New York woman falls, rips Picasso painting
A significant Pablo Picasso painting was damaged after a woman attending art class lost her balance, fell into “The Actor” and tore it, The Metropolitan Museum of Art said.
The unusually large canvas, measuring 77.25 by 45.38 inches (196 by 115 centimeters), sustained a vertical tear of about six inches (15 centimeters) in the lower right-hand corner in the accident on Friday.
The museum, located on the eastern edge of New York’s Central Park, did not elaborate on why the woman fell.
But The Met said the damage did not impact the “focal point of the composition” and that it should be repaired in the coming weeks ahead of a major Picasso retrospective featuring some 250 works at the museum opening on April 27.
Repair work should be “unobtrusive,” it added.
Painted in the winter of 1904-1905, the work hails from Picasso’s critical Rose Period, when the artist shifted from the downbeat tones of his Blue Period to warmer, more romantic hues.
The period also hints at Picasso’s later embrace of abstraction with his signature cubist style.
Donated to The Met by automobile heiress Thelma Chrysler Foy in 1952, “The Actor” features an acrobat striking a dramatic pose against an abstract backdrop. It was painted on a used canvas that already contained a painting. [via.]
Lost her balance? On what??
ASOS: The Online Fashion Store For Men & Women 
Site of the day.
The Man Who Could Beat AIDS
Dr. David Ho was sitting in the audience during an AIDS meeting in 2007 when the presenter flashed a cartoon onscreen to make a point. Along with his colleagues, Ho chuckled at the image of a blindfolded baseball player swinging mightily at an incoming pitch. But as amused as the scientists were, they were sobered too; they knew that the player in the cartoon was them. A swing and a miss, the image was saying, one of many in the long battle against AIDS.
Ho certainly got the message. For nearly a quarter of a century, he and other AIDS scientists had been whiffing repeatedly, failing to make contact as HIV stymied them again and again. Powerful drugs to foil HIV could do only so much. To corral the epidemic and truly prevent HIV, only a vaccine would do. The problem was that no vaccine strategy had ever succeeded in blocking the virus from infecting new hosts, and that wasn’t likely to change in the near future. “It struck a special chord with me,” says Ho of the baseball image. “I think it accurately pictured our chance of success. We all felt that frustration.”
Since that meeting, much has changed, but the fundamental problem of developing an effective AIDS vaccine remains. On the positive side, in 2009, scientists announced that they had developed the first vaccine to show any effect against HIV infection — although that effect is, by all measures, modest. The vaccine’s ability to reduce the risk of new HIV infection 31% is nowhere near the 70% to 90% that public-health experts normally view as a minimum threshold for an infectious-disease vaccine. Even further behind in development, but still promising, are two new antibodies identified by a group of researchers working at a number of labs that, at least in a dish, seem to neutralize the virus and thwart attempts to infect healthy cells.
The excitement over those advances, however, has been tempered by the still raw memories of a humbling retreat in 2007, after a highly anticipated shot against the virus was deemed a failure. While nobody expected spectacular results, neither did anyone expect such a stunning defeat, and the scientific community is still struggling to recover from it. “We are still a long ways away from having an effective HIV vaccine that physicians can reach into the cabinet and pull out in a vial and inject into a person,” says Dr. Bruce Walker, an HIV expert at Harvard Medical School.
That may be true, but Ho, who has been working to develop an HIV vaccine of his own, now believes that a traditional shot, one that relies on snippets of a virus to both awaken and prod the immune system to churn out antibodies, may not be the best way to fight HIV. Rather than expecting the body to do all the work of first recognizing then mounting an attack against the virus, why not just present the body with a ready-made arsenal of antibodies that can home in on HIV? It’s the immunological equivalent of a frozen dinner; the already cooked antibodies eliminate all the hard work of prepping and priming the immune system to do battle.
Continue reading here.
David Blaine elaborates on his triumphs and how he held his breath for 17 minutes.
Song of the day: “The High Road” by Broken Bells
Special shout out to Kyle, for introducing me to this awesome band.
I beg you to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language.
Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them.
The point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer…
Rainer Maria Rilke
“Before we end this rodeo, a few things need to be said. There has been a lot of speculation in the press about what I legally can and can’t say about NBC. To set the record straight, tonight I am allowed to say anything I want. And what I want to say is this: between my time at Saturday Night Live, The Late Night Show, and my brief run here on The Tonight Show, I have worked with NBC for over twenty years. Yes, we have our differences right now and yes, we’re going to go our separate ways. But this company has been my home for most of my adult life. I am enormously proud of the work we have done together, and I want to thank NBC for making it all possible.
Walking away from The Tonight Show is the hardest thing I have ever had to do. Making this choice has been enormously difficult. This is the best job in the world, I absolutely love doing it, and I have the best staff and crew in the history of the medium. But despite this sense of loss, I really feel this should be a happy moment. Every comedian dreams of hosting The Tonight Show and, for seven months, I got to. I did it my way, with people I love, and I do not regret a second. I’ve had more good fortune than anyone I know and if our next gig is doing a show in a 7-11 parking lot, we’ll find a way to make it fun.
And finally, I have to say something to our fans. The massive outpouring of support and passion from so many people has been overwhelming. The rallies, the signs, all the goofy, outrageous creativity on the internet, and the fact that people have traveled long distances and camped out all night in the pouring rain to be in our audience, made a sad situation joyous and inspirational.
To all the people watching, I can never thank you enough for your kindness to me and I’ll think about it for the rest of my life. All I ask of you is one thing: please don’t be cynical. I hate cynicism- it’s my least favorite quality and it doesn’t lead anywhere.
Nobody in life gets exactly what they thought they were going to get. But if you work really hard and you’re kind, amazing things will happen. As proof, let’s make an amazing thing happen right now. Here to close out our show, are a few good friends, led by Mr. Will Ferrell…”
- Conan O’Brien
Oh man, I miss him so much already…
Overheard...
- Tween: Mom, I'm so sorry. I don't know what I was thinking.
- Mother: What are you?
- Tween, starting to sob: Stupid.
- Mother: What kind of stupid?
- Tween: Ten flavors of stupid.
- Mom: And don't you fucking forget it!
