The antitrust lawsuit against Google filed by two consumers has been dismissed by US District Judge Beth Labson Freeman. At the heart of the case, the plaintiff’s lawyers claimed not only that Google had illegal restrictive contracts with Android device manufacturers, but that these contracts stifled competition and drove up prices of all Android devices. The two complainants actually sought … Continue reading
Sanwa hits back by bringing you their latest wireless mouse, the Ma-WBL31. Coming in a 3-button design, this easy-to-use mouse features a 2.4GHz radio frequency (works up to 10 meters), a Blue LED sensor – delivers smooth operation to recognize even slight irregularities and a 1000dpi resolution.
Powered by 1x AA battery, the Ma-WBL31 comes equipped with a storable micro receiver and supports for Windows 8.1-8 (64bit/32bit), 7 (64bit/32bit), Vista, XP, 2000, Windows and Mac OS X (10.2 and later) operating systems.
Measuring W60mm x D104mm x H38mm and weighing 61g (without battery), the Sanwa Ma-WBL31 is available now for 3,240 Yen (about $27) in black, red and silver color options. [Product Page]
From the Editor:
The wickedly talented Idina Menzel got back at John Travolta for his gaffe at last year’s Oscars. During this year’s ceremony, Menzel invited Travolta to the stage by calling him Glom Gazingo.
“I deserve that,” Travolta said, before saying Menzel’s name right. “That was so good!” Menzel said. Watch the interaction below. For a full list of Oscar winners, head here.
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Michael Keaton isn’t the only Birdman.
Caroll Spinney might be the original Birdman since he’s been playing Big Bird on “Sesame Street” since 1969. In a new viral video clip, he’s haunted by the presence of his iconic alter ego.
“How did we get here?” the voice of Big Bird asks. “How do we get to Sesame Street?”
Check out “Big Birdman Or (The Unexpected Virtue of Orange Pants)” in the clip above. And since Spinney is also Oscar the Grouch, maybe there’s some potential for a sequel: Garbageman.
Last week the nation was treated to the sad and embarrassing spectacle of Jeb Bush, mollycoddled scion to an empire of failure, proclaiming that “I’m my own man.” Here’s a simple rule of thumb: Anyone who has to say he’s his own man, or woman, isn’t. The 62-year-old Mr. Bush has been coasting on his family’s power and privilege since he was a weed-smoking, Steppenwolf-listening prep school student in the sixties.
From prep school slacker to presidential frontrunner: Now that’s a “Magic Carpet Ride.”
Sadder still was the list of Jeb’s advisors published this week, a list which included – and was tarnished by – the genuinely execrable Paul Wolfowitz.
For those who might have forgotten Wolfowitz, here’s a quick reminder: The dust had barely settled over lower Manhattan when Wolfowitz began cooking the books for the last President Bush, seeking an Iraq connection to 9/11 where none existed. National security expert Richard Clarke was there when Wolfowitz pressured the White House intelligence team to focus, not on the terrorists who did the deed, but on Iraq – a nation which wasn’t involved in the attack but had been targeted years before by the “Project for a New American Century.”
As Clarke recalled, Wolfowitz’s words were: “No, no, no. We don’t have to deal with al Qaeda. Why are we talking about that little guy?”
Wolfowitz orchestrated the lies about the need for war against Iraq, and he was utterly, disastrously, stunningly wrong in his predictions about the course of that war. Wolfowitz claimed Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. He said the war in Iraq would pay for itself in oil revenues. (That was some $2 trillion ago.) And, most famously, Wolfowitz predicted that the Iraqi people would “greet us as liberators.”
When it comes to the Iraq War, Paul Wolfowitz was – in the words of another Steppenwolf song – “The Pusher.” His promotion of that conflict was the defining act of his career, and it leaves him a failure in every conceivable intellectual or moral application of that word.
There are ways in which Wolfowitz is not a failure, of course: He has succeeded in retaining the esteem, respect, attention and support of right-wing power elites. He succeeded in retaining the implicit approval of the mainstream media, which has conveniently forgotten his moral and policy failures.
But then, hasn’t everyone who “matters”? Even a subsequent personal scandal at the World Bank failed to shake the high regard in which Wolfowitz is held by the powerful cohorts who shape our world. That’s how it goes, once you’re in the club.
It’s like having a rich and powerful dad, when you think about it. Ineptitude, arrogance, and mendacity are shrugged off as lightly as the drug escapades of shaggy-haired prep school brats, even when they cost trillions of wasted dollars and hundreds of thousands of wasted lives.
Now Jeb has Wolfowitz, and Wolfowitz has another potential president’s ear. That’s how these things work. Behind every “great” man or woman – in this case, behind every “I’m my own man” man – is a network of servile sycophants whose primary occupation is to make sure that the presumed paragon of self-sufficiency is propped up, brushed off, and shipshape to be wheeled out onto the political stage.
Neither these advisors nor their leader need to be right about anything. They just need to represent the right people – without offending anyone that matters.
