Danny Puff

This year was all about the bikini for a number of hard-bodied stars. Jessica Alba showed off her fit frame when she hit the beach in St. Barts earlier this year, while models Kate Upton and Gisele Bündchen rocked their assets in string two-pieces. Meanwhile, Julianne Hough got over her broken heart following her breakup with Ryan Seacrest by taking a girls' trip to Miami with pal Nina Dobrev. See all those moments and many more, including Kim Kardashian's pregnant bikini snaps and Kate Moss's swimwear-filled vacation, in our roundup, and make sure to check out all our best of 2013 coverage!



















































Source : http://www.popsugar.com/Celebrities-Bikinis-2013-32765898

Read More

Consider this a "Spoiler Warning" for The Amazing Spider-Man 2. After the next couple sentences, which I am intentionally padding for the sake of the social network feed, I will be discussing, in detail, a couple major plot turns in The Amazing Spider-Man 2. For those who don’t know and don’t want to know, make haste in 3… 2… 1…


The good news is that no one cheered. I’ve written before of my concern that the inevitable death of Gwen Stacy in The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (from the Sony Corporation) would bring cheers from the audience, as hardcore fans would applaud the somewhat iconic story turn. They didn’t cheer. Even with painfully obvious foreshadowing starting with Emma Stone’s "I could die at any moment!" high school graduation speech, it stands to reason that the vast majority of general audience members who saw the film this weekend were actually surprised when Spider-Man tried but failed to save his girlfriend from said death plunge inside a clock tower. But in terms of killing off Peter Parker’s girlfriend to mimic a story that was groundbreaking 41 years ago, Marc Webb, Emma Stone, and company spent so much time being excited that they could that they didn’t stop to wonder whether they should.

I made a point not to discuss said plot turn in my initial review, both because it was a massive spoiler and because it was a plot turn that I disapproved of on principle, and thus it would be unfair to be too hard on a film offering what many fans in fact wanted to see in one form or another. Truth be told, it was a ripping action climax, with Spidey and newly established Green Goblin doing swift and brutal combat as Gwen kept falling in and out of mortal peril. The moment offered the best kind of suspense, which is the horror of knowing how a moment is going to play out even while hoping that things go differently. But the adherence to comics dogma opens up a gigantic can of worms for upcoming Amazing Spider-Man films, harming the would-be appeal of future installments by turning its most popular character into a "woman in refrigerator."

The phrase "woman in refrigerator", coined by future comic book writer Gail Simone 1999, referred to the tendency of comic books to do harm upon the girlfriends, wives, or female siblings of a male hero for the sole purpose of making the hero feel bad and/or seek vengeance. It was named after an incident in a 1994 Green Lantern comic where Kyle Rayner’s girlfriend was murdered and stuffed in a refrigerator. It soon became the de-facto phrase for the pattern in comic books by which the female supporting character in a male-centric title would be raped, murdered, assaulted and/or de-powered so that the male here could "have a sad." And that’s really all the death of Ms. Stacy is for this second Spider-Man film. Emma Stone gave us a rather amusing and engaging female character, the filmmakers did their best to sell the notion that she was her own character with her own agency, then she got chucked down a clock tower so that Peter could feel bad.

Never mind the young woman who was on her way to Oxford, a perfect example of how to realistically write out a major character without having to resort to a now-cliched "shocking death". Never mind the fact that Gwen helped Spidey save the day from Electro’s blackout and then was immediately murdered as de-facto punishment for her heroic pluck. The most important thing about Gwen Stacy will be that she died. Her death only matters in how it affects the male superhero and how he grows or changes as a result. Even as the somewhat fantastically perfect girlfriend, her life was meaningless save how her murder affected Peter and established the Green Goblin as an arch-villain for The Amazing Spider-Man 3. Filmmakers like to talk up the allegedly positive qualities of the hero’s girlfriend as an excuse for not having female superheroes, but in the end Gwen lived only to die violently.

