Avatarded Technology: "World Lens" visual translator/dictionary.

Newest cast member JAY PHAROAH best addition to SNL in years.

“Saturday Night Live” recently hired Jay Pharoah as a featured player and he’s coming through in a big way.

When journalists write about impressions they tend to throw around the terms “dead on” and “spot on” although very few attempts at celebrity impressions are ever any good. But such high praise is justified for Pharoah, who has so far delivered terrific takes on SNL on Will Smith, and, this week, Denzel Washington. They need to give this guy the Obama franchise and move Fred Armisen into something else, like maybe craft services. At this point you have to wonder–why is Armisen still allowed to do Obama? It’s generally acknowledged that he’s not good at it, and now they have a guy on staff who is better at doing the same job. Is SNL part of of old boys (TV) network? What’s up?

Effective impressionists, like Dana Carvey, find specific characteristics about their targets that they exaggerate for comic effect. These characteristics can be real or imaginary–Chevy Chase’s impression of President Ford, for example, isn’t anything like the real Ford, but it captured some of the public’s conception of the man. Armisen doesn’t get this, and flounders away, trying to recreate surface impressions of Obama. There’s no comic imagination or artistic joy in what he does (by contrast, watch Frank Caliendo send up John Madden–he’s having fun, and he draws the audience in).

Pharoah’s spoofs, judging by the few data points he’s offered up so far, go right to the heart of his subjects, painting with bold, bright colors. He’s poised to do some memorable stuff. Here’s a clip of Pharoah from last night’s SNL. The writing in the sketch is sketchy, but his impression is gold.

What do you think? Leave your thoughts in the comments.

Jay Pharoah's debut Saturday Night Live

"Cloudscapes" exhibit; up in the air with art.

(re-blogged from picdit.wordpress.com)

Tetsuo Kondo and climate engineering firm Transsolar worked together to fill a closed space with clouds! “Three layers of air are pumped into the room: cool dry air at the bottom that keeps the cloud floating, hot humid air in the middle to fashion a dense fog and hot dry air at the top.” In the end, you get an amazing exhibition titled Cloudscapes, located at the Corderie in Venice!

GREAT SCOTT! “MARTY MCFLY” NIKE AIR MAG RELEASE?

According to the World Intellectual Property Organization’s website and Dime, Tinker Hatfield and his boys at the Nike Innovative Kitchen have filed patent papers for a shoe with an automatic lacing system, such as seen on the Nike Air Mag from Back to the Future II.

If this technology is to be used in the form of a Marty McFly inspired sneaker it would be the definition of game changer; the perfect intersection between performance and nostalgia. The movie was set in 2015; is a Nike Air Mag “Marty McFly” release on the horizon? Stayed tuned to Nice Kicks for more info!

Check out more photos of the shoes, the lacing system, and the charging system below.

RELATED: A History of Marty McFly Kicks

Nike Air Mag “Marty McFly” Lacing Components

Nike Air Mag “Marty McFly” Fastening and Lighting Detail

Nike Air Mag “Marty McFly” Electric Components

Nike Air Mag “Marty McFly” Inner Component Detail

Nike Air Mag “Marty McFly” Function Diagram

Nike Air Mag “Marty McFly” Touch Closure

Nike Air Mag “Marty McFly” Charging Stand

McDonald's hamburgers don't age

Things that are made from organic material age and decay, especially when they stop being alive. A piece of home-baked bread, say, left on your kitchen counter, will get moldy relatively fast. Lord knows what some ground beef would smell like after a week. But the artist Sally Davies has been photographing one McDonald's hamburger and fries every day for 137 days. They look basically exactly the same.

Far be it from me to tell you what to eat, but I am pretty sure your stomach can't break that down any better than the mold and microbes in the air. Check out the whole progression here.



Via Buzzfeed.

Cop accidentally shoots himself in classroom.

THE DARK KNIGHT'S GOLF CART  














Look, no matter how much evil Batman squashes with his Death-Monk training, at the core of it he’s still a rich white guy. As such, he is innately drawn to hit the links on weekends.
The armored golf tumbler is great in the rough, marauding through sand traps and protecting its driver from stray golf balls. It can even help you play an entire round in under 30 minutes. The only thing it can’t do is improve your short game–that’s where you have to “become an idea” and relentlessly attack chipping and putting like they killed your parents in an alley.













