Bram Cohen

"Europe's Sensational Wild Animal Trainer, Fearless Daughter of Russia's Mad Monk."

I learned about this existence of this wonderful artifact and wonderful kook from Bess Lovejoy's Atlas Obscura talk at DNA Lounge last week, which you should surely attend in the future.

She also later co-authored a cookbook, which includes recipes for jellied fish heads and her father's favorite, cod soup. She also worked as a cabaret dancer in Bucharest, Romania, and then found work as a circus performer for Ringling Brothers Circus. During the 1930s she toured Europe and America as a lion tamer, billing herself as "the daughter of the famous mad monk whose feats in Russia astonished the world." She was mauled by a bear in Peru, Indiana, but stayed with the circus until it reached Miami, Florida, where she quit and began work as a riveter in a defense shipyard during World War II.

Mirrored from jwz.org.

World Bodypaint Festival

Mirrored from jwz.org.

Dear Lazyweb, can anyone tell me how to disconnect my Words With Friends account from my Facebook account?

I'm sick to death of it sending me push-notifications that someone I'm friends with on Facebook but have never played Scrabble with has played a word. There seems to be no way to turn this shit off.

Things I have tried:

1. De-authorizing the Words With Friends app on Facebook. This causes the the iOS app to go into a loop demanding that you re-authorize it.

2. Deleting and re-installing the iOS app. That stops the auth-loop, but does not stop the "notifications about non-friends" issue, and also makes it nag you daily saying "Hey, you used to log in with Facebook! Log in with Facebook okay??"

So I guess I can't do this myself, since it's stuck in their DB. I'll just mail them and ask them to delete that. Ha ha ha.

3. This joke appears to be the closest thing to a non-FAQ support page.

4. So I go to their Facebook page hoping to message them. There's no option to message them. There's no option to post a question on the wall except as a reply to a previous post from them announcing an new feature in a different game. WTF.

5. So I waste my time trying to strip my complaint down to 140 characters and ask them on Twitter. To the shock of nobody, I get no reply.

6. Then on a completely different, unlinked web site, I find this page. I get a brush-off auto-reply saying "update to the latest version of the app, which will direct you to the FAQ instead of letting you actually contact us."

The fact that they are still nagging me with updates about my Facebook friends when they no longer have authorization on my Facebook account means that they have stored an offline copy of my friends tree, which I'm pretty sure is against Facebook's application terms of service. I'm sure both parties care about this a lot.

Yeah yeah, that's what I get for dealing with amoral scumbags like Zynga in the first place. I even paid them money to make the ads go away, so I'm part of the problem. But hey, I like playing scrabble on my phone.

Remember when a paying customer could actually email support? Those were the days.

Previously.

Mirrored from jwz.org.

Dear Lazyweb:

I face-tagged a zillion faces in desktop Picasa while "Store Name Tags in Photo" was unchecked. Now I have checked it and I want it to write all those tags back to the EXIF. How?

Alternately: I just want to extract a map of filename → face-names, and then I can take care of business myself. Where's the API?

Previously.

Mirrored from jwz.org.

Any of you who have been to my home know that this is exactly what my desk looks like.

Mirrored from jwz.org.

Mirrored from jwz.org.

Peaches Geldof has signed up to Aleister Crowley's sex cult Ordo Templi Orientis

Is this, by any chance, a stupid cult? No, actually it's a respected school of academic thought known for its rigorous system of peer-reviewed publishing and many seminal contributions to the philosophy of mind, ethics and epistemology.

Really? No, of course not. It's a stupid cult.

Previously, previously, previously.

Mirrored from jwz.org.

You may have heard that the highest-paid employee in each state is usually the football coach at the largest state school. This is actually a gross mischaracterization: Sometimes it is the basketball coach.

Mirrored from jwz.org.

More Breasts means More Mammal.

Mirrored from jwz.org.

Mirrored from jwz.org.

So I've got ten windows iconified, and another ten open on my desktop. Safari crashes, as it so often does.

I re-launch it. I get back the two frontmost non-iconified windows, and the two oldest iconified windows. What the fucking fuck.

Then I do "reopen windows from last session", and they all come back, including duplicates of the ones I already have open. Come on.

And to insult my injury, the icons in the dock are all blank until after I wait for them all to load in the background, then uniconify and reiconify them, because updating the dock icon at the completion of the background page-load would apparently be too much effort.