The "Woman In Refrigerator" trope is a constant presence in mainstream entertainment, even in entertainment I would classify as "really good." It’s how 24 chose to end its first and last seasons. The Blacklist recently dispatched of a supporting character’s estranged wife just a few episodes after introducing her. Lost killed off two major female characters in season 2 purely to make their respective island boyfriends feel bad. I love Chris Nolan films as much as the next critic, but Memento, The Prestige, and Inception eventually revolved around the violent death of a female character solely so that the hero could be tormented by said violence. The sheer number of films that start or end with a male hero traumatized over the recent death of his wife and/or kids is too numerous to count (Dante’s Peak, Law-Abiding Citizen, Casino Royale, End of Days, Lethal Weapon, just to name a few). I don’t accuse Marc Webb and company of any ill-intent, and I defend on principle their rights as artists to tell any story they choose, but what was groundbreaking 41 years ago is not just cliched but indicative of a cultural issue, in terms of how females are utilized and valued in pop entertainment.

But even if you’re not bothered on a broader cultural sense about the commonplace treatment of female characters as injured/raped/murdered props in the male-centric narratives of mainstream entertainment, or you think I’m picking on Amazing Spider-Man 2 in a way that I didn’t pick on, for example, The Dark Knight, the implications for this franchise are specific and problematic. Thanks to the violent murder of Gwen Stacy, the third Amazing Spider-Man is left without the very thing that audiences and critics claim to love most about the first two films. Even those who didn’t like either of the films will tell you that they enjoyed the quirky romantic banter between real-life couple Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone. Stone is dead, which means that we won’t get that key component the next time around.

There is a reason why Han Solo didn’t stay frozen in Return of the Jedi,why Jack Sparrow eventually came back in Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End, or why Optimus Prime didn’t stay dead in Revenge of the Fallen. You don’t make a sequel by taking away the very thing the audience came to see.  And this film was all about setting up future sequels. With Gwen now deceased, the third film will find a new replacement girlfriend for Peter (because nothing takes the mind off your murdered ex like bumping into your hot red head neighbor who calls you "tiger") and/or put even more emphasis on its villains, which is the one thing most everybody agreed was most problematic. Few moviegoers walking out of The Amazing Spider-Man 2 were excited about the prospect of seeing more of the Green Goblin, more of the Rhino, a resurrection for Electro and/or a return of the Lizard.

Sony's obsessive focus on crafting a kind of "universe" around the various Spidey foes is both the core narrative flaw of this sequel (Peter had no real arc) and the likely path for a third film. The choice to write out Emma Stone was (to my knowledge) an artistic one as opposed to a corporate one. But the gaping hole left in her absence allows future installments to further set up what Sony desperately wants to be the end game for this franchise, a big "Sinister Six" smack down. The problem is that no one particularly likes the villains in this specific franchise. They like the hero and they like the hero’s plucky girlfriend. But said girlfriend just bit the dust, which means that the third Amazing Spider-Man movie, which in turn follows two installments that were somewhat liked or tolerated without being loved, will enter theaters in June 2016 with less of what you liked and more of what you disliked.

The fact that Amazing Spider-Man 2 made $369 million in 19 days of worldwide play with no buzz shows how potent the Spider-Man character still is. But Sony and company just played their trump card, offering the iconic "death of Gwen Stacy" scene that many hardcore fans were waiting for ever since the character was announced. And unlike Iron Man 2 or Star Trek Into Darkness, which were also somewhat dispassionately received sequels that made about as much as the original worldwide, there is no would-be Avengers or 50th anniversary to boost interest for the third installment. The Amazing Spider-Man 3 will live or die by the cards it has dealt itself, and, like Sherlock Holmes: Game of Shadows, it just gave away its trump card. I won’t predict box office doom for Amazing Spider-Man 3, but at some point audiences are going to notice that they aren’t all that crazy about these films.

And on a cultural level, millions of young audience members, male and female alike, just got a profound lesson on the value of female human life in pop-culture entertainment. You can talk all you want creating "strong", "independent", female characters who are "strong role models" for young girls in otherwise male-centric entertainments, but if the plot negates those qualities by turning her into a victim, taking away her agency, and/or punishing her for those very qualities, it doesn’t make a bit of difference. Gwen Stacy may be a great character, mostly only because Emma Stone is a great actress.  But in the end she’s irrelevant save for the fact that she died.