Wolfowitz isn’t the only Iraq-war liar on the Jeb Bush team, of course. As Igor Volsky notes in ThinkProgress, there are a couple of other mendacious Iraq war “architects” onto the team. It’s a poor moral lesson for the children, but there it is: Lies, incompetence, and poor personal ethics are no bar to success in Washington DC. In fact, they can help you climb the ladder. But if you’re right in the wrong way you’ll be blackballed.
It’s true that the leader, not the advisors, is expected to call the shots. But when it comes to Jeb, don’t expect much there. In his first major address, he actually trotted out the old (and Orwellian) Reagan phrase “Peace Through Strength,” accompanied by the tired refrain that a strong military is our only hope for a peaceful world.
“Peace through strength” was a problematic concept even when there was another superpower on the planet. It’s today’s world of a unipolar superpower and asymmetrical warfare, it’s a platitude whose falsehood is demonstrable. America’s military might didn’t bring peace to Iraq or prevent the rise of ISIS. On the contrary: Had our “strength” not been used in that country, ISIS wouldn’t even exist.
“Shock and awe” has led to slaughter and horror.
The policies of the Bush/Wolfowitz crowd have led, not to democracy and development, but to chaos and collapse – and to the formation of a brutal and medieval “caliphate” which is drawing adherents from around the world. Our global reputation as a just and democratic state – what Gary Hart calls the “fourth power” of our principled beliefs – lies in tatters, after more than a decade of torture, spying, and unjustified military intervention.
This war has been the greatest failure in American history. The American people will be paying the price for it for generations to come, in more ways than one. But Jeb Bush has reminded us that there is no price to be paid for failure, or for ethical lapses, among the elites who govern us.
In the gendered language of male power, there is a saying: Success has a thousand fathers, but failure is an orphan. Wolfowitz’s failed war has created more than its share of orphans.
How many more orphans must be left behind before Jeb Bush finally becomes “his own man”?
NEW YORK (AP) — Legendary jazz trumpeter Clark Terry, who mentored Miles Davis and Quincy Jones and played in the orchestras of both Count Basie and Duke Ellington and on “The Tonight Show,” has died. He was 94.
Terry’s wife announced his death on his website late Saturday night. Gwen Terry’s statement did not provide further details, and she did not immediately respond to messages from The Associated Press.
“Our beloved Clark Terry has joined the big band in heaven where he’ll be singing and playing with the angels,” Gwen Terry wrote on the musician’s official Facebook page.
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Terry had been in failing health in recent years after suffering from extreme complications of diabetes. Terry, who had been living in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, entered into hospice care earlier this month.
“The world has lost one of the greatest trumpeters to ever grace the planet,” Quincy Jones wrote on his Facebook page. “Clark Terry was my first trumpet teacher as a teen in Seattle, my idol, and my brother. When he left the Basie and Ellington bands, also two of my idols, to join mine, it was one of the most humbling moments in my life.”
Jones honored his mentor by co-producing the documentary “Keep on Keepin’ On,” which premiered last September and focused on the relationship between Terry and his young protege, blind jazz pianist Justin Kauflin.
During a career spanning more than seven decades, Terry was a mentor to generations of jazz musicians, starting with Miles Davis, who first met Terry as a teenager growing up in East St. Louis, Illinois, across the river from Terry’s hometown.
“Miles credits me as being one of his influences, one of his motivators that inspired him,” Terry said in a 1991 interview for the National Endowment of the Arts.
Born in St. Louis in 1920, Terry displayed his passion for music as a child, fashioning a makeshift trumpet by attaching a funnel to a discarded garden hose with a lead pipe for a mouthpiece. Neighbors were so upset by the racket he made that they chipped in to buy him his first trumpet from a pawn shop. His earliest inspiration was Louis Armstrong.
After a stint in the Navy from 1942-45, Terry worked in a number of bands before joining the Count Basie Orchestra in 1948. Three years later, he joined Duke Ellington’s band, an experience he referred to in interviews as attending “the University of Ellingtonia.”
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Clark Terry playing trumpet with the Carnegie Hall Jazz Band at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival on April 29, 2001. (Photo by Clayton Call/Redferns)
During his 1951-59 stint with the Ellington band, Terry also began playing the rounder-toned flugelhorn, an instrument he helped popularize among jazz musicians.
In 1960, he became the first African-American musician hired as a staff musician at NBC and joined the house band on “The Tonight Show,” where he played for nearly a decade. He became known for his spontaneously improvised mumbling scat singing on the show, and his playful routines led to “Mumbles,” a 1964 recording with the Oscar Peterson Trio that became his signature song.
Terry appeared as a sideman and leader on more than 900 recordings, including sessions with Thelonious Monk, Charles Mingus, Ella Fitzgerald, Dizzy Gillespie and other leading jazz artists.
Terry also led his own small combos, including a quintet with trombonist Bob Brookmeyer, and a big band that performed abroad on State Department-sponsored tours from 1978-81.
He also was a strong proponent of jazz education, teaching in the classroom and at camps, clinics and festivals and writing jazz instruction books. He mentored promising young musicians such as drummer Terri Lyne Carrington and singer Dianne Reeves who went on to become jazz stars.