By CHRIS HARDWICK @ nerdist.com

Donald Duck straight up murders Goofy.

OOPS! 94-Year Old Man Reads His Own Obituary   WWII veteran Paul Schlegelmilch 94, of Rockville Centre, was pretty shocked to see his own obituary in the Rockville Herald. The Long Island NY newspaper was supposed to feature a story about Mr. Schlegelmilch's appointment as Grand Marshal for the coming Memorial Day Parade, but instead mistakenly printed his death. Oops. Mr. Schlegelmilch laughed when asked about his feeling toward his "deceased" status, saying "pretty good." "Not many people get to read their own obituary, right?" The paper acknowledged the mistake and issued a correction. I'm going to get my copy right now. I'm not feeling very well today. Maybe I'm dead. You never know.

Family, Friends Pay Final Respects to Lena Horne at Manhattan Funeral

NEW YORK (AP/ 1010 WINS)  -- Thousands of mourners were bidding a final farewell to jazz singer and actress Lena Horne in New York City on Friday. She was remembered at her funeral as a shy girl from Brooklyn who broke through decades of racism to emerge as a world-class entertainer and social leader. Horne died Sunday at age 92. Mourners at St. Ignatius Loyola in Manhattan included her granddaughter, actress Jenny Lumet, former Mayor David Dinkins and singer Chita Rivera. Horne "was so many ideas existing all at the same time in the same space and they were all conflicting and they were all true,'' Lumet said. "I've tried to sum her up and I can't sum her up; summing up really means it's over and I think that she's not over and that she's quite infinite.'' Broadway star Audra McDonald stood over the casket and sang "Amazing Grace.'' Horne's seductive voice dazzled the world for decades with tunes like "My Blue Heaven'' and "Stormy Weather.'' In the 1940s, she was one of the first black performers hired to sing with a major white band, the first to play the Copacabana nightclub and among a handful with a Hollywood contract. In 1943, MGM Studios loaned her to 20th Century-Fox to play the role of Selina Rogers in the all-black movie musical "Stormy Weather." Her rendition of the title song became a major hit and her signature piece. On screen, on records and in nightclubs and concert halls, Horne was at home vocally with a wide musical range, from blues and jazz to the sophistication of Rodgers and Hart in songs like "The Lady Is a Tramp" and "Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered." In her first big Broadway success, as the star of "Jamaica" in 1957, reviewer Richard Watts Jr. called her "one of the incomparable performers of our time." Songwriter Buddy de Sylva dubbed her "the best female singer of songs." But Horne was perpetually frustrated with the public humiliation of racism. "I was always battling the system to try to get to be with my people. Finally, I wouldn't work for places that kept us out ... it was a damn fight everywhere I was, every place I worked, in New York, in Hollywood, all over the world," she said in Brian Lanker's book "I Dream a World: Portraits of Black Women Who Changed America." While at MGM, she starred in the all-black "Cabin in the Sky," in 1943, but in most of her other movies, she appeared only in musical numbers that could be cut in the racially insensitive South without affecting the story. These included "I Dood It," a Red Skelton comedy, "Thousands Cheer" and "Swing Fever," all in 1943; "Broadway Rhythm" in 1944; and "Ziegfeld Follies" in 1946. "Metro's cowardice deprived the musical of one of the great singing actresses," film historian John Kobal wrote. Early in her career Horne cultivated an aloof style out of self-preservation, becoming "a woman the audience can't reach and therefore can't hurt" she once said. Later she embraced activism, breaking loose as a voice for civil rights and as an artist. In the last decades of her life, she rode a new wave of popularity as a revered icon of American popular music. Her 1981 one-woman Broadway show, "Lena Horne: The Lady and Her Music," won a special Tony Award. In it, the 64-year-old singer used two renditions - one straight and the other gut-wrenching - of "Stormy