from The Daily Star

Archaeologists stunned after unearthing 3,000-year-old penis statue used by cult

The girthy penis rock is 21 inches tall

A giant penis statue — measuring an impressive 21 inches — has been unearthed by archaeologists in Sweden.

The girthy phallus might even have been used in blood sacrifices to a pagan fertility god, researchers said.

Dated to be from the Bronze Age, between 1800 and 500 BC, the penis rock was discovered during an excavation near Gothenburg.

It has been linked to a fertility cult, having been found alongside a lot of animal bones which hints that the area was used for sacrifice.

The lack of any human bones ruled out the theory that the phallus was a unique headstone.

[ click to continue reading at Daily Star ]

from Curbed

‘BoJack Horseman’ is the only show that really gets my city

Tucked into the often-bleak narrative are disarmingly familiar glimpses of Los Angeles life

By Alissa Walker

To live in Los Angeles means forever catching glimpses of your street or favorite restaurant staged as a stand-in for someplace else. Moving around town becomes an exercise in avoiding those film shoots, a constant reminder that we reside on a giant soundstage, where at any given moment, a beloved block or building is being carefully snipped from the surrounding context.

In the last few years, however, shows have been set in actual LA neighborhoods, with characters referencing real places, sometimes with stunning geographic accuracy. There’s the show Love, which takes place in a well-known apartment complex in the Valley. In Transparent, the neighborhoods where the family members live, from Silver Lake to Marina del Rey, provide cues about their characters. LA’s noir past intersects with present-day addresses in the thriller Bosch. Issa Rae’s Insecure is probably the best example of the genre, offering a look at everyday life in South LA with locations as mundane as a Rite-Aid pharmacy.

But BoJack Horseman—the animated Netflix show by writer Raphael Bob-Waksberg and artist Lisa Hanawalt, who were high school friends—is the first show to create an entire Los Angeles universe that feels like it was made for people in LA.

For people who don’t live here, BoJack Horseman might appear to be an endless string of cliches: a narcissistic washed-up sitcom star (who is also a horse) voiced by Will Arnett, colonnades of palm trees, candy-colored convertibles, and jabs at celebrity culture. But tucked into the narrative are disarmingly familiar glimpses of actual Los Angeles—well, Los Angeles if it were mostly occupied by animals.

Every street scene sends me scrambling to hit pause. There are LA landmarks like Chateau Marmoset, Fred Seagull, Parrotmount Studios, and Moose-O & Frank Grill, but it doesn’t stop with obvious parodies—next door to Moose-O’s is Garcetti & Meatballs, the winkingest nod to our Italian-Jewish-Mexican American mayor. Billboard icon Angelyne is portrayed as an angelfish. Even small neighborhood businesses get cameos, like l.a. Aye-Ayeworks, Secret Hindquarters and confusingly named local grocery chains. A dutifully updated Instagram devoted to the hidden jokes has become the best way to catch the ones I’ve missed.

[ click to continue reading at Curbed ]

from The New York Times

A Popeyes Chicken Sandwich and a Tactic to Set Off a Twitter Roar

“Look at how much attention they’re getting — it’s impressive,” the executive editor of a trade magazine said.

By David Yaffe-Bellany

The first Popeyes tweet seemed innocent enough — a photograph of the chain’s new fried-chicken sandwich (chicken breast, brioche bun, pickles, sauce) beneath an artfully garbled caption: “So. Good. Forgot. How. Speak.”

But as a social media battle has captivated the internet this week and generated long lines at Popeyes locations across the country, that tweet from last week now has the feel of an opening salvo. Things grew heated on Tuesday, when Chick-fil-A tweeted what appeared to be a coded response to the Popeyes announcement, extolling the virtues of its “original” chicken sandwich.

Popeyes replied a few hours later: “…y’all good?” 

Soon, the “passive-aggressive chicken sandwich debate,” as one news article put it, had escalated into a Twitter battle royal, as other fast-food companies started promoting their own sandwiches. Shake Shack tried to rise above the fray, promising a chicken sandwich “without the beef.”

As the Twitter commotion intensified, the Popeyes chicken sandwich reportedly sold out at some locations.

[ click to continue reading at NYT ]

from The Mirror

Clown ‘starts violent brawl on cruise ship as passengers use plates for weapons’

Families feared for their lives as chaos erupted on the P&O Britannia cruise following a boozy patriotic party where large amounts of alcohol were consumed

ByLatifa Yedroudj

A passenger dressed in a clown outfit sparked a massive brawl on a P&O cruise which left several staff members injured, according to reports.

The huge fight broke out on board a P&O Britannia cruise with families running to hide as passengers reportedly used plates as weapons.