In 1991, Terry was named an NEA Jazz Master, the nation’s highest jazz honor, and received a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2010.
Terry continued to make occasional club appearances as an octogenarian although his diabetes forced him to curtail touring.
The esteem his fellow musicians felt for Terry was reflected in December when the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra led by Wynton Marsalis took a detour to Pine Bluff, Arkansas, during a day off on their tour to play an impromptu concert for Terry at his hospital.
“Even before we started playing, many of us were full of emotion,” Marsalis wrote at the time. “He was the first great jazz trumpeter I had ever heard actually playing live. His spectacular playing made me want to practice (of course) but his warmth and optimism made me want to be a part of the world of jazz.”
Most self-portraits are, by definition, solo affairs. However, artists Alon Chitayat and Rosalie Yu are blurring those lines a bit. Their Skin Deep art installation lets you draw on 3D-scanned models of the creators, giving their self-portraits your …
Here we have another affordable 11.6-inch notebook from Acer, the Aspire E 11 ES1-111M-C40S. Powered by a 2.16GHz Intel Celeron N2840 processor, this travel-friendly notebook is built with an 11.6-inch 1366 x 768 HD LED-backlight display, an Intel HD Graphics, a 2GB DDR3 RAM and a 32GB of flash memory.
Furthermore, the system comes complete with a webcam, an SD card slot, a Kensington Lock Slot, a built-in 3-cell Lithium-ion battery (3220mAh) providing up to 5 hours per charge and built-in speakers. Running on Windows 8.1 64-bit OS, the Aspire E 11 ES1-111M-C40S provides WiFi 802.11 b/g/n and Bluetooth 4.0 for connectivity.
The Acer Aspire E 11 ES1-111M-C40S will set you back just $197.99. [Product Page]
Our Oscars drinking game involved taking a sip of wine every time a woman or person of color won in a gender-neutral award category. Unfortunately, we ended the night stone cold sober.
Much has been made of the Academy’s failure to nominate people who aren’t white men in many of the award’s most prestigious categories. The cast of white over this year’s lineup was nearly blinding and the gender gap was pretty damn big.
Women made up only 19 percent of all non-acting nominees, and 77 percent of Academy voters are male. If you were to take the white dudes out of the credits for year’s nominated films, Neil Patrick Harris would have had quite a lot of time to fill.
Of course, there were some highlights during this year’s ceremony. Julianne Moore and Patricia Arquette picked up Best Actress awards for powerful portrayals of dynamic female characters. Accepting her award for Best Supporting Actress for her performance in “Boyhood,” Patricia Arquette brought the evening to its indisputable high point with her impassioned plea for gender equality.
Here are some of our favorite moments from the 2015 Academy Awards:
–Octavia Spencer throwing Neil Patrick Harris shade for asking her to watch over the winner’s box and denying her snacks. WTF, NPH?
–Patricia Arquette’s pointed and passionate acceptance speech for Best Supporting Actress. “To every woman who ever gave birth to every taxpayer and citizen of this nation: We have fought for everybody else’s equal rights. It’s our time to have wage equality once and for all and equal rights for women in the United States of America!” Preach, Patricia. Preach.
–Jennifer Lopez and Meryl Streep’s reaction. A “you go girl” moment for the ages.
–Common and John Legend’s powerful performance of “Glory” from Best Picture-nominated film “Selma.” The pair received a standing ovation and later won the award for “Best Original Score.”
–Oprah rocking her own personal LEGO Oscar.
Image: Giphy
–Screenwriter Graham Moore, accepting the award for “Best Adapted Screenplay” for “The Imitation Game” made an incredibly honest, impassioned speech dedicated to anyone whose ever felt like an outcast. The 33-year-old said of his teen years: “I felt weird, I felt different, and I felt like I didn’t belong. And now I’m standing here. I would like for this moment to be for that kid out there who feels like she doesn’t fit in anywhere. You do. Stay weird. Stay different, and then when it’s your turn and you are standing on this stage please pass the same message along.”
–Lady Gaga performing “The Hills Are Alive” in tribute to “The Sound Of Music’s” 50th anniversary as Julie Andrews cheered her on. Intergenerational girl power FTW.
–A documentary made by a female filmmaker earned the top honor in its category — Laura Poitras shared the win for “Citzenfour” with journalist Glenn Greenwald.
–Eddie Redmayne dedicating his award for “Best Lead Actor” to those worldwide living with ALS, the disease afflicting the preeminent Stephen Hawking whom Redmayne portrayed in “The Theory Of Everything.”
–Julianne Moore’s emotional, compassionate acceptance speech for her Best Lead Actress win. Moore won the award for her portrayal of a woman suffering from Alzheimer’s disease in “Still Alice.” “One of the great things about movies is that they make us feel seen and not alone.”
Honorable mention:
Before the ceremony, Reese Witherspoon championed #AskHerMore, a call to action for those who ask actresses questions on the red carpet and interview women in general to acknowledge their accomplishments other than picking out a nice dress.
We collected some of the best tweets from women during the ceremony. See some of our favorites below:
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.
