from The Sun

LAX ‘Jet Pack guy’ spotted AGAIN flying 15 miles from Los Angeles airport at 5,000 feet as FAA and FBI investigates

by Catherina Gioino

A MAN on a possible jet pack was spotted flying 15 miles from Los Angeles International Airport on Wednesday – nearly a year since a spate of previous sightings sparked panic.

The man – who has been dubbed “jet pack guy” – was seen by a Boeing 747 pilot looking similar to Marvel action star Iron Man as he soared at 5,000ft.

“A Boeing 747 pilot reported seeing an object that might have resembled a jet pack 15 miles east of LAX at 5,000ft altitude,” the Federal Aviation Administration told CBS.

“Out of an abundance of caution, air traffic controllers alerted other pilots in the vicinity.”

[ click to continue reading at The Sun ]

from The Observer

The Louvre Is Cracking Down on Pornhub for Turning Classic Art Into Explicit Content

By Helen Holmes

Pornhub, one of the most highly visited adult websites in the United States, is reportedly facing legal action from the Louvre museum in Paris and the Uffizi in Florence after debuting a new interactive website and app, “Show Me the Nudes,” that features porn actors re-envisioning classic works of art as jumping off points for sexually explicit content. Pornography is famously difficult to describe, but it could certainly be argued that a clear continuum exists between unclothed Titian muses and 21st century graphic imagery. However, the aforementioned museums are initiating legal action against Pornhub for rights infringements and pushing for the website to take down the content.

“No one has granted authorizations for the operation or use of the art” a spokesperson for the Uffizi told The Daily Beast. “In Italy, the cultural heritage code provides that in order to use images of a museum, compressed works for commercial purposes, it is necessary to have the permission, which regulates the methods and sets the relative fee to be paid. All this obviously if the museum grants the authorization which, for example, would hardly have been issued in this case.” Some of the works featured on the Pornhub website from the Uffizi Gallery include Bacchus by Caravaggio, Spring by Botticelli and Angelica hides from Ruggiero by Giovanni Bilivert.

[ click to continue reading at Observer ]

from The New Yorker

The Myth of the Cast-Iron Pan

By Jiji Lee and Laura Mishkin

Birth

A cast-iron pan is forged in the flames of a volcano, by the mighty god Hephaestus. When the pan is the color of obsidian, and its weight equals that of a mountain, it is carefully placed in a cardboard box, and is ready for shipping and handling.

[ click to continue reading at The New Yorker ]

from The New York Post

Roger Waters turns down ‘huge money’ for Facebook ad: ‘No f–kin’ way’

By Rob Bailey-Millado

Roger Waters has revealed that Facebook honcho Mark Zuckerberg offered him big bucks to use Pink Floyd’s classic 1979 anthem “Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2” in an Instagram ad.

However, the co-founding member of the iconic rock band turned the “little p–k” down flat — with a cantankerously foulmouthed touch.

“It arrived this morning, with an offer for a huge, huge amount of money,” the 77-year-old bassist and composer said at a recent pro-Julian Assange event, Rolling Stone reported. “And the answer is, ‘F–k you. No f–in’ way.’”

He continued: “I only mention that because this is an insidious movement of them to take over absolutely everything. I will not be a party to this bulls–t, Zuckerberg.”

[ click to continue reading at NYP ]

from HypeBeast

Italian Artist Salvatore Garau Has Just Sold an Invisible Sculpture for $18,000 USD

Made from “air and spirit.”

By Ambrose Leung

Italian artist Salvatore Garau has just sold an invisible sculpture for $18,000 USD. The Io Sono (I am) sculpture, as the artist explains, exists but just not in material form, and is actually more like a “vacuum.”

The 67-year-old went on to elaborate that, “the vacuum is nothing more than a space full of energy, and even if we empty it and there is nothing left, according to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, that ‘nothing’ has a weight. Therefore, it has energy that is condensed and transformed into particles, that is, into us.” Much like how we “shape a god we’ve never seen.”

The “sculpture” is intended to be displayed in a 5×5-foot square and must be displayed in a private space free from obstructions where lighting and climate control are not required. Reiterating that even if you can’t see it, it does exist, Garau included a certificate of authentication to the purchaser.

[ click to continue reading at HYPEBEAST ]

from VICE

‘Fuck This Court’: We Obtained Larry Flynt’s FBI File and It’s Pretty Wild

The 322-page file contains a litany of events from John DeLorean’s cocaine bust to an alleged effort by Flynt to blow himself up in front of the Supreme Court.

