Lunar

Friday marked the 43 anniversary of the first lunar landing.  Here, in commemoration, is the long lost audio:

Punk lives in Russia

Yet another reminder, punk rock is alive and well (and still dangerous) in certain parts of the world.

MOSCOW — In a sign of Russian authorities’ determination to clamp down on dissent, a court extended for six months on Friday the detention of three punk rockers who had staged a protest performance in a cathedral. 

The three young women were among a group of five mask-wearing singers known as Pussy Riot who took to the altar of Moscow’s Christ the Savior Cathedral in February and chanted what they described as a punk prayer. In it, they called on divine intervention to drive then-Prime Minister Vladimir Putin from office two weeks before his election as president. 

The women — Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, 23, Maria Alekhina, 24, and Yekaterina Samutsevich, 29 — were arrested shortly afterward. In a preliminary hearing Friday, prosecutors said they needed more time to investigate and asked for an extension until January. By then the women will have been behind bars for a total of 10 months, accused of blasphemy and offending Orthodox believers. They are being held on hooliganism charges, which can bring up to seven years in jail.

Last December, concert-goers at a punk show in Indonesia were arrested and forced to undergo "re-education."

VICE has a nice interview up with Pussy Riot, which describes itself as a "militant, punk-feminist, street band."  Here's a video of them performing on the roof of a building, facing a detention center housing political dissidents.

UPDATE: Gawker has a nice piece up detailing Pussy Riot and their legal predicament: "The Know-Nothing's Guide to Pussy Riot, the Realest Punks Around."

UPDATE 2: Russian authorities are seeking a penalty of three years against the band.

Afforded

A Redditor has posted a short, concise, and accurate account of everything that the Affordable Care Act ("Obamacare") is and does. Check it out.

Automatic Modernism

Here's a Wordle of my ready-to-defend dissertation.

I actually find the size of "political" a little disturbing. What about "automatic" and "modernism"?

Gold

New Santigold album will be out in about a month. I've been looking forward to this one for awhile. Enjoy.

Muppet Lab

I humbly submit that the next Muppets film center on Bunsen and Beaker.  Any traditional SF theme would work.



This deleted scene comes via the lovely Kendra, reposted from io9.

World's Tiniest Drum Solo

Via BB.

Bitter Laughter

I found this by total accident: a fairly long wikipedia page of Russian political jokes.

A few examples:

A knock knock joke about KGB. The "knocker" knocks on the "knockee"'s door (the joke receiver). The door answerer asks the questions "who is it". The knocker replies stating that he is the KGB, (knocker only says "KGB"). The answerer replies by saying "KGB who" as with all knock knock jokes. The knocker slaps the answerer before allowing the answerer to finish saying the previous line of "KGB who". Then the knocker yells "WE WILL ASK THE QUESTIONS!"

Or

A frightened man came to the KGB and said, "My talking parrot disappeared."
KGB: "This is not our case. Go to the criminal police."
Man: "Excuse me. Of course I know that I have to go to them. I am just here to tell you officially that I disagree with that parrot."

I think there's a fairly good chance Zizek himself wrote some of this.

It is a communist chocolate hellhole and I'm here to stop it ever happening.

A time traveler from the future has been arrested at the Large Hadron Collider.  He was arrested after security guard caught him going through the trash looking for fuel for his 'time machine power unit', a device, CNET reports, "that resembled a kitchen blender."  Tell that to Mr. Fusion.

Corporations are not people.

If they were, they'd make better neighbors.

Stats

A little Wednesday afternoon statistics, to cheer us up.

What are the odds that you, as an individual, exist? Pretty good, you'd guess, since you're sitting right here reading this. But, in an abstract sense, the chances that you exist are really rather slim.

Click here to see the whole thing--and read all the way until the end. Via BoingBoing.

Now go be a statistical miracle.

The long life of the Vortex

Though a footnote in the wider project of England's only avant-garde, the vortograph was intended to be the photographic equivalent of Vorticism's flat canvasses and literary bombs.  So it was something of a surprise--a welcome surprise--to see Gizmodo hosting a competition to get folks to make contemporary vortographs.  The results are actually pretty great.