Moments to chase during Weekend 2

Posted on February 1, 2013 by admins

Dr Dre Beats One of the advantages of a double-weekend Coachella is that those attending the first installment can help advise the next 75,000 entering the gates Friday. We seen the good, have endured the bad, can explain why, for example, it imperative that you see Pulp, can convey the regret you may feel by missing Amon Tobin, suggest that if you want too see Gotye, get there early, because last weekend it was insane.

Despite the fact that all anyone wants to talk about is the Tupac hologram (which is, sadly, already becoming the most anticipated moment of Weekend 2), a lot of cameos, surprises, inspired moments and overall musical joy went down during the first weekend. And since the lineup is repeating exactly, Coachella 2 weekenders are advised to peruse the list of highlights below, make a few notations and stage-jump accordingly.

1. Looking for inspired between-song banter and crowd interaction? Stick around the main stage for both Pulp and the Hives. On Pulp fantastic Friday night slot on the main stage, frontman Jarvis Cocker walked around with a bunch of grapes in his suit coat, which he tossed out, along with candy, to fans throughout the night. And Hives lead singer Howlin Pelle Almqvist, before acknowledging himself to be annoying, conveyed the following of his mind frame: “I a little bit scared, but I also kinda horny right now.”

2. On Sunday afternoon at the Sahara tent, British dubstep producers Nero, after delivering a deep, dynamic set of glacial bass, dropped in the epic closing minute of Prince “Let Go Crazy” — you know, that extended guitar solo, the big, slow build-down that lasts longer than it probably should, but in a great way. The volume was of such height that every note echoed across the polo grounds. (Fifteen minutes later and four stages away, Justice sampled Prince “Kiss.”)

3. Before hitting Coachella, make sure to memorize all the words to Jay-Z and Kanye West “. in Paris,” because it was sampled, remixed and refracted on at least four different occasions in some way. The best, though, was when Flying Lotus dropped it in. It was as if the entire Gobi Tent had just won the lottery.

4. Be forewarned: Product placement is rampant this year. The strangest was when, prior to Snoop and Dr. Dre Sunday night main stage gig, the “Beats by Dre” logo appeared on the jumbo screen as though this were a production in need of credits. Too, a sponsorship agreement means the only beer available is Heineken. And in another keen bit of marketing, Paris Hilton had prominent placement in the crowd for Calvin Harris. Not coincidentally, she got a dance album coming out this year.

5. Beware of ghosts. Tupac Shakur was resurrected Sunday night; as a result, there a spectre on the loose, and he still got amazing abs.

6. If you don like cheesy high-pitched alto saxophone solos, avoid Destroyer like the plague on Saturday afternoon. His show, while beguiling, is rife wtih soft rock references that may or may not be embedded with a wink. The Rapture busts out the alto during its set too. Want to sing along with a song that should define this generation? Hit the Kaiser Chiefs on the Coachella stage for its great ditty “Never Miss a Beat.” As the hipster youth mingled with the bikinied and tan, Chiefs singer Ricky Wilson was barking out the chorus: “Take a look at the kids on the street! No they never miss a beat!”

8. When seeing Radiohead on Saturday night, be aware of the message that singer Thom Yorke conveyed to the crowd during Weekend 1: “We play new songs to make sure we still alive. We are, in fact, still alive.” So if the band wants to perform a bunch of new stuff, cut it some slack.

9. If you like the Black Keys, for heaven sake see Gary Clark, Jr. on Friday afternoon. His set was, for sheer force and confidence, more impressive.

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Evil Women In Literature

Posted on February 1, 2013 by admins

Cheap Beats By Dre In literature as in so-called “real” life, evil is, by far, the purview of the male gender; it is men who are the villains, evildoers, rascals and killers.

Women, by virtue of their historical status as nurturers, and for centuries dominated by men and considered mere breeders, have been characterized by time and custom as the gentler sex, compassionate and kind, more merciful and tenderhearted of the genders. But Cheap Beats they have not always been portrayed as shrinking violets in using what was once characterized as “women’s wiles” to manipulate their more dominant male counterparts to act in ways that have resulted in various degrees of evil.

It was, after all, Eve, persuaded by the snake to eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge who then seduced the feckless Adam to take the bite that got them thrown out of the garden of Eden and started, in arguably mythological terms, the whole contentious and bloody history of the human race.

Manipulation of men, using her considerable tool chest of “wiles” to do both good and evil deeds, appears to be the weapon of choice, with rare exceptions, to exercise female power.

From Rebekka playing her trick on the dying Isaac to induce Jacob to impersonate his brother Esau to get his father’s blessing, through Jezebel and Lady Macbeth to Brigid O’Shaugnessay who uses her wiles to kill Sam Spade’s partner in The Maltese Falcon, literature has been filled with women who ruthlessly exploit their sexuality to get a man to do their murderous bidding.

But changing times and the recent empowerment of women are beginning to alter the landscape. It is now not only commonplace, but also acceptable that women can independently exercise their own evil intent without going through a male surrogate.

