Ouch! Damn, this one made me kind of queasy, Janos Baranyai, of Hungary, grimaces on the platform after dislocating his right elbow while attempting to lift 148 kilograms in the snatch of the Group B of the men’s 77 kg of the weightlifting competition at the Olympics in Beijing on Wednesday. He really dorked his elbow, and the shots of it out of place were seriously disturbing (watch video). Wouldn’t have wanted to be around when the Doc popped that baby back, bet it made that hollow popping noise, urgh yaaaaa blahhka.

Check out the overall view of the stage during a dress rehearsal of the opera “Tosca” by Giacomo Puccini, Friday evening, July 18, 2008, at the Floating-Stage in Bregenz, Austria. The opera took place July 23, 2008, as a part of the Bregenzer Festival. (AP Photo/Winfried Rothermel).

Hipster: The Dead End of Western Civilization
Personally I think it’s FUCKED that people are less subversive now, whatever happened to the concept of a fashion riot? Do we blame the pablum that is MTV? Adbuster’s hits on the topic of Hip, before you run the other way, check it out; “We’ve reached a point in our civilization where counterculture has mutated into a self-obsessed aesthetic vacuum. So while hipsterdom is the end product of all prior countercultures, it’s been stripped of its subversion and originality.”

Depressed, Repressed, Objectified: Are Men The New Women?
Is there a crisis of maleness? For decades straight women have pined for a more sensitive man, now they’ve got him, and they’re not so sure they want him. Less fertile, more weight-obsessed and far more likely to commit suicide than females, we wonder if feminism has made straight guys the weaker sex?

Times Online Asks Where Have All The Real Men Gone?
The Times UK looks at Kathleen Parker’s book “Save The Males” and presents a few interesting ideas, “In the process of fashioning a more female-friendly world, we have created a culture that is hostile towards males, contemptuous of masculinity and cynical about the delightful differences that make men irresistible, especially when something goes bump in the night.” Are we losing “maleness” in the quest to be both liberated and politically correct?

Five paintings by American pop artists Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein were stolen from a museum near Stockholm last month. Officials say thieves thieves broke in a grabbed exactly what they wanted. The stolen pieces have a value of around $500,000. Only $500,000, that number sounds low for such a huge lot of paintings, I think the stolen good were prints.

It’s summer so It’s not like I’m sitting around chowing down on bacon and bacon fat; anyway, this is going to be my last post on bacon so I’m going to make it count. Here from “the Warehouse” is something so wrong, that it’s right; a delicious recipe for a “Bacon Pig”. The “Bacon Pig” (patent pending) is a pork hot dog, encased in ground pork, wrapped in bacon and fashioned into the shape of a little pig (garlic cloves for the ears, and hot chili pepper pieces for the tail and eyes). Wrong, wrong wrong, but probably very yummy.

Numismaster reports, “A Spanish sweet shop owner from Aviles discovered a nicely crafted Hobo Nickel style reworked Spanish Euro coin in the till recently while counting through the change. The artist altered King Juan Carlos from the obverse of a 2001 KM1046 Euro coin into Homer Simpson, leaving the rest of the obverse and reverse alone and as struck. This is the first such alteration I have seen on a circulating Euro coin. A fun extension of the Hobo Nickel tradition.”

Superstar funkster Isaac Hayes, pioneering singer, songwriter, musician and actor who laid the groundwork for the Memphis soul sound through his work with Stax-Volt Records, died Sunday in East Memphis, Tenn. at the age of 65. Best known for his Academy Award winning “Theme From Shaft”, few figures exerted greater influence over the sounds we now call r&b, funk, disco and rap. Hayes was always about the down and dirty, the forbidden soulster force riding high on a funk supreme, which of course made his role of Chef on “Southpark” even more hilarious. Mr. Hayes had been married three times previously. In addition to his wife, he is survived by their son, Nana, and 11 other children. Take a moment and remember Hayes with the super delicious reworking of Burt Bacharach and Hal David’s “Walk On By” streaming above or watch the trailer from SHAFT.

I know you might be feeling a bit like you’re on Michael Phelps overload, but I just couldn’t resist posting this shot of the athlete smiling as Monday’s feel good shot of the day. Snagged during the medal presentation ceremony for the men’s 400m individual medley swimming final that took place over the weekend, Phelps stayed on course for eight Olympic gold medals when the United States won the 4×100-meter relay Monday in record time.

You can usually find me eating over the sink, or hovering over my computer, so the keyboard napkin might be quite useful. Developers say, no more crumbs in your keyboard thanks to their keyboard-napkin. Check out the mostly humorous 8 Must Have Products for Bachelor Led Households as designed by Valentin Engler, Marius Morger, Daniel Grolimund.

Green Bay Packers’ Brady Poppinga (6′3″ 247lbs) rides a bike to football training camp in Green Bay, Wisconsin. It’s a long held tradition for the giant size players to shove themselves onto the bikes of local children and peddle about a block from Lambeau Field to Clark Hinkle Field. Fun to see the huge players on the small(ish) bikes, was kind of hoping that someone would have produced a retro banana bike for one of the larger dudes to ride.

For those of you who awake having a Jimmy Dean meltdown there’s a newfangled alarm clock that will have you waking up to the delicious smell of sizzling bacon. Matty Sallin, Daniel Bartolini, and Hsiao-huh Hsu have designed a pig shaped Wake N Bacon Alarm Clock that will cook up a preloaded strip of greasy bacon with the help of a handy heat lamp. Sort of like an “easy bake oven” for carnivores that comes with an alarm. Oink Oink Pig, Wake Up Or I’ll Burn Your Fucking Bacon To A Crisp! Via the spectacular people of Design Boom.

