Latest news with #Larry
Yahoo
2 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
UPDATE – DitchIt Detonates Iconic Twitter HQ Sign
Twitter Bird SAN FRANCISCO, June 26, 2025 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- In a dramatic move that captured the spirit of Silicon Valley disruption, Ditchit — the emerging online marketplace and OfferUp competitor — made headlines by acquiring and detonating the original 560-pound Twitter bird sign once perched atop Twitter's San Francisco headquarters. Filmed in the Nevada desert, the explosive sendoff featured a 15-person production crew, four Tesla Cybertrucks, and a Hollywood pyrotechnics expert. More than just spectacle, it was a bold declaration: Ditchit is here to challenge legacy tech giants and build a marketplace that puts people before profits. 'Elon Musk rebranded Twitter to X in support of free expression. We're doing the same for local marketplaces,' said Ditchit spokesperson James Deluca. 'Today's platforms are overrun with ads, fees, and algorithms that favor businesses over people. Ditchit is different—free to use, ad-free, and built to empower real communities and real sellers.' The 12-foot Twitter logo, known as 'Larry,' was acquired earlier this year for $34,000. Initially bought for its symbolic value, Ditchit ultimately chose to turn the icon into a statement of disruption. The video of the sign's explosive finale, now live on YouTube, captures a cinematic moment that's quickly gaining viral traction. But Larry's story isn't over. Pieces of the iconic sign have been collected and will be auctioned off through a sealed-bid sale on the Ditchit app starting today. All proceeds will go to the Center for American Entrepreneurship, a nonprofit dedicated to advancing innovation and supporting the next generation of entrepreneurs. 'Many entrepreneurs get their start on local marketplace apps,' Deluca said. 'We're committed to supporting that journey—not just with our platform, but through meaningful action.' With this stunt, Ditchit isn't just blowing up a symbol of big tech—it's ushering in a new era for local marketplaces, one grounded in transparency, accessibility, and community. About Ditchit Ditchit is a local marketplace built with a community-first mindset. Unlike traditional platforms, it's completely free to use, with no ads or fees—making buying and selling simple and fair. Founded in 2024, the Ditchit app is available on iOS and Android. Contact: James Deluca (415) 867-4226 A photo accompanying this announcement is available at: A video accompanying this announcement is available at:
Yahoo
2 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
UPDATE – DitchIt Detonates Iconic Twitter HQ Sign
Twitter Bird SAN FRANCISCO, June 26, 2025 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- In a dramatic move that captured the spirit of Silicon Valley disruption, Ditchit — the emerging online marketplace and OfferUp competitor — made headlines by acquiring and detonating the original 560-pound Twitter bird sign once perched atop Twitter's San Francisco headquarters. Filmed in the Nevada desert, the explosive sendoff featured a 15-person production crew, four Tesla Cybertrucks, and a Hollywood pyrotechnics expert. More than just spectacle, it was a bold declaration: Ditchit is here to challenge legacy tech giants and build a marketplace that puts people before profits. 'Elon Musk rebranded Twitter to X in support of free expression. We're doing the same for local marketplaces,' said Ditchit spokesperson James Deluca. 'Today's platforms are overrun with ads, fees, and algorithms that favor businesses over people. Ditchit is different—free to use, ad-free, and built to empower real communities and real sellers.' The 12-foot Twitter logo, known as 'Larry,' was acquired earlier this year for $34,000. Initially bought for its symbolic value, Ditchit ultimately chose to turn the icon into a statement of disruption. The video of the sign's explosive finale, now live on YouTube, captures a cinematic moment that's quickly gaining viral traction. But Larry's story isn't over. Pieces of the iconic sign have been collected and will be auctioned off through a sealed-bid sale on the Ditchit app starting today. All proceeds will go to the Center for American Entrepreneurship, a nonprofit dedicated to advancing innovation and supporting the next generation of entrepreneurs. 'Many entrepreneurs get their start on local marketplace apps,' Deluca said. 'We're committed to supporting that journey—not just with our platform, but through meaningful action.' With this stunt, Ditchit isn't just blowing up a symbol of big tech—it's ushering in a new era for local marketplaces, one grounded in transparency, accessibility, and community. About Ditchit Ditchit is a local marketplace built with a community-first mindset. Unlike traditional platforms, it's completely free to use, with no ads or fees—making buying and selling simple and fair. Founded in 2024, the Ditchit app is available on iOS and Android. Contact: James Deluca (415) 867-4226 A photo accompanying this announcement is available at: A video accompanying this announcement is available at: in to access your portfolio
