When it comes to videos, everything about the sharing process is more difficult than their photo brethren. The troubles with them have gotten easier over the years, but after shooting a video, any edits that the footage needs are a cumbersome process for those without video-editing software — and the trouble is amplified when the edits need to be made … Continue reading
Ericsson has set its sights on Apple, accusing the company of infringing dozens of its patents for different aspects of mobile device communications, as well as user interfaces and more. According to Ericsson, the company has offered licensing options to Apple, but the latter company has turned them down (and likewise engaged in a legal battle of its own). Now … Continue reading
When I go home to Tennessee, nobody ever asks me if I want a beer. “How ’bout a col’beer?” say the Southerners as they toss a can through the air. (All one word.) The ice cold brew cuts through the summertime humidity nicely. This frigid February in New York City deserves a different kind of cocktail.
This post originally appeared on artnet News
by Brian Boucher
ISIS militants smash artworks in Mosul in their latest propaganda video.
While no one should take ISIS to be any less of a threat than it is, we might take some small consolation from the possibility that some of the sculptures the militants smashed on video this week at the Nineveh Museum in Mosul, Iraq, were replicas. While an Assyrian stone lion smashed in the videos is indisputably a terrible loss, the destruction of replicas in this particular case may soften the blow.
“According to archaeologists, most if not all the statues in the Mosul museum are replicas not originals,” reports Channel 4 News, London. “The reason they crumble so easily is that they’re made of plaster. ‘You can see iron bars inside,” pointed out Mark Altaweel of the Institute of Archaeology at University College, London, as we watched the video together. ‘The originals don’t have iron bars.'”
“According to the British Institute,” adds Channel 4, “the originals were taken to Baghdad for safekeeping. ISIS probably wouldn’t care about the distinction. One false idol is the same as another.”
All the same, reaction around the world has been swift and horrified (see The Metropolitan Museum and Others Respond to ISIS Destruction of Assyrian Sculptures). ISIS has also done a brisk business in smuggling antiquities out of the region for sale on foreign markets (see Increase in Antiquities Smuggling Busts amidst Government Crackdown), though the international trade is mostly focused on smaller items.
Why are the militants so bent on destruction of the region’s cultural heritage? Amr al-Azm, a Syrian anthropologist and historian, told the New York Times that the destruction of artworks, and the slaughter and capture of Assyrians and others in the area that it accompanied, are strategic. While the militants claim that they are smashing the sculptures because they are idols forbidden by Islam, he posits that “It’s all a provocation” aimed to lure U.S. and Iraqi forces to try to retake Mosul. “They want a fight with the West because that’s how they gain credibility and recruits,” Azm said.
ISIS has “repeatedly threatened to destroy [the museum’s] collection,” according to the Times, since they took the city in June.
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You work in them. You live in them. You pass by them everyday. They stretch above us like forest canopies made of metal and steel. They’re the buildings, the skyscrapers, the various architectural structures that, after a while, begin to fade into the background.
via someguy/Instagram
Today, we’re taking a moment to acknowledge these elegant architectural beasts, and just how good they look in front of the camera. From mirrored windows that seem to stretch on into infinity to the geometric fire escapes that zig-zag out of view, the following buildings are extraordinary in their ability to remain nondescript amidst the occupied passersby and utterly arresting to those who take the time to really look.
We asked some of our readers to send their best shots of their chosen entrances and exits, and the stunning results are below. Enjoy the weekend with this series of humble, yet utterly gorgeous, architectural openings.
This article originally appeared on Slate.
By Phil Plait
Via my evil twin Richard Wiseman comes one of the best color optical illusions I have ever seen. The original was apparently posted on Buzzhunt Akiyoshi Kitaoka’s incredible optical illusion website:
You see embedded spirals, right, of green, pinkish-orange, and blue? Incredibly, the green and the blue spirals are the same color. At first I thought Richard was pulling our collective legs, being a trickster of high magnitude. So I loaded the image in Photoshop and examined the two spirals. In the two squares displayed below, the one on the left is colored using the same color from the blue spiral, and on the right using the green spiral.
