Visitors to a castle were left trapped in its walls after its drawbridge was damaged in a freak accident involving a cherry-picker.
The crane was making its way up the drawbridge of Castell Coch, Tongwynlais, when the walkway gave way and tilted upwards, catapulting the machine further inside the entrance of the Victorian landmark.
It then became wedged against a wall between the portcullis and gate, leaving around 20 people stranded inside the castle.
The 2.9 tonne machine was being used to carry out repair work on roof tiles.
[Guests were] treated to a sword-fighting demonstration while they waited.
We’ve already done NYU, Larry Rivers, and the breast videos. Might as well make a day of it with a couple of other items.
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1.) Because an Oklahoma State University employee used her OSU credit card to bill the university for sex toys (she’s been fired), “OSU officials have held training sessions to make sure employees understand how to use [their cards] properly.”
Question #9: Dildos may/may not be billed to the university.
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2.) As an homage to the Nobel prize-winning Portuguese novelist José Saramago, who died recently, the Portuguese edition of Playboy features Jesus (Saramago wrote about Jesus) in a variety of poses with naked women.
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UD thanks James.
I can’t find this apparently food-obsessed professor listed at Washington State.
A Washington State University faculty member is under arrest for Felony Voyeurism. He’s accused of taking a picture up the shorts of a 21-year-old student.
The student told Pullman Police that she caught 36-year-old Prodyut Kumar taking the picture while she was shopping at Safeway.
Officers were able to get video of Kumar taking the picture from the store’s security cameras. [Did he wait until she was, like, leaning over the apple bins? Or did he get on the floor and snap her?]
He was arrested at Sunnyside Park during the Pullman Fourth of July Celebration when an officer spotted him. [So many reassuring words – Sunnyside, Safeway… the Pullman Fourth of July Celebration! — revolving around such an untoward event.]
Officers also searched Kumar’s home computer for evidence.
Kumar is listed as a faculty member in the School of Food Sciences. [Can he claim this was part of his research?] He told officers he is a visiting scholar from India. [I’m finding a Professor Chew at their faculty page, but no Kumar. Chew teaches ADVANCE HUMAN NUTRITION. Is that an imperative, or a title?]
From the Boston Herald. A dean responds to the Russian spy story.
But a former Kennedy School dean poo-poo’d the alleged spy operation.
“Basically they were going after information that any good reporter could have gotten,” said Joseph S. Nye, a former chairman of the National Intelligence Council. “It doesn’t seem that it was a very impressive operation.”
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Update: Dean Nye doesn’t go poo-poo anymore.
The reporters excreted it.
UD always wondered what sort of people pay ridiculous sums for conferences like these.
Put the words art controversy into Google News at the moment, and you’ll be directed to a couple of articles about an exhibit in Vienna of North Korean paintings.
The canvases are all Socialist Realist propaganda: Kim Il-sung accepts the hysterically grateful embrace of a soldier; happy round-cheeked girls take up their brooms. The pictures burst forth from the walls, big and bright; and their titles tell you exactly what’s up: The Dear Leader Reassures the Nation of His Commitment to its Security and Well-Being.
There’s a pretty impressive market for North Korean Socialist Realist canvases in the west, I suppose because there aren’t many of them (NK releases some of this work to Chinese dealers, but it’s still a closed country, and not much gets out), and because virtually no other countries produce this sort of thing anymore. Sophisticated Europeans and Americans seem to have a taste for what some people call Communist Kitsch; and while one can certainly find postmodern ironists in Europe and America who experiment with the conventions of agitprop, the North Korean product is authentic, part of a living totalitarian world.
The Vienna controversy arises from the exhibit’s total lack of commentary. You go there and see the pictures. There’s no introductory statement from the museum about how these paintings are cult-of-personality propaganda, how they were painted by servants of the state who, should someone buy them, will receive no compensation, since all proceeds go to the state… Nothing at all, apparently, frames this collection of comically stultifying products of arguably the world’s most repressive state.
