She’s got her dedushka’s eyes — but this gun-toting, punk-rocking gal is as American as apple pie, although she does love to cook borscht. Tattooed Chrese Evans, 44, of Portland, Oregon — a Buddhist who runs an antique shop — is far removed from her notorious grandfather, Joseph Stalin, the former Soviet Union’s ruthless “man of steel.”

NYPost

This sounds so cool.

This “waiting area” just happens to be the main section of the Millennium Falcon, expertly crafted like it was in the movies. Dejarik table, computers, all of it is there for fans to interact with and explore as they wait for their chance to fly the Falcon. Finally, your boarding group is called and everyone goes into the cockpit.

There are several amazing things about this cockpit. One is that it feels like it’s the only cockpit. (Obviously, it’s not. If it was, it would be a very long wait.) We think there’s some kind of mechanism inside rotating the rooms from one hallway entry point but how Disney achieved that effect, they specifically would not say. Either way, it’s cool.

The other amazing thing about the cockpit is that being inside it is damn near a religious experience.

Every button and switch works. The handle you pull down for lightspeed has a nice weight to it. You’ll probably have to divert power to specific deflector shields. It’s glorious. But, like I said, there are six of you, and the way the ride works is two people are pilots, two people are gunners and two people are engineers. Pilots fly, gunners shoot, and engineers repair. And while it may seem like you’d really only want to be a pilot, working together ensures a more exciting ride and the ride’s designers assured us all three stations are equally fun and rewarding. (Then again, just touching the controls as a pilot gave me chills up and down my arms.)

Take my money, please.

I think about this happening every time I get a new propane tank for the grill.

Jalopnik

CNN announced on Tuesday it has hired longtime Republican operative Sarah Isgur as political editor, charged with shaping its 2020 campaign coverage.

According to a CNN spokesperson, Isgur, who most recently worked as the Department of Justice’s main spokesperson under then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions, will coordinate the network’s political coverage for the 2020 election cycle on TV and on CNN’s website. Isgur starts work next month, and will not be involved in coverage of DOJ. She will occasionally appear on TV.

Isgur’s LinkedIn page indicates she has no journalism experience. She has, however, worked for a variety of right-wing organizations and campaigns, including the Carly Fiorina and Mitt Romney presidential bids, the Republican National Committee, and a Ted Cruz US Senate campaign.

CNN can always be counted on to do the dumbest thing.

Dinosaur Jr scored a Billboard Top 20 hit in Japan with a 25 year old song that was never released as a single.

How?

Piracy!

Last week, an alt-rock mystery puzzled the music press. Almost 25 years after its release, the Dinosaur Jr. song “Over Your Shoulder” appeared at number 18 on Japan’s Hot 100 chart, beating out major new releases like Ariana Grande’s “7 Rings.”

The fuzzy, mournful closer to Dinosaur Jr.’s 1994 album Without a Sound, “Over Your Shoulder” is an unlikely candidate for a hit single. Indeed, it was never released in that format. Stranger still, the track rocketed up Japan’s charts thanks to over eight million video plays—earning the country’s top spot for video streams—despite no YouTube upload of the song having anywhere close to that many views.

...

In the end, no one factor made “Over Your Shoulder” a Billboard hit in Japan. Nearly 25 years ago, it was released. More than 15 years ago, it was used on a Japanese reality show about boxing bad boys. Six years ago, Billboard started counting YouTube plays. And just days ago, YouTube apparently began recommending pirated episodes of that reality show to Japanese users, who seemingly binged it in the thousands, playing “Over Your Shoulder” over and over again in the process.

Ever heard of The Streisand Effect ? This guy has. Ironically, he coined the term.

This is some crazy shit.

In 1986, a research group published a paper in the Journal of the American Medical Association describing the experience of a medical student and a physician who’d become stuporous and disoriented during an ultramarathon. The men were diagnosed with hyponatremia, and they concluded that they’d developed the condition by drinking too much [water].

There’s never been a case of a runner dying of dehydration on a marathon course, but since 1993, at least five marathoners have died from hyponatremia they developed during a race. At the 2002 Boston Marathon, researchers from Harvard Medical School took blood samples from 488 marathoners after the finish. The samples showed that 13 percent of the runners had diagnosable hyponatremia, and three had critical cases of the condition. German researchers similarly took blood samples from more than a thousand finishers of the Ironman European Championship over multiple years and found that 10.6 percent of them had hyponatremia. Most of the instances were mild, but nearly 2 percent of the finishers had severe or critical cases. Although the findings indicate that hyponatremia is still a rare condition, what makes them especially concerning is that the early symptoms of hyponatremia are very easily confused with those of dehydration — weakness, headache, nausea, dizziness and lightheadedness.

FiveThirtyEight

...if their profession is tweet-crazy.

Actual headline.

The Washington Post's David Von Drehle called Twitter the "crystal meth of newsrooms." He dates his moment of disillusionment to the Republican national convention in 2012. In the section reserved for reporters, he noticed many watching TweetDeck feeds instead of listening to speeches from the podium or stepping away to talk to delegates.

"Twitter offers an endless stream of faux events," Von Drehle wrote in a column this past weekend. "Fleeting sensations, momentary outrages, ersatz insights and provocative distortions. 'News' nuggets roll by like the chocolates on Lucy's conveyer belt."

Phys.org

I briefly had a Twitter account. I just deleted it. I can yell at my TV if I want to yell at strangers with no desire for a reply.

When did Ziggy play guitar?