Just Keep Trying
Don’t Mess With The Breasts
from The San Francisco Chronicle
There’s a new texting scam going around, and it starts with a picture of breasts
Within a few weeks of each other, two friends of mine in the Bay Area independently received a text with the same unsolicited photo of a woman’s bra-clad, but otherwise exposed, cleavage sent from an area code in central Pennsylvania last month.
Both of them, curious as to the provenance of the boobs, replied and asked who was texting them. It was clear some scam was afoot. But what was it? They wanted to know the endgame.
Local Redditors, too, have reported similar missives.
“Anyone else in SF getting texts from a random number who sends you a nude and then tries to flirt with you over text?” wrote Redditor NaturalPerspective earlier this month. “I have had three people tell me it has also happened to them in the past 3 weeks. Wondering what is going on.”
If you yourself have gotten a similar text out of nowhere and wondered where the trail of breadcrumbs lead — Phishing? Blackmail? Viral marketing? — we followed them, so you don’t have to.
Rembrandt’s Secret Sauce
Scientists Have Found the Rare Secret Ingredient Rembrandt Used to Make His Paintings So Vibrant
The discovery could be critical in helping to preserve the Dutch artist’s masterful paintings for future generations.
Dutch and French scientists and have discovered the secret behind Rembrandt’s brilliant and life-life impasto technique.
Citing a research paper published in the scientific journal AngewandteChemie, the Daily Mail reports that the team has identified a substance called plumbonacrite, a rare compound thus far only identified in works of art from the 20th century and in one painting by Vincent van Gogh. The information is vital for understanding Rembrandt’s work—and could be crucial for conserving and restoring his masterpieces for future generations to enjoy.
“We didn’t expect to find this phase at all, as it is so unusual in Old Masters’ paintings,” the paper’s chief author, Victor Gonzalez of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam and the Delft University of Technology, told the Daily Mail. “What’s more, our research shows its presence is not accidental or due to contamination, but the result of an intended synthesis.”
‘Oumuamua Lurking
Have Aliens Found Us? A Harvard Astronomer on the Mysterious Interstellar Object ‘Oumuamua
On October 19, 2017, astronomers at the University of Hawaii spotted a strange object travelling through our solar system, which they later described as “a red and extremely elongated asteroid.” It was the first interstellar object to be detected within our solar system; the scientists named it ‘Oumuamua, the Hawaiian word for a scout or messenger. The following October, Avi Loeb, the chair of Harvard’s astronomy department, co-wrote a paper (with a Harvard postdoctoral fellow, Shmuel Bialy) that examined ‘Oumuamua’s “peculiar acceleration” and suggested that the object “may be a fully operational probe sent intentionally to Earth’s vicinity by an alien civilization.” Loeb has long been interested in the search for extraterrestrial life, and he recently made further headlines by suggesting that we might communicate with the civilization that sent the probe. “If these beings are peaceful, we could learn a lot from them,” he told Der Spiegel.
I recently spoke by phone with Loeb, who was frustrated that scientists saw ‘Oumuamua too late in its journey to photograph the object. “My motivation for writing the paper is to alert the community to pay a lot more attention to the next visitor,” he told me. During our conversation, which has been edited and condensed for clarity, we discussed why Loeb thinks we need to consider the possibility that ‘Oumuamua was sent by aliens, the dangers of unscientific speculation, and what belief in an advanced extraterrestrial civilization has in common with faith in God.
Your explanation of why ‘Oumuamua might be an interstellar probe may be hard for laypeople to understand. Why might this be the case, beyond the fact that lots of things are possible?
There is a Scientific American article I wrote where I summarized six strange facts about ‘Oumuamua. The first one is that we didn’t expect this object to exist in the first place. We see the solar system and we can calculate at what rate it ejected rocks during its history. And if we assume all planetary systems around other stars are doing the same thing, we can figure out what the population of interstellar objects should be. That calculation results in a lot of possibilities, but the range is much less than needed to explain the discovery of ‘Oumuamua.
There is another peculiar fact about this object. When you look at all the stars in the vicinity of the sun, they move relative to the sun, the sun moves relative to them, but only one in five hundred stars in that frame is moving as slow as ‘Oumuamua. You would expect that most rocks would move roughly at the speed of the star they came from. If this object came from another star, that star would have to be very special.
