involvement in any specific terrorist plot, according to a report disclosed Friday. The report itself concludes that "for many detainees at Guantanamo, prosecution is not feasible in either federal court or a military commission." Greenwald comments: They can't even be prosecuted in the due-process-abridging military commissions we invented out of whole cloth for those who can't be convicted in a real court. In...
The stupidest thing the late, lamented Halifax Daily News ever did was to fire weekly columnist Jane Kansas over sloppy attribution of an Internet joke. Busybodies elevated the offense to plagiarism, requiring capital expiation — the irony of firing Nova Scotia's most original writer for unoriginality lost on all concerned. Currently on Sabbatical from Halifax, Kansas is travelling on foot from Helena, Montana, to Medicine Hat, Alberta (a 543 kilometer side-trek to visit a friend), thence from Western North Dakota to Toronto (which Google maps calculates at 2082.5 km.). Kansas likes a challenge. Along the way, she files occasional dispatches to...
In 1230, French Cardinal Hugues de Saint-Cher (and 500 of his colleagues) completed the first search engine. The Washington Post's Brian Palmer has a neat piece on the evolution of search tools since. Money quote: Brin and Page's billion-dollar realization was that users would rather see a reputable page that matched their query reasonably well than an obscure page that matched perfectly. These innovations remain the backbone of today's search engines, from Google and Yahoo to Bing and others. But the Web is changing at a staggering pace. The 1994 index for Lycos, one of the Web's first search engines, had only...
Men's Health offers graphic equivalencies for the 20 sugariest drinks in America. A 20-oz Starbuck's Peppermint White Chocolate Mocha with Whipped Cream has as much sugar as as 8½ scoops Edy’s Slow Churned Rich and Creamy Coffee Ice Cream. A 20 oz bottle of SoBe Green Tea has as much sugar as four slices of Sara Lee Cherry Pie. Tim Horton's medium black coffee, no sugar: [Update] But Jocelyne Marchand of Grand Pré points out: A teaspoon of sugar has 16 calories – the issue is not a teaspoon of sugar in a cup of coffee. How many coffee drinkers limit themselves to a level teaspoon, no...