Weather" to give audiences a glimpse of the spiritual odyssey of her five-decade career. A sometimes savage critic, John Simon, wrote that she was "ageless. ... tempered like steel, baked like clay, annealed like glass; life has chiseled, burnished, refined her." When Halle Berry became the first black woman to win the best actress Oscar in 2002, she sobbed: "This moment is for Dorothy Dandridge, Lena Horne, Diahann Carroll. ... It's for every nameless, faceless woman of color who now has a chance because this door tonight has been opened." Lena Mary Calhoun Horne, the great-granddaughter of a freed slave, was born in Brooklyn June 30, 1917, to a leading family in the black bourgeoisie. Her daughter, Gail Lumet Buckley, wrote in her 1986 book "The Hornes: An American Family" that among their relatives was a college girlfriend of W.E.B. Du Bois and a black adviser to Franklin D. Roosevelt. Dropping out of school at 16 to support her ailing mother, Horne joined the chorus line at the Cotton Club, the fabled Harlem night spot where the entertainers were black and the clientele white. She left the club in 1935 to tour with Noble Sissle's orchestra, billed as Helena Horne, the name she continued using when she joined Charlie Barnet's white orchestra in 1940. A movie offer from MGM came when she headlined a show at the Little Troc nightclub with the Katherine Dunham dancers in 1942. Her success led some blacks to accuse Horne of trying to "pass" in a white world with her light complexion. Max Factor even developed an "Egyptian" makeup shade especially for the budding actress while she was at MGM. But in his book "Gotta Sing Gotta Dance: A Pictorial History of Film Musicals," Kobal wrote that she refused to go along with the studio's efforts to portray her as an exotic Latin American. "I don't have to be an imitation of a white woman that Hollywood sort of hoped I'd become," Horne once said. "I'm me, and I'm like nobody else." Horne was only 2 when her grandmother, a prominent member of the Urban League and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, enrolled her in the NAACP. But she avoided activism until 1945 when she was entertaining at an Army base and saw German prisoners of war sitting up front while black American soldiers were consigned to the rear. That pivotal moment channeled her anger into something useful. She got involved in various social and political organizations and - along with her friendship with Paul Robeson - got her name onto blacklists during the red-hunting McCarthy era. By the 1960s, Horne was one of the most visible celebrities in the civil rights movement, once throwing a lamp at a customer who made a racial slur in a Beverly Hills restaurant and in 1963 joining 250,000 others in the March on Washington when Martin Luther King Jr. gave his "I Have a Dream" speech. Horne also spoke at a rally that same year with another civil rights leader, Medgar Evers, just days before his assassination. It was also in the mid-'60s that she put out an autobiography, "Lena," with author Richard Schickel. The next decade brought her first to a low point, then to a fresh burst of artistry. She had married MGM music director Lennie Hayton, a white man, in Paris in 1947 after her first overseas engagements in France and England. An earlier marriage to Louis J. Jones had ended in divorce in 1944 after producing daughter Gail and a son, Teddy. In the 2009 biography "Stormy Weather," author James Gavin recounts that when Horne was asked by a lover why she'd married a white man, she replied: "To get even with him." Her father, her son and her husband, Hayton, all died in 1970-71, and the grief-stricken singer secluded herself, refusing to perform or even see anyone but her closest friends. One of them, comedian Alan King, took months persuading her to return to the stage, with results that surprised her. "I looked out and saw a family of brothers and sisters," she said. "It was a long time, but when it came I truly began to live." And she discovered that time had mellowed her bitterness. "I wouldn't trade my life for anything," she said, "because being black made me understand."

