The hapless New York Jets have handed the Indianapolis Colt’s their first loss this season, ruining their highly anticipated “perfect” season in the N.F.L.

The final score was Jets 29, Colts 15.

The only team to accomplish this distinction was the 1972 Miami Dolphins, in which the always quotable Eugene “Mercury” Morris was an instrumental part of.

Read the full story here...

http://www.indystar.com/article/20091227/SPORTS03/91226006/1004/SPORTS/Jets-end-Colts-pursuit-of-perfection-29-15

Morris Shortly before his untimely death as depicted in the 1984 film, Cloak & Dagger

It’s been 25 long years and we still miss Morris, the lovable geek game store owner whose life was ended prematurely by some murderous thugs searching for a top-secret document hidden within an Atari game.

To me, he was more than an icon in geekdom, he was a fellow Texan. Setting up his shop at what is now known as Crossroads Mall in Balcones Heights (Located somewhere within San Antonio). Not far from where I once lived, actually.

Never had the world of cinema seen such a gentle soul. Morris never dreamed of pissing anybody off, and would never hurt a fly. All he was concerned with was beating the latest game on his Atari 5200 while no one watched his shop, but he seemed fine with that. He found himself in the wrong situation by stumbling onto the plans for a bomber upon reaching a certain point in his game.  Then he was shot and shoved into the trunk of a 1984 Cadillac DeVille.

Because he spent the second half of the movie lying in the back of a car, he was easily forgettable to most viewers. But like Jek Porkins, Morris holds a special place in my heart. Morris stands for those characters we hardly knew, or those cool cats you wish hadn’t died, much like Andy in Dawn of the Dead (2006) or Duke in Jason Goes to Hell. Morris was that guy. And like Piggy in Lord of the Flies, you can’t help but feel a bit of sympathy for the poor bastard when he dies.

Morris the dungeon master still unable to outdo Jack Flack

That’s how I choose to remember this lovable geek. Rest in Peace, Morris. You are still missed.

Remembering Morris:

The ultimate killscreen

Morris staring death in the face

Morris as seen through the remainder of the film

We have just added scouting reports for RHP A.J. Morris, 2B Jeff Kobernus, and SS Ian Desmond.

Earlier today Anne and I were discussing how glad we were to be Minnesotans because Minnesotans are “chill.”  That is, we as a whole are not overly concerned with appearances the way people from some regions *cougheastcoastcough* tend to be.  We’re humble, earthy, wholesome folk…to some extent, anyway.

Well, this evening I thought of another reason I’m glad to be Minnesotan: the ability to enjoy winter.  Enjoying winter is not at all synonymous with enjoying cold.  Anyone who has seen me curled up against the heater with a sweater and a heavy blanket knows that I passionately hate being cold.  Luckily, because I was born and raised in this frosty clime, I’m well aware of how to evade the shivers and enjoy the season.

I took a walk this evening in the sparkling dark.  I wasn’t wearing my glasses (they make your face cold, doncha know?) so the Christmas lights were large, fuzzy blurs of color and light against the lumpish black silhouettes of houses.  With several layers under my coat, dry wool socks in my boots, and a chunky hat, scarf, and mittens, the only skin that could feel the cold was my face from the eyes down to the lips.  Those few inches were seared with enough burning chill to remind me I was alive, but the rest of me was toasty and content.  It was quiet for a Friday night–two cars and a rattling flagpole were the only intrusions upon my silence.  I wandered through the snow when the sidewalks trailed off into nothingness (as is their habit in Morris).  Eventually I found my way home, purged of the lethargy and excess of the day by the crackling chill and voluntary solitude.

And if I weren’t from Minnesota, either I would have been too afraid to brave the winter climate at all, or I would have dressed foolishly and been distracted by discomfort throughout the entire walk.  Bummer for you, you Virginians and Floridians, Texans and New Mexicans.  You don’t know what you’re missing.

