Yes, Death Valley was hot, but did it set a record?

The official stats won’t be available until Monday, but one reading was 128 — which would tie the June record — and another was 129.9.

DEATH VALLEY — Blame it on dueling thermometers.

    

via L.A. Times – California | Local News http://da.feedsportal.com/c/34336/f/625246/s/2e050c9b/l/0L0Slatimes0N0Cnews0Clocal0Cla0Eme0E0A70A10Erecord0Eheat0E20A130A70A10H0A0H34710A50Bstory0Dtrack0Frss/ia1.htm

Snowden’s Fate Is Up to Russia, Ecuador Says

President Rafael Correa said Sunday that while there were weighty arguments for granting asylum to the fugitive American intelligence leaker Edward J. Snowden, it was up to Russia to decide what happens to him.

via NYT > Most Recent Headlines http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/01/world/americas/snowdens-fate-is-up-to-russia-ecuador-says.html

Film Review: ‘The Lone Ranger’

No longer simply the sidekick, Tonto gets top billing in Disney’s extravagant Lone Ranger reboot, which partners a heavily face-painted Johnny Depp with the blandly handsome Armie Hammer.

via Variety http://variety.com/2013/film/reviews/the-lone-ranger-review-1200503371/

Did Serena Williams’s Angry Outburst Really Threaten the Entire Game of Tennis?

The makers of the documentary “Venus and Serena” speak out about the legal battle over a controversial portion of their film.

via Vanity Fair | VF.com http://www.vanityfair.com/online/daily/2013/07/angry-outburst-tennis-serena-williams

Job Title Key to Inner Access Held by Snowden

Edward J. Snowden’s assignment as an infrastructure analyst helps explain how he could lay bare an agency’s efforts to identify potential targets.

via NYT > Most Recent Headlines http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/01/us/job-title-key-to-inner-access-held-by-snowden.html

Sean Parker Is a Honeymoonster: A Guide to Post-Wedding Bridezillas

Yesterday, Facebook mogul Sean Parker published a 9500-word essay on TechCrunch debunking criticism of his $10M wedding in Big Sur. Contrary to media reports that portrayed him as a forest-destroying egomaniac, Parker writes, his wedding was “beautiful,” “tasteful,” “enchanted,” and “epic.” He invokes fairy tales, God, and J.R.R. Tolkien. He uses the phrase “unparalleled beauty.” He also uses the phrase “imbuing the moment with a feeling of supernatural bliss.”

This is honeymoonster behavior.

The honeymoonster is social media’s sequel to the bridezilla. Though its origin is difficult to trace, bridezilla appears to have entered the lexicon in the mid-nineties to describe a woman behaving monstrously during the planning and execution of her wedding. The earliest print reference appears to be a 1995 Boston Globe article about bridal greed: “She also cautions brides-to-be about turning into Bridezilla, the name wedding consultants bestow on brides who are particularly difficult and obnoxious.” Bridezillas reach their peak on wedding day, but like mayflies expiring at dusk after a day of noisy mating rituals, they expire when the night ends. After that, the conventional wisdom goes, they’re just cranky wives.

But modern weddings have a second life online. They are photographed, Instagrammed, and posted on Facebook for admiration, discussion, nostalgia, and gawking. Wedding website templates at The Knot and My Wedding offer mechanisms for distributing pictures after the party. And so a new genre of wedding-adjacent divas have emerged. Let’s call them honeymoonsters—newlyweds who want to manage their weddings after they’re over.

Bridezillas control what you do at a wedding; honeymoonsters control how you document it. (They may ban electronics entirely.) Bridezillas enforce wedding hashtags; honeymoonsters force deletion of tagged material they don’t like. Bridezillas terrorize wedding planners; honeymoonsters terrorize the videographers, photographers, and scrapbookers. Honeymoonsters go to great lengths to trash the dress. They pose for morning-after boudoir photos.

Sean Parker helped engineer the invention of social media, so he is both cause and effect of honeymoonster culture. He is the mother of all honeymoonsters.

Image management is more complicated for a public figure than it is for the rest of us, but according to Parker, the dilemma exists on a continuum of relative digital celebrity. “One of the most salient themes of our ceremony and also of our vows was the notion of ‘sanctuary,'” Parker writes. “Such a place is increasingly difficult to find in our technologically supercharged and hyper-connected world.” For those “cursed with celebrity or notoriety,” the effect is “only exaggerated.” (For the sake of expediency, let’s not dwell on the tortured self-portrait embedded in those statements, tantalizing as it may be.) “We chose a setting for our wedding that was a literal expression of our search for sanctuary: a place that was safe, private, and intimate,” he writes. “We didn’t court attention – quite the opposite, we asked guests to check their cell phones and cameras at the door.” Nevertheless, he planned a multi-million wedding that involved fake ruins and a settlement with the California Coastal Commission, and his essay contains photos and descriptions of the ceremony, all available for public consumption. His angst isn’t only about attention. It’s also about control. Sanctuaries, after all, are only safe when they are controlled to keep out predators and the profane.