By Irving Alpert

When Hustler magazine publisher Larry Flynt died on Feb. 10 at the age of 78, it signaled the end of an era where a misogynistic smut peddler could be viewed as a kind of antihero.

It’s hard to laud someone who built his empire by unabashedly treating women like pieces of meat, but as a First Amendment warrior, Flynt won important legal victories while sticking his thumb in the eye of the powers that be.

Over the decades, Flynt took on America’s morality police or anyone he felt to be hypocritical on matters of sex, engaging in what the Washington Post once referred to as “Dirt Bag Journalism.” This involved offering millions to anyone who could prove an extramarital affair with a high-ranking government official, such as in 1998, when he took down then-House speaker designate and staunch Clinton impeachment backer Bob Livingston. In 2017, Flynt offered $10 million for information leading to Donald Trump’s impeachment and removal from office. 

Many know Flynt best from the Oscar-winning 1996 Milos Forman film “The People vs. Larry Flynt,” in which he was portrayed as a rakish rogue by Woody Harrelson. The movie went a long way toward softening Flynt’s image as a tawdry yet charismatic freedom fighter, while sanding off the more grotesque aspects of his personality.  

To the FBI, he was a person of interest.

[ click to continue reading at VICE ]

from VICE

People’s Expensive NFTs Keep Vanishing. This Is Why

“There was no history of my ever purchasing it, or ever owning it,” said one confused NFT buyer. “Now there’s nothing. My money’s gone.”

By Ben Munster

Last month, Tom Kuennen, a property manager from Ontario, coughed up $500 worth of cryptocurrency for a JPEG of an Elon Musk-themed “Moon Ticket” from DarpaLabs, an anonymous digital art collective. He purchased it through the marketplace OpenSea, one of the largest vendors of so-called non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, in the hopes of reselling it for a profit. 

“It’s like a casino,” he said in an interview. “If it goes up 100 times you resell it, if it doesn’t, well, you don’t tell anyone.”

He never got the chance to find out. A week later, he opened up his digital “wallet,” where the artwork would supposedly be available, and was faced with an ominous banner reading, “This page has gone off grid. We’ve got a 404 error and explored deep and wide, but we can’t find the page you’re looking for.” 

[ click to continue reading at VICE ]

from The Daily Star

Bloke has his penis held to ransom by hackers who took control of digital chastity belt

Qiui, the company which makes the Cellmate cage, says it believes that a true chastity experience is one that ‘does not allow the wearer to have any control over’

By Joshua Smith

A man had his penis held to ransom for more than £700 after hackers locked a digital chastity belt he was wearing.

Sam Summers had been wearing a Qiui Cellmate chastity cage, which connects to the internet, when he received a strange message on the product’s app on his phone.

Someone said they had taken control of the chastity belt and that they wanted around $1,000 (£729) in Bitcoin to give him back control of the device.

“Initially, I thought it was my partner doing that. It sounds silly, but I got a bit excited by it,” Sam Summers told VICE.

But when Same called his partner and told her their safe word, he was shocked to find out it wasn’t her.

That’s when he realised, to his utter horror, that he had been hacked.

His penis was locked in the cage, and he had no way to get it out because the belt has no manual override.

“Oh, s**t, it’s real,” Sam said. “I started looking at the thing.

“There’s no manual override at all. It’s a chastity belt, I guess it kind of shouldn’t have an override.

[ click to continue reading at The Daily Star ]

from AP

Berlin man caught directing flight traffic with radio

BERLIN (AP) — A man has been arrested in Berlin on allegations he made radio contact with air traffic, including police helicopters, and gave fake flight orders while impersonating an aviation official, German police said Friday.

The 32-year-old, whose identity wasn’t released in line with German privacy laws, was arrested Thursday night in the capital’s eastern Koepenick district, police said. 

Police were able to swoop in on his apartment after he made contact with a police helicopter that was dispatched to the neighborhood in the hope of flushing him out.

During a search of his home, police found two radios that transmitted on the frequencies needed to make contact with aircraft.

[ click to continue reading at AP ]

from WIRED

He Made a Viral Bernie Meme Site. Now He Has to Keep It Going

Nick Sawhney’s “Bernie Sits” puts Sanders anywhere on Google Street View. 

by BRIAN BARRETT

BY 9 PM ET last night, Nick Sawhney knew he was in trouble. 

