from WTUE

Boyfriend Punches Man After He Was Caught Looking At His Girl’s Butt

by Bill Galluccio

A North Carolina man cold cocked a stranger inside of an SEA Wireless store in Lincolnton after the stranger was busted staring at the man’s girlfriend’s butt. Surveillance footage from the store captured a guy in a red shirt taking a glance at the woman while he was leaning on the counter.

The woman’s boyfriend called him out for his wandering eyes and he admitted to doing it with a laugh.

[ click to continue reading at WTUE ]

from Driving Line

BIG CAR, BIG BLOCK: 5 V8 MUSCLE MACHINES YOU CAN STILL AFFORD

by Benjamin Hunting

The Mercury Marauder X-100

Looking for a V8 classic but feeling squeezed out by muscle car pricing? Don’t worry, there’s an entire subset of stealth big block cars out there that the collector market has largely ignored, keeping them affordable and relatively plentiful as compared to their more celebrated siblings.

Full-size sedans and coupes were often available with range-topping, large-displacement eight-cylinder engines in the 1960s and early ’70s, but given that the primary demographic for these models were families and business executives, they mostly flew under the radar with the hot rod crowd. It’s a trend that continues today, even with personal luxury coupes that throw in a bit of style to go with their torque-happy drivetrains.

For most builders, these enormous engines can be considered mere starting points for generating huge power after a few judicious modifications, but even in stock form they are a lot of fun. Just remember that we’re quoting gross horsepower ratings for each of these models, as they were all introduced before SAE net ratings were adopted.

Let’s take a look at five fun big block V8 classic cars that you can still afford.

[  click to continue reading at Driving Line ]

from artnet

Was This Mild-Mannered Schoolteacher Couple Behind the Unsolved Heist of a $160 Million de Kooning Painting?

Does a book of short stories hold a clue as to how Jerry and Rita Alter acquired a stolen de Kooning?

by Sarah Cascone

The stolen De Kooning seen hanging behind Jerry and Rita Alter’s bedroom door. Photo by Rick Johnson, courtesy of Manzanita Ridge Furniture & Antiques.

Last year, the University of Arizona Museum of Art in Tucson was thrilled to announce the long-awaited return of Willem de Kooning’s Woman-Ochre (1954–55), which had been stolen from the museum in 1985. Now, new details have emerged about the elderly couple who kept the painting in their bedroom for decades, suggesting they may have carried out the daring heist.

No one who knew Jerry and Rita Alter, mild-mannered former school teachers, ever suspected they were hiding a stolen masterpiece in their Cliff, New Mexico, home, but that’s exactly where Woman-Ochre turned up, 32 years after a pair of thieves first made off with it. Jerry died in 2012, and Rita in 2017, and their estate was purchased by Manzanita Ridge Furniture & Antiques of Silver City, New Mexico, for about $2,000.

One piece, a midcentury painting hanging behind the bedroom door, caught the store owners’ eyes. The shop put the painting on view, where eagle-eyed visitors quickly pegged it for a real De Kooning. A quick internet search turned up the story of the university’s stolen painting, and the work was promptly returned by Good Samaritan co-owners David Van Auker, Buck Burns, and Rick Johnson. (The museum traveled to Silver City this past weekend to celebrate the one-year anniversary of the artwork’s recovery, with a party and panel discussion.) Currently, the museum is raising money to repair the work so it can be returned to view.

But a recently discovered image is fueling speculation that the couple was personally responsible for the robbery, which occurred the day after Thanksgiving. The Alter’s nephew and estate executor, Ron Roseman, has produced a photograph of the Alters taken in Tucson the day before the heist, seated at a holiday dinner table during dessert. AZ Central, which first published the image, points out that the snapshot bears a striking resemblance to a police sketch of the robbery suspects.