Like I said, incredible! For pedantry sake, the RGB colors in both spirals are 0, 255, 150. So they are mostly green with a solid splash of blue.
The reason they look different colors is because our brain judges the color of an object by comparing it to surrounding colors. In this case, the stripes are not continuous as they appear at first glance. The orange stripes don’t go through the “blue” spiral, and the magenta ones don’t go through the “green” one. Here’s a zoom to make this more clear:
See? The orange stripes go through the “green” spiral but not the “blue” one. So without us even knowing it, our brains compare that spiral to the orange stripes, forcing it to think the spiral is green. The magenta stripes make the other part of the spiral look blue, even though they are exactly the same color. If you still don’t believe me, concentrate on the edges of the colored spirals. Where the green hits the magenta it looks bluer to me, and where the blue hits the orange it looks greener. Amazing.
The overall pattern is a spiral shape because our brain likes to fill in missing bits to a pattern. Even though the stripes are not the same color all the way around the spiral, the overlapping spirals makes our brain think they are. The very fact that you have to examine the picture closely to figure out any of this at all shows just how easily we can be fooled.
This is why I tell people over and over again: you cannot trust what you see even with your own eyes. Your eyes are not cameras faithfully taking pictures of absolute truth of all that surrounds you. They have filters, and your brain has to interpret the jangled mess it gets fed. Colors are not what they appear, shapes are not what they appear (that zoomed image above is square, believe it or not), objects are not what they appear.
So the next time someone swears they saw Jesus, or a UFO, or a ghost, show them this picture. What you see in life is absolutely and provably not what you get.
Edit to add: if you like this illusion, then you might want to check out this audio illusion, and this one of a spinning woman’s sillhouette which is one of my all-time favorites.
Annalise Keating and associates wrapped up the killer first season of ABC’s “How to Get Away with Murder” on Thursday, when the pack of cutthroat attorneys solved the season-long mystery of who strangled Lila Stangard and opened up a murderous new can of worms. But after 15 episodes of twists and turns, did the finale live up to the Shondaland standard of greatness? HuffPost Live’s “Spoiler Alert” broke it all down on Friday, when host Ricky Camilleri spoke with a panel of TV critics to get their reviews. Also on this week’s episode: recaps of the latest on “Empire” and the new season of “House of Cards.”
Sign up for Live Today, HuffPost Live’s morning email that will let you know the newsmakers, celebrities and politicians joining us that day and give you the best clips from the day before!
GUATEMALA CITY, Feb 27 (Reuters) – An earthquake shook the capital of Guatemala on Friday, a Reuters witness said, but there were no immediate reports of injuries or major damage.
Mexico’s national seismological service said the quake had a magnitude of 5.2 at a relatively shallow depth of 6 miles (10 km), and that the epicenter was on Guatemala’s Pacific coast about 95 miles (153 km) southeast of the city of Hidalgo in Mexico’s southern state of Chiapas.
(Reporting by Sofia Menchu; Writing by David Alire Garcia; Editing by Simon Gardner, Bernard Orr)
Perhaps—but only perhaps—the problem started long before the carrots, but it was the carrots that made me realize there was a problem.
We were sitting at the pub just a few miles from our house, my husband Michael and I, enjoying a pint of beer and surveying the menus. No kids, no curfew—just two wanna-be hipsters in their mid-to-late thirties pretending we were cool again.
When actually we never were cool.
“What do you think you’ll get?” I asked Michael.
“Fish and chips,” he answered casually, barely scanning the menu. Cause hipsters are casual like that.
Me, sighing with a similar (false) air of casualty: “Yeah, I think I’ll get that too.”
And the the waiter came to take our order and all hell broke loose.
“Heyyyyy guys…” Said Dirk the waiter. “Do we know what we’re having tonight?”
“We do!” said I “Two orders of fish and chips!”
“Excellent!” Said Dirk the waiter, beaming with pleasure as though we had just agreed to his oft-proposed, ne’er accept threesome request or more importantly, to be on his Tuesday night trivia team.