Emergency services were called to the ship’s 16th floor restaurant at 2am on Friday morning.

Paramedics tended to the injured staff who tried to control the massive fight that erupted between passengers.

The guests allegedly threw plates and furniture at each other and there was “blood everywhere”, a witness said.

The fight broke out following a “patriotic” black-tie event on board the cruise ship on Thursday evening with “large amounts of alcohol consumed”, reporter Richard Gaisford said on Twitter .

According to a witness at the scene, passengers were upset after one guest dressed up as a clown despite the ship’s no fancy dress code.

[ click to continue reading at The Mirror ]

from The Independent

Radioactive uranium, whiskey and rattlesnake found in stolen car pulled over by police

Stephen Jennings, 40, told officers he was trying to create a ‘super snake’

by Emma Snaith

A pair of alleged car thieves were found with radioactive uranium, whiskey and a rattlesnake in their vehicle when they were pulled over in a routine traffic stop, police said.

They were initially stopped after police noticed their vehicle’s licence plate had expired, but officers soon noticed the timber rattlesnake in a box on the backseat.

Mr Jennings, 40, then told police he had a gun in the vehicle and police discovered that the car was stolen.

“So now he’s got a rattlesnake, a stolen vehicle, firearm, and somebody under arrest,” Guthrie Police Sergeant Anthony Gibbs told local broadcaster KFOR-TV.

After a further search of the car, police found an open bottle of Kentucky Deluxe whiskey and a container of “yellowish powder” that was labelled “Uranium”.

Mr Jennings told officers  he was trying to create a “super snake” after the uranium was discovered, ABC reported.

[ click to continue reading at The Independent ]

from The Atlantic

The Peculiar Blindness of Experts

Credentialed authorities are comically bad at predicting the future. But reliable forecasting is possible.

by DAVID EPSTEIN

The bet was on, and it was over the fate of humanity. On one side was the Stanford biologist Paul R. Ehrlich. In his 1968 best seller, The Population Bomb, Ehrlich insisted that it was too late to prevent a doomsday apocalypse resulting from overpopulation. Resource shortages would cause hundreds of millions of starvation deaths within a decade. It was cold, hard math: The human population was growing exponentially; the food supply was not. Ehrlich was an accomplished butterfly specialist. He knew that nature did not regulate animal populations delicately. Populations exploded, blowing past the available resources, and then crashed.

In his book, Ehrlich played out hypothetical scenarios that represented “the kinds of disasters that will occur.” In the worst-case scenario, famine rages across the planet. Russia, China, and the United States are dragged into nuclear war, and the resulting environmental degradation soon extinguishes the human race. In the “cheerful” scenario, population controls begin. Famine spreads, and countries teeter, but the major death wave ends in the mid-1980s. Only half a billion or so people die of starvation. “I challenge you to create one more optimistic,” Ehrlich wrote, adding that he would not count scenarios involving benevolent aliens bearing care packages.

The economist Julian Simon took up Ehrlich’s challenge. Technology—water-control techniques, hybridized seeds, management strategies—had revolutionized agriculture, and global crop yields were increasing. To Simon, more people meant more good ideas about how to achieve a sustainable future. So he proposed a wager. Ehrlich could choose five metals that he expected to become more expensive as resources were depleted and chaos ensued over the next decade. Both men agreed that commodity prices were a fine proxy for the effects of population growth, and they set the stakes at $1,000 worth of Ehrlich’s five metals. If, 10 years hence, prices had gone down, Ehrlich would have to pay the difference in value to Simon. If prices went up, Simon would be on the hook for the difference. The bet was made official in 1980.

[ click to continue reading at The Atlantic ]

from The Guardian

from The New York Post

Hollywood legend Audrey Hepburn was a WWII resistance spy

By Reed Tucker

She was one of Hollywood’s most celebrated actresses. But Audrey Hepburn had a role that few knew about: spy.

And unlike the characters that she portrayed on screen, playing this part could literally mean life or death.

The maddeningly private actress, who died in 1993, had dropped hints about her work with the Dutch Resistance during World War II, and now a new book puts the whole story together, providing an in-depth look at her life during the conflict.

Robert Matzen, author of “Dutch Girl: Audrey Hepburn and World War II” (GoodKnight Books), combed secret files, talked to Hepburn’s family and tracked down diaries to uncover new information.

The biggest surprise to many will be Hepburn’s work with the Dutch Resistance against Nazi occupation. She certainly seemed an unlikely hero.

[ click to continue reading at NYP ]

from Vice

French Director Gaspar Noé on America’s Fear of the Penis

“The fear of the penis in the United States still shocks me,” he said. “In many ways, the Western world is turning Victorian.”