The exhibition does not include any background explanation on the totalitarian nature of the North Korean regime, a compromise by the museum with authorities in Pyongyang that came under fire from some politicians and artists. But the MAK forcefully denied it was giving a free pass to the regime’s propaganda.
“Visitors know very well that North Korea is the last dictatorship in the world. There is really no need to remind them of this fact. We just want to show North Korean contemporary art, not to talk about politics,” [the exhibit director] told France24.com
The director of the museum says the same thing:
I am neither a politician nor a political scientist. And besides, everybody knows what sort of a regime that is; we don’t have to explain this to anyone,” [he] said, sipping coffee in his office on the same floor as the North Korean artworks.
The exhibit, then, represents a collision of two aesthetic extremes: The most explicit message-bearing art imaginable meets art for art’s sake. The most dire expression of the reduction of human life to ideology meets the nonchalant gesture of the Vienna curator and director: We need say nothing by way of accompaniment to these images. They are art, and that is all.
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And yet they are arguably not art, since they are the entirely conventional work of anonymous hacks done at the behest of a propaganda machine. Further, since they present themselves as political objects with a message, a message intended to inspire the North Koreans and – I guess – convert outsiders, it’s a little strange for the museum directors to take them apolitically, a little unfair to their intention…
After all, the exhibitors’ aestheticist gesture is itself a political expediency, arising as it does from the museum’s compromise with the regime, its willingness to be silent about its nature in exchange for permission to mount the show.
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A Los Angeles Times writer asks:
[Is the show] merely a stage for a regime that uses art not only as a messenger of its political ideology but also as a source of international funding?
It’s not that, as the reporter worries, the museum is a kind of a dupe of the North Koreans, allowing itself to be used as a platform for their social philosophy. No one thinks North Korea is anything other than a nightmare, and bringing its nightmare images of itself to Austria only deepens the darkness. But there is the intriguing matter of the striking popularity of North Korean propaganda images among hip Europeans and Americans.
[The] work has apparently become a profitable export that is able to skirt North Korea’s international isolation, helping to bring cash back home.
Ardent collectors can travel to the country to shop for art, said Rudiger Frank, professor of East Asian Economy and Society at the University of Vienna. Or works can be acquired at specialized galleries in more easily accessible locations, such as Beijing. Art can even be ordered directly from North Korean artists or the associations they work for.
The North Koreans themselves “did not understand at first why we would want such an exhibition.” You bet. Why should their trash generate ardency and high prices among people you’d expect to want Rothko or Freud on their walls?
UD asks her readers.
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Update: “What some in the west would call propaganda.” The BBC points out that really it’s a matter of opinion. Some might say what the North Koreans are drawing is propaganda. Others, great art.
… isn’t a satire.
Raymond Scott is a British book dealer. One night, about ten years ago, he was in Cuba visiting his girlfriend, a dancer at Havana’s Tropicana Club, when his eye fell upon a 1623 Shakespeare First Folio just sitting there at the bar.
O brave new world,
That has such manuscripts in’t!
He grabbed it, hid it in his house in County Durham, and then, last year, flew to Washington’s Folger Library and asked the staff to verify its authenticity.
The staff had him arrested, and now his trial in England begins.
He says it’s all a conspiracy. “[E]xperts desperate to recover the stolen Durham University folio had conspired against him.”
UD is unclear what he means. As the trial progresses, perhaps the basis of his defense will become clearer.
A new British radio show transforms hedge funds into performance art.
A recent guest explained her view of hedge-fund strategy in her native Armenian, without translation.
… has it that the equilibrium of an image will tend to fluctuate until dissipation sets in — unless the image is firmly held.
The validity of Einstein’s argument has once again been demonstrated — in the very history of the image of Einstein himself.
Hebrew University owns the rights to the use of Einstein’s image, and it has just sued General Motors for turning the physicist into a boy toy (image here – looks like Sam Elliott!) for an SUV ad.
Must be a limerick in here.
A professor at the University of Iowa medical school, recently placed on paid leave for undisclosed reasons, stabbed himself while out jogging and then told police he’d been attacked by a gang.