WHY I MOVED TO NEW ORLEANS
by James Avatar

Those who know about are well aware of the fact that I'm a native New Yorker. Born in Harlem during the Motown explosion, raised in the Bronx during the early days of the Hip Hop and returning to Harlem during my middle aged years after bouncing around from borough to borough.

Some of my friends have offered my tour guide assistance to visitors, assuring them that they are destined to receive the "off-the-beaten-path" tour under my watch.

"This guy knows New York like nobody. He's the one you want."

And, yes, I was more than happy to acquaint cheerful tourists with the current goings on of this great metropolis, taking them to glorious dive bars, hidden ethnic restaurants, underground parties and events...even found them affordable places to shop.

At the end of the day, (A term greatly overused, excuse me) I felt positive with a lift in my spirits from the glowing faces of the new friends I had just made. They seemed genuinely entertained and impressed at New York's vast array of activity. They seemed to view me as an elder statesman and an embassador of fun and good times.

I felt like I had established myself as a true New York historian with the ability to articulate the wonder of this great city though the hundreds of true stories I had acquired throughout my personal journey.

And then my heart turned over.

I hate to blame it all on one event or person, but the city changed a great deal after the policies enforced by then Police Commish Howard Safir and Mayor Rudolf Guilianni.

Changes like the "Unnecessary noise prohibited" law that restricts you from banging a drum, singing loud or walking around with a boombox on your shoulder. Yeah. I'm spoiled. I used to play conga in the park on warm summer nights. I sang a mean barritone during street corner doo-wop sessions. I held down a dope beatbox, spit mad verse in vintage Bronx cyphers and blasted my mix tapes at block parties. All of a sudden the sonic textures of the city had been silenced like someone pulled the plug on one of the world's greatest soundtracks.

Talented singer/songwriters went into hiding, feared of being arrested or fined for playing in public without papers and having their equipment locked up. Even mimes disappeared. Not because they were loud, but because frustrated singer/songwriters kept beating them up.

The drug scene changed. No longer could one fine an small & inexpensive amount of "herbal incense" to aid in the tension of city stress. New drugs (based on drugs previously administered during childhood) flooded the market, causing the price of "herbal incense" to skyrocket. These new drugs caused bad press for dance clubs causing them to shut down. No more huge parties below the radar. No more street corner symphonies. No more toke-toke-pass-let's-sing-Bob-Marley-till dawn nights of bonding with cool Euro's or elder hippies.

The city's landscape changed. Escalating rent shut down most mom-n-pop stores. Clubs were replaced by bars with Jukeboxes blaring music you heard on the radio or on your iPod on your way to the bar. Seeing a live band included a cover charge, hefty for those on hard times. At one point, it seemed like the only way you could hear FREE LIVE MUSIC in Manhattan was to hum a tune in the friggin' bathroom at the McDonald's on 42nd St..

 You see where I'm going with this?

New Orleans is a vibrant, lively city where amazing  brasswork and expert drumsmanship inhale the sweet, warm air and scream an exquisite duet of joy and passion. It is the watering hole for hundreds of muses, drunken with happiness, seducing you with excess in the spirit of abandon. It is where life is celebrated and the human condition is still human.

Yes, there are problems. But even though I am not well traveled, I think it's safe to say that there are  problems in every city. N'awlins strikes a chord in me and it is sweet music to my soul. To be living in a place where live music is so commonplace is truly a blessing. And the fact that  it's SOUL music is a plus. Signs that say "NO COVER" are all over the place. Free is good.

Performers are everywhere while visitors walk around smiling, carrying plastic cups of booze. And a marijuana alternative called "Herbal Incense" and is sold over the counter.

Beautiful women of all shapes and sizes stroll by, comfortably wearing their clothing. The scantly clad ladies standing outside the "Red light" shops on Bourbon St. remind me of a pre-Disney 42nd St. near 8th Ave. They stand in all their glory as street goddesses and sexy barkers, catcalling any handsome beefcake that strolls by. In the distance, a trumpet pierces the night air followed by the klip-klop-klip-klop of a horse-drawn carriage nearby.

These are the sights and sounds of my dreams, a welcome home-cooked meal for a hungry soul weaned on the breast of "record store" DJ's, 3-part hallway harmony, free night shows in Washington Square Park and the squeak of the conga skin in Central Park.

I no longer love New York.  I MISS new York. And I am truly grateful to be in a place now where I am able to fashion new memories from live musical performances, diverse celebration, southern decadence and herbal incense.

J/A

Kumar Ditches Obama Job; plans to re-unite with Harold for next "H&K" movie

The White House wouldn't confirm a report Friday that actor Kal Penn is leaving the Obama administration.

 

Washington (CNN) – The White House isn't confirming a report that actor Kal Penn is leaving the Obama administration.

Entertainment Weekly reported Friday that Penn, best known for his roles in the "Harold and Kumar" films and on the popular medical drama "House, M.D." is leaving the White House.

Penn, whose real name is Kalpen Modi, has spent much of the past year working in the White House Office of Public Liaison, which is run by Obama senior adviser Valerie Jarrett.

EW.com reported that the actor is returning to Hollywood to resume his acting career, starting with a Christmas-themed installation of the "Harold and Kumar" series.
Despite the report, the White House press office isn't saying much about Penn's plans.

