Wettest staircase ever.

What Is Poetry? And Does it Pay? | Harper’s Magazine
http://harpers.org/archive/2002/08/what-is-poetry-and-does-it-pay/?single=1

(via Instapaper)

http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2013/04/landfill-harmonic-an-upcoming-documentary-about-the-recycled-orchestra-in-cateura-paraguay/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+colossal+(Colossal)

Cateura, Paraguay is a small city that has grown atop a massive garbage dump and is regarded as one of the poorest slums in Latin America, a village where people live among a sea of garbage. Incredibly, the landfill itself is the primary form of subsistence for many residents within the slum who pick through waste for items that can be used or sold. Prospects for most of the children born in Cateura is bleak as gangs and drugs await many of them. But then one day, something amazing happened.

A garbage picker named Nicolás Gómez (known as “Cola”) found a piece of garbage that resembled a violin and brought it to musician Favio Chávez. Using other objects collected from the dump the pair constructed a functional violin in a place where a real violin is worth more a house. Using items gleaned completely from trash pair then built a cello, a flute, a drum, and suddenly a wild idea was born: could a children’s orchestra be born in one of the most depressed areas in the world? As you can guess the answer was yes

http://www.theatlantic.com/infocus/2013/04/the-strange-beauty-of-salt-mines/100492/

Google’s rolled out an "Inactive Account Manager" — a dead-man’s switch for your Google accounts. If you set it, Google will watch your account for protracted inactivity. After a set period, you can tell it to either squawk ("Email Amnesty International and tell them I’m in jail," or "Email my kids and tell them I’m dead and give them instructions for probating my estate") and/or delete all your accounts. This has a lot of use-cases, from preventing your secrets from being tortured out of you (before you go to a protest, you could set your dead-man’s switch to a couple hours — if you end up in jail and out of contact, all your stuff would be deleted before you were even processed by the local law) to easing the transition of your digital "estate."

No one wants to think about their own death, but not thinking about it has a zero percent chance of preventing it. The Inactive Account Manager (great euphemism) can send your data from many Google services to your digital heirs, alert your contacts, delete the accounts, or do all or none of the above. It affects Blogger, Contacts/Circles (in Google+) Drive, Gmail, Google+ profiles, Pages and Streams, Picasa albums, Google Voice, and YouTube.

It also serves as a useful self-destruct button. Don’t want anyone watching your stupid YouTube videos after you’ve long forgotten that you had an account? Don’t want your kids to find your password notebook years after you’re gone and read your dirty chat sessions with their dad? You can have your account auto-destruct after trying to reach you using other e-mail addresses and by text message. You know, in case you just get tired of Gmail and wander off somewhere else.

http://boingboing.net/2013/04/13/google-adds-a-dead-mans-sw.html

[Kickass alt-country reinterpretation of the Sisters of Mercy classic. -egg]

Your info is never shared with anyone by me.