According to Energy Fiend, it would take a mere 18 cups of a large Starbucks coffee to kill me. Not that this is particular to Starbucks—you also have the option to find out how many of your other favorite caffeinated beverages it will take to kill you (112 cans of Red Bull, 265 bottles of [...]

We love fun things in foreign languages over here at Reasoner. Not surprisingly, this stencil encourages you to “be vegetarian.” It is the most prominent stencil I have seen so far in Rio de Janeiro. Stencil art often has a social or political message associated with it, which makes it somewhat unique in the street [...]

Okay. I just experienced my first Baile Funk party in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro. For those of you who may not know, favelas are the shantytowns located on the hills of Rio de Janeiro. Traditionally it was forbidden to build on the hills of the city and as a result Rio is one of the only cities where the privileged live at sea level and the poor live up above with breathtaking views of the sea and surrounding area. While the favels are rife with drug trade, my friends that live in Rocinha, Rio’s largest favela, claim that it is actually very safe to live there. The drug traffickers are notorious for keeping general crime down in the neighborhoods, although violence does errupt as a result of the drug trade itself. And the cops? They just stay out of the picture completely.

Back to Baile Funk. It is a genre that has emerged out of Brazil and has been picked up by such artists as M.I.A. and Diplo. It is not the type of funk you’d tradtionally think of in the US—it has a very electronic bassline to it. They sample songs from the mid 90s such as Prince’s When Doves Cry (see Piracy Funds Terrorism vol 1), add a bassline, and add their own lyrics over it.

The frustratingly (for Apple at least) non-copyrightable iNoun marketing fad has been going strong for a while—strong enough that I, for one, am beginning to wish Apple could copyright the thing, just to limit the range of products that would take up the name (and limit them in part to the perfectly post-ironically named iPod). [...]

Exercising his moral right as a Christen Conservative Leader, Pat Robertson makes the call for U.S. assassination of Venezuelan President on his ABC Family show “The 700 Club.” Robertson worried about the large oil reserves sitting under Pres Chavez’s rule claims, “It’s a whole lot cheaper than starting a war. And I don’t think [...]

”[T]hese outings are attended and enjoyed by toddlers to octogenerians, singles, families, youth or church groups, everyone has a good time and brings back something of eternal value.”

Is that a money back guarantee? (And we’re not talking cash here..)

The SF-based Center for Tactical Magic, an “organization dedicated to the extensive research, development, and deployment of the pragmatic system known as Tactical Magic — a fusion force summoned from the ways of the artist, the magician, the ninja, and the private investigator”, has unveiled the Tactical Ice Cream Unit. The what?

Although the TICU appears [...]

That bastion of liberal media bias, The New York Times, has just published an article tracing John Roberts’ political development as an undergraduate and then law student at Harvard in the six years following 1973 (and you thought only Reasoners stayed at Harvard for six or more years). The derision Roberts faced as one [...]