March 31, 2010, 11:26 am

David Mills, Television Writer and Producer, Dies

By DAVE ITZKOFF (NY Times; Art Beat)

12:24 p.m. | Updated
David Mills, an Emmy Award-winning writer and producer for crime dramas like “The Wire” on HBO and “Homicide: Life on the Streets” on NBC died on Tuesday in New Orleans, a press representative for HBO said. The New Orleans Times-Picayune reported that Mr. Mills died from a brain aneurysm. HBO is about to broadcast the debut of a new series, “Treme,” on which Mr. Mills worked as a writer and producer.
After Mr. Mills made his television writing debut with “Homicide,” which his friend, David Simon, helped to create, he wrote for “NYPD Blue” and “ER.” He was also a co-writer and co-producer on “The Corner,” adapted from Mr. Simon’s book about drug abuse and poverty in Baltimore, which won three Emmys. Mr. Mills also created the NBC series “Kingpin,” about a Mexican drug cartel, which was shown in 2003.
HBO said Wednesday in a statement:

HBO is deeply saddened by the sudden loss of our dear friend and colleague David Mills. He was a gracious and humble man, and will be sorely missed by those who knew and loved him, as well as those who were aware of his immense talent. David has left us too soon but his brilliant work will live on.

Mr. Mills also chronicled his passion for music at his blog, Undercover Black Man. Before writing for television, he worked as a journalist and gained national attention for a 1992 interview with the hip-hop performer Sister Souljah in The Washington Post, in which she said, “If black people kill black people every day, why not have a week and kill white people?” When the Rainbow Coalition later invited Sister Souljah to speak at its convention, the group was criticized by Gov. Bill Clinton, then a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, who cited Mr. Mills’s interview.

Leave it to Vice President Joe Biden to celebrate a historic American event by swearing like a sailor. After announcing Barack Obama to the podium after a monumental Health Care reform bill gets passed, he whispers into the Commander-In-Chief's ear, "This is a BIG FUCKIN' DEAL!".

And, of course, the microphone picked up the audio. Nice move, Uncle Joe. Now it's all over the fuckin' internet so everybody's fuckin' kid will have an excuse use that kind of fuckin' language and fuckin' get away with it. WTF?

French Director NICHOLAS SCHMERKIN has won the Academy award for Best Animated Short with a brilliant & disturbing work called "LOGORAMA". I'm not even gonna set this one up. This is one of the most Avatarded pieces of art I've ever seen. Enjoy.  Watch it HERE.

Officials: 6 New Jersey Women Hospitalized after Botched Butt Jobs

NEWARK, N.J. (AP/ 1010 WINS)  -- Six women in New Jersey are recovering after they received buttocks-enhancement injections containing silicone used to caulk bathtubs.
State health officials say the women, from Essex County, apparently underwent cosmetic procedures from unlicensed providers.


John Montone reports (play audio)
 
Investigators have not determined if the cases are related.
No arrests have been made.
Instead of medical-grade silicone, the women received a diluted version of nonmedical-grade silicone.
State epidemiologist Tina Tan says there's the risk for more serious complications when infections are not treated early.

You wanted change: You got it! :
Your day just got shorter
thanks to Chile earthquake.

By Peter Becker

GateHouse News Service

Posted Mar 05, 2010 @ 06:03 PM

According to a NASA scientist, the Chilean earthquake has moved the Earth’s axis and shortened our day.

A minute change may have occurred. Researchers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif., suggest that the Feb. 27 earthquake shortened the length of a day by about 1.26 microseconds. Consider that! We complain that there are not enough days in a week, and now each day may have been speeded up!

Our axis also may have been realigned by the movement of the Earth beneath - by about 3 inches.

There’s no cause for hysteria, but imagine the supermarket tabloid headlines:

GETTING DIZZY YET? EARTH SPIN SPEEDS UP

BETELGEUSE BECOMES NEW NORTH STAR; POLARIS FILES SUIT

HOLD ON TO YOUR HAT: WORLD ON A WHIRL

PENGUINS IN PANAMA; GATORS IN GREENLAND

Note that a microsecond is one-millionth of a second. It remains a wonderful feat of technology that we can measure that short of time.

Scientists also note that it is not the North-South axis that may have shifted, the one around which the world rotates and points to the northern sky immediately next to Polaris, what we know as the North Star. What may have been bumped is the “Earth's figure axis,” about which the planet’s mass is balanced. This axis and the North-South axis are offset by approximately 33 feet. In other words. Polaris didn’t lose any of its coveted star status.

It must also be noted that other earthquakes may have adjusted the rotation and axis as well, and may be a normal occurrence.

