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Windmills Tilted, Scared Cows Butchered, Lies Skewered on the Lance of Reality ... or something to that effect.


Monday, April 24, 2017

The Daily Drift

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Carolina Naturally
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Today in History

858 St. Nicholas I begins his reign as Catholic Pope.
1519 Envoys of Montezuma II attend the first Easter mass in Central America.
1547 Charles V’s troops defeat the Protestant League of Schmalkalden at the Battle of Muhlberg.
1558 Mary, Queen of Scotland, marries the French dauphin, Francis.
1792 Claude-Joseph Rouget de Lisle composes “La Marseillaise”. It will become France’s national anthem.
1800 The Library of Congress is established in Washington, D.C. with a $5,000 allocation.
1805 U.S. Marines attack and capture the town of Derna in Tripoli from the Barbary pirates.
1833 A patent is granted for the first soda fountain.
1877 Russia declares war on the Ottoman Empire.
1884 Otto von Bismarck cables Cape Town, South Africa that it is now a German colony.
1898 Spain declares war on United States, rejecting an ultimatum to withdraw from Cuba.
1915
Irish rebels led by Patrick Pearse and James Connolly, proclaiming an Irish Republic, launch an uprising in Dublin against British home rule. It will take British authorities six days to suppress the uprising due.
1916 Irish nationalists launch the Easter Uprising against British occupation.
1944 The first B-29 arrives in China, over the Hump of the Himalayas.
1948 The Berlin airlift begins to relieve the surrounded city.
1953 Winston Churchill is knighted by Queen Elizabeth II.
1961 President John Kennedy accepts “sole responsibility” for the failed invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs.
1968 Leftist students take over Columbia University in protest over the Vietnam War.
1980 A rescue attempt of the U.S. hostages held in Iran fails when a plane collides with a helicopter in the Iranian desert.
1981 The IBM Personal Computer is introduced.
1989 Thousands of Chinese students strike in Beijing for more democratic reforms.

If You Simply Must Have a Late-Night Snack ...

Pastor Finds Massive 706-Carat Diamond In Sierra Leone Mine

There are people willing to enslave, exploit and kill other humans without a second thought for a fistful of diamonds, so imagine what they would do to get their hands on a 706-carat diamond worth millions.
That's the dilemma pastor Emmanuel Momoh faced when he discovered the monster diamond in an artisanal mine in Sierra Leone, and knowing the discovery put his life in danger he gave it to the government for safe keeping:
According to The Guardian, the government said that Emmanuel Momoh found the gem in an artisanal mine in the village of Koyadu within the diamond-rich Kono region. It weighs in at 706 carats. The stone was presented on Thursday and will be sold in a government-held transparent auction in the Sierra Leone to benefit the community.
"I have to help the government and my people, so all of us can benefit," presidential spokesman Abdulai Bayraytay quoted Momoh as saying.
The diamond still needs to be analyzed by experts, but it's probable that it's among the largest, behind the 3,106-carat Cullian diamond and a 1,111-carat diamond discovered in 2015. Diamond expert Paul Zimnisky told the AFP news agency that it could possibly rank "between the 10th and 15th largest dem-diamonds ever recovered."

Bustles Were a Pain in the Behind

Women's fashions in the 19th century went through many changes, as different designers tried out the ways they could make a woman look the way she should. The crinolines of the Civil War era didn't really work in cities that were becoming more and more crowded, but heaven forbid that a lady could dispense with overly-engineered undergarments that sculpted her into the latest fashionable silhouette. The bustle was patented in 1857 and became all the rage until about 1888.
An 1888 anonymous writer to the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal voiced concerns about the fashion of the time in a letter headed simply “Bustles.”
The writer reels off the numerous health problems they see with everyday women’s fashion: corsets squeezing organs, shoes too small and pointed at the toe deforming the foot and particularly the bustle. “The woman with a bustle can never sit down in a natural position,” the letter records. “It is absolutely impossible for her to rest her back against the back of any seat of ordinary construction. I have no doubt some of the severe backaches in women whose duties keep them seated all day are due to, or at least aggravated by, this disability.”
Read about the rise and fall of the bustle and other 19th-century undergarments at Smithsonian.