In case you missed it, check out Ben McGrath’s in depth examination “A Soldier’s Legacy” which details the controversy surrounding the death of Army major Alan Rogers and the military’s “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” policy.

The article brings to light many of the questions surrounding the decorated Army major and his life that he was forced to compartmentalize due to the rigid restraints of a failed government policy regarding gays in the military. How do you honor a deceased veteran who may or may not have self identified as gay (to some, but not to others), what are the responsibilities and challenges the media have in reporting a story accurately. What are the challenges faced by friends and beneficiaries of the deceased and so forth. Keep reading from the New Yorker series where McGrath answers reader’s questions.

Kudos to Andrian Tomine on the fine illustration that accompanies the story of Major Rogers. The artist best known for his ongoing graphic novel series Optic Nerve, isn’t afraid to go for a look that is quietly revolutionary. Much like the Army Major’s life, the details begin to tell a story which is quite expansive.

Looks like social bookmarking service del.icio.us is now justdelicious, the company that was picked up by Yahoo in 2005, just got a much needed makeover. Sure I miss the lo-fi quality of the old, and some items look a bit wonky (iconography and I’m not much a blue and green fan) all in all it makes for a much easier read and an altogether positive rework. Now if I could just muster up a bit of inspiration to update my account….damn.

There’s been so much crap on television as of late, that when the new season of Mad Men aired last night it was like a fucking epiphany beaming out across an electric horizon. Mad Men remains brilliant all the way across the board, writing, acting and the art direction is mind blowing, it’s seriously off the charts. The show inhabits a matte filmic, cool blue mid-century modernist world of synthetics, supermarkets, TV and the revolution in mass communication. Everything is styled to look extremely sad, extremely beautiful or a combination of both. Am I insane or did we catch a bit of Gregory Crewson thrown in for good measure, it’s really pulling from so many sources.

Read the online chat with Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner, who identifies with the character of Peggy the most, but wishes he were Don Draper. The inclusion of Frank O’Hara’s “Meditations In An Emergency” was fascinating, looked to be one of the original 900 paperbound copies of which American poet John Ashbery said; “To ignore the rules is always a provocation, and since the poetry itself was crammed with provocative sentiments, it was met with the friendly silence reserved for the thoroughly unacceptable guest.”

“I Have a Rendezvous With Death” Director Joseph Kosinski delivers the first trailer for Gears of War 2. A sequel scheduled for release in November 2008. Watch the sickness at G4tv.

Warhol Stars reports that “Current TV is currently showing a preview clip from The Cool School (dir. Morgan Neville) - a film about Irving Blum and Walter Hopp’s Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles which hosted the first solo exhibition of Warhol’s Soup Cans in 1962 and became a refuge for artists that were considered too unconventional for New York’s traditional style. The film was shown last year at the London Film Festival and is now available on DVD as a download from iTunes or through the usual outlets. Watch the Clip Here“.

Something I rarely talk about on my site is the amount of reading I do, and yes, I’m horrible at updating my Good Reads profile. I usually pour over several books at once, i.e. three, four, sometimes five titles that capture and hold my attention for 3-7 days. The statement is not a secret brag, it’s just an admission or method of reading that tricks the part of my brain that tends to be a bit more A.D.D. The stack of reading material gets carried with me, or sits handily on my desk at work packed full of bookmarks and sticky notes, until the end of the week when the final pages are read, and the whole production gets returned to the library, passed on to friends, or put on my bookshelf. Yes, I do need a Kindle.

Trust, it’s not all Cervantes, Defoe, Swift and Dickens, there’s even an occasional Oprah Book Club Selection (not The Secret) comic book, magazine, graphic novel, or what I classify as “other” i.e smut. So much for intellectual pursuits. I’d love to say that I’m reacquainting myself with “Brideshead Revisited” but that would be like a gigantic step back in time; all that Catholicism expressed in a secular literary form, the wonderful ambiguity of Charles and Sebastian’s relationship that fascinated me to no end when I was a 15 year old carrying around a sketchbook and spray painting my mail man shoes silver. Well, the Charles and Sebastian thing is still interesting, and yes I will see the film.

Waugh served up some brilliant writing in Brideshead, “naughtiness high on the catalogue of grave sins”, a reference made at one point to Charles’ impatiently anticipating Sebastian’s letters in the manner of one who is love-struck. Stumbling upon that line as a teenager was awe inspiring, a salaciously delicious bit of forbidden fruit. I suppose I had the same reaction to the naughty bits of the “Canterbury Tales” (because we were forced to read that in High School) almost everything by Tennessee Williams and of course, the dirty passages from Judy Blume’s “Wifey”.

Literacy Debate: Online, R U Really Reading? The New York Times contrasts teen and tween internet heavy reading habits with those of their paper and text loving elders. Marshall McLuhan would call this, “Information overload equals pattern recognition.” We are a nation of skimmers, no doubt school aged Americans are fueled by school systems teaching to the test (they have no choice) and laboriously uncreative state and national standards. Fortunately I live in a place where the public library system is absolutely stellar, and what can only be described as a sign of the times, patrons are not lined up along the book shelves, but waiting in line for computers. The technological gap is being filled publicly. Yes even though you are now homeless due to the foreclosure crisis, you can use the library to update your Facebook account.

That said, I still believe reading is a revolutionary act. Librarians are not and have never been shy retiring shushers’ they are quirky custodians of the mysterious whether it’s online or off. Come on you’ve seen The Desk Set! Although those who are true readers are fully ensconced in their own literary journey that unfolds accidently or fully by design and will probably never have to speak to a librarian. The days of stumbling on to James St James’ “Disco Bloodbath” or picking up White’s A Boy’s Own Story because it has a hot cover, just may be coming to a end.