JPL scientist Richard Gross reported that the same computer model was used to estimate the magnitude 9.1 Sumatran earthquake on Dec. 26, 2004 that set off the giant tsunami.

While the recent Chilean earthquake was of lesser magnitude, it had more of an impact on the Earth because it was located in the mid-latitudes, not close to the equator. The fault that caused the quake in Chile dips into our planet at a steeper angle. Gross said that this would make the Chilean quake more able to budge the planet’s mass and axis. Gross stated that the data is still preliminary and under study.

Quakes on the “Third Rock from the Sun” seem to be on an increase, considering huge quakes in Chile and Taiwan, and another major aftershock in Haiti, all in the past week.

The universe, from a distance, appears so calm, with the glittering stars faithfully shining night after night, the constellations very much the same. They can give us a measure of comfort, but in reality the whole cosmos is forever on the move, and far from stable. Our sun is a constantly churning and boiling. Some stars (not the sun’s type, as far as we know) explode. Black holes form and whole stars are sucked right in. Asteroids strike and comets have landed. The vast asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter may have come from a planet that broke up.

The good news is that we can have a right, stable frame of mind and heart, and although our world around us may rock and roll, we need not be moved!

Last-quarter moon is on March 7. Anyone remember what happened in the daytime sky 30 years ago on March 7?

Write to Peter Becker at pbecker@wayneindependent.com.

Keep looking up!

Nude snow sculpture in Rahway leads police to request 'snowlady' cover-up

By Eliot Caroom/For the Star-Ledger

March 03, 2010, 5:30AM

 
Photos courtesy Conneran family

 A snowlady that Maria Conneran and her family sculpted in front of their Rahway home that attracted passers-by on Rahway's Colonia Boulevard to stop for pictures, but prompted an anonymous complaint to police who had the family cover up the sculpture with clothing.
RAHWAY --She was a frosty Venus de Milo, but one Rahway family’s snow-packed tribute to the Greek goddess of love and beauty was another person’s pornography.
Maria Conneran and her family worked feverishly to fashion their armless, nude snowlady from last week’s heap of snow, grabbing attention and photographs on Rahway’s Colonia Boulevard.
Not all the attention was good, however.

THINGS THAT MAKE YOU GO...WTF?

Among the visitors was a patrolman dispatched to the Conneran household after Rahway police received an anonymous complaint "of a naked snow woman," said Sgt. Dominick Sforza. She sure was, the family gleefully agreed.
"Curvaceous, bodacious and booty-licious," said Elisa Gonzalez, a court reporter who built the snow goddess with her daughter, Maria Conneran, 21 and son, Jack Shearing, 12.
"But she had a six-pack!" Conneran said.
Photo courtesy Conneran family

 A snowlady that Maria Conneran (pictured) and her family sculpted in front of their Rahway home that attracted passers-by on Rahway's Colonia Boulevard to stop for pictures, but prompted an anonymous complaint to police.
When the officer arrived, Gonzalez said, he was apologetic and appreciative of the snowlady and her assets.
"He said, ‘It’s very good,’" Gonzalez recalled.
Despite his appreciation, the officer then asked the family to dress the snowlady. Nonplussed, they complied with a green bikini top and a blue sarong around her ample hips.
 
Photo courtesy Conneran familyJack Shearing, 12, and his mother, Elisa Gonzalez with the nude snowlady.


"I thought she looked more objectified and sexualized after you put the bikini on," Gonzalez said.
Conneran and Gonzalez said the visit from police reminded them of former Attorney General John Ashcroft’s move to drape a semi-nude statue of the Spirit of Justice when he arrived to lead the U.S. Justice Department.
"(Our snowlady) looks like marble. It looks like a statue," Conneran said. "Are you going to go to the Met and cover up all the statues?"
William Torres, visiting the neighborhood from North Carolina, agreed the snowlady should have remained au naturel.
"They’re censoring art," Torres said. "To me ... that’s no different from what you see in a museum ... and its lifespan was short anyway."
Indeed. On Monday, the family took down the snowlady, because with the return of warmer weather, she was starting to melt away.
The Venus di Milo may be gone, but the Connerans said they will continue their work with the next snow. This was not their first foray into famous snow sculpture.
Last January, the family created a realistic bust of newly inaugurated President Obama.
 