[ click to continue reading at artnet ]

from Rolling Stone

Bret Easton Ellis on Podcasts, Politics and How His Dark Satire Predicted Trump’s America

“If there is a sense of cultural irrelevance hovering around me, that’s fine,” says the screenwriter and novelist behind ‘American Psycho,’ ‘Less Than Zero’

By DREW FORTUNE

Over the past three decades, novelist Bret Easton Ellis has dealt in ultraviolence, casual nihilism and the skewering of America’s superficialities. With his last book, Imperial Bedrooms approaching its 10-year anniversary, it began to seem that Ellis was spinning his wheels. With several savagely reviewed screenwriting ventures in recent years — the 2013 Lindsay Lohan/James Deen erotic thriller The Canyons didn’t exactly set the world on fire — the Bret Easton Ellis brand might not hold as much commercial clout as it once did. However, in his 54th year, Ellis is happy. American Psycho has become a millennial touchstone and the pilot for Less Than Zero — a proposed 10-part miniseries for Hulu based on Ellis’s first book — just wrapped. With age came calm, but the man who birthed Patrick Bateman still has the ability to royally piss people off.

After decades of playing possum with his homosexuality in the media and on the page — in his 2005 semi-autobiographical novel Lunar Park, the main character is married with kids — Ellis has reached a place where his identity, politics and worldview are an open forum. The Bret Easton Ellis Podcast, which debuted in 2013 with guest Kanye West, has been a soapbox for the Literary Brat-Packer to rant about whatever is on his mind, from film and music, to pop culture and politics. This year, Ellis took the podcast to Patreon, a subscription service that charges Ellis fans $1.50 per episode, or $10 a month for a membership where users can participate in Q&As with Ellis and his guests. In a time where paid podcasts are mostly viewed as a fool’s venture, Ellis sees it as an experiment in action — albeit one that might not be working out as great as he envisioned.

Catching up with Ellis from his Beverly Hills home, we discussed fear, liberal loathing and why he’s not afraid to be culturally irrelevant.

[ click to continue reading at Rolling Stone ]

from Sierra Vista Herald/Review

Giving old books new life: Bisbee preps for annual Altered Books Show and Auction

By Emily Ellis

BISBEE — In the age of tablets and smartphones, hard copies of books have become a thing of the past for many — something to stuff in a closet or toss in the dumpster.

But in Bisbee, artists are giving such forgotten books the star treatment.

Bisbee’s annual Altered Books Show and Silent Auction, a Friends of the Copper Queen Library fundraiser, returns to town this month for its eighth year. The event showcases works of art made from books that are auctioned off to raise funds for the library. Anyone can submit an art piece for the auction, which have ranged from lamps sculpted to resemble famous literary characters to dresses made of book pages in the past, said library program coordinator Alison Williams.

“To me, even before I worked at the library, it is the best art show in Bisbee,” she said. “A variety of artists build these amazing things. ”

[ click to continue reading at Herald/Review ]

from SPACE.com

Bizarre Rogue ‘Planet’ with Incredible Auroras Puzzles Scientists

By Meghan Bartels

An artist’s depiction of the newly described object. Credit: Chuck Carter; NRAO/AUI/NSF/Caltech

A rogue, planet-size object 20 light-years away from Earth has stunned astronomers with its incredibly powerful magnetic field.

The scientists found that the object’s magnetic field is more than 200 times stronger than Jupiter’s, which, in turn, is between 16 and 54 times stronger than Earth’s, according to NASA. How the object, which scientists call SIMP J01365663+0933473, can maintain a magnetic field so strong, as well as generate spectacular auroras, is still unclear.

“This particular object is exciting because studying its magnetic dynamo mechanisms can give us new insights on how the same type of mechanisms can operate in extrasolar planets — planets beyond our solar system,” lead study author Melodie Kao, an astrophysicist at Arizona State University, said in a statement from the National Radio Astronomy Observatory published Aug. 2. [The Strangest Alien Planets We Know in Pictures]

And it’s not just the magnetic mechanism that’s leaving scientists with questions right now — there are plenty of other mysteries about the object, which scientists first discovered in 2016.

[ click to continue reading at SPACE ]

from AFP via Yahoo! News

World’s most-starred chef Joel Robuchon dead at 73

Paris (AFP) – Joel Robuchon, the world’s most-starred Michelin chef who tore down kitchen walls to give diners new insights into the art of haute cuisine, has died at 73, a French government spokesman said Monday.

Robuchon, who was hailed as one of four “chefs of the century” by the Gault Millau industry bible in 1990, founded a string of restaurants that revolutionised fine dining across three continents, ratcheting up a whopping 31 Michelin stars.

From Tokyo to Paris and Macao, foodies queue up for seats in his L’Atelier restaurants, where they can watch chefs in action, perched on high stools at a U-shaped bar.

“Joel Robuchon, a visionary chef who was the most starred in the world, leaves us today.