Spectator
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Spectator
‘Too bohemian for Bournemouth': the young Lawrence Durrell
These legendary lives need the clutter cleared away from them occasionally. Lawrence Durrell and his brother Gerald turned their family's prewar escape to an untouched Corfu into a myth that supplied millions of fantasies. It still bore retelling and extravagant expansion recently, if the success of ITV's series The Durrells is any sign. (One indication of that pleasant teatime diversion's accuracy: the actor playing Larry, Josh O'Connor, is 6ft 2in. Larry himself was a whole foot shorter.) How Louisa Durrell, struggling with life in Britain after returning from India, went in a bundle with her children to a Greek island of cheap Venetian mansions, heat and innocent adventure is always going to have its appeal. What the Corfu idyll leaves out is why we should be interested in the story in the first place. Lawrence Durrell was a very good novelist, and this episode was only one of many that contributed to his work. That probably needs saying, since he is out of fashion today for a number of reasons. One is that his books, full of extravagant evocations of exotic places and pleasures, no doubt appealed to a British readership in the 1950s that was starved of such things. But how do the delights of Corfu, or indeed Alexandria, stand up when any of us can hop on a plane and sample them for ourselves? A second reason is connected: Durrell's literary style is undoubtedly baroque, his concept of a novel's structure sometimes baffling (especially in the late Avignon Quintet) and in general open to accusations of over-indulgence. I read the Alexandria Quartet recently for the first time since I was at school, and was surprised by how well it had survived – a steely, bloodthirsty thriller of betrayal, deals and gun-running coagulating out of innocent romantic delusion. Individual episodes, such as the duck shoot in Justine, are wonderfully exciting; and the prose, which I had expected to find overblown, can be startlingly close to the Martin Amis of the 1980s: Melissa's dressing-room was an evil-smelling cubicle full of the coiled pipes that emptied the lavatories. She had a single poignant strip of cracked mirror and a little shelf, dressed with the kind of white paper upon which wedding cakes are built. Here she always set out the jumble of powders and crayons which she misused so fearfully. A further reason for Durrell's unfashionableness is, of course, precisely the biographical expansion, and not just the Corfu fantasy. Sappho, his daughter from his second marriage, set down in her diary details of her sexual abuse by him before committing suicide, just as his character Livia, based on Sappho, had been described as doing. These things can destroy a novelist's reputation. For the moment, his story is still worth telling, and although this is not the first or most important biography, it has a strong appeal – which is partly accidental. Michael Haag, who had already written books about Alexandria and the Corfu episode, was at work on a full biography when he died in 2020. This turned out to be complete up till the end of the war, with Durrell only just starting on what would be Justine. Profile Books has decided to publish it as it stands, which in fact is an alluring decision. What we have is that most interesting approach of literary biographies – the formative years before fame. Durrell hardly ever lived in Britain, and indeed in later years the question sometimes arose of whether he was a British citizen at all. He was born in India in 1912, the son of a brilliant engineer (the wonderful loop at the top of the great Darjeeling railway is his father's work). Some memories of Indian life must have fed into the grotesquery he was capable of as a novelist. When his sister was bitten by her pet spaniel, rabies terrors meant that they had to carry the dog's severed head in a canister on a long train journey to be tested. The family was not quite Raj top-drawer, but Durrell was nevertheless sent back to school in England, and lived with his returning mother in a succession of inappropriately ostentatious houses. Aged 19, he was told by her that he was too much for Bournemouth. 