Read More

Rob Walker | @YahooTechGoogle may have set out to "organize the world's information," but thanks to the creativity of a huge variety of artists, designers, hackers and other tinkerers it s become something else: an art museum hidden within a search engine. Because a slew of people have found clever ways to exploit or misuse Google s tools and algorithms and endless troves of data, Google has accidentally become a mother lode of artistic inspiration (and, often humorously, a passive artistic collaborator.) Google has proven such a muse that you could mount an amazing museum show of Google-derived works which is precisely what we ve done. Until we raise the capital to rent out a physical space, you ll have to settle for the virtual version of the Google-heim Art Museum that follows: The most comprehensive collection of Google arts we think you can stand, grouped by specific Google products and services. Enjoy, and please don't touch the artwork/your computer screen.

GOOGLE EARTHIn Juxtapose, Daniel Schwarz gathers Google satellite images of adjacent, remote patches of Earth at different times of year, and pairs them.

Meanwhile, Elena Radice seeks out joints on Google Maps where seasonal shifts are revealed inadvertently: One seasonal set of images abruptly bumps up against another. Her images are collected on the Tumblr Abstract Season Changes.

Onformative, a design studio, has collaborated with Christian Loclair to highlight another landscape feature visible via Google Earth: Google Faces.

From Google Faces. Do you see the face?The spooky video Algorithmic Architecture, by Charlie Behrens, takes viewers on a trip through Google Earth or rather through its many corners where images register improperly. The result is a smeary, blocky, disconcerting landscape, built out of sputtering algorithms.

Clement Valla curates on ongoing collection of charmingly surreal glitch scenes from Google Earth, in the series Postcards From Google Earth.

Peter Root uses Google Earth in his video Digital Detritus. But here it s a backdrop setting for what he calls digital installations wild, sci-fi, 3D-modelled shapes and structures hovering over and sprouting from Earth (or Google s rendition of it, anyway).

GOOGLE ART PROJECTPhil Thompson s Copyrights actually draws on Google s more official interaction with the art world: The Google Art Project, which documents various museums so they can be explored from afar via a Street View-like interface. But evidently there are copyright issues around certain images in certain museums. Thompson seeks those out and captures them with screenshots then he has the pixelated abstraction copied in the form of an oil painting (by companies that offer this service in China; who knew?). Thus a blocked digital image is converted back into a physical art work. GOOGLE STREET VIEWIn this truly lovely short video, The Theory (which openly credits its collaborator, attributing the piece to itself and Google Street View ), stop-motion animation and Street View are combined to show the story of a lonely desk toy who uses Google s tool to make a virtual cross-country road trip.

Two of the most celebrated examples of extracting art from Google data involve using Street View as something like street photography. Jon Rafman's 9-Eyes (a reference to the multi-direction cameras mounted on Google s Street View vehicles) plucks disturbing, funny, beautiful, or otherwise surprising images from the service and collects them on 9-Eyes.com.

From 9-eyes.com And Michael Wolf has created several series culled from captured Street View images, grouped into themes such Portrait (zooming in on faces blurred by Google s system) and Interface (which include Street View s interaction graphics).

by Michael Wolf.As part of an installation project titled Higher Definition earlier this year, Jeroen Nelemans mounted Street View iconography on Plexiglas in front of a home/gallery in Oak Park, Illinois, making the suburban dwelling look in the physical world as it would on a Google-mediated computer screen.

Paolo Cirio s Street Ghosts focuses on the random human beings captured by Street View s documentation, reproducing their semi-blurry forms as street art in the same real-world locations. From Paolo Cirio's Type an address into Street View Stereographic and it converts any Street View image [into] a stereographic projection resulting in a pleasingly insane visual.

GOOGLE GOGGLES

Google Goggles is an Android app designed to enable visual searching : Take a picture of a book or a landmark or whatever, and Goggles is supposed to spit back relevant information. Samuel J. Bland got interested in the similar images component of the results, particularly in cases when Googles didn t seem to comprehend what it was seeing. Bland s series Googlology paired images he submitted with a collage of images Goggles served up in response which weirdly mimic the original form, despite being non-sequiturs.

GOOGLE BOOKS

The Art of Google Books tracks unexpectedly compelling images squirreled away in the vast Google Books project often the result of some error or misstep in the digitization process.