Yesterday, I came across two soc-posts on photographs. The first was SocImages post about the interactions between texts, images, and stereotypes. The second was at Everyday Sociology Blog, where Janis Prince Inniss took on the interaction between viewers’ interpretations of photographs and the “societal” context of that viewing. Both posts got me thinking about how a viewer can look a picture and figure out what, precisely, it shows. Now, I do not mean “what” in a narrow sense. Photographs are good at convincing us that what appears in the picture once existed. This is true even if we know that some photographs are, in fact, elaborate hoaxes, rather than honest depictions of objects off which light rebounded. What I am interested in is how it is that we look a photograph and understand how it came to be made. This is something like a “robust understanding” of a photograph, compared with the simpler knowledge that what appears in a photograph once existed in front of a camera. What we want to know is this: What events arranged those light-bouncing objects in that pose and at that moment?

It is a truism of the visual social sciences that this sort of knowledge is not readily apparent in the photograph itself and that our understanding (in that robust sense) of a photograph is generated within some context. This is what Inniss means when she references the “societal” context of viewership. This is implicitly what SocImages entry tells us, since it suggests that cognitive stereotypes profoundly influence how we make sense of what an image shows. I am, however, terribly uneasy with this truism. Not because it’s wrong, mind you. But because it’s so slippery. What, precisely, is a “context of viewership”? What does it include? The SocImages post would lead us to count cognitive stereotypes, which must somehow also be cultural, as part of the context of viewership; the study to which the post points also suggests that the text surrounding images is, in fact, a weaker contextual influence than are those stereotypes. This is an important observation, as scholars, perhaps betraying their commitment to language over the visual, have tended to emphasize the significance of the text surrounding a photograph to viewers’ interpretations of an image. Morris does this, playing with the captions on the infamous images Colin Powell used in his address to the U.N. Security Council.

Iraq as IHOP - Errol Morris & the power of captions.

Incidentally, these photographs provide a useful way of teaching the power of “context” to students. I use three photos: one I made with the captions covered up, Morris’, and then Powell’s. Each time, I ask the students to try to “interpret” the photographs; over the course of the exercise, it becomes apparent just how difficult this is without possessing a lot of information that does not actually appear in the photographs.

So “context” can mean caption. It can also mean something like the additive effect of words, space, and interaction. Sociologist Howard Becker and anthropologist Lindsay French both make this point. Becker, in an article on photography, writes,

Photographs get meaning, like all cultural objects, from their context. Even paintings or sculptures, which seem to exist in isolation, hanging on the wall of a museum, get their meaning from a context made up of what has been written about them, either in the label hanging beside them or elsewhere, other visual objects, physically present or just present in viewers’ awareness, and from discussions going on around them and around the subject the works are about.

French deftly demonstrates this in an analysis of exhibits featuring photographs taken at Tuol Sleng (also known as S-21). The photographs are of those detained and, in nearly every case, torture and executed at Pol Pot’s secret prison. What they can “tell” to their viewer, French contends, is highly dependent on how they are displayed. Shown at MoMA, in a slick, nearly textless exhibit, they look like high-art and “speak” to their viewers, as French documents by analyzing comments in the guest book, of the universality of heroic, human suffering and the depths of our violence. French argues that this is an ahistorical understanding of what put these prisoners in Tuol Sleng, one that misses the deep and troubling connections between U.S. foreign policy and Pol Pot’s rise to power.

We might organize these definitions by their “size.” Much like some sociologists privilege the “micro,” meaning interactions between people, over the “macro,” meaning structures or institutions, each of these definitions of context privilege one place over another. We would go, then, from something like the “cognitive context” of viewership, the particular stereotypes and cultural models a viewer literally “has in mind,” before they view a photograph, to the text that accompanies the photograph, to the broader, interactive space in which a photograph appears. And all this leads us to… Susan Sontag, who had in mind something larger and less easily measured than what Morris, Becker, and French write of.

In her influential books on visual images, Sontag, too, accepts the truism that photographs meanings are made in a context. But her context is ginormous, including “ideology” and the even more evasive “appropriate context of feeling and attitude.” (These statements appear in Sontag’s book On Photography, pages 19 and 17 respectively.) This definition of context, though, is compelling; it illuminates those occasions when brute, political force efforts to reshape interpretations of photographs. As when, say, commentators looked at the Abu Ghraib photographs and something like gym class or soldiers blowing off steam or terrorists getting what they deserve. (See Senator Zell Miller, Rush Limbaugh, and Senator James Inhofe, in that order.)