'You can be as bohemian as you like, but not in the house. I think you had better go somewhere where it doesn't show so much,' she said. A brief and raucous Bloomsbury period followed; a noisy marriage; and then the celebrated decampment en masse to Corfu. It was not quite as idyllic in all respects as it has been painted. The young Durrells' enthusiasm for nude sunbathing with each other and visiting friends of both sexes (startlingly documented here in photographs) was one thing the Corfiots jibbed at. The decisive period, however, to which Haag devotes most space, was 1940s Egypt. At the outbreak of hostilities, Durrell had been evacuated with his wife Nancy and infant daughter Penelope Berengaria from Kalamata in the Peloponnese. The experience of war in Egypt was tumultuous, and the mix of different cultures, officialdom, idealists, high society and bohemian life is exactly what makes the Alexandria Quartet so enthralling. The Durrells' marriage broke down and Nancy departed in is hard not to conclude that the war, the heady experience of grand café society and the sense of being at the centre of things had changed Larry fundamentally. Soon he was in a tempestuous relationship with the unstable Eve, who became his second wife and ultimately the disturbing Melissa of the Quartet. As captivating as this novel sequence is, it shows (as Haag frankly admits) that Durrell's experiences did not quite equip him to write about the political situation. It has always been agreed that it would have been impossible for his character Nessim, a Copt, to have been a gun-runner for Zionists in Palestine. Durrell decided to make him one because he was irresistibly drawn to the idea that, alone in the drama, Nessim would have wanted to marry the Jewish Justine out of calculation rather than passion. Though it reveals the limits of what Durrell could accept about the time and place he lived in, the Quartet has its own reality. What he observed turns into a compelling statement, made of smoke and steel. It ought to return to fashion in time. Haag's book is highly readable and elegantly put together, and, if unintentionally, produces a satisfying whole by stopping where it does. In fact, I suspect that the second half of Durrell's life, especially the late years – full of tragedy, bad conduct and an undeniable decline in talent and readability – would not be as enjoyable an experience. We end with him returning to his beloved Greece after the war and starting to work on Justine, a book which hit the British reading public in 1957 at exactly the right moment. A full biography, on the other hand, would have to include Sappho's suicide; the dismal and incomprehensible final volumes of the Avignon Quintet (the last of which Faber returned to be revised, so little impressed were they); and Durrell's death in 1990, before the French state could seize his property for non-payment of taxes. I met him briefly in London in 1983; the strange thing now is that I have absolutely no impression of his being as short as he actually was. His presence was immense. Though this is a good biography, I have a request of publishers in general. Lawrence Durrell has been done often, and very respectably. In the course of Haag's descriptions of life at the British Embassy and British Council in wartime Egypt, the name of Robert Liddell comes up. Liddell was also a seriously good novelist, and one who often appears as the adviser and friend of writers such as Barbara Pym, Elizabeth Taylor and Ivy Compton-Burnett. His story – he was abused as a child, abandoned England after the death of his beloved brother, and lived in Egypt and Greece – could be gripping. Might a publisher, for once, commission not a life we've heard several times but one of this remarkable but still strangely neglected novelist?
Yahoo
3 days ago
- Automotive
- Yahoo
Winning NASCAR team owner Larry McClure passes away
Any long-time NASCAR fans know the name Larry McClure, as he was the co-owner at Morgan-McClure Motorsports alongside Tim Morgan and brother Jerry McClure, which operated a NASCAR team from 1983 through 2012. Larry's family confirmed that he passed away on Wednesday at Johnston Memorial Hospital in Abingdon, Virginia. McClure's race team won 14 Cup races including three Daytona 500s. They earned their first 500 win with Ernie Irvan in 1991, and then two more with Sterling Marlin in 1994 and 1995. They are one of just ten teams to ever won three or more Daytona 500s. They utilized the No. 4 car, which became iconic with its Kodak paint scheme. Advertisement While most of their race wins came at the superspeedway tracks, they also earned wins at Bristol, Watkins Glen, Sonoma, Darlington, and Martinsville. Bobby Hamilton earned their final win in 1998, winning from pole at Martinsville and leading 378 of 500 laps -- their most dominant victory. They also finished as high as third in the championship standings, courtesy of Marlin in 1995. The team's first driver in 1983 was NASCAR Hall of Famer Mark Martin, but it wasn't until Irvan's arrival in 1990 when they finally reached Victory Lane. Larry's nephew Eric McClure competed as a driver for many years, running almost 300 NASCAR Xfinity Series races, and he tragically passed away a few years ago at the age of 42. Read Also: JR Motorsports unveils special Red Bull schemes for SVG and Connor Zilisch Concerned teams argue in court over NASCAR subpoena for financial data Here's how to watch NASCAR on TNT, Max, and truTV this summer To read more articles visit our website.
