La Planète sauvage
I Woke Up This Morning and My Penis Was Missing Again
Sea slug’s ‘disposable penis’ surprises
By Rebecca Morelle
A sea slug that is able to detach, re-grow and then re-use its penis has surprised scientists.
Japanese researchers observed the bizarre mating behaviour in a species called Chromodoris reticulata, which is found in the Pacific Ocean.
They believe this is the first creature known that can repeatedly copulate with what they describe as a “disposable penis”.
The study is published in the Royal Society’s journal Biology Letters.
Male and female
The sex life of the sea slug is complicated even before detachable organs come into play.
Almost all of these creatures, which are also known as nudibranchs, are thought to be “simultaneous hermaphrodites”. This means they have both male and female sexual organs and can use them both at the same time.
We were almost killed by an asteroid today. Almost….
Danger of death!
How you are unlikely to die
This Is An Egg On Drugs
You So F†cking Valentine! @
‘You So Fucking Hot’ Lets You Tweet Anonymous Valentines to Your Internet Crushes
By Jessica Roy
It’s Valentine’s Day, and whether you’re in a steady relationship or planning to cap off the night watching porn and eating ice cream, you’re probably having a lot of feels. With no desire to express them in a mature adult fashion, why not unleash anonymous Internet compliments on unsuspecting semi-strangers?
You So Fucking Hot lets you tweet anonymously at people you have Internet crushes on, just in time for Valentine’s Day. It’s basically a modern way to send a secret Valentine, minus the construction paper and glue. “Be Nice…” instructs the site, and so far it has been. “You’re hotter than NSYNC live in concert. Happy Valentines Day!” reads one tweet. Aw.
Transmogrified Cat Wins Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show
No Ordinary Affenpinscher, Banana Joe Is Named Best in Show
Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times
Banana Joe, a black [alleged – Ed.] dog with a monkeylike face, became the first affenpinscher to win Best in Show at the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show on Tuesday night. He defeated six dogs, one a Portuguese water dog on the same night that Bo, who is the same breed, watched his master, President Obama, deliver the State of the Union address.
“He’s won a lot of big, big shows, but none like this one,” said his handler, Ernesto Lara, who held onto Joey, as he calls him, during a postshow news conference.
Joey sat calmly, as if he could have gone back onto the floor of Madison Square Garden and taken on his challengers again. He stuck his tongue out as Lara answered questions. He didn’t appear to need any celebratory drinks or snacks.
Asteroid Definitely
Finally confirmed: An asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs
A team of American and European researchers have confirmed that the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction — the event that wiped out roughly 75% of the planet’s species, including almost every dinosaur — was caused by an asteroid impact in Mexico 66 million years ago. The Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction was the last great extinction event to occur on Earth, and is most notable for causing the diversification of mammals that eventually resulted in Homo sapiens.
66 million years ago an asteroid roughly 15 kilometers (9 miles) wide hurtled into Chicxulub, Mexico. The collision, which left behind a 180-kilometer (110-mile) crater, released 420 zettajoules of energy — 100 teratonnes of TNT, or roughly two million times stronger than the largest thermonuclear device ever used (the Russian Tsar Bomba). The impact created a huge dust cloud that blocked out the Sun, starting the extinction ball rolling by killing off much of the world’s plants, and thus the herbivores soon after. Due to high levels of oxygen in the Cretaceous atmosphere, the impact may also have caused intense, global firestorms that killed off many other species. Because the asteroid landed in the ocean, megatsunamis would’ve swept the world’s coasts, too.
Until now, though, there hasn’t been enough evidence that the Chicxulub impact actuallycaused the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction.
Happy Birthday FT
With a Focus on Its Future, Financial Times Turns 125
By ERIC PFANNER
It was a time when the financial markets were growing and globalizing rapidly. Gossip, speculation and misinformation abounded. There was a need for a “friend to the honest financier and the respectable broker.” From 1888, when it began publishing under that motto, The Financial Times has seen continuity in its mission.
On Wednesday, The F.T. is celebrating its 125th birthday. The newspaper’s London headquarters along the south bank of the Thames will be lit up in pink, the color of the paper on which it has been printed since shortly after it was founded. There will be a few parties — understated, of course, for these are straitened times in the City of London, and challenging ones for the newspaper industry.
Ben & Jerry’s Flavor Graveyard
So Ben & Jerry’s has an actual Graveyard for their Discontinued Flavours
Surrounded by a white picket fence on a grassy knoll, lie the headstones of especially beloved flavours or particularly despised flavours, some that were introduced as early as the late 1970s when the ice cream company was founded, but sadly met their untimely fate.