By Noel Ransome

Near the end of my chat with Gaspar Noé, I ask him why he’s so comfortable with pushing narrative boundaries in film. He replied he doesn’t believe he’s pushing anything compared to what came before. So I remind him of cinema’s growing sensitivity to controversial representations of sexuality in 2019. The French director—whose latest film Climax (which is co-produced by VICE Studios), is a journey with a dance troupe lured into hallucinogenic states to the point of injury and death—decides to answer in the most Noé way possible.

“The fear of the penis in the United States still shocks me,” he lets out during a phone exchange. “In many ways, the Western world is turning Victorian.”

If you’ve ever seen a film by Gaspar Noé, it would be downright disappointing not to hear the word “penis” leave his mouth. The director is famed with his ability to unsettle viewers with equal parts beauty, sexuality and terror. You’ll see it in works such as Irreversible , Love, Enter the Void, and now in Climax set for a March 1 limited release—zero penises guaranteed.

It takes a special kind of mind to come up with films that explore the dark depths of the human psyche. And thankfully, I got a chance to listen to the ideas that a mind like that will throw at you when questioned. Whether it was drugs, directing or “the penis,” Noé was a man comfortable speaking about it all.

[ click to continue reading at Vice ]

from Vanity Fair

The Cult of Richard E. Grant’s Withnail and I Is Finally Having Its Moment

After decades of obsessively quoting Bruce Robinson’s 1987 comedy, Gen Xers are using Grant’s Oscar nomination as an excuse to teach a new generation to demand the finest wines available to humanity.

by DUFF MCDONALD

Bruce Robinson’s script for his 1987 cult classic, Withnail and I,wanders effortlessly between the high (a Hamlet soliloquy) and the low (“You can stuff it up your arse for nothing and fuck off while you’re doing it!”). But it’s the incandescent performance of Richard E. Grantthat sends the dark British comedy—about a couple of out-of-work actors—into the stratosphere of greatness.

So it’s less weird than it might at first seem that the movie which screened at New York’s Film Forum on Thursday night wasn’t the one that has earned Grant a best-supporting-actor Oscar nomination—Marielle Heller’s Can You Ever Forgive Me?, starring Melissa McCarthy—but the one that forged his legend more than three decades ago.

Over coffee in Brooklyn, I asked Grant if he could tell when he read the script for Withnail and I that it was a role for the ages? “I knew it bone-deep,” he said. “It made me laugh out loud, it was so brilliantly written. Even the stage directions were hilarious. I had also been unemployed for nine months, too, so it was the best preparation I could have had for playing an embittered unemployed actor.”

[ click to continue reading at VF ]

from The San Francisco Chronicle

There’s a new texting scam going around, and it starts with a picture of breasts

By Filipa Ioannou

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.

[ click to continue reading at the Chronicle ]

from TIME Magazine

An Egg Has Beaten Kylie Jenner’s Record for the Most-Liked Photo on Instagram

By ASHLEY HOFFMAN

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.

[ click to continue reading at TIME ]

from artnet

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.

Julia Halperin

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.

[ click to continue reading at artnet.com ]

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.”

[ click to continue reading at The Sun Sentinel ]

from The Lexington Herald Leader

Monstrous creature ‘turned its head and looked straight at our car,’ Kentucky woman says

BY MARK PRICE

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.

from The Sun

Forget colonising Mars – From shrivelled willies to sex dolls and radioactive babies, expert reveals why sex will make living in space a nightmare

There are a number of issues surrounding sexual intercourse in micro-gravity  – including lack of arousal and floating fluids

By Mark Hodge

SEX in space is a logistical nightmare with problems ranging from floating fluids to shrinking manhoods, a NASA-funded scientist says.

Dr John Millis, a US physicist and astronomer, spoke to The Sun Online about the issues faced by consenting astronauts who wish to engage in rumpy-pumpy in micro-gravity.

Dr Millis, of Anderson University in Indiana, compared sex in space to having intercourse while “skydiving” but added that it was “not impossible.”

He told The Sun Online: “The issues surrounding the act all revolve around the free-fall, micro-gravity, environment experienced by astronauts.

“Even the lightest touch can make it difficult to stay in contact if both persons are not properly anchored.

“The astronauts would need to brace themselves against the space station, and even each other.

“A shared sleeping bag, or similar, would perhaps be the most useful.”

But more problems would arise if the romantic astronauts were able to lock together in a coital tryst.

Dr Millis, whose work has been funded by NASA, explains that in micro-gravity blood rises to your head, instead of your wedding tackle – making it harder for both men and women to get aroused.

[ click to continue reading at The Sun ]

“Imagine engaging in sexual activity while skydiving – every push or thrust will propel you in opposite directions.