This was shared with me. It claims to be footage for a Japanese McDonalds commercial, but it may just creative editing. Regardless, be wary, it may incur seizure.
Category: Uncategorized
Yo Gabba Gabba gets down
In our semi-regular segment, Asians Dancing, Nathaniel shows us why his Youtube video has been passed around like [insert gratuitous, inappropriate sex or drug reference here]
Finally, cartoons sell what's important: cigarettes
Check out this old commercial, date unknown to me.
The supernatural: graves and ghosts at Temple University
By Christopher Wink | Oct. 30, 2007 | The Temple News
Temple University has been built on the backs of the dead. It’s late October, and we think about the old, the hidden and the dead. Temple has its ghosts, indeed.
TEMPLE BY GRAVES
In the 1880s, Russell Conwell was laying the groundwork for what would be Temple University. He was tutoring young men by low light in the back of Grace Baptist Church, in a room called “the Temple.”
Across North Broad Street was a rambling grave site called Monument Cemetery, already half a century old and filling quickly.
By 1929, Monument had been filled to capacity with 28,000 burial services. Its 11-acre compound had been encircled by a dense urban landscape of rowhomes filled with Philadelphians of German and Irish descent. It sat like that for nearly thirty years, assuring Temple remained a decidedly east-of-Broad institution.
CONWELL WALKS
Conwell was one of the last notable Philadelphians to be buried in Monument Cemetery. He died in 1925, 15 years after his wife. After his wife’s passing, Conwell turned cold and perplexing. He stayed on in his fine home at 2020 N. Broad St., along with at least one maid, but Sarah was on his mind.
Not long before his death, Conwell was searching for his Civil War discharge papers but neither he nor his staff could find them. Legend has it that his wife came to him in sleep and told him where to find them. The next morning, the dream proved prescient, prompting Conwell to celebrate his wife’s reemergence to a maid.
Of course, the maid labeled it lunacy. To counter, Conwell had his maid hide a pen, without telling him where. That night Sarah came to her husband and told him where to find the pen. The next morning, Conwell came to his maid, pen in hand. Sarah, it has been said, was insulted by her husband’s desire to prove her. She never visited Conwell again.
GROWTH UNCOVERS
Like most city neighborhoods, North Philadelphia had a population jump after World War II, before a precipitous decline in the 1950s. Monument Cemetery became an obstacle. For growth. For homes. For Temple.
In September 1955, a court order was passed, ordering the city to begin transporting the remains from Monument to Rockledge’s Lawnview Cemetery in Montgomery County. Russell and Sarah, together once again, were entombed at West Laurel Hill Cemetery in Bala Cynwyd, an act paid for by Temple.
By 1956, Temple bought the cemetery site. The rock walls that separate the Broad Street sidewalk and the parking lot between Montgomery and the Student Pavilion are the last visible reminder of 28,000 dead in Temple’s neighborhood.
Three years later, in June 1959, Temple welcomed two back home. Russell and Sarah were buried in the sidewalk alcove that rests along North Broad Street between Conwell and Wachman Halls. There were photos and coverage from all the major media of the day.
It took more than a decade, though, for the Conwells to have a final resting place, then with much less attention. Just a single clipping from a yellowed copy of The Temple News is all that presented itself to show the last trip Russell and Sarah took. That a short walk to what was then a newly constructed Founder’s Garden. They were settled there late in the summer of 1968. Questions remain whether they have explored other homes for the future.
Text as it appeared in The Temple News on Oct. 30, 2007. See it here.
Janet Jackson teaches Larry King how to dance
Why would producers do this to this man?
What only cable news could offer us…
Your grandmother playing nintendo
(Photograph by Charles Fox/Philadelphia Inquirer Staff Photographer)
In last Sunday’s Inquirer, Pulitzer Prize-winner Mike Vitez, who is always good for a great trend or human interest story, had one of his best of recent memory.
It was the story of residents in retirement homes bowling… with Nintendo Wii.
Below check this video for the new media that the Inqy isn’t providing but totally should be. ..How can you not enjoy it?