People in a passing car stop to take a photo of a snow sculpture of a female torso on a lawn in Rahway.

On the run, the lingerie model who heads an all-women cocaine-smuggling cartel

A lingerie model is believed to be the mastermind behind an all-women drug gang that smuggles cocaine into Britain.
An international arrest warrant has been issued for Angie Sanselmente Valencia, 30, who is said to only hire glamour models to transport the drugs from South America to Europe.
It's believed that Colombian-born Valencia had been seeing a Mexican drug lord known as 'The Monster' but split with him at the end of last year to form her own cocaine-smuggling gang.

Wanted: Angie Sanselmente Valencia, who was crowned Colombia's 'Queen Of Coffee' in 2000, left modelling and moved to Argentina late last year to establish her drugs network

Enlarge  

She is said to describe the women working for her as 'unsuspicious, beautiful angels'. The women are told to be 'nice, but not flashy'.
Valencia, who was crowned Colombia's 'Queen Of Coffee' in 2000, left modelling and moved to Argentina late last year to establish her network.
Her 'angels' were paid £3,200 for each trip they made and one of her gang is believed to have boarded a flight every 24 hours with the packages of cocaine.
From Argentina they would fly up to the Mexican Caribbean resort of Cancun and from there they would smuggle them into Europe. 

However her network began to unravel several weeks ago when one of her 'drug mules' was caught at Argentina's Ezeiza International Airport in Buenos Aires carrying 55kg of cocaine.

Valencia's network began to unravel when one of her 'drug mules' was caught at Argentina's Ezeiza International Airport (pictured) in Buenos Aires carrying 55kg of cocaine

The 21-year-old woman began to talk and within 12 hours police investigators had arrested a further three people.
The drug mule had made no attempt to hide the cocaine in her suitcase because she'd been told no one would stop her at the airport, according to Argentine newspaper La Nacion.

Police are now investigating the gang's links to people working at the airport.
Following the arrests Valencia promptly disappeared from a four-star hotel in Buenos Aires but is still believed to be in the South American country.
She'd arrived from Mexico last December with her beloved pet Pomeranian dog. Investigators tried to trace her through the address to which the animal was registered but it only led them to an abandoned warehouse.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1253347/Runaway-lingerie-model-Angie-Sanselmente-Valencia-named-head-drug-gang.html#ixzz0gZ1oXVDi

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Yahoo Inc plans to integrate Twitter into its collection of websites, as the company seeks to enhance the appeal of its online properties with popular social networking features.

The partnership will allow web surfers to view the short, 140-character messages created by Twitter users, dubbed Tweets, directly within Yahoo sites as well as to publish their own Twitter messages without leaving Yahoo.

The move, which Yahoo announced late on Tuesday, comes a couple of months after Yahoo announced a similar deal with Facebook, the world's No.1 social networking site.

Earlier this month, Google Inc unveiled a new service dubbed Google Buzz that replicated many of the social networking features that have made services like Twitter and Facebook Internet success stories.

Facebook and Twitter - which said on Monday that users of its service generate more than 50 million Tweets every day - pose an increasing threat to established Internet giants like Yahoo and Google whose businesses depend on selling online ads to large audiences.

In January, Facebook overtook Yahoo to become the second most visited website in the United States, according to a recent report by web analytics firm Compete. A separate study by comScore showed Yahoo maintaining its No.2 rank with roughly 164 million unique U.S. visitors, while Facebook was the No.4 site with 112 visitors, behind third-ranked Microsoft Corp.

Yahoo said that beginning on Tuesday its Internet search engine results will display up-to-the-second Tweets about various topics, matching the so-called "real time search" capabilities that Google and Microsoft announced in their own respective deals with Twitter last year.

Yahoo also plans to display a live stream of Tweets within other online properties including its email service and sites devoted to sports, entertainment and finance later this year.

Yahoo executives said that the company was looking at ways to make Twitter messages relevant to each property, such as by customizing the selection of messages that appear alongside an article about a particular sporting event, for example.

"We believe that the content and context side of things is very unique," Yahoo Vice President of Communities Jim Stoneham told Reuters in an interview.

Yahoo would not comment on any financial terms involved in the deal with Twitter.

According to some media reports, Microsoft and Google paid a combined $25 million for the right to include Twitter data in their search results.

(Reporting by Alexei Oreskovic; editing by Carol Bishopric)