Slightly NSFW. Stick with it till the bitter end.

H/t to Terry!

Darren Aronofsky directs the Biblical story with a cast including Russell Crowe, Jennifer Connelly, Anthony Hopkins, and Emma Watson:

What do you think?

An Argentinian car mechanic has created an invention that'll suck the baby right outta you, inspired by one of those tools that extracts stuck corks from wine bottles. And apparently, it works so well that health experts are hopeful it could save the lives of thousands of women and babies who have difficult births:

Mr. Odón, 59, an Argentine car mechanic, built his first prototype in his kitchen, using a glass jar for a womb, his daughter’s doll for the trapped baby, and a fabric bag and sleeve sewn by his wife as his lifesaving device... With the Odón Device, an attendant slips a plastic bag inside a lubricated plastic sleeve around the head, inflates it to grip the head and pulls the bag until the baby emerges.

Doctors say it has enormous potential to save babies in poor countries, and perhaps to reduce cesarean section births in rich ones.

“This is very exciting,” said Dr. Mario Merialdi, the W.H.O.’s chief coordinator for improving maternal and perinatal health and an early champion of the Odón Device. “This critical moment of life is one in which there’s been very little advancement for years.”

It's exciting to see someone create a tool so basic and fundamentally useful. I only wish the babies came out with a satisfying "pop" and celebratory gush of cabernet. GET ON THAT, NEW MOMS.

• fairelectionsseattle.com

I got an email last night from Estevan Munoz-Howard of Fair Elections Seattle, insisting that Seattle Prop 1 (public campaign financing) is not actually dead yet. "If overall trends continue, we may just squeak by," says Munoz-Howard. "We'll also be chasing ballots this weekend and would love to get as many folks out to help as possible."

Hmm. The yes vote's 50.3 percent share of yesterday's drop was disappointing. But okay. Yeah. Trailing by less than 3,000 votes with about 18,000 left to count in the race, I suppose it is still remotely conceivable that Prop 1 could squeak by. But if it does, the campaign is going to have to cure every challenged ballot it can find. And they need your help.

The campaign is looking for volunteers to fill slots ballot chasing in various precincts—you can fill out this form to offer your help. And since Prop 1 ballots likely lean toward Kshama Sawant as well, your efforts would help both campaigns at once. So volunteer!

If they can't impeach Obama, House Republicans will go after the most prominent Obama Administration official possible:

Coming soon to the House of Representatives: an attempt to impeach Attorney General Eric Holder. The effort, from a small group of conservative House Republicans, will likely be introduced to the House on Thursday. So, why should Holder be impeached? According to those behind the attempt, the answer is a whole bunch of stuff.

Since Michele Bachmann is one of the "masterminds" behind this plan, I don't expect it to go very far, but it's another reminder that, even in the middle of this Obamacare website maelstrom, Republicans will find a way to change the conversation to something unpopular and unhelpful soon enough. The only people calling for Holder's head are conservative bloggers. House Republicans can't help themselves from pursuing a far-right agenda even when the public is ready to take sides with them against President Obama.

• Geoffrey Smith

In this week's paper edition of The Stranger, in the Chow Events calendar, we erroneously listed Ethan Stowell's Macaroni and Cheese Cook-Off as happening this coming Sunday. In fact, it is happening on Sunday, November 24. It's at Tavolata, and you get to try 117-ish kinds of macaroni and cheese made by pro chefs and notable amateurs, plus lots of beer, and proceeds benefit the Fetal Hope Foundation. We regret the error, and you should go to this, because MACARONI AND CHEESE (PLURAL) plus CHARITY.

In related Chow Events news: Tommy Gun on Capitol Hill has debuted Mac & Cheese Monday, in which you may comfort yourself on Monday evening with a full-size serving of macaroni and cheese for just $3. Also, drinks. No one here has tried their macaroni and cheese—have you?

(Want to make your own at home? Here is my macaroni and cheese recipe from Slog of yesteryear.)

Continue reading »

My living space is 460 square feet and I LOVE IT. It's small enough to discourage house guests, and as a woman with healthy hoarding instincts, I appreciate its lack of closet space, which keeps me from accumulating more dried chicken's feet and bedazzled reptile heads than I actually need. Also, it takes five minutes to clean (10 if I actually use cleaning fluids).

But fuck, my place seems opulent when compared to this couple's home, that they share without killing each other.

At approximately 128 square feet, this tiny house cost the couple who calls it home a mere $33,000. By building a tiny home on wheels, they sidestepped municipal zoning and permitting—plus moving is a breeze.

Those pics are great, but my favorite tiny homes remain Tiny Texas Houses, which are stunning doll-esque human homes made from 99 percent reclaimed materials. They're gorgeous.

