Everything is Interesting
Papa Grows Funk is a funk band from New Orleans.
The band was started by frontman John ‘Papa’ Gros in early 2000, developing from a series of Monday night jam sessions helmed by Gros at New Orleans’ Maple Leaf Bar. Gros would invite some friends down to play, and the impromptu jams became a common bond for a handful of musicians, including guitarist June Yamagishi, sax player Jason Mingledorf, bassist Marc Pero and drummer Jeffery ‘Jellybean’ Alexander.
Ivan Neville (b. 1959) is a multi-instrumentalist musician, singer, and songwriter. He is the son of Aaron Neville and nephew to members of The Neville Brothers. While it was never a huge charting song, Neville’s ‘Why Cant I Fall In Love’ become a sleeper fan-favorite, gaining fame from the 1990 Soundtrack to the Christian Slater film, ‘Pump Up the Volume.’ Neville has played with and appeared on several Neville Brother records, as well as his father’s solo records.
He performed in Bonnie Raitt’s band from 1985 to 1987. He also contributed keyboards to two Rolling Stones albums, 1986’s ‘Dirty Work’ and 1994’s ‘Voodoo Lounge’ as well as being a member of Keith Richards’ solo band the X-Pensive Winos. In 1988, he toured with Richards. In 2003, he formed his own band Dumpstaphunk. When the levees failed in New Orleans in 2005, Neville joined The New Orleans Social Club and recorded the benefit album ‘Sing Me Back Home’ with producers Leo Sacks and Ray Bardani at Wire Studios in Austin, Texas.
Quiverfull is a movement among some conservative evangelical Christian couples chiefly in the United States, but with some adherents in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Britain and elsewhere. It promotes procreation, and sees children as a blessing from God, eschewing all forms of birth control, including natural family planning and sterilization. The movement derives its name from Psalm 127:3-5, where many children are metaphorically referred to as the arrows in a full quiver.
Some refer to the Quiverfull position as Providentialism (the belief that God’s will is evident in all occurrences), while other sources have referred to it as a manifestation of natalism (the promotion of child-bearing). Some of the beliefs held among Quiverfull adherents have been held among various Christians during prior eras of history. As birth control methods advanced during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, many conservative Christian movements issued official statements against their use. Continue reading
Natalism [neyt-l-iz-uhm] is a belief that promotes human reproduction. The term is taken from the Latin adjective form for ‘birth,’ ‘natalis.’ Natalism promotes child-bearing and glorifies parenthood. It typically advocates policies such as limiting access to abortion and contraception, as well as creating financial and social incentives for the population to reproduce.
The degree of natalism is individual; the extreme end is ‘Natalism’ as a life stance (with the first letter capitalized), which holds natalism as of ultimate importance and everything else is only good to the extent it serves this purpose. The more moderate stance holds that there ought to be a higher rate of population growth than what is currently mainstream in industrialized countries. Philosophic motivations for natalism may include that of considering value in bringing potential future persons into existence. Continue reading
‘Breeder‘ is a denigrating term for heterosexuals used in LGBT slang. It is often used pejoratively. The use in homosexual groups is drawn from the fact that their sexual activity cannot lead to reproduction, where as heterosexual sexual intercourse can, with implicit mocking by connotation of animal husbandry, the original usage of the word. Along these lines a particularly fecund woman may be referred to as a ‘brood sow,’ implying low ethical standards and an absence of due diligence in the reproductive process.
‘Breeder’ may also be used as a derogatory term by childfree people of any sexual orientation, to refer to parents who focus on their children and abandon their previous friends and lifestyle. The phrases ‘breeder, not parent’ (BNP) or ‘parent, not breeder’ (PNB) are used by some childfree communities to differentiate between what they regard as positive and negative parenting.
The Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, or VHEMT (pronounced ‘vehement’), is a movement which calls for the voluntary gradual self-extinction of the human species through abstaining from reproduction. VHEMT’s motto is ‘May we live long and die out.’ Proponents of VHEMT concepts are characterized either as supporters, or as volunteers (extinctionists).
Les U. Knight of Portland, Oregon is generally cited as founding VHEMT in 1991, although he does not take credit for it. Knight is the owner of vhemt.org and acts as a spokesman for the movement. In his mid-twenties, he underwent a vasectomy in support of his conviction that, ‘It’s obvious that the intentional creation of another [human being] by anyone anywhere can’t be justified today.’ During the 1970s, he joined the organization Zero Population Growth. Continue reading
Last Tango in Paris (Italian: ‘Ultimo Tango a Parigi’) is a 1972 Italian romantic drama film directed by Bernardo Bertolucci which portrays a recent American widower who takes up an anonymous sexual relationship with a young, soon-to-be-married Parisian woman. It stars Marlon Brando, Maria Schneider, and Jean-Pierre Léaud. The film’s raw portrayal of sexual violence and emotional turmoil led to international controversy and drew various levels of government censorship. The MPAA gave the film an X rating upon release in the United States. After revisions were made to the MPAA ratings code, it was classified as an NC-17 in 1997.
