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demmiblue

demmiblue's Journal
demmiblue's Journal
August 31, 2016

Beware of the dog.

August 31, 2016

Please offer me a seat.

Source: BBC



People with hidden health conditions are being offered "Please offer me a seat" badges in a bid to help ease their suffering on London transport.

The Transport for London (TfL) trial follows the success of its "Baby on board" badge for pregnant women.

TfL is recruiting 1,000 people to start wearing the blue badges from 12 September.

Mayor of London Sadiq Khan said he hoped they would "give confidence" to people who find standing difficult.

<snip>

"This small act of consideration from Londoners could make a huge difference to disabled people getting around the city and being fully involved in all London has to offer," said Alice Mitchell-Pye of charity Leonard Cheshire Disability.


Read more: http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-37222554


People helping people... it doesn't get any better than that! I hope this trial is very successful.
August 30, 2016

White Lives Matter Has Been Declared a Hate Group

Source: NYT



A white nationalist group called White Lives Matter, which calls itself an opponent of the Black Lives Matter movement, has been declared a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, an organization that tracks extremist groups in the United States.

“The White Lives Matter website says their movement is dedicated to the preservation of the white race. That tells you all you need to know,” said Heidi Beirich, the director of the Intelligence Project at the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Ala. “They’re against integration, immigration. This is standard white supremacist stuff.”

The group, which grew out of a social media meme, argues that white Americans are victims of a genocide caused by factors like the immigration of nonwhite people and marriage between white Christians and nonwhites or Jews, Ms. Beirich said. The law center’s designation is meant to draw attention to and increase scrutiny of the group’s activities.

Last week, its members held a protest outside the Houston office of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People to demand that it denounce Black Lives Matter, according to video posted online by the group. The Houston Chronicle reported that some of the protesters carried assault rifles and Confederate flags.


Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/31/us/white-lives-matter-has-been-declared-a-hate-group.html
August 30, 2016

iPad2 users: is there any fix for the constant reloading of web pages?

I don't even bother to log into DU on my iPad anymore!

The admins added yet another line of those gawd-awful taboola ads (it is beginning to look like Times Square up in here), and I find myself clicking on them by accident, due to a little lag, while I am scrolling down. Then my iPad acts like it is traversing through a pond of molasses!

I wish I had never updated the OS.

August 26, 2016

Not now John...



August 16, 2016

Breathtaking Portraits Capture Ballet's Finest Dancing on the Streets of New York

Source: My Modern Met

Miming and photography might not seem to go hand-in-hand, but for Omar Z. Robles, a background in the former physical art has inspired a stunning series of still images with the dynamic elegance of any real-time staged show. Born in Puerto Rico but now based in New York City, Robles captures dancers poised gracefully against the city grit, performing pirouettes and pliés amid taxi traffic jams, sidewalk puddles, and other bustling urban scenes.

In an interview with Huffington Post, he explains, “Like mime theater, photography [is] an amazing nonverbal communication medium…Yet it allowed [me] to capture fleeting emotions and tell a story for a much longer time than mime theater could.” In his stirring visual tales, ballerinas and ballerinos make the perfect protagonists. As he describes, “Ballet dancers make us feel as if their movements were truly effortless. This while pushing their bodies to the very extreme of what is humanly possible. It is that grace and elegance which mesmerizes us.”

He works with dancers from the American Ballet Theatre, Dance Theatre of Harlem, Ballet Concierto De Puerto Rico, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre, and more, and their paused movements are indeed mesmerizing, particularly when paired with Robles’ selections of surroundings. The men and women twist and twirl with elegance, encumbered by neither the city hubbub nor the harshest of natural elements. He’s taken many of the portraits during pounding rainstorms, for example, with the dazzling drops swirling around long legs and arms like glitter; otherwise, he tends to seek sensational lighting conditions, whether using the beams of cars to create technicolor backgrounds, sourcing slices of heavy shadow in dim alleyways, or backlighting his subjects in the glow of the setting sun.

The continuously developing collection is stunning in its vibrant variety, rendering theatrics from ordinary sidewalks. This juxtaposition between ballet dancer and urban backdrop is all a part of Robles’ vision: “to break the norm of the everyday, to shatter the monotony of our way of life and portray a world where we could move without the stiff rules of etiquette. To capture the idea of weightlessness, or hovering around town.”













More: http://www.mymodernmet.com/profiles/blogs/omar-robles-ozrdance

(For some reason, I couldn't post some of my favorite pics)

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