Yet I find Sontag’s understanding of the context of viewership too blunt. Take, again, the Abu Ghraib photographs. Ideology was too weak of a thing to make people see the photographs show a “few bad apples” “humiliating” Iraqis. In place of pure, brute ideology, we saw a half-dozen or so official investigations, official investigators sent over to the Armed Services Committee to testify about their findings, and the out-visualization of the Abu Ghraib photographs. In other words, even if ideology is an appropriate word for the context of American viewership (circa 2004) of Abu Ghraib, it has to be understood as involving the ability to make an appropriate context of viewership.

General Kerns Shows Abu Ghraib to the Senate Armed Service Committee (9.9.2004)

For instance, an investigator of Abu Ghraib, when testifying before the Senate Armed Services Commitee on 9.9.2004, displayed a satellite image of Abu Ghraib to the Committee. By doing so, he, in essence, allowed the committee to “zoom out” from the halls and cells in which the events at Abu Ghraib occurred. He then could narrate the Committee through the photograph, explaining to them places where the violence occured (Tier 1a) and where it did not (the tent site, in the lower-left corner.) Here was compelling evidence that what the photographs showed occurring Tier 1a was spatially isolated and, in fact, not a widespread type of violence. Here, too, was contextualization-in-action. Rather than rely solely on a pre-existing context of viewership (whether it be old cognitive models of the world or long-standing ideological commitments to, say, support the troops), a new context of viewership, which included all sorts of evidence about the events depicted in the photographs, was forged. If one wanted to talk about those photographs, particularly if one wanted to talk about those photographs as representing official policies of detention and interrogation, one had to deal with the force of this new context, which seemed to line the facts up behind the opposing story.

What this suggests, perhaps, is that understanding may appropriately begin, but not end, with photographs. They are, as we often read, malleable things, whose edges are never edges, but diverse attachments to the world outside them.

For those who remember my previous post on Daniel Meadows’ digital storytelling, here’s my own stab at it. Plus some more.

On Friday, through a mixture of luck and illegal drugs (joking), I passed my 100wpm shorthand exam, making me an automatic figure of hate in our class. But before I did so, I made this video about how much I love it. Hope you enjoy.

Dan Bloom – Why I love Teeline shorthand

I thought you might like to see the efforts of some of my colleagues, too. The best video gets a bottle of bubbly – our tutor’s idea of getting a spirit of competition going. Who deserves that prize Cava?

Fiona Roberts – Sloightly on the Huh

James Franklin and Nick Moore – How to be a modern journalist

Ciaran Jones and Caroline Cook – Santa’s career change

Brendan Perring – Paradox

Hugh Morris – LIES

Ella Walker – My sister

Tom Victor & Joe Curtis – Chariots of Failure

Josie Allchin – My Shoes

Andrew Papworth – Trans-Siberian railway

Aimee Steen – Is online taking over?

Mike Brown – Billy Banks

I have two homes now, one in Woodbury with my parents and one in my Morris apartment with Anne.  It gets a little semantically confusing as I instinctively refer to both of them as “home,” but I figure it’s a small price to pay for reaching a state of being that, four years ago, I considered impossible.  The reason Morris is home to me now is not because I have spent almost four years here–time is immaterial.  Home is where you live with family, and I do that both in Woodbury and in Morris.

Most people have biological family, you know, the people who are obligated to love you.  My biological family is (in my opinion) pretty much the best ever, and I’ve always known I was lucky in that department.  But acquired family is luck on an entirely separate level.  These people are beyond friends–they truly are family–yet they aren’t obligated to love you; they love you by choice.  I think some people go through life largely without these people, and if I were the sort of person who used the word blessed, I would say I am truly blessed to have several in my life.  Just like family, I know they won’t leave me when times get tough, and just like family, where they are is home.

When I was a miserable freshman four Decembers ago, I decorated my half of the dorm room with tinsel and snowflakes and red bows and had never felt so far away from Christmas and from home.  Today I baked cookies and sang  songs and took pictures in front of the Christmas tree with Anne in one of my two fabulous homes.  I’m a rags to riches story, I guess…the lonliest girl in the world to the luckiest in four quick twists of a big, blue-green ball.

