“The Tree In Kensington Gardens {London} That Looks Like Ireland.” (Therese O’Donoghue)

“The puddle in Auckland NZ That Looks Like Ireland With The Chewing Gum As the 6 counties.” (Ciara Byrne)

“The Steak That Looks Like Ireland.” (James McAuley)

“The Chicken Nugget Discovered In New York That Looks Like Ireland.” (Deborah Gannon)

Things That Look Like Ireland to Broadsheet@broadsheet.ie


A phenomenon recently (but not for the first time) highlighted in an article on Cracked are the myriad links and overlaps connecting the movies of Quentin Tarantino. Little things, like the fact that Michael Madsen’s character in Reservoir Dogs, Mr Blonde (the only one not known solely by his code name) is called Vic Vega. Tarantino has already confirmed that Mr Blonde is the brother of Vincent Vega (John Travolta’s character in Pulp Fiction).

But there’s more. As Redditor FrancisDollarHyde succinctly puts it:

Warning: Inglourious Basterds spoiler ahead) As it turns out, Donny Donowitz, ‘The Bear Jew’, is the father of movie producer Lee Donowitz from True Romance – which means that, in Tarantino’s universe, everybody grew up learning about how a bunch of commando Jews machine gunned Hitler to death in a burning movie theater, as opposed to quietly killing himself in a bunker.

Because World War 2 ended in a movie theater, everybody lends greater significance to pop culture, hence why seemingly everybody has Abed-level knowledge of movies and TV. Likewise, because America won World War 2 in one concentrated act of hyperviolent slaughter, Americans as a whole are more desensitized to that sort of thing.

Hence why Butch is unfazed by killing two people, Mr. White and Mr. Pink take a pragmatic approach to killing in their line of work, Esmerelda the cab driver is obsessed with death, etc.

You can extrapolate this further when you realize that Tarantino’s movies are technically two universes – he’s gone on record as saying that Kill Bill and From Dusk ‘Til Dawn take place in a ‘movie movie universe’; that is, they’re movies that characters from the Pulp Fiction, Reservoir Dogs, True Romance, and Death Proof universe would go to see in theaters. (Kill Bill, after all, is basically Fox Force Five, right on down to Mia Wallace playing the title role.)

Mind blown.

INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS Fits Perfectly into Quentin Tarantino’s Movie Universe and Influences His Entire Filmography? (Collider)

Street Charge, developed by Brooklyn based designers PENSA is a solar powered USB charging station for the street: a free alternative to coffee-shop recharging. The blurb sez:

Street Charge is Pensa’s concept for the city streets, where we, as product designers, can take back our built environment to create small urban oases.

It’s a nice thought.

Charging your expensive ear-candy on a darkened street under an LED light.

laughingsquid/fastcodesign

You remember?

The Apostolic Visitation.

He was the lead ‘investigator’.

Cardinal Timothy M. Dolan (above) of New York authorized payments of as much as $20,000 to sexually abusive priests as an incentive for them to agree to dismissal from the priesthood when he was the archbishop of Milwaukee.

Questioned at the time about the news that one particularly notorious pedophile cleric had been given a “payoff” to leave the priesthood, Cardinal Dolan, then the archbishop, responded that such an inference was “false, preposterous and unjust.”

But a document unearthed during bankruptcy proceedings for the Archdiocese of Milwaukee and made public by victims’ advocates reveals that the archdiocese did make such payments to multiple accused priests to encourage them to seek dismissal, thereby allowing the church to remove them from the payroll.

Fancy.

Three months ago:

The apostolic visitation led by the archbishop of New York, Cardinal Timothy Dolan, noted that there had been some “progressive steps” towards reforming church structures and in particular the handling of allegations of child abuse. Several Irish judicial inquiries found the Catholic hierarchy had covered up allegations of abuse, often by moving accused priests to other dioceses or even out of the country.

 

Wonder if he’s going to the Eucharistic Congress?

In Milwaukee Post, Cardinal Authorized Paying Abusers (Laurie Goodstein, New York Times)

 

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