GoodShit

This is the story of a French postman who spent thirty years of his life building his dream home– a palace made of pebbles and stones he found along his postal route….

MORE.

VERY HANDY

HERE.

this isn’t happiness™ Peteski.

Won’t they help?

Why bystanders are reluctant to report a violent crime or aid a victim, and how they can be taught to step up and help

READ.

READ.

READ.

German photographer Michel Lamoller created these fascinating collages that seem to show people melting into the landscape behind them….Michel achieved the effect by layering multiple photos of the same location at different times. Check out the entire series below!… via.

French partisan “Nicole” captured 25 Nazis in the Chartres area, in addition to “liquidating” others, August, 1944. (i.imgur.com)

READ.

I’m starting to wonder if we’ve entered some kind of golden age of books about education. First came Paul Tough’s book, “How Children Succeed,” about the importance of developing noncognitive skills in students. It was published in September 2012. Then came “The Smartest Kids in the World,” by Amanda Ripley, which tackled the question of what other countries were getting right in the classroom that America was getting wrong. Her book came out just about a year ago.

Continue reading →

MOREn.

Lou Reed, Mick Jagger and David Bowie hanging out together at Café Royale, 1973—Here are some interesting black and white photos of Lou Reed, Mick Jagger and David Bowie at the Cafe Royale after Ziggy Stardust’s last “live” performance at Hammersmith Odeon in London in 1973, taken by Mick Rock. All kinds of characters showed up, including Ringo Starr, Jeff Beck, Bianca Jagger and Lulu…, but David spent much of his time chatting and laughing with Lou Reed and Mick Jagger…. “I’ve just remembered that I never told you about the party I had at the Café Royal after my last concert, so I’ll make this week’s letter about that… Oh, what a night it turned out to be! Mick Jagger, Lou Reed, Jeff Beck, Lulu, Spike Milligan, Dana Gillespie, Ryan O’Neal, Elliott Gould, Ringo Starr and Barbra Streisand… all there at my last concert party at the luxurious Café Royal – everyone looking so lovely in their sparkling evening clothes and colourful make-up… dancing, sipping champagne and tasting delicious salmon and big fresh strawberries and cream. The disc jockey played lots of really good soul and rock ‘n’ roll records, and the dance floor was absolutely packed all night.” – David Bowie recalled
—The gathering was also a great opportunity for Bowie to celebrate his fame and new friendships with fellow musical heavyweights such as Mick Jagger. But according to biographer Jerry Hopkins (1985) Bowie had reason to be anxious about Mick Jagger’s attendance. Reportedly Jagger had threatened Bowie because he believed that Bowie had put the “make” on his wife Bianca earlier that week. Hopkins even reports that Bowie had wanted to cancel the show because of Jagger’s threats. However, all was made up at the party and Bowie danced with Jagger and briefly kissed both Jagger and Lou Reed when asked to by Mick Rock who was photographing the event.

MORE.

Are we asking the right questions about smart drugs? Marek Kohn looks at what they can do for us – and what they can’t.

READ.

MORE.

ludwig bemelmans

VIDEO HERE

50 soldier’s of Syria’s 417 Division were beheaded and their heads put on poles.

Jihadists from the Islamic State group have killed at least 50 Syrian soldiers in an ambush, summarily executing most of them after their capture, a monitoring group says.
—The assault in Raqa province, the jihadists’ Euphrates valley stronghold, came amid their fiercest assault yet on Damascus-held territory.

The deaths added to 74 already killed in the offensive across the north and northeast, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said on Friday (local time).
—”At least 50 soldiers were ambushed, some of them were killed in fighting but most of them were beheaded,” Observatory director Rami Abdel Rahman said.

IS militants claimed the toll was as high as 75.

via.

Pete Seeger and Toshi Seeger, their son Daniel, and folklorist Bruce Jackson visited a Texas prison in Huntsville in March of 1966 and produced this rare document of of work songs by inmates of the Ellis Unit.

Worksongs helped African American prisoners survive the grueling work demanded of them. With mechanization and integration, worksongs like these died out shortly after this film was made.

Bruce Jackson’s book Wake Up Dead Man (University of Georgia Press) is a highly recommended study of work songs in Texas prisons.

The large plantations in the U.S. South were based on West African agricultural models and, with one major difference, the black slaves used worksongs in the plantations exactly as they had used them before they had been taken prisoner and sold to the white men. The difference was this: in Africa the songs were used to time body movements and to give poetic voice to things of interest because people wanted to do their work that way; in the plantations there was added a component of survival. If a man were singled out as working too slowly, he would often be brutally punished. The songs kept everyone together, so no one could be singled out as working more slowly than everyone else.

– From Bruce Jackson’s background notes on making this film.

VIDEO .

READ.

READ.

Hitler, Sepp Dietrich and members of the Waffen-SS at a Christmas party, Germany December 1940. (upload.wikimedia.org)

The immediate aftermate of the Wall Street Bombing, September 16th, 1920. The bombing was never solved. (i.imgur.com)

business news .

Science News .

Techmeme.

War News Updates.

Are we selfish?
—Economists like to say that, to a first approximation, we are. In other words, that we tend to seek to maximize our own rewards, in a more or less rational manner.
—The trouble is that this theory (at least, a straightforward interpretation of it) doesn’t describe how people behave in many situations. For example, given a sum of money and asked to decide how to split it between themselves and an anonymous stranger, most people choose to give some of it away. This scenario is called the Dictator Game, and along with a handful of similar tasks, it’s a problem for the selfish theory.

Continue reading →

These miniature cars are small enough to hug – and they’re so easy on gas and parking that hugging them would only seem natural!

We covered most of the three-wheeled micro-car varieties in our previous article, and today we’ll have a look at so-called “Bubble Cars” of the 1950s and 1960s: (mostly) four-wheeled marvels of compact engineerin

MORE.

Superkilen is a public park in the Nørrebro district of Copenhagen, Denmark. Designed by the arts group Superflex with the collaboration of BIG architects and a German landscape architecture firm called Topotek1, the park is considered one of the most ethnically diverse and socially challenged neighborhoods in the Danish capital. Filled with objects from around the globe, it is designed as a kind of world exposition for the local inhabitants, covering over 60 nationalities, who have been able to contribute their own ideas and artifacts to the project.

MORE.

VIDEO HERE

via.

Have you ever found yourself doodling on the cover of a book, even just tracing over the lines of the artwork with your fingertips, or be it drawing moustaches with a permanent marker on magazine covers? I think we can safely say that American artist Joseph Decamillis has taken this practice to a whole new level…

MORE.

The conflict in the Mideast has intensified in the last month with turbulent fighting in Gaza strip. Over 800 Palestinians have been killed and over 5,000 injured, according to Palestinan health officials. World leaders have been working on a truce between Hamas and Israel to end the bloodshed. –Leanne Burden Seidel (36 photos total)

MORE.

READ.

After 13 years of daily use, I stopped smoking weed. But quitting only made me feel better about the drug

READ.

New unexplained holes have appeared in Siberia following the mystery over a giant crater on the Yamal Peninsula.A second is in the same permafrost region of northern Russia, and a third on the Taymyr Peninsula, to the east, in Kransoyark region. Both were spotted by reindeer herders who almost fell in.The original hole received worldwide attention after being identified by helicopter pilots some 20 miles 32km from a huge gas extraction plant at Bovanenkov.

MORE.