GOOGLE MAPS (SATELLITE VIEW)For the series Satellite Collections, Jenny Odell selected specific categories of built-landscape features (swimming pools, nuclear cooling towers, stadiums, parking lots, etc.) and assembled them into fascinating collages. IMAGE SEARCH RESULTSDaniel Mercadante gathered up a massive trove of pictures of spherical objects, most from Google Image Search, and assembled them into the dazzling short super-super-supercut video, Ball.





Ben West and Felix Heyes used Google to search every word in the dictionary, grabbed the top Image result for each, and assembled a 1,240-page book (titled Google ) of the results.



Ken Goldman s series of Google Portraits render Google Image Search results pages in the form of watercolors. Dina Kelberman s I m Google was inspired by wandering through Google Image Search and YouTube, and recreates the journey of similar Web-culled visual leading to slightly similar visual, gradually evolving into completely different visuals infinitely in an endless-scroll Tumblr. (Endless scrolling is currently disabled, but a note on I m Google says it will be restored in a week or two. )

Phew! So, what did I miss? If there are other Google-derived or inspired art projects I should know about, speak up in the comments or tweet them @notrobwalker.

Read More

NEW YORK (AP) Paula Deen dissolved into tears during a "Today" show interview Wednesday about her admission that she used a racial slur in the past, saying anyone in the audience who's never said anything they've regretted should pick up a rock and throw it at her head.

The celebrity chef, who had backed out of a "Today" interview last Friday, said she was not a racist and was heartbroken by the controversy that began with her own deposition in a lawsuit. Deen has been dropped by the Food Network and as a celebrity endorser by Smithfield Foods.

"I've had to hold friends in my arms while they've sobbed because they know what's been said about me is not true and I'm having to comfort them," she said.

Deen told Lauer she could only recall using the "n-word" once. She had earlier said that she remembered using it when retelling a story about when she was held at gunpoint by a robber who was black while working as a bank teller in the 1980s in Georgia. In a deposition for the lawsuit involving an employee in a restaurant owned by Deen and her brother, she had said she may also have used the slur when recalling conversations between black employees at her restaurants.

Looking distressed and her voice breaking, Deen said if there was someone in the audience who had never said something they wished they could take back, "please pick up that stone and throw it as hard at my head so it kills me. I want to meet you. I want to meet you.

"I is what I is and I'm not changing," she said. "There's someone evil out there that saw what I worked for and wanted it."

An uncomfortable Lauer tried to end the interview, but Deen repeated that anyone who hasn't sinned should attack her.

Deen said she appreciated fans who have expressed anger at the Food Network for dropping her, but said she didn't support a boycott of the network.

"These people who have met me and know me and love me, they're as angry as the people who are reading these stories that are lies," she said.

___

Online:

http://www.today.com/

___

Follow Dave Bauder on Twitter at http://twitter.com/dbauder

Read More

HANOI, Vietnam (AP) Ecuador's foreign minister said Monday his country will act not on its interests but on its principles as it considers an asylum request from National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden, wanted for revealing classified U.S. secrets.

Speaking to reporters through a translator at a hotel in Hanoi, Foreign Minister Ricardo Patino said the asylum request "has to do with freedom of expression and with the security of citizens around the world."

Patino spoke briefly to reporters on his way to a meeting with Vietnam's foreign minister. He did not say how long it would take Ecuador to decide.

Snowden was on a flight from Hong Kong that arrived in Moscow Sunday and was booked on a flight to Cuba Monday, the Russian news agencies ITAR-Tass and Interfax reported, citing unnamed airline officials.

"We know that he's currently in Moscow, and we are ... in touch with the highest authorities of Russia," Patino said.

Anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks said Snowden was bound for Ecuador "via a safe route for the purposes of asylum, and is being escorted by diplomats and legal advisers from WikiLeaks." The organization's founder Julian Assange, was granted asylum by Ecuador last year and has been staying at the country's embassy in the United Kingdom.

The Russian reports said a plane carrying Snowden arrived in Moscow on Sunday and he was booked on a flight to Cuba on Monday. The reports cited unnamed airline officials and said he intended to travel from Cuba to Caracas, Venezuela. There was also speculation that he might try to reach Ecuador.

Snowden had been in hiding in Hong Kong for several weeks after he revealed information on the highly classified spy programs.

