Overnight Open Thread (9-10-2014)

First Lines of Classic Novels in Emojis: A Quiz

Answers Here:

1.) "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times ." - Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities.
2.) "As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect." - Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis.
3.) "Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins." - Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita.
4.) "A screaming comes across the sky." - Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow.
5.) "It was a pleasure to burn." - Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451.
6.) "Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself." - Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway.
7.) "All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." - Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina.
8.) "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife." - Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice.
9.) "He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish." - Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea.
10.) "Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice." - Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude.
11.) "The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new." - Samuel Beckett, Murphy.
12.) "Call me Ishmael." - Herman Melville, Moby-Dick.

VDH: Are The Orcs Winning?

What a Real Rape Culture Looks Like

Ross Douthat:

Show me what a culture values, prizes, puts on a pedestal, and I'll tell you who is likely to get away with rape.

In Catholic Boston or Catholic Ireland, that meant men robed in the vestments of the church.

In Joe Paterno's pigskin-mad Happy Valley, it meant a beloved football coach.

In status-conscious, education-obsessed Manhattan, it meant charismatic teachers at an elite private school.

In Hollywood and the wider culture industry - still the great undiscovered country of sexual exploitation, I suspect - it has often meant the famous and talented, from Roman Polanski to the BBC's Jimmy Savile, robed in the authority of their celebrity and art.

And in Rotherham, it meant men whose ethnic and religious background made them seem politically untouchable, and whose victims belonged to a class that both liberal and conservative elements in British society regard with condescension or contempt.

A example in real life of the apocryphal Voltaire quote: "To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize."

During the 80s This Happened

The Lucrative World of Government Civil Forfeitures

• Only a sixth of the seizures were legally challenged, in part because of the costs of legal action against the government. But in 41 percent of cases - 4,455 - where there was a challenge, the government agreed to return money. The appeals process took more than a year in 40 percent of those cases and often required owners of the cash to sign agreements not to sue police over the seizures.


• Hundreds of state and local departments and drug task forces appear to rely on seized cash, despite a federal ban on the money to pay salaries or otherwise support budgets. The Post found that 298 departments and 210 task forces have seized the equivalent of 20 percent or more of their annual budgets since 2008.

The fact that the money was returned in nearly half the cases as soon as someone legally resisted the seizure is a pretty strong indicator that civil forfeiture is mostly opportunistic grift on the part of local governments.

RIP Jaws

Vox Now Just Trolling

Outside Now Considered Harmful to Children

Horrific and disturbing if true.

Why You Can't Have Roquefort Cheese Anymore

In early August, these cheeses and many more landed on an FDA Import Alert because the agency found bacterial counts that exceeded its tolerance level. Cheeses on Import Alert can't be sold in the U.S. until the producer documents corrective action and five samples test clean, a process that can take months.

Of course, French creameries haven't changed their recipes for any of these classic cheeses. But their wheels are flunking now because the FDA has drastically cut allowances for a typically harmless bacterium by a factor of 10.

Also there are rumors that these cheese varieties have an exceptionally strong Cheese Boson Fields that could be used for evil purposes.

Now That's a Big Chunk of Diamond

232-Carat white diamond recovered at Cullinan.

8 Antarctic Traditions

Well I had heard of the 300 Club but not Icestock or the Ross Island Cup.

Redesigned Choking Posters

Apparently many cities require that restaurants put up posters showing what to do in the event of someone choking, but they didn't specify an official poster. So restaurants have been getting creative.

The Group knows what you did.

Tonight's post brought to you by George RR Martin isn't slow - he's just verbose:

Notice: Posted by implicit permission of XXX S.A. Please send intelligence to Ace. Also be prepared with extra mags and survival gear tomorrow.

posted by Maetenloch at 10:39 PM

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