The folks at Ben & Jerry’s are pretty good at word play and each flavour has its own poetic epitaph.
Richard Artschwager Gone
Richard Artschwager, Whose Multifarious Work Defied Categorization, Dies at 89
Richard Artschwager, who crafted a protean and enigmatic body of work over the course of more than half a century, has died. He was 89. David Nolan Gallery and Gagosian Gallery, which both presented his work in New York, confirmed his death.
Given Mr. Artschwager’s thrillingly diverse output, it’s difficult to pin his fame to any particular series. He made haunting grayscale paintings, often of domestic scenes and architecture, on textured Celotex and sculptures with Formica—“the great ugly material,” he said of the stuff—and wood that often resembled functional objects like pianos, chairs and tables, betraying the artist’s work as a furniture maker in the 1950s. But he also made curious little pieces that he called “blps,” knockwurst-shaped works that he sometimes installed throughout the city. All the while, he handily sidestepped the reigning art movements of the day, indulging elements of Minimalism (in his sculptures) and Pop art (in his paintings) while playfully ignoring their strictures.
Just a week ago, a major retrospective of his work—titled “Richard Artschwager!”—ended its run at the Whitney Museum. As part of the show, “blps” were installed throughout West Chelsea, where the Whitney will open its new museum in 2015. The show was his second career-spanning show at the museum, and will travel to the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles later this year.
Justin Bieber vs. God
Skrillex Retires – Books Vegas Run with Cirque du Soleil
Skrillex Pairs with Cirque du Soleil for Las Vegas Club Residency
Zedd, Sebastian Ingrosso also sign deals with new dance spot
By STEVE BALTIN
Cirque du Soleil has staged its acrobatic spectacles to the music of the Beatles, Elvis and other rock legends. Now the famed performance troupe is entering the electronic dance music world with LIGHT, a new club that will open at the Mandalay Bay hotel in Las Vegas on April 26th.
As is typical with the Vegas scene, the club has signed residency deals with several big-name DJs, the biggest of whom is Skrillex. The dubstep star tells Rolling Stone that he is hoping to create a unique environment in the new dance spot (which has yet to announce start dates for each artist residency).
“The LIGHT Skrillex show is gonna be only in Vegas,” he says. “I want it be distinct to the LIGHT club because the configuration is so customizable, it’s fucking crazy. That’s the thing about the club, too: they can do anything, so it’s how you maximize the dynamic of a great show with all their fucking bells and whistles and all of their budgets and resources to do anything.”
“I have set my life upon a cast”
Richard III’s Bones: Should One of History’s Losers Be Redeemed?
These are royal bones. Researchers from the U.K.’s University of Leicester confirmed today that the remains of a skeleton discovered in September beneath a parking lot in the British Midlands were that of Richard III, a monarch who ruled for a brief, bloody two years before being slain in battle in 1485.
But now that we have — or at least, believe we have — established the identity of the remains, what of the historical figure that once gave them life? Richard III perished at the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485 when his army was decisively defeated by the forces of Henry Tudor, a rival claimant to the throne who would go on to become King Henry VII.
More than a century later, William Shakespeare would immortalize the cornered Richard’s final moments in Richard III as he fights grimly on foot after losing his steed — “A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse.” Sensing his doom a few lines before, Richard intones: “I have set my life upon a cast,/ And I will stand the hazard of the die.”
Pork Bone Broth for a Chinese hot pot
Pork Bone Broth for a Chinese hot pot
2 tablespoons olive oil
2 onions, peeled and chopped
8 cloves garlic, peeled
Pork bone shoulder, plus 4 or 5 smaller pork bones
Cold water (enough to fill stockpot 3 / 4 full)
1 pinch goji berry
1 pinch dong quai
1 pinch longan berry
2 slices peeled ginger
2 to 3 green onions
Salt, to taste
In a large stockpot, heat olive oil over medium-high heat. When hot, add onions and garlic and saute until softened, about 5 minutes. Add pork bones and fill the pot three-quarters full with cold water. Add goji, dong quai, longan berry, ginger, green onions and salt. Reduce heat and gently simmer broth for 5 hours, stirring occasionally. Carefully strain stock through a mesh strainer. Return to pot and keep hot until ready to serve.
Avenge Of The Nerds
Geeks are the New Guardians of Our Civil Liberties
Recent events have highlighted the fact that hackers, coders, and geeks are behind a vibrant political culture.