Ironically, I discovered this as I composed my latest novel The Serpent’s Bite and created the character of Courtney Temple, a failed actress driven to evil deeds by frustration, celebrity and greed. Numerous readers confirmed, what I must have subconsciously suspected, that women were capable of committing horrible deeds on their own hook, upfront and solo.

A bit of literary sleuthing indicates that a number of literary ladies have been pretty good at performing foul deeds on their own. Nurse Ratchet of One Flew Over the Cuckoo Nest, Mrs. Danvers of Rebecca, Annie Wilkes of Misery, Cathy Ames of East of Eden needed no male surrogates to perform their evil deeds.

There are the Phyllis Diertrichsons of Double Indemnity and Cora Papadakis of The Postman Always Rings Twice who push their erotically inflamed lovers to kill their husbands, and one must not discount the female capacity for vengeance, especially when betrayed by men, like Mrs. Havisham of Great Expectations or those women who cannot inspire love in the man they choose like Scarlett O’Hara, and take it out ruthlessly on those who find her irresistible.

One can expect a lot more female evildoers to populate the literary landscape as women move to parity with men in every endeavor. The day might be Beats By Dre Cheap coming that there will be a plethora of Madame Jekylls who will find the formula to turn themselves into Madame Hydes and perform deeds that forever erase the centuries old categorizing of the gentler sex.

A search for diamonds in Canada’s far north turned up a rare fossil a chunk of a redwood sealed in volcanic rock more than 50 million years ago.

A study of the well-preserved specimen, which also contains a sliver of amber, shows that the now-icy region where it was found had a swampier past.

The wood was found a few years ago in a kimberlite pipe, named the Panda pipe, over 1,000 feet (315 meters) below Earth’s surface at the Ekati diamond mine, just south of the Arctic Circle in Canada’s Northwest Territories, the researchers say. A kimberlite pipe, a type of volcanic pipe, forms when kimberlite magma pushes through deep fractures in the Earth’s crust to create a vertical tubelike structure that’s wider at the top like a carrot. Kimberlites have the deepest origins of all magmas on Earth and when they cool, they leave behind rocks dense in crystals, sometimes holding diamonds.

The researchers, who report their findings in a Sept. 19 paper in the journal PLoS ONE, say the site of the Panda pipe was covered with a forest of Metasequoia, similar to today’s dawn redwoods, during the early Eocene. The kimberlite eruption that occurred there about 53.3 million years ago opened a hole in the Earth’s surface, sucking in some of those redwoods. “Then it cooled, and the wood was locked in the volcanic rock,” Wolfe told LiveScience in an email.

The specimen may be the oldest of its kind found in the region, surpassing wood from the Axel Heiberg fossil forest in northern Canada by millions of years. Wolfe said that for its age, Beats By Dre Outlet it is by far the best preserved, which is important in a region where glaciers have scraped other traces of prehistory off the map.

“All sedimentary rocks and their fossils have been wiped clear by glaciation in this part of the world,” Wolfe said. “Thus we have, deeply buried in these rocks, vestiges of ancient ecosystems and a sole source of fossils pertaining to the character of Eocene forests in subarctic Canada.”

Since the fossil is in such good condition, it gives scientists a better picture of the region’s climate in the early Eocene. By measuring the ratio of oxygen and hydrogen isotopes (atoms of the same element with different numbers of neutrons) in the wood’s well-preserved cellulose, the researchers found that western Canadian subarctic temperatures were 21 to 30 degrees F (12 to 17 degrees C) warmer and four times wetter than they are today.

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Invasive Species You Can Eat PHOTOS

Posted on February 1, 2013 by admins

Beats By Dre After habitat loss and global warming, invasive species are probably the third leading cause of global extinctions. and the Caribbean hunting and fishing for invasive species in order to try eating them for a book entitled, Eating Aliens. When humans decide that something in the wild is good to eat we are pretty good at running through it unless legal limits are put in place. I hypothesized that encouraging people to eat these species could leverage human self-interest to help protect the native species and ecosystems at risk from invasive species.

My mother says that I was a picky eater as a kid. In retrospect, I must have been pretty picky as an adult, too. While working on Eating Aliens I ended up eating everything from armadillos to iguanas. It turns out that most of the world tastes pretty similar to chicken, beef, and pork. My whole idea of what sort of things I would consider eating has totally been changed by the work that went into the book. Along the way I found that some of these things are more practical than others as food for the masses, but nothing turned out to be downright inedible.

Our problems with invasive species are mostly problems with human behavior. As human beings we have a collective responsibility to fix the ecological problems that humans have created. Tough as it is to swallow, that means that someone has to be the reaper. For 16 months that someone was me. These are some of the photos that I took along the way (with a few taken by the Swedish filmmaker, Helenah Swedberg, who came along for a while to film me and ended up as my girlfriend). I haven’t included anything too gory, so the squeamish are welcome.