The Creators of "Spinal Tap" Still Haven't Been Paid

Rob Reiner, Michael McKean, Christopher Guest, and Harry Shearer began working on an idea in 1978 that would eventually become the movie This Is Spinal Tap in 1984. They performed music gigs and made a 20-minute demo, but were rejected by studio after studio until the movie was finally made on a budget of $2 million, and released in 1984. This Is Spinal Tap performed modestly in theaters, but found success on home video, and is now a classic. As the 30th anniversary of the movie approached, Harry Shearer realized that neither he nor the other three principles had been paid any residuals, despite conceiving, writing, performing music, and acting in the film.
Sometimes it takes a malcontent to disturb something as intractable as Hollywood accounting practices. By the terms of the contract they signed in 1982 with Embassy Pictures, the four creators of Spinal Tap are entitled to a portion of income from the film, including merchandise and music, provided certain benchmarks are hit. Given the wild afterlife of This Is Spinal Tap, it seems impossible that anyone with a piece of the movie hasn’t made money. And yet this is Hollywood, where studios have claimed that some of the highest-grossing films—hits such as Return of the Jedi, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, and the Lord of the Rings trilogy—somehow haven’t turned a profit. As David Zucker, one of the creators of Airplane!, once said of his own sleeper hit, “It made so much money that the studio couldn’t hide it fast enough.”
With Embassy out of business, the theatrical rights to Spinal Tap bounced around from Coca-Cola to De Laurentiis Entertainment Group to a L’OrĂ©al property named Parafrance to, around 1990, Studiocanal, a subsidiary of the French company Vivendi SA. The home-video rights followed a separate path and landed with Sony Music Entertainment. None of those companies paid the four creators, and no one did anything about it until Shearer finally lost his patience. “We were approaching the 30th anniversary,” he says, “and this low-burning lightbulb begins to go off—‘Hey, wait a minute, what’s going on here?’ ”
An investigation into the film's accounting showed that the four were owed $81 in merchandizing income and $98 in album income. Smelling a rat, Shearer filed a $125 million lawsuit last year. In 2017, Reiner, McKean, and Guest joined the lawsuit and raised the amount to $400 million, plus reversion of the copyright to the name Spinal Tap.
Vivendi, in its response to the lawsuit, argued that the creators made the film as a work for hire, and were hence not entitled to the copyright. It seems crazy, given that there’s plenty of evidence the four of them invented the band years before making their deal with Embassy, but calling a contribution work-for-hire is fairly common in copyright cases. In Shearer’s latest filing, he calls Vivendi’s position on the copyright a threat to scare him away from pressing his profit case. He also says it’s hypocritical for the company to cling to a film’s copyright while suggesting, based on what it claims is the film’s poor performance, there’s no money to be made with it.
You can read the details of the story, and some background on Hollywood accounting, at Bloomberg. -

Nikki Bella and John Cena Got Naked to Celebrate

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​Does Your Sex Life Affect How Often You Masturbate?

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​Does Your Sex Life Affect How Often You Masturbate?
​A new study offers some insight to solo sex

Your Penis Wants You to Sleep In Quiet​

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The Surprising Reason Your Penis Wants You to Sleep In Quiet​
Nighttime noise might be doing some damage below the belt

Cringe-worthy Stories of Men Breaking Their Penis During Sex

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9 Cringe-worthy Stories of Men Breaking Their Penis During Sex
If this article doesn’t make you wince at least three times, we haven’t done our job

Budweiser Wants You to Sext More

Secrets to Pooping, Having Sex In Space

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​Astronaut Reveals the Secrets to Pooping, Having Sex In Space
​Mankind’s most pressing questions have finally been answered

This NSFW TV Show Is Kid-Proofing Their Sex Scenes

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Here’s How This NSFW TV Show Is Kid-Proofing Their Sex Scenes
​It’s been called one of the most graphic shows in TV history

Here Comes the Big Assault on Workers' Rights

O'Reilly Ruined the News

Fox 'News' execs forced black women to arm wrestle for ‘amusement and pleasure of white superiors’

“Forcing a black woman employee to ‘fight’ for the amusement and pleasure of her white superiors is horrifying. This highly offensive and humiliating act is reminiscent of Jim Crow era battle royals,” the document states.
Dumbass Trump Pal Hannity Accused Of Sexual Harassment As Fox 'News' Scandal Grows
A former Fox 'News' contributor has accused Hannity of sexual harassment after he invited her back to his hotel room and then never booked her for his show again after she declined.…

Solarcoaster

The real toxic future we face if we allow fracking to continue

Animal Pictures