Good morning fine Crasstalkers. I know you may feel a bit out of sorts by the changes, but please give this a try because we think you will like the new design. Courage.
Please see the post from our fearless leader for more information about the redesign. We hope that we are making you look as fancy as you all deserve. While no news on Crasstalk is as important as what is happening on Crasstalk, here are a couple of stories from overnight. Continue reading
As they did with In Rainbows, prog-pop paranoiacs Radiohead just announced a new album with no lead-up, countdown or fanfare. The King of Limbs is their eighth album. The details of the release are listed below. I’m curious to see how their sound will have changed (if at all) after the Ink Spots-inspired, heavily orchestrated In Rainbows, and needless to say I pre-ordered the vinyl edition, because of course I would.
The cryptic “perhaps” aside might mean nothing, or maybe it means we’ll get something before Saturday. Either way, this is pretty exciting news!
Radiohead’s new record, The King Of Limbs, is presented here as the world’s first* Newspaper Album, comprising:
- Two clear 10″ vinyl records in a purpose-built record sleeve.
- A compact disc.
- Many large sheets of artwork, 625 tiny pieces of artwork and a full-colour piece of oxo-degradeable plastic to hold it all together.
- The Newspaper Album comes with a digital download that is compatible with all good digital media players.
- The Newspaper Album will be shipped on Monday 9th May 2011 you can, however, enjoy the download on Saturday 19th February 2011.
- Shipping is included in the prices shown.
- One lucky owner of the digital version of The King Of Limbs, purchased from this website, will receive a signed 2 track 12″ vinyl.
*perhaps
Newspaper Album + MP3 PRICE $48.00
Newspaper Album + WAV PRICE $53.00
Radiohead’s new record, The King Of Limbs, is presented here with a choice of two digital formats:
- MP3 version is a 320K constant bit rate file.
- WAV version is a full CD quality uncompressed digital audio file.
- One lucky owner of the digital version of The King Of Limbs, purchased from this website, will receive a signed 2 track 12″ vinyl.
The King of Limbs can be pre-ordered now and downloaded on Saturday 19th February 2011.
MP3 PRICE $9.00
WAV PRICE $14.00
We all asked it when we were children, or we really, really wanted to: How are babies made?
How does it work? He sticks what where?!?!
As a child I was fascinated by it all, and to my mother’s dismay, asked endless questions about peepee’s and weewee’s and whozits and whatzits galore (I also liked The Little Mermaid.)
My mother was conservative, but also a nurse and therefore believed it was better to answer the questions in a straightforward manner, lest I seek other more embarrassing sources for the questions that kept popping into my little head. Rather than describing things for my more visual-oriented mind, mom sat me down with a book instead. “Where Did I Come From” By Peter Mayle along with it’s companion, “What’s Happening To Me” became frequent sources of information for me growing up- I would read the descriptions of sex, ( One page reading, “By this time, the man wants to get as close to the woman as he can, because he’s feeling very loving to her. And to get really close the best thing he can do is lie on top of her and put his penis inside her, into her vagina.” left little to the imagination.) and look at the diagrams showing the stages of puberty in awe, feeling very enlightened for a 7 year old. Being let in on the big secret of the adult world opened the floodgates of my inquisitive mind. Did the man always lay on top? Did it always feel like “scratching an itch, but a lot nicer”? What happened after? How often did it happen? Did my parents do that? I never had “THE TALK” because the topic of sex and puberty was always open for discussion (In privacy, of course) with my mother.
This behavior on her part came from growing up in the 60’s with a cold-as-stone mother. Think Betty Draper, but instead of being the pampered wife of a New York Ad Executive, being the poor wife of an alcoholic farmer in the middle of nowhere. When my mom asked my Baba (Grandmother in Ukrainian) how she would know if she had gotten her period, Baba replied curtly, “You just will.” And the discussion was never to be brought up again. My mother never wanted her children to grow up distressed with unanswered questions and feeling shameful for having them in the first place, like she was made to feel.
Now I ask, how did you learn about the birds and the bees? And if you have children of your own, how have you dealt with their questions?
Dear Peasants and Assorted Self-Aggrandizers,
We have been up all night, my friends and I, beneath mosque lamps whose brass cupolas are bright as our souls, because like them they were illuminated by the internal glow of electric hearts. And trampling underfoot our native sloth on opulent Persian carpets, we have been discussing right up to the limits of logic and scrawling the paper with demented writing.
Our hearts were filled with an immense pride at feeling ourselves standing quite alone, like lighthouses or like the sentinels in an outpost, facing the army of enemy stars encamped in their celestial bivouacs. Alone with the engineers in the infernal stokeholes of great ships, alone with the black spirits which rage in the belly of rogue locomotives, alone with the drunkards beating their wings against the walls.
Then we were suddenly distracted by the rumbling of huge double decker trams that went leaping by, streaked with light like the villages celebrating their festivals, which the Po in flood suddenly knocks down and uproots, and, in the rapids and eddies of a deluge, drags down to the sea.
Then the silence increased. As we listened to the last faint prayer of the old canal and the crumbling of the bones of the moribund palaces with their green growth of beard, suddenly the hungry automobiles roared beneath our windows.
“Come, my friends!” I said. “Let us go! At last Mythology and the mystic cult of the ideal have been left behind. We are going to be present at the birth of the centaur and we shall soon see the first angels fly! We must break down the gates of life to test the bolts and the padlocks! Let us go! Here is they very first sunrise on earth! Nothing equals the splendor of its red sword which strikes for the first time in our millennial darkness.”
***
Ok, so I stole that from the Futurist Manifesto of 1909. I’m here to explain why the Crasstalk you once knew has shapeshifted into the internet-vanquishing beast you see now.
First of all, many of you said the old design was just a bit too crazy and anarchic. We think the new look will make it much easier to find the posts that interest you. In addition to the neat little slide show at the top, all the newest stories will appear in the menu at the top left of the page and in traditional blog format below.
The new template also enables us to categorize posts by topic and the site’s 80-some authors can now write up little blurbs explaining who they are to the readers. Lastly, the site seems to work a lot better in Firefox, which was a common complaint we were hearing.
So we hope you enjoy the new look. The main idea of the site hasn’t changed. It’s still the home of the web’s most self-aggrandizing commenters. The only difference is that it now looks a little bit less like the insane wall-diagram of a paranoid-schizophrenic.
For Authors:
There are a few new features you need to understand.
– The slideshow at the top shows the four most recent posts that have been assigned to the “Featured Posts” category. DO NOT put your post into this category unless you have a picture to go up in the slideshow. To add an image here, you must upload an image to the site using the Media button, then paste the image’s URL under “Post Options.” If you try to post a link from some other site, it won’t work. It has to be hosted by the Crasstalk’s Media Library.
– The About The Author box is controlled by the About box on your User page in WordPress.
– Feel free to suggest new categories.
I hate the Grammy Awards and usually ignore them, but I’m crashing at a friend’s place tonight and she hosted a little Grammys party so I had to sit through the whole thing…and it wasn’t bad! That’s not to say there weren’t plenty of boring and/or awkward moments to be had–and Katy Perry’s wedding-video montage was just the most mawkish thing–but they also got some things right this year, which was definitely a pleasant surprise. Here are some examples:
What did you all think? Who on earth is Esperanza Spalding, and why have I never heard of her? Could Justin Bieber have looked more ridiculous in his lil’ white tuxedo?