Alien Ice-disk In Presumpscot
from the Portland Press Herald
Spinning in the Presumpscot, this alien-looking ice disk has Westbrook all abuzz
The circular sheet appears to be rotating and growing, drawing comparisons to a crop circle, a Lazy Susan and a duck-go-round.
BY DENNIS HOEY
A disk of ice roughly 100 yards across that formed on the Presumpscot River and was slowly rotating and gaining size Monday had Westbrook buzzing almost as much as when city police spotted a giant snake eating a beaver in roughly the same location in June 2016.
Nothing ever came of those mysterious snake sightings – the reptile was dubbed “Wessie” by locals – but the sight of an alien-looking circle of ice stuck in the river had some people wondering about that section of the river’s knack for producing weird events.
“It kind of looks like a crop circle,” said Doug Bertlesman, a web developer at Ethos Marketing. His company is at 17 Ash St. The four-story building with a roof deck overlooks the river where the ice disk formed.
Egg Beats Kylie
An Egg Has Beaten Kylie Jenner’s Record for the Most-Liked Photo on Instagram
An egg won the internet Sunday.
In the latest example that internet dominance is as fragile as an eggshell, an egg Instagram overtook Kylie Jenner by posting the most liked Instagram photo ever.
The egg racked up more than 18.2 million likes as of Sunday evening — a big win for a little egg.
The Instagram account set out on its journey Sunday morning with its first post declaring its ambitions.
“Let’s set a world record together and get the most liked post on Instagram. Beating the current world record held by Kylie Jenner (18 million)! We got this,” the bio read.
Cosmic Steamships
Steam-powered spaceship could cruise the cosmos indefinitely without running out of gas
Scientists say the microwave-sized craft would suck its watery fuel right out of the asteroids, planets and moons it’s exploring.
By Brandon Specktor
Come one, come all and behold the future of space travel: steam power!
No, seriously; half a century after the world’s first manned space mission, it seems that interplanetary travel has finally entered the steam age. Scientists at the University of Central Florida have teamed up with Honeybee Robotics, a private space and mining tech company based in California, to develop a small, steam-powered spacecraft capable of sucking its fuel right out of the asteroids, planets and moons it’s exploring.
By continuously turning extraterrestrial water into steam, this microwave-sized lander could, theoretically, power itself on an indefinite number of planet-hopping missions across the galaxy — so long as it always lands somewhere with H20 for the taking.
“We could potentially use this technology to hop on the moon, Ceres, Europa, Titan, Pluto, the poles of Mercury, asteroids — anywhere there is water and sufficiently low gravity,” Phil Metzger, a UCF space scientist and one of the chief minds behind the steampunk starship, said in a statement. Metzger added that such a self-sufficient spacecraft could explore the cosmos “forever.”
Yikes! Why To Watch Your Blood Sugar Levels
Dangerous chase during rush hour result of driver having medical emergency
COLUMBUS, Ohio (WSYX/WTTE) – A potentially deadly situation was stopped when a police officer from Hilliard, Ohio managed to safely stop a driver swerving all over the interstate during rush hour, after a short chase. Officers now say the driver was having a medical emergency which led to the dangerous pursuit.
Police received reports about a vehicle driving erratically on I-270 on the west side shortly before 6 p.m. Thursday. After stopping on the side of the highway to look for the driver, an officer had to suddenly move his patrol vehicle out of the way to avoid being struck after he saw the SUV veer off the road right behind him.
The officer immediately began following the car with lights and sirens, trying to pull over the driver. Dashcam video shows the SUV going from one side of the highway to the other, veering into the grass and clipping roadway signs. At one point, the driver stops in the grass next to the off-ramp to Tuttle Crossing, only to suddenly drive off again, going all the way across the median and back onto the highway as traffic passes.
“(Send) me some help from somewhere, this guy’s going to kill somebody. He’s all over all five lanes,” the officer radioed dispatch after the driver speeds off again, veering across 270. Seconds later, as the SUV goes into the grass and back onto the highway, the officer performed a PIT maneuver, hitting the SUV and bringing the driver to a stop in the middle of the highway.
Solitary Bullshit
How solitary confinement drove a young inmate to the brink of insanity
by Jeff Coen and Stacy St. Clair
With his mental state deteriorating as he sat in the crushing isolation of solitary confinement, a desperate inmate named Anthony Gay saw a temporary way out.
