Ohio deputy fired for making inmates dance
Kantele Franko, Associated Press:
A northeast Ohio sheriff fired a deputy for ordering five jail inmates to dance to a song by Usher in exchange for privileges such as using a phone or microwave, the sheriff’s office said Thursday.
AAAAAARGH
Modern Mechanix: This Gun Replies to “Hands Up!” With Bullets
This is probably the best post in the history of Modern Mechanix. From the May 1929 issue of Modern Mechanics comes a machine gun vest. That’s a vest with a machine gun in it. That fires. Bullets.
GoldenEye Spectrum Emulation Unlocked
New ROM hack of GoldenEye 007 for the N64!
Little benownst to the world all this time, GoldenEye (N64) has a fully-functional ZX Spectrum 48x emulator built into it. By feeding it a proper Spectrum monitor program and calling menu 25 to load a snapshot, any Spectrum 48x program can be run.
Waiiiiiiiiiiiit a minute.
What.
Itagaki: Tecmo Tricked Me Into Releasing Dead Or Alive 2
From a piece by Chris Kohler for Wired’s Game|Life blog:
As the deadline of the PlayStation 2’s launch grew closer, the company’s sales general manager approached Itagaki at his desk [about the development of the port of Dead or Alive 2].
“Can I borrow a copy of this so I can play it a little?” Itagaki remembers the manager saying.
“I said, sure, yeah, go on, and I handed him the disc which was still under development,” Itagaki said. “But this disc was never played by them.”
Instead, Itagaki said to the crowd of game developers and executives, “it was taken into a factory for production on that day without me knowing it.”
What the fuck.
Western canon to be rewritten as three-volume graphic novel
Alison Flood, The Guardian:
From The Epic of Gilgamesh to Infinite Jest via Dante, Dangerous Liaisons and Dubliners, the western canon is set to be turned into a 1,344-page, three-volume graphic novel.
The ambitious project from New York press Seven Stories is being hailed as the “graphic publishing literary event of the year”. Each of the 189 works of literature covered is being interpreted by a comics artist, with 130 illustrators contributing to the project including Robert Crumb, Will Eisner and Hunt Emerson. The first volume of The Graphic Canon – “From The Epic of Gilgamesh to Shakespeare to Dangerous Liaisons” – is out in April, to be followed by the second (“Kubla Khan to the Brontë Sisters to The Picture of Dorian Gray”) in July and the third (“From Heart of Darkness to Hemingway to Infinite Jest”) in October.
My original reaction to this was going to be “what the dickens,” but then I realized what I did there and shot myself.
Douglas County Assemblyman Kite wants to bring back ‘Brianna’s Law’ for 2013 Legislature
One of the most contentious crimes in recent Nevada history was the murder of Brianna Denison, a young woman who was killed by serial rapist James Biela. In response to the case, a bill dubbed “Brianna’s Law,” which would require anyone arrested on suspicion of a felony (not necessarily convicted) to have their DNA sampled, was introduced in the Nevada Legislature in 2011. It blasted through the Assembly, but it wasn’t taken up by the full Senate largely because of privacy and financial concerns. Samantha Stone wrote up a long piece on the bill for Nevada News Channel if this actually interests you.
The Nevada legislature meets only every other year, so the next time the bill can be reintroduced is 2013. According to Reno Gazette-Journal political reporter Ray Hagar, Assemblyman Kelly Kite of Minden plans to do just that if he’s re-elected:
“My grandson is in Afghanistan right now and they took his fingerprints and DNA and he will never have a chance to get that taken out of the file,” Kite said. “If you are arrested for a felony, I don’t see where you would have more rights than someone defending our country.”
Hey jackass, maybe we should just not treat our veterans like shit, how about that.
Sleeping Florida man arrested in drive-thru, offers cops taco as I.D. from inside burning car
In a world… where flaming tacos are government I.D.…
The Most Surreal Hour of Television So Far This Year: The Good Wife – “Bitcoin For Dummies”
Okay so we’re not even a whole month through this year yet but it’s still true dammit.
Anyway, last night’s episode of The Good Wife, “Bitcoin For Dummies,” was unsurprisingly about Bitcoin. Highlights of this bizarre episode include:
I was cracking up the entire time at this amazing mess of a program.
This is the title art by Duncan McLean for the game Fish! by Magnetic Scrolls. I don’t want to be too presumptuous, but I think you’ll agree with me when I say that this should never have existed.
This setting of the picture is courtesy of the fansite The Magnetic Scrolls Chronicles.
I just finished the book The Prodigal Tongue by Mark Abley a few days ago. It was a pretty enjoyable look at the influence of other languages on English and the influence of English on other languages. Here’s a review by The Telegraph if you’re interested.
The Madidi titi, a species of South American monkey, was mentioned in the book. From Wikipedia:
Rather than choosing a name themselves, [British biologist Robert] Wallace, his team, and WCS auctioned off the naming rights to raise funds for FUNDESNAP (Fundación para el Desarrollo del Sistema Nacional de Áreas Protegidas), the nonprofit organization that maintains Madidi National Park. The online casino GoldenPalace.com, one of over a dozen bidders, paid US$650,000 to have the species named after them.