PiratesArrrrrrCool

"The day after Columbine, I was interviewed for the Tom Brokaw news program. The reporter had been..."

Fri, 21 Dec 2012 00:37:53 +1300

“The day after Columbine, I was interviewed for the Tom Brokaw news program. The reporter had been assigned a theory and was seeking sound bites to support it. “Wouldn’t you say,” she asked, “that killings like this are influenced by violent movies?” No, I said, I wouldn’t say that. “But what about Basketball Diaries?” she asked. “Doesn’t that have a scene of a boy walking into a school with a machine gun?” The obscure 1995 Leonardo Di Caprio movie did indeed have a brief fantasy scene of that nature, I said, but the movie failed at the box office (it grossed only $2.5 million), and it’s unlikely the Columbine killers saw it. The reporter looked disappointed, so I offered her my theory. “Events like this,” I said, “if they are influenced by anything, are influenced by news programs like your own. When an unbalanced kid walks into a school and starts shooting, it becomes a major media event. Cable news drops ordinary programming and goes around the clock with it. The story is assigned a logo and a theme song; these two kids were packaged as the Trench Coat Mafia. The message is clear to other disturbed kids around the country: If I shoot up my school, I can be famous. The TV will talk about nothing else but me. Experts will try to figure out what I was thinking. The kids and teachers at school will see they shouldn’t have messed with me. I’ll go out in a blaze of glory.”

In short, I said, events like Columbine are influenced far less by violent movies than by CNN, the NBC Nightly News and all the other news media, who glorify the killers in the guise of “explaining” them. I commended the policy at the Sun-Times, where our editor said the paper would no longer feature school killings on Page 1. The reporter thanked me and turned off the camera. Of course the interview was never used. They found plenty of talking heads to condemn violent movies, and everybody was happy.”

- Roger Ebert (via ibad)

That man should take a bow.

"When we lose certain people, or when we are dispossessed from a place, or a community, we may simply..."

Fri, 21 Dec 2012 00:35:24 +1300

“When we lose certain people, or when we are dispossessed from a place, or a community, we may simply feel that we are undergoing something temporary, that mourning will be over and some restoration of prior order will be achieved. But maybe when we undergo what we do, something about who we are is revealed, something that delineates the ties we have to others, that shows us that these ties constitute what we are, ties or bonds that compose us. It is not as if an ‘I’ exists independently over here and then simply loses a ‘you’ over there, especially if the attachment to ‘you’ is what composes who ‘I’ am. If I lose you, under these conditions, then I not only mourn the loss, but I become something inscrutable to myself. Who ‘am’ I, without you? When we lose some of these ties by which we are constituted, we do not know who we are or what to do. On one level, I think I have lost ‘you’ only to discover that ‘I’ have gone missing as well. At another level, perhaps what I have lost ‘in’ you, that for which I have no ready vocabulary, is a relationality that is composed neither exclusively of myself nor you, but is to be conceived as the tie by which those terms are differentiated and related.”

- Judith Butler (via yum & yuk)

Soooo very very true!

Fri, 21 Dec 2012 00:26:54 +1300

Soooo very very true!

If the world does indeed end on Dec 21st...

Fri, 21 Dec 2012 00:25:09 +1300

mitigatedwrath:

Ladies and gentlemen, know it has been a privilege blogging with you….

ahahahahahaha yes! yes this!

expose-the-light: Lincoln Harrison’s Startrails

Fri, 21 Dec 2012 00:20:34 +1300

expose-the-light:

Lincoln Harrison’s Startrails

huatunan: 墨破苍鹰。

Fri, 21 Dec 2012 00:17:53 +1300

huatunan:

墨破苍鹰。

"My alone feels so good, I’ll only have you if you’re sweeter than my solitude."

Sun, 18 Nov 2012 22:18:01 +1300

“My alone feels so good, I’ll only have you if you’re sweeter than my solitude.”

- Warshan Shire (via ikenbot)

Word!

Fri, 12 Oct 2012 13:21:48 +1300

Word!

fantasymuffler: Australia! Lmao!!

Fri, 12 Oct 2012 13:13:34 +1300

fantasymuffler:

Australia!

Lmao!!

gaksdesigns: ‘Cosmic Love’ self portrait series by Photographer...

Thu, 11 Oct 2012 14:25:31 +1300

gaksdesigns:

‘Cosmic Love’ self portrait series by Photographer Phillip Schumacher.