[ click to continue reading at Yahoo! News ]

from The Mirror

Inside world of bare-knuckle boxing where fights are full of blood, edge and danger and the injuries are very real

Know as Ultimate Bare Knuckle Boxing (UBKB) it’s run by Netflix star Shaun Smith who admits ‘because there are no gloves, the punches have far more impact’

By Tom Duffy & Andrew Gilpin

The vicious fight between Atkin and Clark (Image: Getty Images Europe)

Bare-knuckle boxers sit battered and bruised, their faces cut and bleeding, the bandages on their hands covered in blood.

These are men like Jay ‘BamBam’ Eggleston, 35 from Sheffield and Paul Stredder, 35 from the Wirral, who had to be checked over by a medical team during their brutal bouts last night.

As these shocking pictures reveal, all the matches were brutal, bloody affairs.

Bare-knuckle boxing now looks set to shed its underground image and become more mainstream as the sports moves from pubs and car parks to bigger, more established venues.

Last night at the Bowlers Exhibition centre in Stretford, Manchester, the main event saw two-time World Bare-Knuckle Boxing Champion Luke Atkin, 30, from York, take on Dom Clark, 35, from Bournemouth during the Rogue Elite world title bout.

It was a bout Clark won in a ferocious match up.

Know as Ultimate Bare Knuckle Boxing (UBKB) and run by promoter Shaun Smith, the sport sees men of all ages battle out one of the rawest forms of legalised sport.

The first formal bare-knuckle boxing bout in Britain was recorded in 1681 with the sport popularised by the end of the 17th century.

The introduction of gloves into boxing with the Queensberry rules in 1867 eventually pushed bare-knuckle underground.

[ click to continue reading at The Mirror ]

from The Guardian

‘You’ve had what we call a cosmic orgasm’: the rise of conscious breathing

You do it more than 23,000 times a day, but are you breathing properly? From a rebirthing session to holotropic breathwork, Richard Godwin inhales the latest wellness craze

by Richard Godwin

Photograph: Getty Images

Are you sitting comfortably? Airways clear, back straight, no respiratory conditions? OK. Take a series of short, deep breaths. Activate your diaphragm, pull the air right down into your belly, let the chest fall. Repeat 30-40 times. Feeling a little floaty? Fingers tingling? Don’t worry. It’s just oxygen saturating your cells.

Now take a big breath, then expel all the air from your lungs and hold it. Relax, you’ll be fine. (As long as you’re not doing this in a swimming pool.) That slight feeling of panic? It’s nothing to worry about. You might be surprised how long you can push it before you have to take a huge gasp.

After three attempts, I managed three minutes 23 seconds of not breathing. The person who formulated this exercise, Dutch endurance specialist and multiple world record holder Wim Hof, 59, has trained himself to go up to six or seven minutes. He claims that by performing this exercise daily (along with a regimen of cold showers and meditation), we can help treat a whole suite of conditions and diseases, from depression to arthritis. “It’s so simple,” he tells me. “That’s why people overlook it. They stay in their brains thinking, ‘This cannot be so simple.’ But it is!”

[ click to continue reading at The Guardian ]

from Prospect Magazine

Where has all the sperm gone?

Sperm counts have been decreasing for decades. Nobody seems to know why it’s happening, and not much is being done to find out, but we could be facing a public health disaster

by Philip Ball

The last time I checked—about 16 years ago—my sperm count was rather feeble. That didn’t feel like the devastating blow to my manhood that it might once have been. It’s a common enough problem: an estimated one in 20 young men (I was hardly that even then) have sperm counts low enough to impair fertility. But neither does it feel that the matter is taken very seriously. Doctors tend to shrug: “Oh, so that’s the problem.”

“Anything I can do?” I asked my GP. “Not really,” he replied indifferently, not bothering to check if I was a heavy drinker or what my diet was like—both factors that have been shown to cause trouble for sperm.

For centuries, science has ignored the potential role of the male in infertility. The default assumption that it was the woman’s fault wasn’t fair, but the consequence is that we know a lot today about the causes of female infertility, and have many -potential -treatments. Male infertility, in contrast, remains rather mysterious and little researched. One group of experts on male health wrote recently of our “andrological ignorance,” an indifference reflected also by the continued lack of a “male pill” for birth control.

