KLAXON KLAXON KLAXON FOR KITH FANS:
Kids in the Hall alumni Bruce McCulloch is bringing tales of his rabble-rousing youth to the small screen with a new comedy series on City.
Young Drunk Punk is set in Calgary in the 1980s and follows two recent high school graduates who embark on a rebellious search to figure out who they are.
The show is semi-autobiographical for McCulloch, 53, who grew up in Alberta and has performed a one-man play of the same title.
I didn’t want Benedict to go public, because of my marriage, but you cannot harness a warrior soul.
AHP on why you should read like a teen again (apparently, she does NOT mean “with frequent breaks to furtively touch yourself”):
As adults, our lattice of responsibility, guilt, and shame often makes it nearly impossible to make a conscious decision to read like a teen. It’s hard to say, “Today I’m going to shirk all worldly responsibilities!” Which means we often have to be tricked into teen reading: not by our peers, or our partner, but by the power of a book.
Hey, cool idea, patent office! THE UNLIKELY HARBINGERS OF SOCIAL CHANGE.
I would love to be the sort of person who doesn’t find chess boring and awful, and I can’t figure out if cheating would make it more or less fun. Also, I had hoped the cheating would be of the “LOOK OVER THERE” (moves pieces) “Oh, sorry, thought I saw a dragon” variety, but it’s not:
To catch an alleged cheater, Regan takes a set of chess positions played by a single player—ideally 200 or more but his analysis can work with as few as 20—and treats each position like a question on a multiple-choice exam. The score on this exam translates to an Elo rating, a score Regan calls an Intrinsic Performance Rating (IPR). There are, however, three main differences between a standard multiple-choice exam and Regan’s anti-cheating exam. First, on a standard exam each question has a fixed number of answers, usually four or five choices; on Regan’s exam, the number of answers for each position equals the number of legal moves. Second, on a standard exam, one answer per question receives full credit, while the other answers receive zero credit; on Regan’s exam, every legal move is given partial credit in proportion to how good it is relative to the engine’s top choice. (Partial credit falls off as a complicated nonlinear relationship based on the engine’s evaluations. Credit also abides by the constraint that all moves taken together for a position must sum to full credit.)
eyes glaze over i hate myself
I will trust Sondheim to the gate and past it, but my heart is full of fears:
Sondheim continued, “You will find in the movie that Rapunzel does not get killed, and the prince does not sleep with the [Baker’s Wife].” He added, “You know, if I were a Disney executive I probably would say the same thing.”
Another teacher asked if the song “Any Moment,” which follows the encounter between Cinderella’s Prince and the Baker’s Wife, had been cut. “The song is cut,” Sondheim stated. Following outcry from the teachers, Sondheim added, “I’m sorry, I should say, it’s probably cut.”
When pressed that he should have stuck up for the inclusion of the song, Sondheim said that he and Into the Woods’ Tony Award-winning book writer James Lapine did so. “But Disney said, we don’t want Rapunzel to die, so we replotted it. I won’t tell you what happens, but we wrote a new song to cover it,” he said.
On the general fuckery of family cap restrictions:
There’s little evidence that family caps work as advertised. What is unquestionably true is that they make poor families poorer. A 2006 report from the Urban Institute found that family caps increase the “deep poverty” rate of single mothers by 12.5 percent, and increase the deep poverty rate of children by 13.1 percent. It’s easy to see how this works. In Maryland, a state without family caps, the average benefitfor a single-parent family of three is $574. If, while receiving that benefit, the parent had another child, it would rise to $695, a 17 percent increase. By contrast, in Virginia—where the benefit for a family of three is $389—it would stay the same (as opposed to growing to $451). And when you consider the generally low benefit levels of family cap states—in Georgia, the average monthly benefit for a three-person household is $280, in Mississippi it’s $170—what you have is a recipe for greater poverty.
Even Jane Austen couldn’t get a break from other people’s damn opinions.