The idea grew from Bernardo Bertolucci’s sexual fantasies, stating ‘he once dreamed of seeing a beautiful nameless woman on the street and having sex with her without ever knowing who she was.’
Hair of the dog is a colloquial expression in the English language predominantly used to refer to alcohol that is consumed with the aim of lessening the effects of a hangover. The expression originally referred to a method of treatment of a rabid dog bite by placing hair from the dog in the wound. The use of the phrase as a metaphor for a hangover treatment dates back at least to the time of Shakespeare. It is possible that the phrase was used to justify an existing practice, ‘similia similibus curantur’ (Latin: ‘like cures like’), which dates back to ancient Greece.
Similarly, in the 1930’s cocktails known as Corpse Revivers were served by hotel staff to guests ailing from too much drink. Continue reading
Wife Acceptance Factor (WAF) refers to design elements that increase the likelihood a wife will approve the purchase of expensive consumer electronics products such as home theater systems and personal computers. Stylish, compact, unobtrusive forms and appealing colors are commonly considered WAF. The term is a tongue-in-cheek play on electronics jargon such as ‘form factor’ and ‘power factor’ and derives from the gender stereotype that men are predisposed to appreciate gadgetry and performance criteria whereas women must be wooed by visual and aesthetic factors.
Larry Greenhill first used the term in 1983, writing for ‘Stereophile’ magazine, but Greenhill credited fellow reviewer and music professor Lewis Lipnick with the coining of the term. Lipnick himself traces the origin to the 1950s when hi-fi loudspeakers were so large that they overwhelmed most living rooms. Lipnick’s wife, actress Lynn-Jane Foreman, arrived at a different term: Marriage Interference Factor (MIF). Foreman suggested that audiophile husbands should balance their large and ugly electronic acquisitions with gifts to the wife made on the basis of similar expense, with opera tickets, jewelry and vacations abroad among the suggestions.
Google Goggles is an image recognition application used for searches based on pictures taken by handheld devices. The program proposed will be able to identify virtually anything. Currently the system can identify various labels or landmarks, allowing users to learn about such items without needing a text-based search. The system can identify products barcodes or labels that allow users to search for similar products and prices, and save codes for future reference, similar to the failed CueCat of the late ’90s, but with more functionality. The system will also recognize printed text and using optical character recognition (OCR) produce a text snippet, and in some cases even translate the snippet into another language.
Google is currently working to make the system able to recognize different plants and leaves, which can aid curious persons, those wishing to avoid toxic plants, and botanists and environmentalists searching for rare plants. Goggle applications are in the process of being used for metaverse virtual world image indexing and catalog applications. Regional coordinates are cammed by avatar-based movement in virtual camera scripted vehicles. In 2011, version 1.3 was released; it can solve Sudoku puzzles.
Word Lens is an augmented reality translation application for the iPhone from Quest Visual. It uses the built-in phone camera to identify text, such as a sign or a menu, in one language and have the words shown translated into another language. The words are displayed in the original context, on the original background, without connection to the internet. When it was released in 2010 only English and Spanish were supported. Word Lens is best used on clearly printed text and was not designed to translate handwritten or stylized fonts.
This application was created to help tourists understand signs and menus. The application was not designed to read books, but journalist Ben Rooney managed to understand a page from ‘Harry Potter y el Prisionero de Azkaban.’ The Google Goggles application for Android and iPhone also has the capability to translate text or identify objects in an image, but it requires users to take a picture with their phones, and an active internet connection. Word Lens does it on the fly, meaning it’s interpreting frames in video, almost in real time.
The Schreiber theory is a writer-centered approach to film criticism which holds that the principal author of a film is generally the screenwriter rather than the director. The term was coined by David Kipen, Director of Literature at the US National Endowment for the Arts. In his 2006 book ‘The Schreiber Theory: A Radical Rewrite of American Film History,’ Kipen argues that the influential 1950s-era Auteur theory has wrongly skewed analysis towards a director-centered view of film. In contrast, Kipen believes that the screenwriter has a greater influence on the quality of a finished work and that knowing who wrote a film is ‘the surest predictor’ of how good it will be.
Kipen acknowledges that his writer-centered approach is not new, and pays tribute to earlier critics of Auteur theory such as Pauline Kael and Richard Corliss. He believes that the Auteurist approach remains dominant, however, and that films have suffered as a result of the screenwriter’s role being undervalued. Kipen refers to his book as a ‘manifesto’ and in an interview with the magazine ‘SF360’ stated that he wished to use Schreiber theory as ‘a lever to change the way people think about screenwriting, and movies in general.’ In seeking a name for his theory, Kipen chose the Yiddish word for writer – ‘schreiber’ – in honor of the many early American screenwriters who had Yiddish as their mother tongue.