This ignorance about fertility in men is alarming, because sperm counts seem to have been decreasing steadily and significantly for decades. The issues involved, however, are so hopelessly tangled up with received ideas about gender roles and identity that they are being neglected. Something disturbing is going on, and the consequences for health and society could be profound.

[ click to continue reading at Prospect ]

from The Drive

Behind the Shadowy Billion-Dollar Payouts of F1, NASCAR, and IndyCar

We take an in-depth look at who makes the money—and how much—in the world’s top-tier racing series.

BY JERRY PEREZ

GETTY / Scott Dixon is rumored to be the highest-paid IndyCar driver, earning around $2-3 million per year.

If you want to make a small fortune in auto racing, start with a huge fortune. That old saying is more relevant than ever. The finances behind high-stakes, competitive motorsports are ruthless—even more so than in any other mainstream sport.

The variables behind how teams, drivers, and sanctioning bodies like IndyCar, NASCAR, and F1 make their money aren’t only wildly complex, but they can also change frequently, depending on evolving business needs, market conditions, and any number of other factors. Plus, the principals are deeply secretive, with most members of the racing fraternity unwilling to discuss contracts, salaries, or sponsorship deals.

Racing is a performance business. Only the best, the fastest, and the smartest can survive for long. The historical, decades-long losses sustained by, say, the Cleveland Browns, would never fly in motorsports. Whether open-wheel or stock cars, the basic rules of capitalism are applied with neither mercy nor sentiment: a team with top-10 overhead can’t finish outside the top 10 and expect prime sponsors and drivers to stick around. The flashy decals will stop arriving and the talent will jump ship. And once that happens, it’s game over.

[ click to continue reading at The Drive ]

from INQUISITR

Lena Waithe Tabs Daniel Kaluuya To Star In New Movie, ‘Queen & Slim’

by Stephanie Barnes

Get Out and Black Panther actor Daniel Kaluuya has been tabbed to take the lead role of Slim, in an upcoming film, Queen & Slim, a romance drama written by Emmy award-winning writer Lena Waithe.

According to the Hollywood Reporter, the script is being described as the black version of Bonnie and Clyde’s love story. The film will focus on a black couple out and about enjoying their first date together when things take a turn for the worse. The couple ends up killing a police officer in self-defense and have no other option but to head to Cuba.

“Queen & Slim is an exploration of America’s social and political climate through the lens of a genre-defying love story,” according to Variety.

The movie is said to be based on an idea and treatment from best-selling author James Frey (A Million Little Pieces) and story created by Waithe and Frey. Melina Matsoukas is also set to join the star-studded team as director, making this her directorial debut for a featured film. Matsoukas is known for her work on HBO’s Insecure and has directed a number of music videos, including Beyonce’s “Formation.”

[ click to continue reading at INQUISITR ]

from AP

50 years on, McDonald’s and fast-food evolve around Big Mac

By CANDICE CHOI

As with many of its popular and long-lasting menu items, the idea for the Big Mac came from a franchisee.

In 1967, Michael James “Jim” Delligatti lobbied the company to let him test the burger at his Pittsburgh restaurants. Later, he acknowledged the Big Mac’s similarity to a popular sandwich sold by the Big Boy chain.

“This wasn’t like discovering the light bulb. The bulb was already there. All I did was screw it in the socket,” Delligatti said, according to “Behind the Arches.”

McDonald’s agreed to let Delligatti sell the sandwich at a single location, on the condition that he use the company’s standard bun. It didn’t work. Delligatti tried a bigger sesame seed bun, and the burger soon lifted sales by more than 12 percent.

After similar results at more stores, the Big Mac was added to the national menu in 1968. Other ideas from franchisees that hit the big time include the Filet-O-Fish, Egg McMuffin, Apple Pie (once deep-fried but now baked), and the Shamrock Shake.

“The company has benefited from the ingenuity of its small business men,” wrote Ray Kroc, who transformed the McDonald’s into a global franchise, in his book, “Grinding It Out.”

[ click to read full article at AP ]

from artnet

Putting Art in the Back Seat, Kenny Schachter Goes to Venerate the Old Masters of the Racetrack at the Festival of Speed

With a lull in the art calendar, our columnist went off to pursue his second all-consuming passion—classic cars—at a tony British hillclimb.

by Kenny Schachter

Seventeen-time Le Mans entrant, and driver of my car, Nic Minassian. Photo courtesy of Kenny Schachter.

