Chasing Sunset

The days of listening to music in MP3 file format will soon receive competition from MusicDNA.

MusicDNA is aiming to take the way users experience their music to the next level. The new format can be considered a tree of the popular MP3 format as its creator, Dagfinn Bach, worked on the very first MP3 player. One of the investors in MusicDNA is also Karlheinz Bradenburg , who is credited as the creator of MP3 files.

The new format is set to provide more than just music, as it can contain lyrics, videos, artwork and even blog postings. The benefit of the new system is that data will be updated real-time. Bands will also have the ability to inform owners of their music about their tours and future releases by sending updates to the file. This allows for the music to also become a form of advertising directly between artists and their fans.

Its creators are hoping that MusicDNA will make music more personal again, as in the days when they used to buy LP records and they contained an emotional value.

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1. Avril Lavigne (50)
2. The Veronicas (24)
3. Blue Stone (16)
4. Frou Frou (15)
5. Fionn Regan (12)

Imported from Last.fm Tumblr by JoeLaz

Charlie Simpson was so upset by the devastation wrought by the earthquake that he told his mother he wanted to do anything he could to help. The boy set out to raise £500 for Unicef’s Haiti appeal by riding his bike five miles around his local park – but the schoolboy’s efforts inspired hundreds of people online who donated a total of more than £60,000 in just one day.

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by Hank Hyena

Okay, buck naked? I am. Fun. Toes wiggle in the shag carpet. Butt cheeks stick to the chair. Nipples goose-bump. We’re natural… nudists! Our huge organs (skin) tingle with sensual data that’s zipped to our thrilled brains. We feel… wild, healthy, alert, spunky. Alive.

Clothing is crushing us! Trapped in tomb-like textiles, we exile our flesh from experiencing the environment. We atrophy the majority of our epidermis. If you put a plaster cast on a broken arm, the skin starves for Vitamin D; muscles weaken due to strangled range of motion; nerve synapses depress to a whimper of their former joy. Twenty-first century hominids shroud the entire skin palette, obliterating symbiosis with the planet except via face, neck and hands. (Burqa-clad Muslim women lose nearly 100%.) We hide in cocoons, when we could be free as butterflies.

History reveals many cultures that were not clothes-minded. Spartans were basically bare and their victories in pan-Hellenic sports competitions enticed all neighboring Greeks to exercise nude, creating the word “gymnasium” (Greek gymnos = naked). Romans mingled in magnificent bathhouses, enjoying dense communal nudity as they drank, dined, defecated, bathed, read books, argued politics, and watched theater. Adamists — naked heretics — performed stripped-down church services in North Africa, Bohemia, the Netherlands, and England. Pre-Hitler Germans were avid adherents of Freikorperkultur (“Free Body Culture”) with 70,000 attending co-ed Nacktkultur schools. There’s naked Japanese in hot springs, naked Finns in saunas, “sky-clad” Jain monks in India, plus millions of nudists worldwide going to “Nakation” camps, beaches, and resorts, still sporty as Spartans. They hike naked (“free bush rambling”), canoe naked (“canuding”), bicycle naked, ride horses naked, run naked, play volleyball, badminton, ping-pong and chess naked, swim naked, dance naked, do Naked Yoga, Naked Tai Chi, Naked Gardening, Naked Bowling, and you and I, dear reader, we’re both NIFOC — Naked In Front of Computers.

Many famous figures are bare-all aficionados; too many politicians to name, so I’ll just list sci-fi and scientists: Leonard Nimoy, Alexander Graham Bell, Robert Heinlein, and seismologist Charles Richter. Of course, most movie stars skinny-dip at the French Riviera, trying to elude paparazzi seeking pix of Bruce Willis’ willy or Natalie Portman’s port side.

…click through for some benefits to going bare

Tsukudu (Sam) is a tall, burly, 42-year-old who has five children and loves to spend his time gardening or watching birds with a glass of Coke. He joined Pick n Pay in 1986 as a shelf packer and today works in the vegetable department.

But his real job is to charm. To banter with customers in Greek, French, Italian, Portuguese or even Chinese. He knows greetings and a few key phrases.

He delivers groceries to those too old to fetch them. He walks a blind man - John Chandler - home from the store and helps him unpack his groceries. Over a 10-year friendship, Tsukudu learnt to decode what groceries Chandler needs, because his wife has a habit of tearing off bits of the washing powder box, a lid from the pilchards tin or the top of a pasta container. Once, when it was pouring with rain, Tsukudu used his own car to drive John to the shop.