Sometimes it came in the form of a contraband razor blade. Occasionally it was a staple from a legal document or a small shard of something he had broken.
He would mutilate himself in his Illinois prison cell, slicing open his neck, forearms, legs and genitals hundreds of times over two decades in solitary confinement. Once, he packed a fan motor inside a gaping leg wound; another time he cut open his scrotum and inserted a zipper.
Each time he harmed himself, he knew that, at least for a little while, the extreme step would bring contact with other human beings. Therapists would rush to calm him. Nurses would offer kind words as they took his pulse and stitched him up.
“It’s kind of like being locked in the basement, and then emerging from the basement and being put on the center stage,” he said. “It made me feel alive.”
Gay entered the Illinois Department of Corrections in 1994 as a young man, convicted of robbery after brawling with another teen who told police that Gay took his hat and stole a single dollar bill. He expected to serve as little as three and a half years.
Instead, a fight with a fellow inmate led to Gay’s first stint in segregation, pushing him into a downward spiral that resulted in 22 years in solitary confinement. Shortly after the segregation started, the cutting and suicide attempts began.
The Next Big Sport
Shit!
Earth’s magnetic pole is on the move, fast. And we don’t know why
Earth’s magnetic field is what allows us to exist. It deflects harmful radiation. It keeps our water and atmosphere in place. But now it’s acting up — and nobody knows why.
by Jamie Seidel
Planet Earth is alive. Deep beneath its skin, its life blood — rivers of molten iron — pulse around its core. And this mobile iron is what generates the magnetic field that causes auroras — and keeps us alive.
But, according to the science journal Nature, something strange is going on deep down below.
It’s causing the magnetic North Pole to ‘skitter’ away from Canada, towards Siberia.
“The magnetic pole is moving so quickly that it has forced the world’s geomagnetism experts into a rare move,” Nature reports.
Real Bullriding
XFL Coming
Could NCAA Stars Bolt College for XFL Before NFL?
The XFL isn’t bound by the same eligibility rules that restrict the NFL and its prospective players.
SANTA CLARA, CA – JANUARY 07: Trevor Lawrence #16 of the Clemson Tigers reacts after his teams 44-16 win over the Alabama Crimson Tide in the CFP National Championship presented by AT&T at Levi’s Stadium on January 7, 2019 in Santa Clara, California. (Photo by Harry How/Getty Images)
Though it won’t be kicking off until 2020, the XFL is already making it clear it will welcome talented players who want to get paid as early as possible.
Under NFL rules, a player must be out of high school for at least three years before joining the league. In addition to working on their games, that’s a big reason many top prospects choose to play college football, generally for more than one season.
But, the XFL doesn’t have the same rules as the NFL and it sounds as if players who want to play pro football right out of high school may have that option in 2020. Additionally, college players who want to leave school early before they are eligible for the NFL will also likely be in play for the XFL.
Gigantic Jets
What Causes Earth’s Rare and Mysterious Gigantic Jets?
By Ross Pomeroy
We’re all well acquainted with lightning. The bright, brief flashes of electrical energy puncture the general monotony of Earth’s sky. Their luminous dance, however, is restricted to within and below the planet’s billowing thunderclouds. Often shielded from our view above is a light show of a more magnificent nature. Here can be seen transient bursts of luminous plasma, the most common of which is a sprite, resembling a red mushroom cloud between 50 and 100 kilometers above the surface. Lucky onlookers can also see blue jets, bold, yet wispy blue bolts extending upwards from the tops of clouds to as high as 40 to 50 kilometers.
Rarest of all the “lightning above the clouds” is the gigantic jet, which is like a supersized blue jet that transitions to the color red at the highest altitudes. Scientists at the Arecibo Observatory once observed a blue jet extending from a thundercloud up to 70 kilometers, blazing at speeds of roughly 2,000,000 meters per second, more than forty times faster than ground lightning!
Fighting Back
NASA to crash 13,500mph spacecraft into ASTEROID in mission to stop deadly strike on Earth
NASA is planning to smash a spacecraft into an asteroid in the next phase of its planetary defence experiment.
SAVE EARTH: NASA will practice stopping a catastrophic asteroid strike (Pic: GETTY)
The US space agency is working on the most fiery and crucial stage of its Double Asteroid Redirection Test, DART.