Patino said Ecuador would not base its asylum decision on its potential to damage the country's relationship with the United States

"There are some governments that act more upon their own interests, but we do not," Patino said. "We act upon our principles."

He added, "We take care of the human rights of the people."

Patino was to hold a news conference Monday evening in Hanoi.

WikiLeaks said it was providing legal help to Snowden at his request and that he was being escorted by diplomats and legal advisers from the group.

Assange has spent a year inside the Ecuadorean Embassy in London to avoid extradition to Sweden to face questioning about sex crime allegations. He told the Sydney Morning Herald that his organization is in a position to help Snowden because it has expertise in international asylum and extradition law.

Read More

JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) - South Africans appeared resigned on Monday to the inevitability of one day saying goodbye to former president Nelson Mandela after the 94-year-old anti-apartheid leader's condition in hospital deteriorated to critical.

Madiba, as he is affectionately known, is revered among most of South Africa's 53 million people as the architect of the peaceful 1994 transition to multi-racial democracy after three centuries of white domination.

However, with his latest hospitalization - his fourth in six months - a realization has set in that he will not be around for ever.

His deterioration this weekend, two weeks after being admitted in a serious but stable condition with a lung infection, has caused a perceptible switch in mood from prayers for recovery to preparations for a fond farewell.

"If it's his time to go, he can go. I wish God can look after him," said nurse Petunia Mafuyeka, as she headed to work in Johannesburg.

"We will miss him very much. He fought for us to give us freedom. We will remember him every day. When he goes I will cry."

In a statement, President Jacob Zuma's office urged South Africa and the world to pray for Mandela "during this difficult time". But there was some concern among the public about doctors trying to prolong the life of one of the 20th century's most influential figures.

"I'm worried that they're keeping him alive. I feel they should let him go," said Doris Lekalakala, a claims manager. "The man is old. Let nature take its course. He must just rest."

Since stepping down in 1999 after one term as president, Mandela has stayed out of active politics in the continent's biggest and most important economy and his passing is expected to have little political impact.

His last public appearance was waving to fans from the back of a golf cart before the final of the soccer World Cup in Johannesburg's Soccer City stadium in July 2010.

During his retirement, he has divided his time between his home in the wealthy Johannesburg suburb of Houghton, and Qunu, the village in the impoverished Eastern Cape province where he was born.

The public's last glimpse of him was a brief clip aired by state television in April during a visit to his home by Zuma and other senior officials of the ruling African National Congress.

At the time, the 101-year-old liberation movement, which led the fight against white-minority rule, assured the public Mandela was "in good shape", although the footage showed a thin and frail old man sitting expressionless in an armchair.

(Reporting by Ed Cropley and Pascal Fletcher; Editing by Pascal Fletcher)

Read More

By Gerry Shih

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Facebook Inc has inadvertently exposed 6 million users' phone numbers and email addresses to unauthorized viewers over the past year, the world's largest social networking company disclosed late Friday.

Facebook blamed the data leaks, which began in 2012, on a technical glitch in its massive archive of contact information collected from its 1.1 billion users worldwide. As a result of the glitch, Facebook users who downloaded contact data for their list of friends obtained additional information that they were not supposed to have.

Facebook's security team was alerted to the bug last week and fixed it within 24 hours. But Facebook did not publicly acknowledge the bug until Friday afternoon, when it published an "important message" on its blog explaining the issue.

A Facebook spokesman said the delay was due to company procedure stipulating that regulators and affected users be notified before making a public announcement.

"We currently have no evidence that this bug has been exploited maliciously and we have not received complaints from users or seen anomalous behavior on the tool or site to suggest wrongdoing," Facebook said on its blog.

While the privacy breach was limited, "it's still something we're upset and embarrassed by, and we'll work doubly hard to make sure nothing like this happens again," it added.

The breach follows recent disclosures that several consumer Internet companies turned over troves of user data to a large-scale electronic surveillance program run by U.S. intelligence.

The companies include Facebook, Google Inc , Microsoft Corp , Apple Inc and Yahoo Inc .

The companies, led by Facebook, successfully negotiated with the U.S. government last week to reveal the approximate number of user information requests that each company had received, including secret national security orders.

(Reporting by Gerry Shih; Editing by Richard Chang)

Read More