We at The Stranger are huge fans of Joe Sacco’s fearless comic-book journalism. In locations like Palestine and Sarajevo, Sacco has interviewed the kinds of people—ordinary kids having fun at a dance club, hit men who’ve seen too much—that traditional journalists ignore. His new historical book, The Great War, consists of a single, wordless scroll of paper depicting a panoramic view of the Battle of the Somme on July 1, 1916. It’s a narrative unlike any you’ve ever seen, a chance to get as close as you’ll ever want to the front lines of World War I. (Town Hall, 1119 Eighth Ave, townhallseattle.org, 7:30 pm, $5)

Those of us who want to flirt awkwardly with Snow White and then beat the shit out of Grendel have finally been heard. The Wolf Among Us, based on Bill Willingham's largely excellent Fables comics series, dives into the world of fairy tale characters exiled in New York and dials up the noir. The protagonist is the sheriff of Fabletown, Bigby Wolf (oh, like you could do better), who's trying to make up for past misdeeds by keeping his fellow fables from slaughtering each other as they wallow in the depravity of the mundane world.

• This is you. (The one closer to the sidewalk, unfortunately.)

Telltale Games is carving out an interesting niche in the space between video games and interactive fiction. Its recent game series based on The Walking Dead delivered a super-dark narrative, but married it to janky controls that were more frustrating than challenging. This time, they've made the action sequences more intuitive (and better telegraphed), but they're still a little troublesome for players who just want to get on with the story. We're hoping they find the sweet spot next time, but the control system really isn't a deal-breaker. (We played using Steam on a Windows machine, and found it consistently tough to identify and mouse over moving targets quickly enough in combat.)

The story drew us in just as tightly as the comics did (despite Willingham's unfortunate ideology). Exposition is fairly smooth, though at times there's just no way around lines of dialogue like "It's a good thing fables are so hard to kill." The choice points are well paced and use a timing mechanism that may challenge slow readers or the chronically indecisive, but it's not so hard to skip back if you flubbed something serious. They've built in some choose-your-own-adventure replayability by showing the choices you made at the end of the chapter—which comes maybe just a little too soon and ends on a WTF-hanger. $5 per chapter (or $15 for a "season pass" for all five chapters on Xbox Live) is a decent price, and it's available on a pretty wide range of platforms—but not on mobile yet. It's certainly worth a look.

The Stranger Testing Department is Rob Lightner, Paul Hughes, and Mary Traverse.

I've already thoroughly fisked Seattle Times editorial columnist Sharon Pian Chan's earlier post on the topic, and this anti-$15 minimum wage column is mostly a retread. But Pian Chan does give us one revealing new tidbit of inadvertent honesty:

Please let this discussion die a Seattle death by committee.

As I'd previously explained, when the Seattle Times editorial board argued that "Seattle leaders ... should watch what happens in SeaTac" rather than "act quickly to follow suit," what they were really advocating was an effort to slow down the minimum wage debate long enough to kill it. It was a close reading that Pian Chan now confirms.

Kshama Sawant's surprisingly strong support was as close to a proxy vote on the $15 minimum wage as we could get in Seattle without actually putting a measure on the ballot. The proposal has momentum. And it has the public endorsement of a majority of council members and our newly elected mayor. The time to act is now.

CNet's Stephen Shankland explains:

A federal judge has dismissed a copyright infringement lawsuit that an author group brought against Google, concluding that books are like Web pages when it comes to indexing them and displaying small excerpts in search results.

The Google Books project has indexed millions of books, digitizing them without copyright holders' permission, and the Authors Guild sued over the fact. But U.S. Circuit Judge Denny Chin in New York rejected that argument, granting on Thursday Google's motion for summary judgment.

In his opinion, Judge Chin cited Google Book Search's "significant public benefits," saying that the project is good for the "arts and sciences" while still being careful to avoid piracy.

I've heard passionate arguments on both sides of the issue. Authors are obviously rankled that Google did this without their permission, and they're concerned about piracy issues. But there are also obviously tremendous benefits to having books digitized and available for search. In an ideal world, the government would be doing this digitization project, making an online public library available to all. But Google got there first, and so this battle has dragged on for years.

YOU CANNOT MAKE THIS SHIT UP. Watch now, and marvel along with the stunned attendees.

From the New York Post:

At a press conference this morning, Mayor Rob Ford addressed the accusation that he tried to go down on a female staffer, one of several complaints filed against Ford in court documents released on Wednesday. “Oh, and the last thing was Olivia Gondek, it says it says that I wanted to eat her p—y,” he told a throng of reporters on Thursday. “I’ve never said that in my life to her. I would never do that. I’m happily married. I’ve got more than enough to eat at home. Thank you very much,” he said.

Meanwhile, the Toronto City Council is considering stripping Ford of some mayoral powers.

The image says it all:

Photo: urbanrelationsinfo: Left: renaissance-era Florence, Italy. Right: a single freeway interchange in... http://t.co/ydCZh31dh0
— James McLean (@JJGMcLean) April 13, 2013

And so in Portland, one of the most bike-friendly cities in the US, "the tiny house movement for apartment dwellers has arrived":

It's a new milestone for the Portland area's off-the-charts rental shortage, the third-tightest in the nation in the third quarter of 2013. And it might also be the key to a new model for apartment living that's designed to deliver relatively affordable rents for tiny units in highly desirable neighborhoods.

The new buildings, sometimes called "aPodments" or "micro-apartments," typically offer lightly furnished studios including a private bathroom. In order to attract tenants despite the small size, they're located in areas with one of the hottest commodities on the real estate market right now: excellent active transportation. Portland's first such building at 2250 NW Thurman St. proudly proclaims its Walk Score, Transit Score and Bike Score...