Tsukudu, overnight, transformed from being a long-time friend to a mini-celebrity inside the Bedfordview retirement village. The fame came after a stranger photographed Tsukudu walking down a busy road and carrying a frail 75-year-old resident on his back. The man Tsukudu rescued, Danie Britz, had missed his bus home and collapsed at a petrol station near the Bedford Centre.

But, in truth, anyone who has known Tsukudu in the 24 years he has worked at the centre’s Pick n Pay would know that the act of kindness was not extraordinary. It was just Sam.

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1. Within Temptation (47)
2. Avril Lavigne (25)
3. Emilie Autumn (22)
4. Giant Drag (19)
5. Tracy Chapman (17)

Imported from Last.fm Tumblr by JoeLaz

Cabel Saasser brings word of a mysterious cafe that he recently experienced in Kashiwa in Japan. Located inside the Urban Design Center Kashiwa-no-ha, the Ogori cafe looks innocuous enough, but holds a surprise in store for its patrons. In a nutshell, you get what the person before you ordered, and the next person gets what you ordered. Thus, if you’re in on the game, you can choose to be either a generous benefactor and treat those that come after you, or try your luck at being cheap. Either way, it’s an interesting experiment that explores surprise, kindness and encourages interactions.

How can anyone not repost this? I actually giggled. With noises and everything!

….read the post here

Head over to Mystery Google and search like you normally would — except get not what you searched for, but what the person before you searched for. Lots of potential for random weirdness here.

Most South Africans reportedly oppose polygamy, believing that it is a patriarchal society’s way of giving men an excuse to have sex with loads of different women.

However, this morning the Presidency’s Cultural Advisor, Casanova Dlamini, rejected the criticism and defended polygamy as a treasured ancient tradition standing proudly alongside other treasured ancient traditions like stoning women to death, female circumcision and burning old women who can read because they are probably witches.

He also rejected accusations that polygamy entrenched women in a weaker role in society and stripped them of their identity.

“This is nonsense,” he said. “African women are strong. They have to be, to carry those buckets for five kilometers.”

Asked if President Zuma’s openness towards polygamy was likely to pave the way for women to have multiple husbands, Dlamini gagged before asking, “Are you on crack?”

“This is a democracy, not some orgiastic free-for-all gang-bang fantasy cooked up by insane femi-Nazis out of their freaky nymphomaniac minds,” he said. “Marriage is a sacred contract between a man and his fathers-in-law. If we mess with that, my God! It would be just a matter of months before women wanted to get educated and have jobs, and once that happens we’re days away from a cannibal apocalypse.”

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1. Within Temptation (81)
2. Lily Allen (27)
3. Garbage (20)
4. Michelle Branch (12)
5. Harris Tweed (1)

Imported from Last.fm Tumblr by JoeLaz

Seems like all the stores are just shutting down in the Rivonia block. Mugg n Bean shut its doors last month, their premises still empty as I walked by today en route to the Global Wrapps, which, it…

1. Paramore (88)
2. Garbage (64)
3. Avril Lavigne (47)
4. Blue Stone (32)
5. Roxette (30)

Imported from Last.fm Tumblr by JoeLaz

If there was an award for best quote of the year, our money would be on Richard Fisher, the director of NASA’s Heliophysics Division.

Fisher was interviewed in October by National Public Radio after NASA scientists discovered a mysterious ribbon of hydrogen around our solar system.

The layer, a sort of protective barrier called the heliosphere, shields us from harmful cosmic radiation. Its existence defies all expectations about what the edge of the solar system might look like.

Fisher’s response: “We thought we knew everything about everything, and it turned out that there were unknown unknowns.”

In other words: We don’t know what we don’t know until we know that we don’t know it.

Life is funny that way. You think you’ve got the world wrapped up in string, only to watch some bit of news come along to unravel your comprehension of how things work.

One thing we did expect: that 2009 would be full of strange and wonderful revelations.

A prediction for 2010? Same thing as this year, only different.

…read on for a list of stuff we culled from 2009 that may have come as a surprise.

Women’s magazines have come under fire in recent years, and for good reason. It’s taken a long time, and many hurt women, but these so-called publications are all getting called out more and more frequently for spewing loads of hot air — and often outright lies — to their readers. Spending no more than five minutes reading one of these rags can be enough to cause mild brain-damage, with the sheer amount of bad advice regurgitated month after month. We went through a few months’ worth of all the worst offenders, and honestly the effect is probably worse than sniffing glue — but we’ve got results. These are the 15 absolute worst lies that all women’s magazines tell — they’ve got millions of readers, so it may be a little scary.

…read the full article