Question 29e: The Real Reason Why McRaven's At SOTU
q29e:
The reason Admiral William McRaven, the Commander of the Special Operations Command, deserves the extraordinary and public recognition he’ll get tonight is not — I repeat not — because of his role in planning and commanding the DevGru SEALs who killed Osama bin Laden last year.
Surely,…
La Sera-Please Be My Third Eye (video by Vice Cooler)
New lp Sees the Light out March 27, 1012!!!!
Tim Barber—the photographer, curator, proprietor of tinyvices.com, and former Vice photo editor—recently brought us this treasure trove of photos that his mother and father, along with their fellow hippies, took during their halcyon days of gettin’ back to the land in the 1970s. First we said, “Wow, your folks weren’t fucking around!” Then we said, “Wow, these pictures are beautiful! What the hell are we doing living in this urban death trap when we could be out there in the crisp, cool snow with the goats and the eagles?” Then Tim went us one further and handed over a piece of a memoir that his father, Robin, has been working on about those long-gone days. And so here it is: a glimpse of country life courtesy of a really cool dad.
Yelle - Comme Un Enfant (Freaks Remix) (by nathanjbarnatt)
Kickstarter is annoying but like please please please help make this Bill Callahan doc happen.
PS We were thinking of starting a rumor that in certain locales they’re running advertisements for Bank of America set to the tune of Callahan’s “America!” If anyone has any advice on how to start rumors, let us know.
There are two reasons, basically, why soccer lends itself to spectatorial boredom. One is that the game is mercilessly hard to play at a high level. (You know, what with the whole “maneuver a small ball via precisely coordinated spontaneous group movement with 10 other people on a huge field while 11 guys try to knock it away from you, and oh, by the way, you can’t use your arms and hands” element.) The other is that the gameplay almost never stops — it’s a near-continuous flow for 45-plus minutes at a stretch, with only very occasional resets. Combine those two factors and you have a game that’s uniquely adapted for long periods of play where, say, the first team’s winger goes airborne to bring down a goal kick, but he jumps a little too soon, so the ball kind of kachunks off one side of his face, then the second team’s fullback gets control of it, and he sees his attacking midfielder lurking unmarked in the center of the pitch, so he kludges the ball 20 yards upfield, but by the time it gets there the first team’s holding midfielder has already closed him down and gone in for a rough tackle, and while the first team’s attacking midfielder is rolling around on the ground the second team’s right back runs onto the loose ball, only he’s being harassed by two defenders, so he tries to knock it ahead and slip through them, but one of them gets a foot to it, so the ball sproings up in the air … etc., etc., etc. Both teams have carefully worked-out tactical plans that influence everything they’re trying to do. But the gameplay is so relentless that it can’t help but go through these periodic bouts of semi-decomposition.
But — and here’s the obvious answer to the “Why are we doing this?” question — those same two qualities, difficulty and fluidity, also mean that soccer is uniquely adapted to produce moments of awesome visual beauty.
Lana Del Rey - Born To Die [Clams Casino Remix]
IMG_5261 copy by Penny Hyde on Flickr.
<3 Best friends <3
Douglas Coupland on coincidence and déja vu
I take comfort in the fact that there are two human moments that seem to be doled out equally and democratically within the human condition—and that there is no satisfying ultimate explanation for either. One is coincidence, the other is déja vu. It doesn’t matter if you’re Queen Elizabeth, one of the thirty-three miners rescued in Chile, a South Korean housewife or a migrant herder in Zimbabwe—in the span of 365 days you will pretty much have two déja vus as well as one coincidence that makes you stop and say, “Wow, that was a coincidence.”
The thing about coincidence is that when you imagine the umpteen trillions of coincidences that can happen at any given moment, the fact is, that in practice, coincidences almost never do occur. Coincidences are actually so rare that when they do occur they are, in fact memorable. This suggests to me that the universe is designed to ward of coincidence whenever possible—the universe hates coincidence—I don’t know why—it just seems to be true. So when a coincidence happens, that coincidence had to work awfully hard to escape the system. There’s a message there. What is it? Look. Look harder. Mathematicians perhaps have a theorem for this, and if they do, it might, by default be a theorem for something larger than what they think it is.
What’s both eerie and interesting to me about déja vus is that they occur almost like metronomes throughout our lives, about one every six months, a poetic timekeeping device that, at the very least, reminds us we are alive. I can safely assume that my thirteen year old niece, Stephen Hawking and someone working in a Beijing luggage-making factory each experience two déja vus a year. Not one. Not three. Two.
The underlying biodynamics of déja vus is probably ascribable to some sort of tingling neurons in a certain part of the brain, yet this doesn’t tell us why they exist. They seem to me to be a signal from larger point of view that wants to remind us that our lives are distinct, that they have meaning, and that they occur throughout a span of time. We are important, and what makes us valuable to the universe is our sentience and our curse and blessing of perpetual self-awareness.
Jock Jams: How The Song "Seven Nation Army" Conquered The Sports World(via @Deadspin)
The march toward musical empire began on Oct. 22, 2003, in a bar in Milan, Italy, 4,300 miles away from Detroit. Fans of Club Brugge K.V., in town for their team’s group-stage UEFA Champions League clash against European giant A.C.
TeBowie
SHUT UP AND PLAY THE HITS Trailer
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