Just a half hour earlier, still steeped in the afterglow of Joe Biden’s inauguration, Sawhney had pushed live a website that lets you put a viral image of Bernie Sanders—seated, mittened, alone—atop any Google Street View image. The meme had already reached a fever pitch, with the Photoshop faithful placing the senator from Vermont in everything from Mortal Kombat to Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks. But Sawhney’s creation, born out of a group chat with friends, added layers of personalization, ease of use, and absurdity; because it fixes Sanders in the same coordinates regardless of his location, he occasionally looks as though he’s floating, or sitting on a car, or in an otherwise unlikely orientation.

The site gained traction on Twitter slowly at first; friends retweeting, then friends of friends. A few verified accounts joined in. And then, as wonderful and perfectly timed internet creations do, it snowballed.

[ click to continue reading at WIRED ]

from The Drive

Video Taken By Pilots Of What Could Be The Elusive Los Angeles Jet Pack Guy Emerges (Updated)

Flight school pilots were on a training flight off the coast when they were surprised to see what appeared to be a guy in a jet pack whizzing by.

BY TYLER ROGOWAY

When it comes to weird stories that keep getting weirder, the elusive “Jet Pack Guy” of Los Angeles pretty much takes the cake. After multiple reported sightings from airline pilots on more than one occasion of a guy in a jet pack flying around at thousands of feet near Los Angeles International Airport—some of the most congested airspace on earth—as well as ongoing FAA and FBI investigations into the matter, we now have credible video of what seems to be the flying object in question.

The footage doesn’t come to us from some random Reddit board or YouTube channel, either. It was taken during an instructional flight from Sling Pilot Academy in the training area off Palos Verdes. We reached out to the flight school, which is based out of Zamperini Field, in Torrance, California for additional details.

[ click to continue reading at The Drive ]

from WIRED

The WIRED Guide to Memes

Everything you ever wanted to know about Nyan Cat, Doge, and the art of the Rickroll.

by ANGELA WATERCUTTER & EMMA GREY ELLIS

MEMES AND THE internet—they’re made for each other. Not because they’re digital visual communication (though of course, they are that), but because they are the product of a hive mind. They are the shorthand of a hyper-connected group thinking in unison. And, friends, the web hive mind is a weird (often funny, sometimes dangerous) place. 

The term “meme” comes from evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins. For Dawkins, cultural ideas were no different than genes—concepts that had to spread themselves from brain to brain as quickly as they could, replicating and mutating as they went. He called those artifacts memes, bits of cultural DNA that encoded society’s shared experiences while also constantly evolving.

But Dawkins coined the term in 1976, in his book The Selfish Gene, long before the modern internet, before memes morphed into what they are now. Back then, Dawkins was talking about passing along culture—song melodies, art styles, whatever. Today, denizens of the internet think of memes as jokes passed across social media in the form of image macros (those pictures of babies or cats or whatever with bold black-and-white words on them), hashtags (the thing you amended to what you just wrote on Twitter), GIFs (usually of a celebrity, reality star, or drag queen reacting to what you just wrote on Twitter), or videos (that Rick Astley video people used to send you).

[ click to continue reading at WIRED ]

from VICE

The Untold Story of Wood, the Well-Endowed Man From Those Coronavirus Texts

Through interviews with his loved ones, we dug deeper into the fascinating life of Wardy Joubert III, the real man behind the memes.

By Alex Zaragoza

Last week, I went down a rabbit hole in pursuit of a story: the proliferation of prank texts that appear to provide breaking news links on the COVID-19 pandemic, only to open up to a photo of a beefy, naked Black man with a massive penis. I set out to find the well-endowed man to talk to him about his cult status during this time of crisis, only to find out he was a guy named Wood who had died several years ago.

Emails, DMs, and endless memes poured in from people who had read the story and wanted to know more about the now-fabled Wood. A few even asked about donating to Wood’s family. Like many of them, I felt unsatisfied with the story; it just didn’t feel like a closed case.

All I really knew about this man was that he had done a jerk-off video at some point in his life, and that he had died. It seemed unfair to tie a bow on a person’s legacy based on just two things from his years on earth. I’d hate to think that one day, when I’m gone, the only thing people might know about me is that I once fell on a cactus while drunk off Bud Light. So I set off to find out even more about who he was as a person beyond his large penis and meme infamy, and I did. This is the untold story of Wood, or, rather, Wardy Joubert III.