Photo

Tue, 09 Oct 2012 17:22:18 +1300

rhamphotheca: Galaxy formation: The new Milky Way A fresh look...

Mon, 08 Oct 2012 21:24:06 +1300

rhamphotheca:

Galaxy formation: The new Milky Way

A fresh look at our Galaxy points to a chaotic past and a violent end.

by Ann Finkbeiner

Arcing across the night sky is a pale band of light the Romans called the via lactea — the Milky Way. Astronomers have known since the 1920s that this band is an edge-on view of the Galaxy in which we live: a vast pinwheel teeming with nebulae, gas clouds and billions upon billions of stars. For most of the nine decades since, astronomers also thought that our Galaxy and others like it were rather quiet places: ponderous, slowly rotating structures that formed many eons ago and had settled into uneventful middle age.

But then they began to see the Milky Way with fresh eyes (see ‘Galactic portrait’). Starting in the 1970s and 1980s, new generations of ground- and space-based telescopes began mapping the Milky Way at wavelengths ranging from microwaves to X-rays, revealing an unimagined richness. By the 2000s, syste-matic observing programmes were tracing galactic structures that sprawl across most of the heavens, and are so big that no one had noticed them before. By the present decade, teams of astronomers were racing to build ever-more powerful computer simulations to model the origins of galaxies on every scale from cosmos to star clusters. And by next year, the Atacama Large Millimeter/Submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile will be mapping the Galaxy at unprecedented levels of detail.

Astronomers are still struggling to assimilate all this new information. Disagreements, uncertainties and unanswered questions abound. But no one today would argue that our cosmic home town is a quiet backwater. The emerging picture of the Milky Way reveals that the Galaxy was born in chaos and shaped by violence, that it lives in a state of turbulent complexity, and that its future holds certain catastrophe…

(read more: Nature | News)

OoooOOoooOOOoo science!

mothernaturenetwork: 8 of the world’s most dangerous daredevil...

Fri, 05 Oct 2012 17:08:43 +1300

mothernaturenetwork:

8 of the world’s most dangerous daredevil stunts
What feels like the stuff of nightmares to the rest of us is a source of thrills for history’s most famous daredevils.

"Cranquis: Sorry I’ve been sending you so many knee xrays today. Xray Tech: No problem. But..."

Fri, 05 Oct 2012 17:05:43 +1300

“

Cranquis: Sorry I’ve been sending you so many knee xrays today.

Xray Tech: No problem. But you’ll be sending me another one before the shift is over.

Cranquis: Oh really? How do you know?

Xray Tech: I can feel it in my BONES.

”

- Dr. Cranquis’ Mumbled Gripes: Behind the Medic: This pun is x-rayted

did-you-kno: Source Dunno how true this is, but interesting if...

Fri, 05 Oct 2012 17:04:06 +1300

did-you-kno:

Source

Dunno how true this is, but interesting if it is. There’s a lot of very fishy things about 9/11

woodendreams: (by osh80) Whenever I see lighthouses, I think...

Fri, 05 Oct 2012 17:02:53 +1300

woodendreams:

(by osh80)

Whenever I see lighthouses, I think about how almost every time I’ve been to one there’s been gale force winds and standing has been difficult. Or in the case of East cape and the 700 steps - nigh impossible!

did-you-kno: Source O george!!!!!!!!

Fri, 05 Oct 2012 16:59:12 +1300

did-you-kno:

Source

O george!!!!!!!!

Prettiful!

Fri, 05 Oct 2012 16:57:56 +1300

jamesnord:

I didn’t know when Karlie was coming in for her fitting and was in the PR office talking to Erika when someone grabbed us saying they were doing the fittings for last looks. I ran out into the studio and caught a wisp of gown as it turned the corner to face Oscar. For the next 10 minutes everyone just kind of stared, mouths agape as Karlie and Marikka Juhler tried on the last looks for the SS2013 show.

jamesnord: The George Washington Bridge i am on instagram...

Fri, 05 Oct 2012 05:33:27 +1300

jamesnord:

The George Washington Bridge

i am on instagram @jamesnord

expose-the-light: Space Pictures

Fri, 05 Oct 2012 05:32:03 +1300

Dumbbell Nebula

Roiling Quasar

Mars Crater

Starry Arch

Bird's Eye

expose-the-light:

Space Pictures