Yahoo
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Why We Didn't Have a DIY Beach Wedding
The idea of getting married on a sandy shore is nice, but executing an event that looks good and is also comfortable for all isn't worth the effort. Welcome to Beach Week, our annual celebration of the best place on Earth. Before my fiancé became my husband—in fact, even before he became my fiancé—we spent a lot of time on and around an 18,600-acre Missouri reservoir known as Mark Twain Lake. We invited friends to join us on the pontoon boat for charcuterie and cocktails, we took the kayak and the stand-up paddleboard into coves, and we spent many hours enjoying both the sand and the not-quite-surf at John F. Spalding Beach. Which is why, as soon as we knew we were planning a wedding, we asked ourselves what it would take to host it there. "Imagine the two of us," Larry said, "saying our vows on the beach at sunset." The iconic cliché of the sunset ceremony—and you'll have to forgive us, we were newly engaged—quickly expanded into what we hoped would become an extended beach party. Having the event at Mark Twain Lake would make it a destination wedding, in the sense that the lake is far enough away from everything else that even our local guests would have to set aside the entire day to attend, and so we began thinking of activities that would make the trip worthwhile. "We could rent a few extra kayaks," I said, "or play beach volleyball." "And we can get a bunch of stuff going on the grill!" Larry was very enthusiastic about the possibilities. "Our beach wedding would be about bringing the people we love to this place that we love, so they can love it too." My mother, who probably loves us more than anybody, was less enthusiastic about the possibility of spending her oldest daughter's wedding day playing beach volleyball. She suggested that, since we were still very early in the planning process, we might want to consider having a more traditional kind of beach wedding with a ceremony and dinner and dancing because that's what has been proved to be the most enjoyable for everyone involved. In fact, we might even want to go back to our original plan, which was to have our wedding in our backyard garden. Hadn't we been talking about that ever since we bought the house? The truth is that my mother is right about most things—and we did in fact have our wedding in the backyard, but not before we figured out all of the reasons why a beach wedding was wrong for us. Here's what we learned. Some of the people we loved thought that a day full of swimming and kayaking and grilling was a great idea, but those were the people who had been coming to the lake with us for years. The rest of the people we loved were perfectly willing to come to this place that we loved, if that was where we wanted to have our wedding, but they very quickly let us know that they probably wouldn't love the beach as much as we did—especially if they were required to participate in sports and activities. "Can we just come for the sunset ceremony?" they asked. "Sure," I said, reassuringly. "Come whenever you like." Once we agreed that none of our guests would have to get into a kayak unless they really wanted to, and that anybody who wanted to come just for the sunset ceremony was welcome to do so, my mother asked the next important question: "Are you going to be wearing a swimsuit in your wedding photos?" I told her that I probably would end up wearing my swimsuit during the ceremony if it came at the end of a daylong beach party, since it wasn't like Larry and I were going to be able to shower and change and style our hair. Then my mother asked me if there weren't any showers at the beach and I said of course there were, but they were beach showers. It quickly became clear that many members of my family wanted to use the wedding as an opportunity to take the kinds of photos that could only be taken when everyone is gathered together. The various family groupings, all of the siblings together, the big picture with everyone in it and so on. From there it made sense that Larry and I should think about how we might look presentable, in the sense that whatever photos we took would live on various mantels for decades, and that we should make sure that everyone else had the opportunity to look their best as well. "I have this white eyelet lace sundress that I wore when Larry and I bought our house," I said, "and I told him I wouldn't wear it again until we got married in the backyard, but I could wear it on the beach instead and we could do the more traditional kind of wedding with a dinner and a ceremony and dancing." As Larry and I put our minds toward having a traditional wedding on a Midwestern beach, the logistics of how everyone would enjoy the day became more and more complicated. "We still need to confirm whether we need a permit," I said, "and if we're having a formal dinner we'll probably want to rent a shelter house, and we may want to do the thing where you rent a bunch of chairs and tie ribbons around them and arrange them in rows on the sand." "Can we get by without renting chairs if we keep the ceremony short and get everybody back to the shelter house for dinner as quickly as possible?" Larry asked. "Probably," I said, optimistically. "We'll also want to rent the shelter house for at least one day before the wedding, because I want to power wash the entire thing beforehand. Those places are full of spiders. Does that mean we'll need to rent a power washer?" And suddenly we were talking about budgets and bunting and staple guns and Pinterest boards and whether we'd need to give each guest a pocket-size thing of bug spray with a ribbon tied around it; how we would keep the food at a safe temperature and whether we'd need to assign one of our guests the job of remaining at the shelter house during the ceremony to keep the squirrels off the crudités. Then we started thinking seriously about the logistics involved in getting people from the shelter house to the beach, including the difficulties that might come up for guests who have specific mobility needs, and then I said the sentence that ended the entire project: "Larry, when they come back from the ceremony, they're going to have sand in their shoes." "What do you mean?" "If we want to do a formal beach wedding at sunset and then dinner and dancing afterward, people are either going to have to wear their dress shoes onto the beach and then back up to the shelter house, or they're going to have to leave their shoes at the shelter house and make their way across the parking lot barefoot, or maybe they'll carry their shoes, who knows, but either way they're going to get sand on their feet, and that means they'll be uncomfortable during the dinner and dancing." So we had our backyard wedding instead—which was exactly the kind of wedding Larry and I had been talking about ever since we first bought our house. We had been so enamored of the beach-wedding-at-sunset image that we forgot what should have been obvious. We kept the parts of the beach wedding that we liked, including the part where my sister brought over a bunch of lawn games for the kids to play, and added the parts that my mother knew would be best for everyone, such as formal photos with the extended family. Most importantly, we brought the people we loved to a place that we loved—only in this case the place was our home. Related Reading: My 2024 DIY Backyard Wedding Inspired a Backyard Refresh The Reason to Love Lakes Is the House Peeping