A decade-plus of anthropological fieldwork among hackers and like-minded geeks has led me to the firm conviction that these people are building one of the most vibrant civil liberties movements we’ve ever seen. It is a culture committed to freeing information, insisting on privacy, and fighting censorship, which in turn propels wide-ranging political activity. In the last year alone, hackers have been behind some of the most powerful political currents out there.
Before I elaborate, a brief word on the term “hacker” is probably in order. Even among hackers, it provokes debate. For instance, on the technical front, a hacker might program, administer a network, or tinker with hardware. Ethically and politically, the variability is just as prominent. Some hackers are part of a transgressive, law-breaking tradition, their activities opaque and below the radar. Other hackers write open-source software and pride themselves on access and transparency. While many steer clear of political activity, an increasingly important subset rise up to defend their productive autonomy, or engage in broader social justice and human rights campaigns.
Despite their differences, there are certain websites and conferences that bring the various hacker clans together. Like any political movement, it is internally diverse but, under the right conditions, individuals with distinct abilities will work in unison toward a cause.
Dawn Of The Real Undead
Raging (Again) Against the Robots
THE robots are coming! Word is they want your job, your life and probably your little dog, too.
Robots have once again gripped the nation’s imagination, stoking fears of displaced jobs and perhaps even a displaced human race. An alarmist segment on “60 Minutes” was only the most vivid of a recent series of pieces in respected magazines and news outlets warning about widespread worker displacement. Professors at Cambridge University and a co-founder of Skype are creating a new Center for the Study of Existential Risk, which would research a “Terminator”-like scenario in which supercomputers rise up and destroy their human overlords, presumably plotting the whole caper in zeros and ones.
In New York alone, there are four plays running this month with themes of cybernetics run amok. One is a revival of “R.U.R.,” a 1920 Czech play that was the granddaddy of the cybernetic revolt genre and that originated the current meaning of the word “robot.”
Such android anxiety has a long history. John Maynard Keynes wrote about “technological unemployment” during the Great Depression. In the Industrial Revolution, disgruntled laborers — including the original Luddites — smashed automated looms and threshing machines that “stole” their jobs. In the 15th century, scribes protested the printing press, with a futile zeal rivaled perhaps only by that of modern journalists.
Hizzoner Ed Koch Gone
Ed Koch was fearless, priceless and loyal — a combination not found in today’s politicians
He took heat for his bipartisan efforts, but he forged relationships and did what was necessary to make New York City a better place. That’s what Ed was all about.
BY ALFONSE D’AMATO / NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
WILLIE ANDERSON/NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
Loyalty, loyalty, loyalty — that was Ed Koch. He never gave up and he never let partisanship stand in the way of doing the right thing. I think a lot of people underestimated the brilliance of Ed Koch, the legal mind that he had, the ability to cut through things and understand.
He was fearless and priceless. And what you saw is what you got. That’s not what you get today in politics and in too many political leaders. They want to be all things to all people and they’ll promise them anything with little substance behind it.
Not Koch. When you were his friend, you couldn’t have a better friend. I never had a better friend.
Google-walk the Grand Canyon
First Digital Image Ever Created Was Of A Hot Chick, Of Course
The Never-Before-Told Story of the World’s First Computer Art (It’s a Sexy Dame)
In the late 1950s, an anonymous IBM employee made a lady from the pages of Esquire come to life on the screen of a $238 million military computer.
During a time when computing power was so scarce that it required a government-defense budget to finance it, a young man used a $238 million military computer, the largest such machine ever built, to render an image of a curvy woman on a glowing cathode ray tube screen. The year was 1956, and the creation was a landmark moment in computer graphics and cultural history that has gone unnoticed until now.
Using equipment designed to guard against the apocalypse, a pin-up girl had been drawn.
She was quite probably the first human likeness to ever appear on a computer screen.
She glowed.
[T]he pin-up program likely dates from 1956 to 1958. The upper end of the year range, 1958, can easily be established because multiple eyewitnesses claim that the diagnostic was present when the first non-test SAGE site went live in New Jersey in early 1958. The lower end of the range, 1956, comes from a compelling piece of cultural evidence.
In 1955, famed pin-up artist George Petty resumed a relationship with Esquire magazine just before his retirement. He illustrated two calendars for the publication, one for 1955 and one for 1956. Each month’s page came accompanied by a lushly illustrated and extremely scantily clad Petty pin-up.