I tried an extension that purported to auto-save sessions, but it did some confusing and complicated thing that was not even remotely what I wanted.

Is there a sane solution to this?

(No, I don't want to switch browsers, STFU. No I don't use tabs, STFU.)

Mirrored from jwz.org.

@shyhoof: An ode to the journey of ó on a shipping label.

Mirrored from jwz.org.

Turns out you cannot light a candle with a taser. Who knew.

Mirrored from jwz.org.

Mirrored from jwz.org.

Mirrored from jwz.org.

[Citation Needed] - Citation needed

"Citation needed", most commonly rendered as ^{[citation needed]}, is a common editorial remark on Wikipedia, which has become used to refer to Wikipedia in wider popular culture. ^{[citation needed]}

Link

Previously, previously, previously.

Mirrored from jwz.org.

Four homes were demolished and thousands were left without power after Barry Swegle started smashing homes with his bulldozer.

Neighbor Keith Haynes said that the man "just went nuts." "He took a skidder and took out two houses," Haynes told the Peninsula Daily News. "I mean demolished. It was like a war zone."

Neighbor Barbara Porter isn't too surprised. When she heard the bulldozer start to rumble, she knew that Barry was about to get feisty.

"We all said one of these days Barry is going to take that dang CAT and he's going to start tearing up people's property and that's what he did."

And that article contained this sidebar:

RELATED: NAKED, HIGH DALLAS MAN DRIVES THROUGH A SHOPPING MALL AND STEALS CLOTHES

"Normally, when we deal with people that are," Dallas Police Sgt. Elliot Forge told the station as he took a long pause and tried not to laugh. He continued "naked, they're usually under the influence of some kind of narcotics."

Yes. Highly relevant.

Previously.

Mirrored from jwz.org.

Mirrored from jwz.org.

Mirrored from jwz.org.

I should be on a boat.

Mirrored from jwz.org.

Mirrored from jwz.org.

Fuck io9 a lot, but this is funny:

It bears repeating that the judges Hodgson surveyed were no ordinary taste-testers. These were judges at California State Fair wine competition -- the oldest and most prestigious in North America. If you think you can consistently rate the "quality" of wine, it means two things:

1: No. You can't.

2. Wine-tasting is bullshit.

[...]

A 2006 study, published by the American Association of Wine Economists, found that most people can't distinguish between paté and dog food.

My personal wine Venn Diagram consists of a large outer circle labelled "something my companions thought was a good idea" enclosing smaller almost-equally-sized circles labelled "something that gives me a headache before a buzz" and "something that would be better with bubbles and OJ in it".

Also, liver-flavored butter? Who eats that on purpose?

Mirrored from jwz.org.

There was no transition at all, no sense of approaching danger. It was as if I had suddenly gone blind and deaf.

I was aware that my legs were surrounded by water, but my top half was almost dry. I seemed to be trapped in something slimy. There was a terrible, sulphurous smell, like rotten eggs, and a tremendous pressure against my chest. My arms were trapped but I managed to free one hand and felt around -- my palm passed through the wiry bristles of the hippo's snout. It was only then that I realised I was underwater, trapped up to my waist in his mouth.

I wriggled as hard as I could, and in the few seconds for which he opened his jaws, I managed to escape. I swam towards Evans, but the hippo struck again, dragging me back under the surface. I'd never heard of a hippo attacking repeatedly like this, but he clearly wanted me dead.

Hippos' mouths have huge tusks, slicing incisors and a bunch of smaller chewing teeth. It felt as if the bull was making full use of the whole lot as he mauled me -- a doctor later counted almost 40 puncture wounds and bite marks on my body. The bull simply went berserk, throwing me into the air and catching me again, shaking me like a dog with a doll.

Then down we went again, right to the bottom, and everything went still. I remember looking up through 10 feet of water at the green and yellow light playing on the surface, and wondering which of us could hold his breath the longest. Blood rose from my body in clouds, and a sense of resignation overwhelmed me. I've no idea how long we stayed under -- time passes very slowly when you're in a hippo's mouth.

The hippo lurched suddenly for the surface, spitting me out as it rose. Mike was still waiting for me in his kayak and managed to paddle me to safety. I was a mess. My left arm was crushed to a pulp, blood poured from the wounds in my chest and when he examined my back, Mike discovered a wound so savage that my lung was visible.

Previously, previously, previously.

Mirrored from jwz.org.