He hopped away, a little lumbersexual jack-rabbit in maroon skinny jeans and a bolo tie.
“Wait!” said Michael, bringing Dirk, who was still beaming over our menu choices, sailing back to our table.
“Yes, sir?” He may have even mini-saluted.
“On second thought, I don’t think I’ll have the french fries,” said Michael easily.
And here’s where things get really bad, people, so you might want to avert your eyes.
“No French fries?” said Dirk, looking hurt.
“No French fries?” said I, looking confused
“No French fries.” said Michael, looking oblivious.
Then he said the words that he would live to regret for hours, days, weeks to come. Words he could never take back once they had thudded out, like dead weight.
Like cold cod fillets falling from a salted barrel.
He said: “I’ll have steamed carrots instead.”
And with that, it was over.
Dirk was hopping away, I presumed, to locate said carrots and catch the fish, perhaps, with a reel he had whittled in his apartment in his spare time. Michael was tipping his pint glass to his mouth, smiling. Tapping his foot to the strains of hipster odes—Dave Matthews and Coldplay pounding rhythm on the wooden floors. He looked pleased.
But. I. Was. Fuming.
I decided to count to ten internally before making any move, because my initial reaction to his food order would have put me in jail for destruction of property (think: pint glass through plate glass).
After I finished counting to ten, I reassessed.
My second reaction would have put Michael on the floor (think: my moccasin be-clad foot and one swift kick to the chair beneath him).
I decided to count again, this time to 467 and then, I spoke the most agreeable words I could muster.
“You are a flipping jerk.” Except maybe I didn’t say flipping. Or jerk. .
“What???” He said, clearly confused by my reaction.
“Carrots.” I said through clenched teeth. “Just what the HECK (maybe I didn’t say Heck either. Just remember, I’m Italian. And very…spirited) was that about?”
“I just wanted carrots…”. His eyes darted from side to side, wildly.
Like a caged animal searching for any sign of exit. He had been down this rabbit hole before.
“Oh I know what you wanted.” I answered back, looking him right in the eyes. “You wanted….to send a message, didn’t you.” I sounded sort of sweet, and his confusion turned to fear. He had learned that sweetness was more dangerous than overt anger at this interval of my madness. It meant I had crossed over from outrage to cunning. It meant that I was preparing for something dangerous.
It meant: things were going really bad for him and he was unlikely to get laid.
“You ordered the carrots because…” I said, slowly. “Because….you think…I need TO GO ON A DIET!”
What?
What.
What-what.
“Huh?” he looked truly stunned. And Dirk picked just that moment to put my heaping plate of fish and chips in front of me.
“YOU get the french fries!” Dirk said, beaming as though I had just won the olive green Amana range set on Let’s Make a Deal.
I smiled warmly at Dirk and his scraggly beard.
And then I aimed my laser beam eyes at Michael who was sitting looking down at the orange spheres on his plate.
“Eat your carrots!” I said pleasantly.
“They just sounded good…” He said helplessly, his voice trailing off. “I had french fries for lunch…”
He was quickly realizing there was no way out of the hutch–Dirk was hopping, I was hopping mad and there were carrots galore.
It was his own personal rabbit hole of hell. And our furry waiter was the tour guide.
*****************************************************************************
I realize now, after the fact, that as a woman, as a wife, I can sometimes over-interpret, mis-interpret an action that capitalizes on my own self-consciousness–twisting carrots into commentary about the curve of my thick hips.
All right, I’ll be honest. At 35 years old, I am an expert at this.
I realize now that it is entirely possible that he just wanted to eat carrots for dinner.
But I was sitting there in my size 10 (12?) jeans, the edge of the waistband pressing on my flesh.
And here’s how the female wife brain works, folks: I wanted french fries and I felt guilty about that. I wanted him to eat them too, to assuage the guilt. His carrots made him seem “holier than thou”. Which in turn made me want to stab him in the eye with my fork.
I’m not pretending this is NOT unreasonable of me. I understand that it is irrational that when he sees carrots and thinks yum! I see his carrots and think “you….prick”.