Petty had a way of painting a woman by which she almost appeared nude if not for a sheer, skin-hugging fabric that obscured almost nothing. Such is the case in the December 1956 calendar pin-up, which leaves little besides the woman’s mysteriously absent nipples to the imagination.
Shazam! Private Pyle Relieves Himself of Closet Duty
‘Gomer Pyle’ actor Jim Nabors marries longtime partner, Stan Cadwallader, in Seattle
82-year-old actor had been dating former Honolulu firefighter since 1975
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
HONOLULU — Jim Nabors, the actor best known for playing Gomer Pyle on TV in the 1960s, has married his longtime male partner.
Hawaii News Now reports Nabors, 82, and Stan Cadwallader, 64, traveled from their Honolulu home to Seattle to be married Jan. 15. Gay marriage became legal in Washington state last month.
The couple met in 1975 when Cadwallader was a Honolulu firefighter.
“I’m 82 and he’s in his 60s and so we’ve been together for 38 years and I’m not ashamed of people knowing, it’s just that it was such a personal thing, I didn’t tell anybody,” Nabors said. “I’m very happy that I’ve had a partner of 38 years and I feel very blessed. And, what can I tell you, I’m just very happy.”
Reverse Elder Abuse Applauded
Nursing home defends prostitutes’ visits
The former manager of a nursing home has been forced to defend the level of “holistic care” offered to her patients after East Sussex council suggested that allowing prostitutes to visit her residents was inappropriate.
Residents of Chaseley nursing home, in Eastbourne, referred to them as “special visits”. The home’s care workers would take the visitors to a resident’s room. They then put a “special red sock” on the door and checked on them every 15 minutes.
The home, which mainly cares for disabled ex-servicemen, has long had a policy of facilitating sex workers. However a spokesman for the council said that it was unaware of the practice and was investigating because it “has the potential to place vulnerable … residents at risk of exploitation and abuse.”
“If there’s a great idea, our job is to figure out what to do with it.”
How James Frey’s “IP Factory” is Re-imagining Book Packaging
By Rachel Aydt
The multi-media packaging business Full Fathom Five, the brainchild of James Frey — who until Lance Armstrong appears on TV today, was likely Oprah’s most famous confessor — has refined a business formula that marries talented writers, filmmakers, television producers, video game makers and toy designers, into one big collaborative “IP Factory.”
Frey explains that the formula isn’t as Draconian as it’s been made out to be in the press since the company’s inception. In the past, their work for hire contracts were publicly vilified, most extremely by a writer in New York Magazine in 2010 (who had a project in the works with Full Fathom that went sour). The article claimed that Frey’s company was a “Fiction Factory” employing hungry young talent, plucked straight from enviable MFA programs, at the pay rate of (wait for it) $250 per book. “The fact that we work exclusively with graduate students is a myth,” says Frey. “It’s not true. We work with New York Times bestselling writers as well as talented up and comers.” Contractually their pay scale isn’t standardized, he explains — nor could it be — because their products are spread so far across the multimedia map, not just in terms of medium, but also in terms of audience.
“Many book packagers focus on one demographic, like Alloy, who makes books and products exclusively for teenaged girls,” he says. Alloy, of course, is the force behind the adolescent girl phenoms Gossip Girl, The Vampire Diaries, and the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants franchises. “And I have a lot of admiration for what they’ve done. We’ve done some things for that age group, but I like to think that we’re ‘demographic agnostic.’ We’re not working with a specific demographic. If we have a great idea for a new population, we’ll try it out.” The collaborative piece of his business lies in deciding how to best roll out an idea. “If there’s a great idea, our job is to figure out what to do with it.”
Unreformed SPY Espied At Vanity Fair
THE IMPOSSIBLE INTERVIEW: Nikki Minaj speaks with Thomas L. Friedman
Weenmasters
Dean Ween, Les Claypool Shooting Fishing Show With ‘South Park’ Creators
Since the breakup of weirdo rock group Ween, Melchiondo has been fishing the waters off the Jersey Shore.
He has a charter boat and takes fans and fishing fiends out to grab a catch all the time. But Hurricane Sandy screwed up his fall scheduling, so Dean’s been sailing through the bitter cold of the Northeast winter.
In a recent interview with NJ.com, the guitarist revealed that he’ll be taping a pilot for a cable fishing show, starring himself and Les Claypool of Primus. The producers? “South Park” creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone.
Hipsterian Marxism
Young Publisher Takes Marx Into the Mainstream
By JENNIFER SCHUESSLER
Erin Baiano for The New York Times
When Bhaskar Sunkara was growing up in Westchester County, he likes to say, he dreamed of being a professional basketball player.