Posted by Audiegrl

Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter by Seth Grahame-Smith

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Seth Grahame-Smith

In the post today came (amongst other items, more of which later) a complementary bottle of Bailey’s Coffee Blend (highly recommended by the way). Not a huge bottle, I grant you, but a bottle nonetheless, and a fine time has been had from’t. My thanks to the kind Celts at Bailey’s Irish Cream for their generosity.

What is it about receiving packages that makes you feel special? Or makes Me feel special, at any rate… though we may have paid ridiculous amounts for it, the very fact that a brown paper parcel with a name on it (or, as in today’s case, nine brown paper parcels with MY name on them) happens to appear on the door-step brings such glee, especially when delivered during advent, that it makes us forget for a moment the harshness of the day or the true cost of the self-imposed-gift is wonderful. Or perhaps it’s just me. Either way, -I- feel good about it…

My flat also has, as of late, a mouse in it. I’ve named him Morris (as frankly the name isn’t widespread enough as it should be… and the alliteration was attractive to me); he seems to spend most of his life scuttling between the oven and the bins. We’ve tried barracading him out, we’ve tried humane mousetraps (and frankly I’d rather have a live mouse than a broken-backed one), but the wily fucker dodges the lot. Good for him. Wise Morris! Wise Morris Mouse.

Sitting on the sofa, watching panels of wood get literally beaten out of place from behind in order to make way for rodential passage gives a certain sense of perspective. Sure, we pay rent; we build; we maintain; we garden; we paint; we pander; we ignore… does this make the property more ‘Ours’? You’d be hard pushed to persuade a mouse he didn’t have the right to squat. The Borrowers seemed to take to it well.

Now, I’m not about to start telling everyone that property is theft and we’re just renting off of nature and so on and so forth, because frankly I’m not a wanker, but… well, it’s a thought isn’t it? I mean the mouse seems happy enough, and I’m damned if I’m going to move him along.

Moving the stream of consciousness along, I’m currently watching ‘Misfits’ on E4; an absolutely excellent piece of programming (not least for the MASSIVE ‘Big Lebowski’ reference it just made). This is what annoys me about the haters who don’t watch television; the ones who, when you ask them why, are all too happy to harp on about how it’s all shit. It’s not. If believing it’s all shit helps you to justify not making an effort, then go for it… but come on… stop the delusion; you’re being a prick.

As is the way with anything, the vast majority is shoddy, cater-to-the-lowest-common-denominator bullshit… but then it has to be! True excellence can only ever exist in the minority, otherwise it’s not above average, it’s just the norm. To sit there in your ivory tower and expect the gems to come to you because… what… because you’re worth it? Because everyone else has an obligation to please you? No. To reap the rewards you have to go out there on your own, wade through the heaps and heaps of tripe and find the gems bare-handed.

It is more than worth it.

If, on the other hand, you simply can’t be bothered then fine; that’s your choice. Good for you. Do not for a second, however, dare to make the assumption that just because you cannot be bothered to search there is nothing worth bothering about. There is. Accept the truth of your motivations and slit the high horse by the throat.

Bailey’s can be got for free; parcels can arrive unexpected; mice can be uplifting members of the household; television (or the internet, or magazines, or any media or art you may care to mention) DOES have wonderful stuff to offer. The only thing getting in the way is you. Accept it or change. Simple as that.

-Brice out.

Ho letto Il commesso invitata dal mio libraio di fiducia, che sostiene che Malamud sia un autore imprescindibile.
L’ho letto lentamente, al contrario di come faccio di solito. Mi sembrava uno spreco lasciar andare anche una sola parola, e, pu consapevole fin da subito che l’avrei letto e riletto, non mi volevo perdere nessuna atmosfera, nessuna suggestione.
La trama è semplice, e pochi i personaggi.
Una drogheria sull’orlo del fallimento in un quartiere popolare di New York fa da sfondo alle vite dell’onesto proprietario ebreo, della diffidente moglie e della figlia in cerca di marito.
Un commesso che non troppo casulamente si troverà a lavorare nel negozio, cambierà le loro vite.
E’ il dopoguerra americano, quello della rinascita ma anche quello dell’emarginazione, dei ghetti, degli ebrei, degli arrampicatori sociali, della malavita.

