Decoding Space Bursts
Mysterious radio bursts from space may soon have an explanation
by Seth Shostak
Just when you think you’ve cataloged all the beasts of the cosmos, a new one howls to us from the celestial savanna. Fast radio bursts are now one of the hottest topics in astronomy. In less time than an eye blink, these mysterious objects can release enough energy to power the world for three centuries.
And the race is on to figure out what the heck they are.
Last month, a consortium of five dozen astronomers reported the discovery of eight new bursts that may lead to an answer. The objects were found with the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment, or CHIME. This unusual-looking radio telescope, about the size of a football field, consists of four metal mesh cylinders — like skateboard half-pipes — that collect and focus incoming radio waves. CHIME is in a sparsely populated, mountainous region of British Columbia about 30 miles north of the U.S. border.
While CHIME is leading the pack today in discovering radio bursts, the first such burst was found a dozen years ago by a West Virginia University astronomer sitting at his desk in Morgantown. Duncan Lorimer was combing through data obtained from a radio telescope in Parkes, Australia — half a world away — when he noticed a short burp of static, the kind of signal you’d produce by firing up a transmitter and then turning it off a few milliseconds later.
Bojack Angeleno
‘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
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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.
Pedro Bell Gone
Pedro Bell, Whose Wild Album Covers Defined Funkadelic, Dies at 69
His vivid imagery, hypersexualized and full of futuristic themes, helped create the mythology of George Clinton’s groundbreaking group.
Pedro Bell, whose mind-bending album covers for the band Funkadelic gave visual definition to its signature sound in the 1970s and ’80s, died on Tuesday in Evergreen Park, Ill., near Chicago. He was 69.
George Clinton, the brains behind Funkadelic, announced his death on his Facebook page. Mr. Bell had been in poor health for many years.
Mr. Bell created his first cover for Funkadelic, the pioneering band that merged funk and psychedelic rock, in 1973. The album was “Cosmic Slop,” and it featured a topless woman, space imagery and mutants. Though Funkadelic and its sister act, Parliament, had been around for several years, Mr. Bell’s artwork and the liner notes he wrote under the name Sir Lleb (“Bell” spelled backward) helped define Funkadelic and its elaborate mythology.
Space Chicken
from Fast Company
SpaceX is playing a game of chicken with its Starlink satellites
Elon Musk’s SpaceX apparently doesn’t play well with others when it comes to space traffic. As Forbes reports, on Monday the European Space Agency (ESA) said it had to perform collision avoidance maneuvers with its Aeolus Earth observation satellite when it detected that it had a 1 in 1,000 chance of hitting “Starlink 44,” one of SpaceX’s Starlink satellites.
While those odds of a collision might seem slim, they were actually 10 times higher than the threshold that requires a collision avoidance maneuver. The thing is, when the ESA realized its satellite was on a potential collision course with Starlink 44, the agency contacted SpaceX and asked it to move its satellite out of the way. But SpaceX refused to, turning the incident into a game of chicken in space.
Forest Bathing
Forget Weed. Colorado’s Hottest Trend is Forest Bathing.
The Japanese practice has become popular around the world, and the Rocky Mountains in particular are experiencing a surge in interest.
If you’re like me, maybe you’re thinking: ‘Forest bathing? Sounds like a bunch of hippies skinny-dipping in the woods.’
Wrong. Contrary to my own initial reaction, forest bathing has nothing to do with bathing and it doesn’t even have to take place in a forest. Rather, the Japanese practice of Shinrin-Yoku, which translates to “forest bathing” or “taking in the forest atmosphere,” emphasizes the importance of slowing down to connect with nature. It was developed in Japan during the 1980s and has become a cornerstone of preventive health care and healing in modern Japanese medicine.
My first “forest bath” was in Colorado, a much slower (and less exhausting) alternative to the hiking, mountain biking, and skiing the region is best known for. The practice has gotten so popular in the Rocky Mountain state that guides are available in half a dozen cities and a forest therapy guide training program in Colorado this September filled up many months in advance. Forest bathing is growing in popularity around the world and guides can even be found in major metropolitan cities like London and New York City. That said, the blue spruce, Ponderosa pine, white fir, quaking aspen, and other stunning and aromatic trees native to Colorado make it an excellent place to get your nature bath on.