[ click to continue reading at VICE ]

from artnet

A Mysterious Steel Monolith Was Discovered in the Utah Desert. Is It a Work of Art—or the Work of Aliens?

Theories about who or what is behind the object have started circulating online.

Cue Also sprach Zarathustra. 

A mysterious steel monolith has been discovered deep in the red rock canyons of southern Utah. And no one seems to know who—or what—is behind it.

Officers from the Utah Department of Public Safety (DPS) eyed the object from a helicopter last week while counting bighorn sheep in the area. The spotters were quick to posit two theories about the polished steel block: it’s either a work of art, or the work of aliens. 

“I’m assuming it’s some new-wave artist or something or, you know, somebody that was a big ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ fan,” Bret Hutchings, the helicopter pilot, told the Utah news outlet KSL 5 News. 

[ click to continue reading at artnet ]

from Vulture

Our ‘Lost’ Weekend With Van Halen

A couple college dudes won an MTV contest to tour with Van Halen. Then all hell broke loose.

By Chris Lee

On an overcast morning in the spring of 1984, Kurt Jefferis and Tom Winnick, a couple of college-age bros of no particular renown, departed the world of normalcy in a stretch limousine to embark on a rock-and-roll fantasy. Their destination: Detroit. More accurately: oblivion. Jefferis, a 20-year-old department-store stock clerk, had bested more than a million other competitors to win the MTV contest “Lost Weekend With Van Halen.” He and his plus-one, Winnick, a childhood buddy, would in a matter of hours find themselves backstage with the legendarily hard-partying Atomic Punks on a two-day bender that ticked every box of rock debauchery synonymous with the Big Hair era. “You’ll have no idea where you are,” Van Halen’s vainglorious front man, David Lee Roth, said in a promo for the contest. “You’ll have no idea where you’re going and probably no memory of it after you go.”

That turned out to be partially true. As Jefferis and Winnick tell it now, nearly 40 years later, in the weeks following Hall of Fame guitar virtuoso Eddie Van Halen’s death, certain elements from the Weekend remain fixed points in their lives — the private jets, the Champagne and lobster, the cocaine, the onstage chugs of Jack Daniel’s, a woman named Tammy — while other details have been lost to the fog of time. The contest becamesomething of Van Halen folklore in the intervening years; it was the subject of a short film, Lost Weekend, which screened in competition at last year’s Tribeca Film Festival, as well as a dedicated chapter (subtitled “MTV and Van Halen Team Up to Nearly Kill a Super-Fan”) in the 2011 book I Want My MTV: The Uncensored Story of the Music Video Revolution. The events surrounding the contest unfolded just as Van Halen was first ascending the heights of multiplatinum superstardom but only months before Roth would quit the quartet for a solo career. What took place in front of MTV’s cameras served as a primitive precursor to reality television: loosely scripted situational intrigue that wound up far beyond anyone’s control.

[ click to continue reading at Vulture ]

from The Daily Beast

The new documentary “Assholes: A Theory” examines the assholing of America, a nation ruled by the biggest asshole of them all: Donald J. Trump.

by Nick Schager

As U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens (Timothy Olyphant) famously opined on Justified, “You run into an asshole in the morning, you ran into an asshole. You run into assholes all day, you’re the asshole.” Yet in a 2020 America on the precipice of a monumental presidential election, it seems that assholes are not only everywhere you turn—in newspapers, on cable TV, at political rallies and protests, and all over social media—but that they, and their behavior, has been normalized. It’s this “rising tide of assholery” that’s the focus of director John Walker’s Assholes: A Theory, which adapts philosophy professor Aaron James’ 2012 non-fiction book into a documentary aimed at both precisely defining the term “asshole,” and investigating how those who fit that bill have increasingly come to dominate key spheres of modern public life.

Donald Trump isn’t seen or mentioned once by name in Assholes: A Theory. Nonetheless, his specter looms large over Walker’s film (in theaters Oct. 30, and on VOD Nov. 6), whether during conversations about corrupt Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi—the forerunner of the media-manipulating populist-criminal-strongman trend that’s recently swept through Western nations—or passages discussing Facebook, Twitter and Google’s prioritization of profit over their responsibility to safeguard democracy from hate speech and disinformation. Without once bringing him up, Walker makes clear that Trump is the embodiment of this problem, given that his election to the highest office—and subsequent flouting of rules and standards of common decency—has made it appear acceptable, and in fact rewarding, to act in the worst possible manner as a means of achieving one’s selfish ends. He is, the film silently contends, the apex of American assholery.

