Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert!

God, I'm old. By my ever-rising standards, he was too young to die.

I like quinoa all right, but with my larva phobia, I am put off by the squiggly white thing.

For tommyrot.

Awwww....

Wow, here's a catastrophe I'd never heard of....

PS General Slocum

The PS General Slocum was a sidewheel steam passenger ship, also known as a paddle steamer, built at Brooklyn, New York in 1891... She operated in the New York City area as an excursion ship for the next thirteen years under the same ownership.

On June 15, 1904, the General Slocum caught fire and burned to the waterline in New York's East River.[1] At the time of the accident she was on a chartered run carrying members of St. Mark's Evangelical Lutheran Church (German Americans from Little Germany, Manhattan) to a church picnic. An estimated 1,021 of the 1,342 people on board were killed. The General Slocum disaster was the New York area's worst disaster in terms of loss of life until the September 11, 2001 attacks.[2] The events surrounding the General Slocum fire have appeared in a number of books, plays and movies through the years.

...

This is one of the freaky things about the disaster:

Although the captain was ultimately responsible for the safety of passengers, no effort had been made to maintain or replace the ship's safety equipment. The fire hoses had been allowed to rot, and fell apart when the crew attempted to put out the fire. Likewise, the crew had never had a fire drill, and the lifeboats were tied up (some claim they were wired and painted in place)[9] and inaccessible. Survivors reported that the life preservers were useless and fell apart in their hands. Desperate mothers placed life jackets on their children and tossed them into the water, only to watch in horror as their children sank instead of floated. Most of those on board were women and children who, like most Americans of the time, could not swim; even victims who did not don the worthless life preservers found that their heavy wool clothing weighed them down in the water.[9]

It has been suggested that the manager of the life preserver manufacturer actually placed iron bars inside the cork preservers to meet minimum weight requirements at the time. Many of the life preservers had been filled with cheap and less effective granulated cork and brought up to proper weight by the inclusion of the iron weights. Canvas covers, rotted with age, split and scattered the powdered cork. Managers of the company (Nonpareil Cork Works) were indicted but not convicted. In any event, the life preservers had been manufactured in 1891 and had hung above the deck, unprotected from the elements, for thirteen years.[10]

This is why we don't let the invisible hand of the market set our life preserver standards.

The Uncomfortable Truths Well.

The intriguing collision of Tolkien, astronomy and xkcd.

Nice quote.

This is why we don't let the invisible hand of the market set our life preserver standards.

Why do you hate America, Hec? If people wanted life preservers that really worked, they'd pay for them.

edit: (and now I feel a bit nauseous and in need of brain Purell)

I've always loved that quote. It was nice to see them reference that (visually) in the extended RotK.

If people wanted life preservers that really worked, they'd pay for them.

Yeah. Hey poor people, have you tried, oh I dunno, NOT BEING POOR? I think that would work out a lot better for you.

I've always loved that quote. It was nice to see them reference that (visually) in the extended RotK.

I suspect that quote reflects something Tolkien saw on a battlefield somewhere.

Why do you hate America, Hec?

I love America! It's just that my America has a national anthem by Woody Guthrie, movies by Preston Sturges at the multiplex, Bob Wills and Duke Ellington and The Byrds on the radio, and Krazy Kat, Pogo and Peanuts on the comics page.

It's the other America that listens to Rush Limbaugh and knows who Snookie is that I have issues with.

Hey poor people, have you tried, oh I dunno, NOT BEING POOR?

New Republican plank? Bring back Debtor's Prison. I'm calling it for 2012.

I've always loved that quote. It was nice to see them reference that (visually) in the extended RotK.

They did a lot of little grace notes like that. Really the model for how to allude to things in the text that they don't have time to address directly on film.

Outtakes from the 1980 Floor Show. You can see Marianne's naked flank under that nun's habit at about 2:50 into it.