As an isolated, overweight child growing up in Long Island with zero exposure to culture, cars were my gateway drug to art. It was the industrial design that initially drew me in, and now I when I sit down to write I have a car directly under my desk, in my office that was once a garage and which I have since converted into a hybrid office-cum-carpark. The reasoning: when you drive a vehicle you don’t see it, and when you park, you leave it. I am drawn to the lines, smells, and furniture (aka car seats), all of it. I love to look at cars, except when I write about art—then I black out, see nothing but the page, and listen to the same song 200 times in a row. (The Strokes recently, ugh.)

Goodwood House, in Chichester, West Sussex, was built in 1600 and acquired by the Duke of Richmond in 1697; the 12,000-acre estate features car and horse racetracks, an airport, two golf courses, a hotel, and an organic farm. (I wandered into a pig patch and got challenged by a 300-pound beast.) The headquarters of Rolls Royce are also situated on the premises. There are George Stubbs hunting scenes, a Caneletto London-scape, Van Dycks, and a Veronese on the walls, lest I forget. The present Duke, Charles Richmond, established the Festival of Speed (FOS) 25 years ago, a hillclimbing event where competitors race against the clock on a vertiginous course—in this case, the service road in front of the Duke’s pile (UK slang for a rather large abode). Five years later he launched the Revival, where visitors dress in period attire to embrace the early days of motorsport.

[ click to continue reading at artnet ]

from METRO

Fat tourists are crippling donkeys that carry them on holiday in Greece

by Jane Wharton

A guide leads a group of tourists on donkeys and mules through the streets of Fira, the capital of the Greek island of Santorini (Picture: AFP)

Greece is breeding a new kind of donkey to cope with overweight British tourists wanting to ride them, it has emerged.

Donkeys on the picturesque island of Santorini are being crippled by carrying overweight holidaymakers up the steep cobbled hills. Now locals are starting to breed their donkeys with stronger mules so it is easier for them to carry fatter tourists.

A spokesman for charity Help the Santorini Donkeys told the Mirror: ‘They’re having to resort to using cross-bred mules, as the donkeys just aren’t strong enough.

‘It’s recommended animals carry no more than 20% of their body weight.

‘Obese and overweight tourists combined with the lack of shade and water, heat and cobbled steps is what’s causing such a problem.’

[ click to keep reading at METRO ]

from SPIN

Billy Corgan Wants You to Know He Is Not Taylor Swift’s Father

by Chris DeVille, Stereogum

CREDIT: John Medina/Getty Images

Does Taylor Swift look like Billy Corgan? I don’t really think so, but a meme that made its way to Corgan suggests their faces are similar.

Corgan has opted to weigh in on the side-by-side image, which originates from TotallyLooksLike.com — presumably a more reliable source than Corgan’s beloved InfoWars, at least. (Hey, people did accuse Swift of pandering to the right-wing extremists in her fan base, which would certainly represent some common ground with Corgan.) What begins with a denial that he’s Swift’s father evolves into a lengthy meditation on identity and personal mythos.

Here’s what the ruling Smashing Pumpkin had to say….

[ click to continue reading at SPIN ]

from CNN

NECCO, the oldest American candy company, suddenly shuts its factory

by Talib Visram

The future of Sky Bars and Sweethearts is in limbo after the NECCO factory closed this week.

The NECCO plant in Revere, Massachusetts, was shut suddenly Tuesday by its owner, Round Hill Investments LLC, The investment company, owned by billionaire C. Dean Metropolous, bought NECCO out of bankruptcy in May for $17.3 million.

The news was first reported by The Boston Globe.

“We are disappointed that Round Hill could not follow through on the enthusiasm it expressed when it acquired Necco barely two months ago,” said Revere Mayor Brian Arrigo in a statement.

Arrigo said he was disappointed that the city received no advance word about the plant’s closing, but he was encouraged that six private food service companies have already expressed interest in interviewing the former NECCO factory workers.

[ click to continue reading at CNN ]

from the Omaha World-Herald

Council Bluffs woman driving over 140 mph arrested moments after receiving ticket for going 92

from NPR

14,000-Year-Old Piece Of Bread Rewrites The History Of Baking And Farming

by LINA ZELDOVICH

When an archaeologist working on an excavation site in Jordan first swept up the tiny black particles scattered around an ancient fireplace, she had no idea they were going to change the history of food and agriculture.

