…but only in the UK (or to those elsewhere in the world who can use a BitTorrent client). The season will include eight episodes as well as a two-hour Christmas episode.
The first episode will open not with a witty but icy quip from the peerless Violet, Dowager Countess of Grantham, played by Maggie Smith, but with the massive explosion of a shell in the battle of the Somme, where the heir to Downton, Matthew Crawley (played by Dan Stevens), is fighting. The drama’s producers hope that the darker wartime storylines, and the aristocratic ensemble dressing down in the “we’re all in it together” clothing of wartime, will not deter the fans.
The US premiere is not until January 2012 (nice poster though). Oh, and Fellowes is already working on storylines for a third season. Yay! (thx meg)
A nice piece, poignant even, about that so-called slow-moving truck driver you flipped off on the highway the other day.
Let me tell you a little about the truck driver you just flipped off because he was passing another truck, and you had to cancel the cruise control and slow down until he completed the pass and moved back over. His truck is governed to 68 miles an hour, because the company he leases it from believes it keeps him and the public and the equipment safer.
(The title of the post is from one of my kids’ favorite books: Trucks.)
They’re broke and living at Spencer’s parents’ beach house in Santa Barbara because of the free rent; Heidi’s body and face are forever changed from plastic surgeries she now wishes she had not gotten; their relationships with friends and family are severely damaged; and they have found themselves largely unemployable, both on camera and off.
Yeah, not sure how anyone could have envisioned all that would end badly. But at least it was fun for the viewers? Right? Watching people ruin their lives between Coors Light commercials? (via @sfj)
I posted about Chris Burden’s Metropolis II a few months ago. The artist is almost set to deliver the piece to Los Angeles County Museum of Art and there’s a proper preview for it:
My favorite line of the interview with Burden that runs over the video:
The idea that a car runs free, those days are about to close.
In 1956, 96-year-old Samuel Seymour appeared on a game show called I’ve Got A Secret…his secret was that he saw Lincoln’s assassination when he was five years old.
Mind-blowing…the Civil War & Lincoln’s assassination directly linked to something as modern as a TV game show. That same year, Seymour gave an interview about witnessing the assassination to the Milwaukee Sentinel. His father was an overseer on a Maryland estate and his boss, Mr. Goldsboro needed to travel to Washington to check on “the legal status of their 150 slaves”. Seymour got to go along.
It was going on toward supper time — on Good Friday, April 14, 1865 — when we finally pulled up in front of the biggest house I ever had seen. It looked to me like a thousand farmhouses all pushed together, but my father said it was a hotel.
[…] When I finally had been rushed upstairs, shushed and scrubbed and put into fresh clothes, Mrs. Goldsboro said she had a wonderful surprise.
“Sammy, you and Sarah and I are going to a play tonight,” she explained. “A real play — and President Abraham Lincoln will be there.”
After Lincoln was shot, Seymour saw Booth fall from the balcony and run off.
Finally got around to listening to the excellent episode of This American Life on patents: When Patents Attack! The episode surveys the state of the US patent system, using Nathan Myhrvold’s smarmy Intellectual Ventures as a hook to tell the story.
In polls, as many as 80 percent of software engineers say the patent system actually hinders innovation. In other words, it does exactly the opposite of what it’s supposed to do. It doesn’t encourage them to come up with new ideas and create new products, it actually gets in their way.
The Economist chimed in as well, saying that the American patent system is “a travesty which threatens the wealth and welfare of the whole world”.
At a time when our future affluence depends so heavily on innovation, we have drifted toward a patent regime that not only fails to fulfil its justifying function, to incentivise innovation, but actively impedes innovation.
5. Not using a knowledgeable intermediary to deal with Sen. Clay Davis. He was clearly out of his league with Davis and had he used an attorney with the correct political connections, he could have likely gained all that he sought with fewer complications than he did.
Punchfork is a recipe aggregator that does ranks and rates recipes from popular food sites around the web. I really like the visual layout of the recipes; the site has a nice feel all around.
Charlie Ayers, former executive chef for Google, once worked alongside a former cook for Elvis Presley and that cook gave him his special recipe for fried chicken. Ayers says it’s “the best southern fried chicken I [have] ever tasted”. The recipe uses Google-sized portions…here’s a recipe converter to scale it down.
The web has been a real boon for introverts…the asynchonicity of email, the information-rich messaging of Twitter & Facebook, and the social acceptability of conducting much of one’s social & business communications online all play to the introvert’s strengths.
A text message, a Facebook message, a tweet — each is a discrete, articulated piece of information being shared. Rather than riding the texture of a live conversation to figure out how to give and receive information, people are now used to simply pushing their thoughts out into the world, to be responded to at some undetermined future point. Even voicemail messages are now more often the point of a phone call than an actual conversation.
It is based on the theory of purchasing-power parity (PPP), the notion that in the long run exchange rates should move towards the rate that would equalise the prices of a basket of goods and services around the world. At market exchange rates, a burger is 44% cheaper in China than in America. In other words, the raw Big Mac index suggests that the yuan is 44% undervalued against the dollar. But we have long warned that cheap burgers in China do not prove that the yuan is massively undervalued. Average prices should be lower in poor countries than in rich ones because labour costs are lower. The chart above shows a strong positive relationship between the dollar price of a Big Mac and GDP per person.
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