But the height gods, among others, didn’t smile in his favor. So in 2009, during a medical leave from his sophomore year at George Washington University, Mr. Sunkara turned to Plan B: creating a magazine dedicated to bringing jargon-free neo-Marxist thinking to the masses.
“I had no right to start a print publication when I was 21,” he said in an interview in a cafe near his apartment in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. “Looking back, I see it as a moment of creative ignorance. You have to have enough intelligence to execute something like this but be stupid enough to think it could be successful.”
The resulting magazine, Jacobin, whose ninth issue just landed, has certainly been an improbable hit, buoyed by the radical stirrings of the Occupy movement and a bitingly satirical but serious-minded style. Since its debut in September 2010 it has attracted nearly 2,000 print and digital subscribers, some 250,000 Web hits a month, regular name-checks from prominent bloggers, and book deals from two New York publishers.
Bothersome Burros Blocking Bullhead City Boulevards
Arizona motorists warned about burros on roadway
Associated Press
The Mohave Valley Daily News reports (http://bit.ly/WjDw7n) that there have been more than half a dozen recent calls of burros on or near Bullhead Parkway.
The calls include an accident last month that left a motorcyclist injured and an animal dead and a late-night accident this past week that left one of the stray burros with a leg injury after being struck by a car.
7-11 Launches Direct Frontal Assault Against Mayor Bloomberg
Chain pain on Lower East Side
Locals take big gulp over opening of 7-Eleven on Avenue A.
Lower East Siders have found something they fear and loathe even more than banks and Starbucks—7-Eleven—and they’re not going to take it anymore. The global convenience-store giant, with its garish orange-and-green logo and blinding batteries of fluorescent lights, has already opened four locations in the neighborhood. Another is scheduled to open this spring at Avenue A and East 11th Street.
In response, dozens of community activists and residents gathered last week at Father’s Heart Ministries church just up the street to discuss ways to stop the chain before time runs out.
“It’s a total invasion of the soul snatchers,” warned Bob Holman, proprietor of the recently closed Bowery Poetry Club, who showed up at the meeting sporting yards of heavy steel chains wrapped around his torso. “It’s the blandification of America.”
The world’s largest convenience store operator, franchisor and licensor is in the midst of an aggressive expansion in Manhattan. In the past two years, the Dallas-based chain, famous for its Big Gulps and Slurpees, has quadrupled its store count in the borough to 32, from eight previously. Another 20 are planned for this year.
Locals charge that 7-Eleven is tearing the fabric of the Lower East Side, saying that the stores stick out like visitors from another planet. Others complain that the chain is taking business away from small grocers, newsstands and bodegas, and they are fighting back with a barrage of boycotts, bumper stickers and marches.
People Are Awesome 2k13
First Twinkies, Now Atari
Atari US Files for Bankruptcy, Sells Assets, Logo
In an effort to untangle itself from its parent company, the France-based Atari SA, Atari US has filed for bankruptcy and will sell all its assets in the next three to four months. They have already locked down a debtor-in-possession investment of $5.25M from investment advisory Tenor Capital Management and hope the move will land them some fresh business.
What assets are on the auction block? That would be classic franchises like Pong, Centipede, Missile Command and Asteroids, so Hollywood get out your checkbooks for those film rights. Wait, you’re telling me there’s already an Asteroids movie in development? Of course there is.
“It’s 19-feet long and two guys wearing cheap spandex costumes drove it….”
1966 Batmobile Sold for $4.62 Million
Sought after by fans for decades, the owner and builder of the original 1966 Batmobile finally put it up for auction.
It’s 19-feet long and two guys wearing cheap spandex costumes drove it in the classic “Batman” live action TV series that ran from 1966-1968. If you haven’t guessed by now, we’re referring to the original Batmobile that was built by Hollywood custom car builder George Barris almost five decades ago. Many replica versions have been built and sold over the years but Barris still clung to the original despite many lucrative offers to buy it. But at age 88 he decided to put it up for auction at this year’s Barrett-Jackson auction in Scottsdale, Arizona.
Barris had been the car’s sole owner for all these years but now it belongs to someone else after they paid a shocking $4,620,000. During the auction Barris was on stage as the bids came in for what used to be a 1955 Lincoln Futura concept. Way back when, Barris was given just three weeks by the TV studio to build the Batmobile. Within that time, he managed to fabricate those distinct bat-shaped body pieces and many other bits that made the car a cultural icon.