Los Ramo-nays and The Clash

Punks in Havana.  Gawker reports.

Face-making

The Atlantic has a nice list up of 19th century British slang for "sex."  Here are the best ones:

• Amorous congress: 
To say two people were engaged in the amorous congress was by far the most polite option on the list, oftentimes serving as the definition for other, less discreet synonyms.

• Basket-making: 
"Those two recently opened a basket-making shop." From a method of making children's stockings, in which knitting the heel is called basket-making .

• Bread and butter: 
One on top of the other. "Rumor has it he found her bread and butter fashion with the neighbor."

• Face-making: 

Aside from the obvious, this also comes from "making children," because babies have faces.

• Blanket hornpipe: 

• Green gown: 
Giving a girl a green gown can only happen in the grass.

• Lobster kettle: 
A woman who sleeps with soldiers coming in at port is said to "make a lobster kettle" of herself.

Breaking Badder

Gag real from Season Four.



Happy Wednesday.

Cubed

Turns out, I'm not the only one.

The NYT documents the triumphant return of the Rubix Cube.  Here's an image of my cube, bought last summer in the depths of dissertation writing.  I can reliably solve it in about two minutes.

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.