Amaia Arranz-Otaegui is an archaeobotanist from the University of Copenhagen. She was collecting dinner leftovers of the Natufians, a hunter-gatherer tribe that lived in the area more than 14,000 years ago during the Epipaleolithic time — a period between the Paleolithic and Neolithic eras.

Natufians were hunters, which one could clearly tell from the bones of gazelles, sheep and hares that littered the cooking pit. But it turns out the Natufians were bakers, too –at a time well before scientists thought it was possible.

[ click to continue reading at NPR ]

from Deadline

CAA Signs James Frey As Sam & Aaron Taylor-Johnson Ready ‘A Million Little Pieces’ Film For Fall Festivals

by Mike Fleming Jr

REX/Shutterstock

EXCLUSIVE: CAA just signed best-selling author James Frey. This comes as Brad Weston’s Makeready and The Picture Company prepare to launch A Million Little Pieces, the screen version of the semi-autobiographical and controversial addiction novel that was adapted into a feature by Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Sam Taylor-Johnson, the latter of whom directed her husband in the lead role. The film, which also stars Billy Bob Thornton, Giovanni Ribisi and Odessa Young (Assassination Nation), will be launched as an acquisition title in the fall festivals.

[ click to continue reading at Deadline ]

from LEMONWIRE

“Go Ask Alice” (1973) offers an anti-drug message with a side of rock ‘n’ roll

By Dodie Miller-Gould

Now streaming on YouTube is a 1973 movie based on the once- alleged true story of a young drug addict named Alice. The movie is based on the book of the same name that was published in 1971. While the book’s origin was once steeped in controversy, it is mostly forgotten now.

“Go Ask Alice” the movie is significant to fans of rock music and history by the way it contextualizes rock music of the late 1960s and attempts to show the means by which even a girl from a good family can fall into the trap of drugs and their attendant misadventures.

“Go Ask Alice” 45 years later

Watching the film version of the book is as close to watching a time capsule as some people will get. There is a bit of editorializing as the opening credits appear and what sounds like a cover version of Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit” plays. Viewers are shown “examples” of kids of the time period. Kids with glasses, boys with long hair; moody-looking girls with very long hair; there were even two black students. The song “White Rabbit” contains the line from which the title “Go Ask Alice” derives.  The fashions and the moods clue viewers in on what life was probably like 50 years ago. The movie is interesting on that basis alone.

“Go Ask Alice” and controversy

Years before James Frey and the “Million Little Pieces” scandal, there was “Go Ask Alice” and the theories about who wrote the book. The author is listed as “Anonymous.” The book was purported to be the real journal of a 15-year-old girl who was the Alice of the title.

Once thought to be nonfiction, “Go Ask Alice” is categorized as fiction now. The controversy about the book’s authorship has done nothing to negatively impact the book’s popularity. However, the American Library Association challenges the book’s suitability for young audiences because of its language and depictions of sex and drug use.

[ click to continue reading at LEMONWIRE ]

from Page Six

Diane von Furstenberg thinks Viagra is ‘the worst thing’ for women

By Francesca Bacardi

from The San Francisco Chronicle

Poop is beginning to be a big problem at Burning Man, authorities say

By Annie Vainshtein

At Burning Man, an annual celebration of experimental art and counterculture in the dusty Nevada desert, experts are contending with the difficult — but necessary — question of human waste.

In a recent report, the Bureau of Land Management described the proliferation of attendees who have apparently forgotten — or cannot make it to — the festival’s restrooms. This is especially a problem in the deep playa, an area far away from the center of the festival and from portable toilets, the Reno Gazette Journal first reported.

The government’s proposal? Poop bags and pee bottles, either to be brought by participants or for staff members to hand out.

[ click to continue reading at The Chronicle ]

from The Express

Yellowstone Volcano latest: 100-FOOT fissure sparks URGENT park closure

A 100-foot fissure has opened up in the Grand Teton National Park – not far from the potentially catastrophic Yellowstone volcano.

By SEAN MARTIN

The giant crack in the Wyoming–based national park has prompted officials to shut down areas from tourists in case of landslides.

WoodTV.com, a US-news site affiliated with NBC, reported: “A 100-foot long fissure has prompted the closing of part of Grand Teton National Park.”