Let’s blame society for this, it’s easier than blaming my insecurity. Plus, I would be willing to bet that I am not the only wife whose brain works this way.
But it isn’t fair and I know this.
This is a man who married me exactly as I am now, french fry eating, big-assed and white girl afro and all that.
This is a man who just wanted carrots for dinner and ended up unknowingly making a horrible, orange mistake.
****************************************************************************************
We sat in silence. I ate my fish with reckless abandon.
“Dos more pints.” I burped to Dirk, french fry hanging from my lip like an ashen cigarette. “And the dessert tray, por favor.”
Michael didn’t eat much.
I felt badly, kind of, but I didn’t know how to fix it.
Unlike him, I wasn’t used to having to apologize (ahem).
But I didn’t have to.
My husband leaned in and took my hand across the table and looked into my eyes.
“Every guy here wants to be me right now. Every guy wishes he was with you, right here.”
This clearly wasn’t true.
I looked around at the other patrons, at Dirk flirting with the other waiters, at a guy with an arm sleeve of tattoos doing a Russian dance near the band.
No one cared about us. No one cared about me.
Except Michael.
“You’re one of a kind.” He said warmly, squeezing my fingers.
Now this…this, clearly WAS true.
Maybe the carrots helped him see things a little more plainly, rabbits have very good eyes, don’t they?
I squeezed his hand back and smiled a half-drunk smile.
“So are you, love” I said, pushing forward my plate. “Now have a french fry.”
The most important person in a reality television star’s life is their entertainment attorney, at least in the beginning. Later on, when you’re famous, you’ll have agents, managers and other people holding your hand. But when you first get into the entertainment business, the first things you’ll have to do are negotiate a development deal, and then hopefully, a contract for a show with a network.
Here’s the thing, good entertainment attorneys aren’t that easy to gain access to — they’re seriously busy, very expensive, and most of the time you need a referral. If you know someone in the reality television business already, get a referral from them. It’s the easiest route. Or reach out to a reality celebrity you have a social media relationship with — I get questions all the time via Facebook and Twitter.
Depending on the kind of show, the network and whether or not your business is involved, you can easily spend anywhere in the neighborhood of $5,000 to $15,000 on legal fees before you finish production of the first season.
Keeping in mind that most of the information requests and panicked questions I get from complete strangers considering dipping their toes into the reality pond are usually things I reply to with the question “do you have an entertainment attorney?” I thought it would be helpful to ask an entertainment attorney to actually answer them for us. And she agreed.
Nicole Page, a Head of Entertainment and Media Law at Reavis Parent Lehrer in New York, and Chair of the Board of Women Make Movies, represents numerous reality television clients, in addition to production companies. She’s also spent years working in television development, so she has a dual-sided perspective on the industry. And she doesn’t cut cards when you ask a question. So I asked her a few.
These are the kinds of questions and answers that belong in a “Dummies” book for aspiring reality TV talent, but since that book doesn’t exist, we’ll start here. I asked my entertainment law expert Nicole Page:
1. What is a development agreement, versus a “real” contract? Does this mean I’m guaranteed a show or not? Is it okay that they’re asking me to invest in a demo or “sizzle” reel to show networks?
Nicole says: A contract is a contract and any time you are signing an agreement, even an appearance release, have an attorney review it. A development agreement is the first step in the process. It generally ties you to a producer who will then shop the project with you attached to a network. If the network bites and wants to move forward, you will then be asked to sign a participation or talent agreement. As talent, you should never pay for a sizzle reel. Any reputable production company will fund the production of the sizzle. If however, you have spent the money already, I hope you have an agreement in place that states you co-own the sizzle with the producer.
2. Will I be under contract to a network eventually or working for the production company? Who is my boss? Do I have a boss?
Nicole says: You may be signed directly to the network or you could be signed to the production company. Even if you are signed to the production company, however, your ultimate “boss” is the network. If you are the main character in a series, you will have to adhere to network policies and, oftentimes, while the contract may be between you and the production company, the network is also named in the contract so that your obligations will extend to both the production company and the network.