Parker faced an abnormal level of wedding backlash, but the pursuit of control drives non-celebrity honeymoonsters, too. Check out the rationale from this “Cellphone/Camera Ban” discussion at The Knot:

Is anybody banning cellphones and/or cameras at their ceremony so that the guests can actually enjoy the moment without having to duck around other guests’ electronics in the way of view and so that when you look out to see the happy smiles and tears of joy on their faces you can actually see their faces instead of the electronics? I plan to hire a photographer and videographer for the ceremony and possibly set up an Instagram hashtag for the reception so that guests can share their photos from that.

The bride wants to edit how her guests “enjoy the moment” (preferably with visible tears of joy) as well as how they will look in the professional photographs she commissions (no cellphone facial obstruction). She’s not against attention; reception Instagramming is fair game, as long as the images are properly tagged. She wants to influence when and how people pay attention to her, both in the moment and when they look back.

Wanting to remember your wedding a certain way is not inherently monstrous. Nor is the post-facto pursuit of privacy. Both are reasonable desires and can be indulged healthily. But when your post-wedding triage approaches the length of the Epic of Gilgamesh, consider taking a break. The wedding is over. It served its purpose. You are now married. You probably even had fun! “Our wedding day was a beautiful dream come true,” Parker writes. “After all the stress of the preceding 19 days, the wedding itself went off without a hitch. Afterwards we were excited to run away on our honeymoon and forget about everything.” But he could not. Some toxic combination of
wedding stress, digital feedback loops, and social anxiety had driven him to madness. He had become a honeymoonster.

Special thanks to Josh Gondelman for critical lexical contributions to this article.

Read more posts by Maureen O’Connor

Filed Under:
sean parker
,weddings!
,bridezillas
,honeymoonsters
,honeymoons
,social media
,control freaks
,love and war

via Daily Intelligencer http://nymag.com/thecut/2013/06/honeymoonsters-bridezillas-after-the-wedding.html

How Formula One Teams Calculate the Cost of Crashing

The price to pay involves more than money when a driver has an accident, even if there are no injuries.

via NYT > Most Recent Headlines http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/29/sports/autoracing/How-Formula-One-Teams-Calculate-the-Cost-of-Crashing.html

The Next ‘Sopranos’?

Jace Lacob on ‘Ray Donovan,’ Showtime’s Liev Schreiber and Jon Voight fixer drama, which begins Sunday.

    

via The Daily Beast – Latest Articles http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/06/28/ray-donovan-is-the-liev-schreiber-led-showtime-drama-the-next-sopranos.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+thedailybeast%2Farticles+%28The+Daily+Beast+-+Latest+Articles%29

Netflix Renews Original Series “Orange is the New Black” For Second Season Ahead Of First Season Premieres

Season 1 Premieres Thursday, July 11th on Netflix

via TVbytheNumbers http://tvbythenumbers.zap2it.com/2013/06/27/netflix-renews-original-series-orange-is-the-new-black-for-second-season-ahead-of-first-season-premieres/189520/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Tvbythenumbers+%28TVbytheNumbers%29

Company That Vetted Snowden Accused of Chronic Slacking, Lying to the Government

In response to the NSA scandal, the government has argued that surveillance is necessary for our safety, and we just need to trust that they’re violating Americans’ privacy as little as possible. It’s a lot harder to make that leap of faith following the revelation that those handling sensitive data might not be checked all that thoroughly. Federal investigators claim they have evidence that USIS, the largest private provider of government background checks, frequently failed to properly complete its investigations of those seeking security clearance, then lied to government to cover their tracks. After all, it’s not like one of their subjects was likely to steal a trove of classified information, post it online, and spark an international manhunt, right?

USIS performed Edward Snowden’s security background check, and officials say that while there were unspecified problems during the process he was eventually cleared to work as a Booz Allen Hamilton contractor at the NSA’s Hawaii office. While recent developments shed more light on the issue, the concerns aren’t new. The Office of Personnel Management, which oversees most of the government’s security background checks, launched a contracting-fraud investigation of USIS in 2011 (just a few months after Snowden was given security clearance). Though the OPM inspector general’s office won’t comment on the case, last week Sen. Claire McCaskill said USIS is the subject of a criminal probe due to a “systematic failure” to conduct background checks.

The company was required to conduct reviews of all of the background checks it performed to make sure nothing had been overlooked. However, from 2008 to 2011 USIS allegedly skipped the second review in as many as half of its cases, then told the government it had performed both checks. Now a federal watchdog tells the Washington Post that he plans to recommend that the government stop using USIS, unless the company can prove that it’s changed its ways.

Making good on that threat would be difficult, as USIS handles about 45 percent of all background checks for OPM, and the system is already plagued by huge backlogs. So even if the allegations are true, the task of determining who should be handling our most sensitive data might remain with a company that lied about cutting corners, but promises not to do it again.

Read more posts by Margaret Hartmann

Filed Under:
spy games
,edward snowden
,usis
,privacy

via Daily Intelligencer http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2013/06/company-that-vetted-snowden-did-shoddy-work.html