Non posso smettere di pensare a quelle pagine, scritte con la maestria che ricorda i grandi russi, ma senza strascichi romantici.
Ogni parola è stimolo di riflessione, mi viene da dire semplificando un pò, sul bene e il male, sulle forme che entrambi assumono.

Interessante anche l’intervista che fa da appendice al romanzo, quasi un prontuario per gli scrittori in erba.

13. By 2012 we will build a stronger coalition between the University of Minnesota Morris and the region to increase enrollment to 2,100 of which 1,800 will be on-campus students.

İngiliz zoolog, yazar ve ressam Desmond Morris’ten yaşama bakışınızı değiştirecek bir başka kitap daha… 1970’li yıllarda Türkiye’yi de sarsan kült kitap Çıplak Maymun’un (1967) çokyönlü eksantrik yazarı öğretmeye, şaşırtmaya ve eğlendirmeye devam ediyor. 2004’te yayımlanan Çıplak Kadın’ın ardından bu kez tepeden tırnağa çıplak kalan, erkek.

Çıplak Adam gözlerden penise, ellerden omuzlara erkek vücudunu mercek altına alırken, bilimsel ayrıntıların bile kolayca anlaşılabileceği eğlenceli bir okuma vaat ediyor.

Erkeklere gerçekten ihtiyaç var mı? Av peşinde koşmaya gerek kalmayınca avcılık dürtüsüne ne oldu? Hayatta kalma stratejisi içinde erkek tekeşli mi kalmalı? Eşcinsel erkekler daha mı başarılı? Erkeğin beden dilinin ardında yatanlar… Sünnettin eksileri ve artıları… Çıplak Adam’da Desmond Morris bir kez daha tabuları sarsarak hararetli tartışmalar yaratıyor…

Çeviren: Nurettin Elhüseyni
Yayın Yılı: 2009
296 sayfa
Kitap Kağıdı
15,5×23,5 cm
Ciltli
ISBN:6055813338
Dili: TÜRKÇE

Desmond Morris
NTV YAYINLARI

Morris Pemeket Laser Toner
Digunakan untuk memekatkan printer laser sebagai pengganti Film negatif pembuatan stempel karet.Lebih ekonomis untuk pembuatan Stempel Runaflek ( karet )

Rp.100.000

Morris Pemeket Laser Toner
Digunakan untuk memekatkan printer laser sebagai pengganti Film negatif pembuatan stempel karet.Lebih ekonomis untuk pembuatan Stempel Runaflek ( karet )

Rp.100.000

Nota di Pao: La notizia è questa e la pubblico, ma a me sembra una fesseria. Fermo restando che non fumo, resta il fatto che non si può imputare alla Philip Morris la colpa dell’enfisema polmonare. E’ il caso che ognuno si prenda le sue colpe, non siamo mica obbligati a fumare per legge e, perlomeno negli ultimi 25-30 anni, è stato più volte confermato che fumare fa male.

A questo punto vado a comprare una pistola, mi sparo in un piede e poi faccio causa alla Beretta? Ma siamo seri…

°°°

In Florida, la giuria di un tribunale ha condannato il produttore di sigarette Philip Morris a pagare oltre 300 milioni di dollari a una ex fumatrice di 61 anni, Cindy Naugle, costretta su una sedia a rotelle a causa di un enfisema polmonare. La giuria della Broward Circuit Court ha imposto il pagamento di 56,6 milioni di dollari per spese mediche passate e future alla società produttrice di tabacco.

La sentenza è tra le più onerose di casi simili dibattuti finora, visto che altri 244 milioni di dollari di multa sono stati comminati per danni materiali. Philip Morris ha annunciato che farà ricorso contro un verdetto che contiene ”numerose decisioni sbagliate”, come ha affermato il portavoce della società Murray Garnick. Philip Morris fa parte della Altria Group Inc.

Fonte: www.corriere.it

Couldn’t resist taking this picture of my husband and dog. Morris is definitely the best looking Pug on the block!

noul single morris feat. sonny flame-havana lover. suna bine, bine!

Morris ft Sonny Flame – Havana Lover