The experiment will be the latest in NASA’s mission to protect Earth from deadly asteroid strikes.
In 2021, it aims to fully test the new defence system by smashing a spaceship into a rock at 13,500mph (6 km per second).
Space experts are worried an asteroid could potentially smash into earth causing catastrophic damage.
[ click to continue reading at The Daily Star ]
The Undersea World of Damien Hirst
Damien Hirst Created a Fake Documentary About His Fake Venice Show—and Now You Can See It on Netflix
The film, financed by the artist himself, seeks to re-enact the fictional backstory behind the divisive show.
One of Damien Hirst’s “found treasures.” Screenshot via Netflix & Science Ltd. “Treasures From the Wreck of the Unbelievable” (2017).
The exhibition that launched a thousand angry tweets lives on—on Netflix.
Earlier this week, the streaming service released a mockumentary, “Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable,” that chronicles the fictional story behind Damien Hirst’s two-venue exhibition in Venice last year.
The slickly produced film—full of sweeping underwater shots and a swelling soundtrack—was financed by the artist himself, a spokesperson from Hirst’s company, Science Ltd, tells artnet News. “The film is something Damien wanted people to be able to come across in years to come, which explores the backstory of the project,” she says.
According to the 90-minute mockumentary, the vast Venice spectacle was not the 52-year-old artist’s highly anticipated comeback exhibition, which took 10 years and cost a reported $65 million to produce.
Instead, the film suggests the show was the debut presentation of long-lost treasure discovered by a team of archaeologists and divers off the coast of east Africa. The trove—so the story goes—had been assembled during the 1st or 2nd centuries by a former slave turned voracious collector, Cif Amotan II (an anagram, it turns out, for “I am fiction”).
The film follows a team of researchers as they identify Amotan’s shipwreck beneath the surface of the Indian Ocean. But in order to retrieve the sunken booty, they need a benefactor. Enter: Damien Hirst.
Dog’s Man Bites Man
from The South Florida Sun Sentinel
Bay Area jogger is attacked by a dog, then bitten by the dog’s owner
by Alejandra Reyes-Velarde
A woman jogging in a Bay Area park was bitten by the owner of a dog who also attacked the jogger, police said.
The jogger was in Anthony Chabot Regional Park in Castro Valley when a dog attacked her about 10:30 a.m. Thursday, and she had to defend herself with pepper spray, the East Bay Regional Park District Police Department said.
The woman later came across the dog’s owner — another woman — who tackled and punched her multiple times, authorities said.
“As the victim attempted to push her assailant off of her,” police said, “she was bitten on her forearm by the female, causing significant wounds.”
Everybody Wants Some!!
Van Halen: Why the Original Line-Up MUST Return to Save Rock ‘n’ Roll
The rainbow belching Yeti requires Michael Anthony on bass.
By Tim Sommer
The year ended with startling news. The kind of news that makes old men remember the elastic arrogance and sunny ignorance of their youth, and old women recall a time when life was so easy and full of charm that they could smoke Merit Lights in the scrubby grass behind the cafeteria, wear culottes, and sigh over the roman curls of Mark Goodman.
Multiple sources state that the original primo line-up of Van Halen — David Lee Roth, Eddie Van Halen, Alex Van Halen, and the amazing Michael Anthony — were gearing up for a reunion tour.
As this information — still unconfirmed, mind you — began to sparkle and ooze over the webbernet, every white American over 45 gasped with excitement, releasing a sound oddly similar to the colossal downward “Thwoooooooo!” bass run in Gerry Rafferty’s “Baker Street.”
If you believe that rock’n’roll is a rainbow-belching Yeti wearing a puka shell necklace and a completely un-ironic California Jam II concert tee while holding a liter of Mateus Rosé, then you already know why this is such an important event.
When the brick-colored fog clears on the final day, when the mud-orange skies dissolve into a soot that can sustain no echoes of life or joy, when the dust from the earth meets the dust from the sky, when the mountains meet the seas and the life-salt of ocean becomes the lifeless talc of the desert, the creator (or at least the 22 year-old Nephew of The Creator who lives in the Creator’s paneled basement, sleeps on a sofa bed framed by posters of Farrah Fawcett and the “Hang In There!” cat, and when really high can explain, at great length, why you really really need to spend more time listening to Rainbow and UFO) will point its magical, misty finger at Roth-era Van Halen and say, that is rock’n’roll.