3. Do I need an agent to help me with my first season of a new show?
Nicole says: Possibly, but only if the agent is really going to go to bat for you. Success breeds success. Good agents become not only interested in you, but also more valuable to you, once your show is a hit. At that point, there is the chance to negotiate for more money and better terms. Early in the game, the talent does not have that much leverage, especially when they are not a celebrity.
4. How long should a development agreement last? How long do they own me? If they don’t sell my show, do I have to stick with them?
Nicole says: This is all negotiable but the standard term of a development agreement ranges from 6-12 months. Sometimes companies include “sunset” provisions in their agreements so that even after the term ends, the company may still be attached as producer for a certain period of time. These are the types of provisions your attorney should look for and advise you about.
5. If my business is involved in the show, what’s the biggest thing I need to worry about?
Nicole says: In some cases (think “Cake Boss”), having your business featured on a reality show is a boon. But you must be aware that once you sign on for a show, you will not have control over how your business is portrayed. Do not expect to be allowed in the edit room or to have the chance to watch cuts of the show before it airs. That doesn’t happen. So there is always some degree of risk regarding how your business will be depicted. Separately, people don’t realize how much time shooting a reality show actually takes. You have to be prepared for the fact that you and your employees may find yourselves spending more time shooting and less time running the business and that could impose a financial cost.
Finally, be prepared for the network to ask for a percentage of the proceeds from your business. The network position is that by broadcasting your series, they are providing you with more advertising than money can buy and if they create a platform for you to create a wildly lucrative bakery or hair salon, then they are entitled to profit from it as well.
6. Are they really allowed to play tricks on us to up the drama? I’ve heard stories of production companies doing really outrageous stuff to get reactions when they’re filming.
Nicole says: I don’t think that kind of thing is universal but I think it can and does occur on occasion.
7. Can I take off my microphone and take a break when I need it? Can I tell them to stop filming whenever I want? Can I just walk away if I need to?
Nicole says: If you find yourself in an uncomfortable situation or just need a rest then just speak up. The production process should be collaborative and respectful.
8. Why do I have to do a full background check?
Nicole says: Unfortunately, background checks are now standard because there have been several ugly situations where a network included someone on a show and later discovered that the individual had serious skeletons in the closet. Just recently TLC pulled its very successful show “Here Comes Honey Boo Boo” after the mother on the show began dating a known sex offender. Despite the maxim that “all publicity is good publicity,” TLC did not want to be associated with that kind of criminal conduct and pulled the show. When a network elects to air a series, they are thinking about their brand and advertising dollars. So they are checking you out because they don’t want to pay for a show about you and then later discover you are an axe murderer. If the network brand is tainted, ratings can drop and ad dollars disappear. Networks will simply not take that risk.
9. What if I hate it? What are the consequences? If I don’t get paid til it’s finished anyway, why can’t I just say forget it and walk away, or kick them out of my business?
Nicole says: Well, because you’ve signed a contract and the network has put up a lot of money to make a series about you. So if you walk in the middle, you are likely to be in breach of contract and could find yourself defending a lawsuit.
10. What does it mean when I grant them “access” to my home or business? Can I set the rules about where the cameras are? What kind of “alterations” will they want to make to my business?
Nicole says: Your home and your business belong to you. You can absolutely set rules about where the cameras are. If “alterations” are being made, that should be paid for by the network but nothing should be done without your prior consent.
Okay, so now it’s not just me telling you that you won’t have an opportunity to see the show before it airs and that you don’t get to participate in the editing. If you’re seriously considering participating in a reality show and you haven’t gotten legal advice from an entertainment expert, you absolutely positively must make that your next step.
It doesn’t matter if you don’t own a business, or you don’t feel like you have a lot of assets to protect, take a look at some of the reality star successes that have you actually considering taking this on in the first place. That said, it can go equally bad. Just take a look at Spencer Pratt and Heidi Montag, once famous for “The Hills.” Now they’re on WEtv’s “Marriage Boot Camp” talking about how reality television producers ruined their lives.
If I had to take a bet, I’d say they didn’t have good entertainment attorneys when they signed up for their first shows.
Good luck!
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
