desideratum

This Spanish/Portuguese beauty born and raised in the O.C. is into designing clothes, modeling and more than modeling. With a distinct sense of style, humor and this bangsy/lip-biting thing going on that’sa nice, she’s got my vote.

Oh and um, don’t read too much into the watermark, heh..

Rawr.

I don’t usually get t-shirts online (except for the “- i pwn n00bs -” shirt I just bought off Pure Pwnage), but this is realllllly tempting. Also, Threadless designs are pretty sweet and I need a new hoodie.

/shop on.

The VT shooting is ringing out all across the web / social networking sites, and probably will be for quite some time. Here are some select links that I thought were particularly interesting and/or telling. Oh, and I’m frequently updating these links for some reason.

• Daily Show: Who’s to blame for the VA Tech Massacre? (via Crooks and Liars)
• NBC news has made Cho Seung-Hui a martyr by airing his tapes. I agree — hence why I refuse to watch them. (via deusexmalcontent)
• Yale prohibits stage weapons. Money quote:
  

  Brandon Berger ’10, who plays a swordsman in the show, said the switch to an obviously fake wooden sword has changed the nature of his part from an “evil, errant knight to a petulant child.”

  (via Yale Daily News)
  
• A little healthy realization that blaming video games for the shooting is flat out idiotic (read: Jack Thompson = moron). (via MSNBC)
• Tribute to / profiles of the VT victims. (via NYTimes)
• Sigh.. more JT.. now he’s blaming Bill Gates for Counter-Strike which has no relation to the VT shooter. (via TheHappyGamer)
• Jack Thompson gets pwned on Hardball [video]. (via Kotaku)
  
• Are you sure the devil didn’t make him do it? (via FOXnews)
  
• Atheism taking heat for not showing sympathy. Yeah, why can’t you be more like the Westboro Baptists and the Scientologists, silly atheists? (sarcasm) (via newsblogger@aol)
• This student who said at a discussion about the shooting that he “could understand” how someone might go postal gets arrested. He might or might not be dangerous, but c’mon.. free speech? (via ABCnews)
• Koreans at VT getting scared. I feel sorry for people who can’t distinguish individual from ethnicity. (via Salon)
  
• Ok, so the shooter didn’t have games in his possession. I would argue that if he had them, he might not have done it. (via GayGamer)
  
• Justin Timberlake-alike American Idol singer does the VT sympathy dance. And Simon rolls his eyes. (via DrudgeReport)
• The shooter contacted NBC news and sent them his manifesto. (via MSNBC)
  
• Photos of the VT shooting aftermath. (via neoncobra@blogspot)
• Cho Seung-Hui wrote some plays, and apparently they’re online. You can tell the author tries to be funny in a dark way and fails because he’s an awful writer. (via newsbloggers@aol)
• Jack Thompson using the VT shooting to espouse more anti-video game propaganda. (via Kotaku)
• Dr. Phil pulls a Jack Thompson: blames video games for VT shooting. (via GamePolitics)
  
• Gunman identified as South Korean student Cho Seung-Hui. (via Reuters)
• VT questions, copycat odds, and ‘net nabs wrong man. (via BoingBoing)

Joshua Bell, a world-renowned violinist, pulls out his $3.5 million instrument for an unexpected audience: the 8am rush hour travelers at the L’Enfant Plaza subway station in Washington D.C.

His performance was arranged by The Washington Post as an experiment in context, perception and priorities — as well as an unblinking assessment of public taste: In a banal setting at an inconvenient time, would beauty transcend?

And the results, while not unexpected, are nevertheless shocking. I’d like to think I would have stopped if I had passed by and heard him play, but I’m not sure I would have. I definitely would have given him $5 if I had passed while he was playing Schubert’s “Ave Maria” though; I just love the song so much that I make it a point to show that to any street performer that plays it.

Oh yeah, and there are videos. Check it out.

Link (washingtonpost.com)