[ click to continue reading at TDB ]

from Yahoo! Finance

Former Google CEO Calls Social Networks ‘Amplifiers for Idiots’

by Gerrit De Vynck

(Bloomberg) — Former Google Chief Executive Officer Eric Schmidt said the “excesses” of social media are likely to result in greater regulation of internet platforms in the coming years.

Schmidt, who left the board of Google’s parent Alphabet Inc. in 2019 but is still one of its largest shareholders, said the antitrust lawsuit the U.S. government filed against the company on Tuesday was misplaced, but that more regulation may be in order for social networks in general.

“The context of social networks serving as amplifiers for idiots and crazy people is not what we intended,” Schmidt said at a virtual conference hosted by the Wall Street Journal on Wednesday. “Unless the industry gets its act together in a really clever way, there will be regulation.”

[ click to continue reading at Yahoo! ]

from the New Hampshire Union Leader

Woman accused of impersonating prosecutor, dropping criminal charges against herself

By Mark Hayward

A Littleton woman allegedly impersonated a Hillsborough County prosecutor when she filed bogus documents with court officials declaring that the drug possession and stalking case against her had been dropped, according to recently released indictments.

Lisa Landon, 33, of Railroad Street, Littleton, faces one charge of false personation and six charges of falsifying physical evidence, according to Hillsborough County grand jury indictments handed up earlier this month.

The indictments allege that Landon submitted the fake documents in three different court cases last November and December. In several instances, she used the New Hampshire court system’s electronic system to file documents.

[ click to continue reading at the Union Leader ]

from The LA Times

The story behind that Patagonia tag, and how the Trump era changed outdoor recreation

By SAMMY ROTH

Browse Patagonia’s online shop, and you’ll find T-shirts condemning Big Oil, encouraging people to vote with planet Earth in mind and declaring that when it comes to wilderness, Americans must “defend it or lose it.”

But the company is getting far more attention for a cheeky, hidden message that appears only on the tag of a limited-edition pair of shorts, in tiny print.

The message: “VOTE THE ASSHOLES OUT.”

The label, which went viral on Twitter, was only the latest Trump-era call to action from Patagonia. The company has responded to the federal government’s environmental rollbacks with increasingly vocal campaigns to protect the country’s public lands — and yes, it says the four-word message applies to the president, along with other politicians who refuse to act on climate change.

[ click to continue reading at LAT ]

from Futurism

TESLA DRIVER PULLED OVER GOING 93 MPH WHILE COMPLETELY ASLEEP

by JON CHRISTIAN

Canadian cops say they pulled over a Tesla that was traveling at 93 miles per hour — while the driver was completely asleep, with the seat pulled down like a bed.

“The officer was able to obtain radar readings on the vehicle, confirming that it had automatically accelerated up to exactly 150 km/h [93 mph],” the Royal Canadian Mounted Police said in a statement to Global News.

[ click to continue reading at Futurism ]

from The New York Post

Jimmy Carter admits son smoked pot with Willie Nelson on White House roof

By Kate Sheehy

Former President Jimmy Carter admits in a new documentary that one of his sons smoked pot with Willie Nelson on the roof of the White House.

Carter, 95, was asked about the legendary country crooner’s previous accounts of puffing on a “big fat Austin torpedo’’ atop 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in the doc “Jimmy Carter: Rock & Roll President,’’ which came out in theaters this week, the Los Angeles Times reported Friday.

“[Nelson] says that his companion that shared the pot with him was one of the servants at the White House,’’ Carter said.

“That is not exactly true. It actually was one of my sons.’’

[ click to continue reading at NYP ]

from AFP via Yahoo! News

Porn video interrupts US court hearing for accused Twitter hacker

Miami (AFP) – A court hearing held via Zoom for a US teenager accused of masterminding a stunning hack of Twitter was interrupted Wednesday with rap music and porn, a newspaper reported.

The purpose of the hearing was to discuss reducing bail terms set for the 17 year old Tampa resident arrested last Friday over the hack last month of the accounts of major US celebrities.

But the interruptions with music, shrieking and pornography became so frequent that Judge Christopher Nash ended up suspending it for a while, the Tampa Bay Times said.

Investigators view the youth — AFP has chosen not to release his name because he is a minor — as the brains behind the mid-July cyberattack that rocked Twitter.

[ click to continue reading at Yahoo! ]