UI spokesman Tom Moore confirmed that the UI Department of Public Safety is investigating Hunninghake — although it isn’t yet clear what for — and that UI placed Hunninghake on paid leave on April 23. Moore also confirmed that five search warrants had been served in the Hunninghake investigation.
UD is currently scratching her head over this one. Hunninghake was a big shot with a big salary, so theft seems unlikely. Though why else would there be all of those search warrants? Academic fraud’s another possibility. They want to look at his records and computers to see whether he fakes data along with physical assaults.
As for the faked assault itself: This seems a bit more straightforward to me. A distraction. An effort to gain sympathy.
… it says at the top of this page (click on Negotiated Procedure for EU Charter of Fundamental Rights in Poems to get to it).
(Update: Link’s not working. Here’s the home page.)
We’re at the website of the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights, whose function is to
provide the relevant institutions and authorities of the Community and its Member States when implementing Community law with assistance and expertise relating to fundamental rights in order to support them when they take measures or formulate courses of action within their respective spheres of competence to fully respect fundamental rights.
The guy who runs FRA also thought it would be a good idea to have a poetry contest.
The FRA is looking to contract a poet or other experienced individual (or group of individuals), or organisation, to devise a poetic composition based on the articles of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights, along with the organisation of an accompanying performance.
This “Charter in Poems” (working title) should be composed in English (literary language). The piece will then be performed at the Fundamental Rights Conference 2010, to take place in Brussels on 7 December. This performance should be approximately 80 minutes in length, and should be supported by multimedia elements and/or other artistic performances (dance, music, etc.). It should be a group performance that reflects the diversity of the EU.
EIGHTY MINUTES OF POETRY ABOUT HUMAN RIGHTS. That’s almost an hour and a half of people singing and dancing to the tune of balanced and sustainable development and [the] free movement of persons, services, goods and capital, and the freedom of establishment.
The Justice Commissioner is pissed. That’s why FRA has had to close the negotiated procedure.
Justice commissioner Viviane Reding has killed off plans to recast the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights as an 80-minute-long epic poem.
Concerned about what she viewed as a frivolous waste of time and money, Ms Reding, who is also responsible for fundamental rights and citizenship, has written a tersely worded letter seen by EUobserver to the director of the Fundamental Rights Agency, Morten Kjoerum, lambasting the plans.
“The language of the charter is already clear and direct,” she wrote. “I do not therefore see what is to be gained by running the initiative you have in mind in order to promote its accessibility to citizens. I rather see the counterproductive risk that the dignity of the charter is undermined.”
“This initiative does not provide the added value that is expected from the agency and is not in line with its mandate,” she continued, demanding to know how much time and money had been spent on the poetry plans.
… It is understood that the commissioner was surprised when she read about the agency’s poem project. “It just came out of leftfield. She thought: ‘Is this really how they should be spending their time?” said one EU official.
Ms Reding however said the idea was beyond the mandate of the agency and that it should stick to its main job of analysing the human and civil rights situation in the EU…
To keep geese off the quad –
students find barefoot frisbee
à la feces unappetizing –
Boise State University
has constructed predator
silhouettes. Coyotes.
Seems a good seasonal job for
students: Predator Silhouette Mover.
… and finds himself in the hangar.
A British law professor is slamming Air Canada after the airline left him asleep on a plane for 90 minutes after it landed — and he woke up in a hangar at Vancouver International Airport.
… “It’s absolute craziness,” said [Kris Lines]… who is head of sports law at Staffordshire University.
“The last thing I remember was taking off from Calgary. I knew I was safely on board and there was no further destinations and it was all good,” Mr. Lines added.
“Somebody would wake me up at the end.”
What he didn’t expect was to be roused by a mechanic after the Air Canada Jazz plane was towed into a hangar at YVR…
UD, a nervous flier, finds this story amazing. Short of being blotto (which UD never is), she cannot imagine attaining the buddhistic calm that would allow you to miss your plane’s arrival at an airport…
… at ten o’clock last night:
ALL PASSENGERS LEAVING THIS AREA
MUST CONTINUE TO EXIST