[ click to continue reading at RCL ]
Mean Gene Gone
Legendary Interviewer Gene Okerlund Passes Away At The Age Of 76
Legendary wrestling interviewer Gene Okerlund has passed away at age 76.
Okerlund got his start in AWA before signing with WWE in 1984. He interviewed all of the top stars in the sport including Hulk Hogan, Randy Savage, Andre The Giant, Ric Flair and more. He also provided commentary and hosted WWE shows All-American Wrestling, Tuesday Night Titans, Wrestling Challenge and Prime Time Wrestling.
Okerlund left WWE in 1993 to join WCW where he continued to add to his interviewing resume, working with the likes of the Four Horsemen, Sting, Goldberg and others. He returned to WWE in 2002 to call the Gimmick Battle Royal alongside Bobby Heenan at WrestleMania 17.
In 2018, Okerlund interviewed AJ Styles as part of Raw 25. The side of the entrance ramp, where the commentary booth currently sits, is referred to as the Okerlund Position in honor of “Mean” Gene as many of his interviews took place in that spot. He was inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame in 2006.
Super Dave Gone
Bob Einstein, 76, a.k.a. Super Dave Osborne and Larry David Pal, Dies
Bob Einstein, whose career as a comedy writer took a quirky turn into television acting as the hapless daredevil Super Dave Osborne, and later as a friend of Larry David’s on “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” died on Wednesday at his home in Indian Wells, Calif. He was 76.
His manager, Lee Kernis, said the cause was cancer.
Mr. Einstein played Marty Funkhouser, Mr. David’s pal and occasional antagonist, on “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” the long-running fictionalized version of Mr. David’s life on HBO. Mr. Einstein’s health precluded him from working on the series’ 10th season, which is now in production.
“Never have I seen an actor enjoy a role the way Bob did playing Marty Funkhouser on ‘Curb,’ ” Mr. David said in a statement. He added, “There was no one like him, as he told us again and again.”
Losing The High Ground
China just landed on the far side of the moon: What comes next?
The lander-rover combo touched down where no human or robot has ventured before. Find out what it’s doing there, and what else is headed for the lunar surface.
BY
This image from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter centers on the South Pole-Aitken basin, the largest impact basin on the moon and one of the largest in the solar system. The distance from its depths to the tops of the highest surrounding peaks is nearly 10 miles. IMAGE BY NASA/GODDARD
On the evening of January 2, a Chinese lander named for an ancient moon goddess touched down on the lunar far side, where no human or robot has ever ventured before. China’s Chang’e-4 mission launched toward the moon on December 7 and entered orbit around our cosmic companion on December 12. Now, the spacecraft has alighted onto the lunar surface.
Leading up to the historic touchdown, details on Chang’e-4’s landing were few and far between. CNSA is notoriously secretive; the last update offered was on December 30, when officials stated that the spacecraft had entered its final pre-landing orbit. Around the world, scientists and enthusiasts huddled in online forums and on Twitter before the landing, trading whispers as they read the latest from well-sourced journalists, Weibo accounts, and amateur astronomers tracking Chang’e-4’s orbit.
Once confirmation came that Chang’e-4 touched down, though, uncertainty gave way to joy.
TR-3Bs @ WPAFB
Rise in mysterious ‘TR-3B UFO sightings’ sparks PANIC over ‘top-secret US military plans’
THERE has been a shocking rise in alleged TR-3B triangular UFO sightings across the world – with the most recent footage showing the bizarre aircraft close to a US airbase in Ohio.
By OLI SMITH
A recent jump in the number of sightings of alleged TR-3B aircrafts has sparked a panic among online conspiracy communities. Experts fear that there “is something going on” amid concern over top-secret US military experiments or the involvement of extraterrestrials. Michael, of the YouTube channel MrMBB333, posted the latest sighting of the alleged TR-3B in Toledo, Ohio.
He said: “According to the guy who filmed this, it had circled over his neighbourhood at least three times.
“It looks like a perfect triangle. You cannot see anything except the lights.
“I’ve tried to put on different light filters to get a clearer picture but all you see are the bright lights.
“We are seeing a lot of these lately – especially in Ohio.
“Something is going on.”
The sighting took place just a few miles from the Wright-Patterson air Force Base – raising concern of US military involvement.