SnakeheadsSnakeheads, or the so-called ‘frankenfish’ aren’t so strange when you meet one in person. for use as food and for the aquarium trade before being illegally dumped in the Potomac River in Maryland. A voracious ambush predator, it has sharp teeth that can rip larger prey in half. But once it’s in the kitchen, it’s just another fish. Snakeheads have a taste and texture nearly identical to swordfish. I served this one to a group of journalists who agreed that there is nothing scary about this fish after the first bite.

Black Spiny-Tail Iguana The black spiny-tail iguana might look like a miniature dinosaur, devour endangered species like scrub jay chicks and gopher tortoise hatchlings, and dig dangerous holes along foundation walls. But it has one thing in its favor — it tastes like chicken (with a texture like crab). This Central American species was dumped on Gasparilla Island off the Gulf Coast of Florida by a pet-owner who grew tired of caring for them. It has recently made its way to the mainland and could eventually pose a threat to the rest of Florida.

Armored CatfishAfter my first trip to Florida to hunt invasive lizards, I came back again to catch invasive fish with famed professional iguana hunter, George Cera (in the background). George and I drove around for a few days looking for any kind of water where we could throw nets for tilapia and other invasive fish to eat. Here, my net holds an armored catfish, native to the Amazon Basin. These probably became established via dumping of unwanted fish from home aquariums. We constantly had to pick up and move to a new spot in our pursuit of invasive tilapia on account of the alligators. This big eight footer grabbed the leash of my net, gave it a good jerk, and then didn’t want to let go. He knows that there might be a meal on the bottom end and there is definitely a meal at the top (me). As herbivores, tilapia don’t often bite a baited hook and nets are the most practical way of catching them.

Feral Pigs Invasive wild hogs aren’t very appetizing to look at, but this bacon that I butchered from a big Texan sow certainly is. I’ve found that wild pork tends to be leaner than their farmed relatives but the flavor is often superior. Iberian ham is prized for coming from pigs that are allowed to run and exercise and which have been finished on a diet of mostly acorns. Wild American pork hunted in the autumn is pretty much the same thing, only it’s free and local. Feral pigs cause massive environmental destruction every year, transforming habitat by their constant rooting, as well as directly feeding on many endangered species.

NutriaSure, nutria look like giant rats. But don’t try to tell me that lobsters look any more appetizing than these guys do. to be farmed for its fur. When prices collapsed, they were released. Nutria are ubiquitous around much of the Gulf Coast, especially in Louisiana. Their burrowing habit erodes riverbanks and levies and their feeding habits tend to devastate vegetation that native wildlife depend on. I bagged this one from the deck of an air boat while cruising around with French chef Philippe Parola and a bunch of Cajuns who have been eating nutria since they first showed up. The unusual thing about nutria is that not only does it taste like chicken but the texture is also identical. It was delicious cooked with Cajun spices and served over rice.

Giant Canada Goose The giant Canada goose has been deliberately introduced far outside of its native range in the mid-west. I have spotted them as far away as a park in Munich, Germany. When the species is kept in captivity for a generation before being released it will have no idea where it is supposed to migrate to. This means that the birds will typically park themselves on the same pond or lake year-round, having a greater impact on the water quality than if they were only visiting for a few months. Goose meat is nothing like chicken. It is a red meat, like a finely-grained beef, only with a softer fat than beef. I took this one with a shotgun and then carved it up with chef Daniel Klein of the Huffington Post’s ‘Perennial Plate’ and we ran it through a meat grinder to make goose burgers.

Silver CarpThere is a myth among American fishermen that carp taste like mushy, rancid cardboard full of bones. I’ve eaten enough carp now that I can put that myth to rest. When butchered quickly after they are caught, invasive carp such as this silver carp that I ate in Missouri taste like any other firm, white fish. I doubt that most people could tell the difference between carp and cod in a blind taste test. Silver carp from Asia have come to dominate huge stretches of the Missouri River, comprising up to 95% of the biomass in some areas. Federal programs are struggling to erect barriers and study new means of controlling the species, but I think that stone age technology in the form of people dragging nets through the water is probably the best way to deal with the problem. Net the fish, sell them for food, problem solved.

LionfishThe venomous lionfish was my first big taste surprise while working on Eating Aliens. I traveled to the island of Eleuthera, in the Bahamas, to pursue these Pacific and Indian Ocean natives. The flavor turned out to be very clean, bright, and not fishy at all when eaten fresh. The texture reminded me of Chilean sea bass. The venom is located only in the spines which you see sticking out like the mane of a lion. The spines are easily removed when the fish are cleaned. Otherwise cooking at even a low temperature will neutralize the venom. Catfish spines contain a similar venom and we seem to deal with those in the kitchen easily enough.

my people were all from the appalachians and would eat all sorts of stuff. i miss squirrel, rabbit, dove and venisen but i live in town now and all i’d catch with a deadfall would be a flea bag alley cat. i wish i knew someone who raised rabbits and free range chickens. you think you’ve had chicken but the real ‘wild’ chicken (and turkey) tastes so much better. it has such rich flavor. same with what we called ‘green’ ham-that is uncured fresh killed ham or shoulder. it is a different meat than the stuff we think of as ham.

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