The Novacene Coming
Cyborgs will replace humans and remake the world, James Lovelock says
‘Our supremacy as the prime understanders of the cosmos is rapidly coming to end.’
By Corey S. Powell
For tens of thousands of years, humans have reigned as our planet’s only intelligent, self-aware species. But the rise of intelligent machines means that could change soon, perhaps in our own lifetimes. Not long after that, Homo sapiens could vanish from Earth entirely.
That’s the jarring message of a new book by James Lovelock, the famed British environmentalist and futurist. “Our supremacy as the prime understanders of the cosmos is rapidly coming to end,” he says in the book, “Novacene.” “The understanders of the future will not be humans but what I choose to call ‘cyborgs’ that will have designed and built themselves.”
Cyborg Pole Dancing – Yea, Novacene!
Gyrating ROBOTS debut at French pole dancing club, with the androids performing alongside human counterparts
By SOPHIE TANNO
A French nightclub has caused a stir after it exhibited pole-dancing robots donning high heels.
The gyrating robots had CCTV cameras for heads and were interspersed among their human counterparts at the Strip Club Cafe (SC-Club) in Nantes on Friday night.
The androids moved their hips in time to the blasting music while on elevated platforms, in front of a male-dominated audience.
Not with a whimper…
The many ways our world could end
by Ishaan Tharoor, The Washington Post
The man-made fires ravaging huge expanses of the Amazon rainforest have – if only for a brief moment – trained global attention on a looming calamity facing the planet. More people now understand that a series of alarming environmental developments are all linked: A spike in carbon emissions, the rapid melting of Arctic ice, the steady rise of global temperatures, the increasingly erratic and extreme storms assailing coastlines. Every day, we are living in a “dramatic climate emergency,” declared U.N. Secretary General António Guterres this week.
But it’s not just an evolving climate that poses an existential challenge to humanity. “End Times: A Brief Guide to the End of the World,” a new book by veteran science writer Bryan Walsh that published this week, is a harrowing chronicle of a range of threats that could bring about human extinction in the not-so-distant future. These include eternal dangers to the planet, such as supervolcanoes and asteroids, but also distinctly modern perils – from killer robots and artificial intelligence to civilization-ending nuclear war to weaponized bioengineered super viruses. And then, of course, there’s the inexorable toll of man-made global warming, whose effects we’re already feeling around the world.
Walsh’s book isn’t all gloom, taking us to the front lines where researchers and scientists are seeking new ways to protect humanity.
Franco Columbu Gone
Franco Columbu, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s ‘best friend,’ dies at 78
Arnold Schwarzenegger is mourning the loss of the man he called his best friend — Italian bodybuilder Franco Columbu.
The 78-year-old Columbu was the best man at the wedding of Schwarzenegger and Maria Shriver in 1986. He was also an actor.”
From the minute we met in Munich, you were my partner in crime. We pushed each other, we competed with each other, and we laughed at every moment along the way,” Schwarzenegger wrote in his tribute Friday. “I am devastated today. But I am also so, so grateful for the 54 years of friendship and joy we shared.”
A MILLION LITTLE PIECES – In UK Theatres Today
Dark Fate
‘Terminator: Dark Fate’: James Cameron On Rewired Franchise, Possible New Trilogy
EXCLUSIVE: James Cameron understands better than anyone that revisiting the past to alter the course of history is a dicey proposition at best, but that hasn’t stopped the Hollywood titan from taking on his latest cinematic mission: returning to The Terminator franchise that gave him the first signature success of his history-making career.
“It’s special,” Cameron said of the Terminator success that propelled him toward ever-grander spectacle projects like Aliens, The Abyss, Titanic, and Avatar. Sci-fi’s greatest showman moved on from his Skynet series in 1991, but now he’s reunited with his first great cinematic brand through Terminator: Dark Fate, the Skydance Productions and Paramount Pictures release that hits theaters November 1.