#HughesToo
Hollywood’s cruellest casting couch predator: Howard Hughes was famed as a reclusive billionaire but a disturbing new book reveals he handpicked scores of young girls as playthings on false promises of fame
- Howard Hughes searched for models in magazines and took them to Hollywood
- Within weeks, the girls would sign $75-a-week contracts with Hughes company
- Every moment of their day was scheduled: dance, voice and acting classes, , always chaperoned, while Hughes took months or years to find a ‘perfect script’
- He was hailed by the media as ahero and the most eligible bachelor in the world
Fighting back: Feisty Ava Gardner, left, proved a match for control-freak HughesThe search for fresh ‘talent’ would begin with a stack of newspapers and magazines. As he flicked through the pages, Howard Hughes was searching for only one thing: photographs of nubile young women.
They might be models, beauty queens or teenagers yet to graduate from high school. Once, it was a girl who had won a local fishing contest.
But was she as pretty as she seemed? From experience, Hughes knew better than to trust a grainy photograph — so he despatched aides to track down whichever girl had caught his eye, with orders to get her to pose for a set of new pictures.
He was very specific about the images he wanted. There had to be three of the girl sitting down, another three of her standing up; she also needed to be shot head-on and in profile, and without heavy make-up or fancy hairstyling.
So it was the mothers who were instructed to ensure that their girls always slept in their bras (to prevent droop and were never allowed to turn their heads more than 15 degrees to the left or right (only Hughes knew why).
Meanwhile, the young women were each assigned a furnished flat and an on-call driver — though few ever knew that he doubled as a spy for Hughes. Every moment of their days and nights was scheduled: dance, voice and acting classes, followed by dinner out, usually at Perino’s on Wilshire Boulevard, always chaperoned by the drivers.
Emma Roberts Reads KATERINA
Emma Roberts Is All Smiles After Purchasing James Frey’s ‘Katerina’ in LA!
Emma Roberts has some holiday reading in store!
The 27-year-old American Horror Storyactress was spotted heading out after purchasing a copy of James Frey‘s Katerina on Wednesday (December 26) in Los Angeles.
The novel, released earlier in 2018, is described as a sweeping love story alternating between 1992 Paris and Los Angeles in 2018.
It’s All Fake, Folks
How Much of the Internet Is Fake? Turns Out, a Lot of It, Actually.
By
Photo: Artwork by Ayatgali Tuleubek
In late November, the Justice Department unsealed indictments against eight people accused of fleecing advertisers of $36 million in two of the largest digital ad-fraud operations ever uncovered. Digital advertisers tend to want two things: people to look at their ads and “premium” websites — i.e., established and legitimate publications — on which to host them.
The two schemes at issue in the case, dubbed Methbot and 3ve by the security researchers who found them, faked both. Hucksters infected 1.7 million computers with malware that remotely directed traffic to “spoofed” websites — “empty websites designed for bot traffic” that served up a video ad purchased from one of the internet’s vast programmatic ad-exchanges, but that were designed, according to the indictments, “to fool advertisers into thinking that an impression of their ad was served on a premium publisher site,” like that of Vogue or The Economist. Views, meanwhile, were faked by malware-infected computers with marvelously sophisticated techniques to imitate humans: bots “faked clicks, mouse movements, and social network login information to masquerade as engaged human consumers.” Some were sent to browse the internet to gather tracking cookies from other websites, just as a human visitor would have done through regular behavior. Fake people with fake cookies and fake social-media accounts, fake-moving their fake cursors, fake-clicking on fake websites — the fraudsters had essentially created a simulacrum of the internet, where the only real things were the ads.
How much of the internet is fake? Studies generally suggest that, year after year, less than 60 percent of web traffic is human; some years, according to some researchers, a healthy majority of it is bot. For a period of time in 2013, the Times reported this year, a full half of YouTube traffic was “bots masquerading as people,” a portion so high that employees feared an inflection point after which YouTube’s systems for detecting fraudulent traffic would begin to regard bot traffic as real and human traffic as fake. They called this hypothetical event “the Inversion.”
Christmas Creature Caught On Cam In Kentucky
from The Lexington Herald Leader
Monstrous creature ‘turned its head and looked straight at our car,’ Kentucky woman says
A woman is reported to have seen a frightening “creature” on a road outside the eastern Kentucky town of Sandy Hook, prompting an investigation by the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization.