The Grand Teton National Park said in a statement: “The Hidden Falls and Inspiration Point areas are currently closed due to elevated potential for rockfall.

“The area was closed to protect human safety on July 10 after expanding cracks in a rock buttress were detected.

“It is unknown how long the closure will be in effect. Geologists are monitoring the buttress for movement and have initiated a risk assessment for the area.”

It is currently unclear how the crack opened but it is likely due to normal seismic activity in the national park area.

Despite being around 100 kilometres from the Yellowstone National Park, Grand Teton does sit over the Yellowstone supervolcano.

If it was seismic activity beneath Grand Teton which caused the fissure, it could be a sign that Yellowstone is reawakening.

[ click to continue reading at The Express ]

from VICE

Finally, the World Has a Giant, Shirtless Jeff Goldblum Statue

Photo via NowTV / Fever PR

Jeff Goldblum is iconic in everything he touches, but there is no role quite so canon as his turn as Dr. Ian Malcolm in Jurassic Park, and no scene that captures his essence quite as well as that brief, beautiful moment where he’s sweaty as all hell and shirtless for some reason.

It’s been 25 years since that cinematic touchstone graced this world, and to commemorate it, London’s NOW TV has constructed one of the greatest artistic achievements of our time: A 25-foot statue of a half-naked Jeff Goldblum.

It was an audacious move on the artist’s part to even try to recreate such an impeccable expression of the human form, but the risk paid off. No detail was spared: The stubble is perfectly rendered, so subtle you’d miss it if you didn’t take a closer look. His hand hangs loose from the wrist in that quintessentially Goldblum-ian attitude of effortlessness, of ease with the self. And those eyes: They gleam with a confluence of fear and knowledge—a mirror image of the look Goldblum flashed the camera just after Dr. Malcolm nearly lost his life to a T. Rex.

[ click to continue reading at VICE ]

from RealClearLife

Hells Angels at 70: Rebels With a Cause

The infamous motorcycle gang now does brisk business selling branded merchandise and politicking.

By Kevin B. Sullivan

Motorcycles are parked on the street outside the Hells Angels motorcycle club headquarters in New York. (AP Photo/Tom Hays, File)

In the early hours of December 11, 2016, while cruising New York City’s East Village neighborhood, 25-year-old David Martinez and his friends encountered a problem. Driving down E. 3rd Street, the group suddenly found themselves stuck behind a livery cab. Noticing an orange parking cone obstructing their way around the cab, Martinez hopped out of the passenger side door of his black Mercedes-Benz in order to move the cone and squeeze by the livery cab.

Unfortunately for Martinez and his companions, that cone had been deliberately placed there by the notorious Hells Angels Motorcycle Club, who have long called that stretch of 3^rd Street between First and Second avenues home. The club’s illegal practice of saving spaces for motorcycles in front of their East Village clubhouse was common knowledge for those in the local know, but one with potentially deadly consequences for the uninitiated.

A melee ensued over the cone, as Martinez and his friends clashed with a handful of Hells Angels members. It was then that Anthony Iovenitti – a security guard and reported “prospect” with the club – pulled a firearm and shot Martinez in the stomach.

[ click to continue reading at RCL ]

from The New York Times

Amazon’s Curious Case of the $2,630.52 Used Paperback

By David Streitfeld

SAN FRANCISCO — Many booksellers on Amazon strive to sell their wares as cheaply as possible. That, after all, is usually how you make a sale in a competitive marketplace.

Other merchants favor a counterintuitive approach: Mark the price up to the moon.

“Zowie,” the romance author Deborah Macgillivray wrote on Twitter last month after she discovered copies of her 2009 novel, “One Snowy Knight,” being offered for four figures. One was going for “$2,630.52 & FREE Shipping,” she noted. Since other copies of the paperback were being sold elsewhere on Amazon for as little as 99 cents, she was perplexed.

“How many really sell at that price? Are they just hoping to snooker some poor soul?” Ms. Macgillivray wrote in an email. She noted that her blog had gotten an explosion in traffic from Russia. “Maybe Russian hackers do this in their spare time, making money on the side,” she said.

[ click to continue reading at NYT ]

from The Guardian

The legendary American director Stanley Kubrick on the set of Barry Lyndon in 1975. Photograph: Corbis via Getty Images