| From the wikipedia article Zap (Action): GAA member Marty Robinson is credited with developing the zap following a March 7, 1970 police raid on a gay bar called the Snake Pit. Police arrested 167 patrons. One, an Argentine national named Diego Vinales, so feared the possibility of deportation that he leapt from a second-story window of the police station, impaling himself on the spikes of an iron fence.[11] Gay journalist and activist Arthur Evans later recalled how the raid and Vinales' critical injuries inspired the technique: The Snake Pit incident truly outraged us, and we put out a leaflet saying that, in effect, regardless of how you looked at it, Diego Vinales was pushed out the window and we were determined to stop it....There was no division for us between the political and personal. We were never given the option to make that division. We lived it. So we decided that people on the other side of the power structure were going to have the same thing happen to them. The wall that they had built protecting themselves from the personal consequences of their political decisions was going to be torn down and politics was going to become personal for them.[12]
- Music:Human League - Love Action
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| I've played a few games lately that have made me want to make a ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif) film_stills post about them, only they weren't eligible because they weren't films. So I've created game_stills in order to have a place to put them. The first post is about Fallout 3. Come add your own! | |
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|  Nvidia is only slightly better. While I had no problems finding drivers for the Nvidia Geforce GT 220, that's not necessarily a good thing. As it turns out, the latest drivers for that card, despite the release notes' boast that it would improve Fallout 3's performance by around 11%, caused frequent bluescreens that were only fixed when I rolled back the drivers. Doing so also happened to fix a less fatal bug in the original Fallout that frequently blanked the screen and would only redraw on mouse position updates. | |
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| From the WSJ, The French Get Lost in the Clouds Over a New Term in the Internet AgeBefore a word such as "cloud computing" or "podcasting" ("diffusion pour baladeur") receives a certified French equivalent, it needs to be approved by three organizations and get a government minister's seal of approval, according to rules laid out by the state's General Delegation for the French Language and the Languages of France. The process can be a linguistic odyssey taking years.
[...]
Each of France's government ministries has at least one terminology committee attached to it. The job of the people on the committee is to spot new English words and create and define French alternatives before the English version catches on. Ms. Madinier called on the committee in charge of computing terminology -- which is part of the French Finance Ministry -- to handle the expression "cloud computing."
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The problem was the word "cloud." In French, to be "dans les nuages" -- or in the clouds -- is a common expression meaning to be distracted. So, committee members were wary of using the word "nuage." One would not want to have his head in the clouds. They came up with alternatives, including Capacité Informatique en Ligne (or online computing capability), which could be shortened to CIEL, which, of course, means "sky" in French.
"Going from 'cloud' to 'sky' seems to be a bit far-fetched," one committee member wrote his colleagues last August in an email.
[...]
But at the meeting earlier this month, the 17 members of the commission were quickly confused. "How are we supposed to understand it?" asked Alexandre Grandazzi, a Latin professor.
"I think we can survive without the term 'cloud computing,'" said physics expert Mr. Guyon, slamming his hand on the table.
"Cloud computing" will now go back to the drawing board. In other news, the Grand-High Muckymucks of English have again failed to reach consensus over suitable English replacements for various tricky words of foreign origin. Things got off to a smooth start with a successful motion to replace "tsunami" with "huge fucking wave," but a nearly-successful bid to replace "hamburger" with "beef sandwich" was scuttled when concerns were raised over the French origin of the word "beef."
Similarly, a suggestion to replace "taco" with "unleavened open-face sandwich" was torpedoed by the observation that it's not technically the sandwich that was unleavened, but the bread used to make it. The suggestion was amended to "open-face sandwich made with unleavened bread," but stalled again when nearly 30% of the board complained that it was too long to be of any use.
In exasperation, Hilaire Dubois, a freelance lexical Onanist, unthinkingly suggested "Mexican pita," and was wordlessly slapped across the face for her trouble by prominent Chaucer bore Hiroyuki Takeda. The meeting adjourned shortly thereafter. | |
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| From ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) ferricide, an amazing testament to devolution in action. | |
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| It's weird how this:
Doesn't feel nearly as fresh as this:
She's dressed better in the second video, too.
I approve of the guy in red pants in the first video, though. | |
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| Once again, the famously altruistic world of high fashion races to the rescue of the 3rd world by combining glamor photography with questionable taste:  A series of striking images have been produced to highlight the fact that two-thirds of blind people are women, 90% of whom live in developing countries.
Trachoma is a blinding disease spread by eye-seeking flies.
It is significantly more common in women than men and is one of the biggest reasons women go blind in the developing world. Erm. Yes. Well. Oddly, they seem to have forgotten to apply solidarity blackface. | |
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I... I came ;_;
Jocelyn Elders only wishes she could promote masturbation this effectively. | |
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