The group released a “follow-up report” this month that concludes the woman saw something that wasn’t human. Sandy Hook is about 100 miles east of Lexington, Kentucky.
“She described it as a walking tree,“ investigator Jack Smarr said after interviewing the woman.
His report stops short of declaring it was Bigfoot, a legendary “ape-like creature” that remains more a popular myth than a scientific fact, according to Live Science.com.
Great Expectations
THE ‘FUTURE BOOK’ IS HERE, BUT IT’S NOT WHAT WE EXPECTED
by
HOTLITTLEPOTATO; GETTY IMAGES
THE FUTURE BOOK was meant to be interactive, moving, alive. Its pages were supposed to be lush with whirling doodads, responsive, hands-on. The old paperback Zork choose-your-own-adventures were just the start. The Future Book would change depending on where you were, how you were feeling. It would incorporate your very environment into its story—the name of the coffee shop you were sitting at, your best friend’s birthday. It would be sly, maybe a little creepy. Definitely programmable. Ulysses would extend indefinitely in any direction you wanted to explore; just tap and some unique, mega-mind-blowing sui generis path of Joycean machine-learned words would wend itself out before your very eyes.
Prognostications about how technology would affect the form of paper books have been with us for centuries. Each new medium was poised to deform or murder the book: newspapers, photography, radio, movies, television, videogames, the internet.
Some viewed the intersection of books and technology more positively: In 1945, Vannevar Bush wrote in The Atlantic: “Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified.”
Researcher Alan Kay created a cardboard prototype of a tablet-like device in 1968. He called it the “Dynabook,” saying, “We created a new kind of medium for boosting human thought, for amplifying human intellectual endeavor. We thought it could be as significant as Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press 500 years ago.”
GMA: KATERINA on Best Books of 2018 List
from ABC News/Good Morning America
Best books of 2018 make great gifts for the holidays
By TONY MORRISON & ALISON EHRLICH via GMA
GMA, ABC News Photo Illustration
A perfectly selected book as a gift for the holidays can make you the most thoughtful of gift-givers.
Whether you’re looking for something new to pick up for yourself or stumped by what to get that very special bookworm in your life, check out our list of best reads of 2018. It’s curated by our “GMA” Book Editor, including what we just can’t wait to get our hands on in the New Year.
“The Kiss Quotient,” by Helen Hoang
“Sadie,” by Courtney Summers
“Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup,” by John Carreyrou
“Katerina,” by James Frey
They Just Keep Coming
Meteor spotted in north metro was one of this year’s biggest worldwide
The fireball was reported above Cambridge, in Isanti County, about 2:10 a.m.
By Tim Harlow
MATTHEW SPARBY
One of the biggest meteors seen worldwide this year streaked over the north metro early Thursday, giving the night sky a light show and rattling homes with a sonic boom.
The refrigerator-sized fireball entered the stratosphere above Cambridge, Minn., in Isanti County about 2:10 a.m. and illuminated the sky with brilliant hues of blues and greens as it burned its way eastward before going dark over Harris in southern Chisago County, said Pat Branch, an observer and meteorite hunter with the American Meteor Society, which collects reports from all over the world.
It wasn’t immediately clear how close the meteor came to Earth impact, but it probably was close enough to drop pea- to grape-size rocks with charred, crusted or chipped edges, Branch said. The drop zone between Harris and North Branch would be about 2 miles long and a half-mile wide, he said.
QUEEN & SLIM on The Black List
Black List 2018: Matt Drudge, Kobe Bryant Movies Top List of Best Unproduced Scripts
by
The Black List 2018 is here — a survey of the best screenplays that have not yet gone into production.
This year, the 73 films included films about Serena and Venus Williams’ hard-driving father (Zach Baylin’s “King Richard”), the sexual assault case against former NBA star Kobe Bryant (Mike Schneider’s “Mamba”) and Cody Brotter’s “Drudge” about The Drudge Report founder Matt Drudge and how he broke the Monica Lewinsky scandal.
The list also includes Emmy winner Lena Waithe’s “Queen & Slim,” a disgruntled Snapchat employee’s account of founder Evan Spiegel (Elissa Karasik’s “Frat Boy Genius”) and Gary Spinelli’s “Rub & Tug” a project that has been in limbo since Scarlett Johansson’s exit from the project because of objections to her playing a trans man.