New York Times gets down, plagiarizes
Slate.com got the latest scoop.A New York Times story from last Saturday on paco, an illicit drug that is apparently causing all sorts of havoc in Argentina, lifted two lines from a story that ran in the Miami Herald, more than a year and a half later from August 2006.In the Herald it ran as follows:
Paco is highly addictive because its effect is so short—a couple of minutes—and so intense that many users resort to smoking 20 to 50 cigarettes a day to try to make its effects linger.
Paco is even more toxic than crack cocaine because it is made mostly of solvents and chemicals, with just a dab of cocaine, said Jim Hall, executive director of Up Front Drug Information Center, a Miami nonprofit that has been tracking cocaine abuse for more than two decades.”
In the Times, 18 months later, it ran as follows:
Paco is highly addictive because its high lasts just a few minutes—and is so intense that many users smoke 20 to 50 paco cigarettes a day to try to make its effects linger. Paco is even more toxic than crack cocaine because it is made mostly of solvents and chemicals like kerosene, with just a dab of cocaine, Argentine and Brazilian drug enforcement officials said.”
Christopher Wink reports on Bill Clinton speech
Yesterday, for The Temple News, I went with a staff photographer to the campus of the University of Pennsylvania to see former President Bill Clinton give a speech.
I wrote a quick summary, grabbed a photo and had it on our site before any other media.
Continue reading Christopher Wink reports on Bill Clinton speech
Attendance spotty at event to improve attendance
How about having an event to increase attendance and… no one shows up? Ouch.
Well, that’s what happened for a consortium between the business school and the athletic marketing at Temple University. For The Temple News, I covered the finals of a competition that asked Temple students to make suggestions of how to increase fan turnout for athletics event. Outside of me, the pep band, the judges and the contestants, there were scarcely more than ten people there at the widely publicized event. Read the full story here or check its start below.
Earlier tonight, a pep band member submitted his name three times to a raffle in the Fox Gittis Room of the Liacouras Center. He won each time.
Attendance was indeed thin at an event intended to help improve just that, attendance at Temple athletics.
“We are very disappointed,” said Jaine Lucas, who coordinated the event, the finals of the Temple’s sports enthusiasm competition. Lucas is director of the university’s Innovation and Entrepreneurship Institute.
At times, less than 30 people, including just a scattering of fans, watched five Temple students present the six top ideas to help further attract fans to the games, matches and meets of NCAA sports at this university.”
Read the full story here or check its start below.
Photo courtesy of Ron Davis of The Temple News.
Kate Flynn: the health of the Philadelphia region
Interview and article prepared for the Philadelphia Business Journal, as filed last week, without edits, to run in this Friday’s edition.
The Health Care Improvement Foundation works with all of the Delaware Valley’s 60 hospitals, each year, in one capacity or another, in the hopes of improving common best practices in and around Philadelphia.
New president Kate Flynn only hopes to carry on the nonprofit’s mission.
“I want to continue the work that we’ve started, extending beyond the walls of the hospital, to embrace and engage other parts of the health care community,” she said. “What we have in common is the patient.”
Early January saw Flynn moving to HCIF in Center City, after consulting for the group while with VHA East Coast in Trevose.
“We engage hospitals and health care providers to work towards standard approaches across, if we can, the entire region,” she said. “We convene and act as facilitator.”
The group, which receives funding from Independence Blue Cross, is aligned with the Delaware Valley Health Care Council, and works with the ECRI Institute, among other partners, organizes forums and workshops for the region’s health care leaders.
The group has been a leader in the fight against MRSA, a staph infection, by working with communities and health care facilities to educate the public on its dangers.
“It takes a village to make that happen,” she said.
An ongoing task of theirs is to increase collaboration between the region’s medical facilities to increase patient safety.
“The specialization of medical care has done so much, but the unintended consequence is a ton of communication issues,” she said. “Philadelphia has world class medical institutions and medical research and education for all kinds of medical and allied health. We want to bring Philadelphia’s reputation for patient safety to that same world class level.”
They involve themselves in broader concepts of safety, too.
Currently, the group is working with 20 regional health care providers on an environmentally friendly pilot hospital. They’ve also assisted in coordinating disaster preparedness strategies in Philadelphia and beyond.
Now Flynn is charged with these tasks and more.
“Our goal, as an organization,” she said. “Is to make the Delaware Valley the safest place in the world to receive medical care.”
See other reporting by Christopher Wink here.