The Person With a Phone on Their Face
The fantasy of being disconnected
An overactive world is hard to break away from.
by SCOTT STEIN
It takes a boat ride, in the middle of the Atlantic ocean, to get me to finally feel offline. Which makes me feel pretty sad. But it reminds me of the impossible goal I keep failing to attain: staying away from screens. Or, more accurately, the internet.
It feels impossible to disconnect because I work in tech. I review phones. I wear headsets (sometimes on vacation). I have watches on my wrists. What absurdity am I discussing, me being disconnected from tech? It’s more that I’ve realized my attention being sapped away. Or my kid saying to me, hey, spend less time on the screen. Which only proves that I’ve become known as the Person With a Phone on Their Face.
I’ve tried screen-time limitations, cutting off notifications and being in the present moment like Sherry Turkle, who’s studied online behavioral psychology for years, wrote about back in 2015 in her excellent book Reclaiming Conversation. I’ve never found screen timers to work. Not for me. They feel like fitness trackers without the coaching.
What has worked? Spending a week and a half, roughly, where I go as offline as I ever can. It’s become a tradition each summer: I’ve joined my in-laws to go across the Atlantic. I’ve done this, now, six times.
I didn’t expect to be this person who cannot unplug. And you don’t need to be this person, either. But I’ve come to realize, the more I take this trip, that I love being forced to live without the internet.
QUEEN & SLIM To Open AFI
Universal Drama ‘Queen & Slim’ to Open AFI Fest
by Etan Vlessing
Universal’s Queen & Slim is set to open AFI Fest 2019, it was announced Tuesday.
The drama hails from Emmy-winning writer Lena Waithe and director Melina Matsoukas, who helmed Beyoncé’s “Formation” and the Nike “Equality” campaign, and stars Daniel Kaluuya and newcomer Jodie Turner-Smith, along with Chloe Sevigny.
Waithe wrote the script based on an original idea by best-selling author James Frey. Waithe also produces via her company Hillman Grad Productions, along with Matsoukas via her production company De La Revolución Films. Frey produces via his production company 3BlackDot, alongside Andrew Coles and Michelle Knudsen. Makeready’s Brad Weston and Pam Abdy also are producers.
Queen & Slim was financed by Makeready and will be distributed by Universal Pictures worldwide, with eOne handling distribution in select territories including the U.K. and Canada. The pic is slated to hit theaters Nov. 27.
How Iggy’s Lived
The Survival of Iggy Pop
An inventor of punk rock on his long career, the future, and swimming in Miami.
In late July, in a brief window between professional appointments, Iggy Pop drove to the mouth of Biscayne Bay, so that he could bob in its tropical waters. In 1995, he had bought what he described as “a very seedy condo” in Miami, and he has had a home in the city ever since. The extremity of the place—it is both environmentally tenuous and aesthetically vulgar—seems to suit Pop, who, in the late nineteen-sixties, as a member of the Stooges, helped invent and refine punk rock, a genre of music so menacing and physically savage that it is sometimes shocking that Pop has made it to the age of seventy-two. After he moved to Miami, he started swimming every day. “I didn’t know anybody,” he said. “I’d go to the beach and come home, go to the beach and come home. I tried to build myself back up from twenty years in harness—New York City, the modern American record industry, gruelling economy touring. I quit smoking here.”
From afar, Pop resembles a bronze statuette. He is lithe, sinewy, and deeply tanned, with a torso that, for decades, has appeared so exquisitely and minutely muscled that an onlooker might reasonably assume it was painted on. In recent years, his midsection has relaxed a bit, but he assured me, while patting it, that it remains quite firm. His hair is blond, shoulder length, pin straight, and parted in the middle, and his eyes are an oceanic blue. Though he has had Lasik surgery—“In Colombia, before it was legal here”—his vision is still imperfect, a malady he chalks up to doing too much intravenous cocaine. He has retained a bit of a round, Midwestern accent from his upbringing, outside Detroit. In conversation, he is nearly guileless, and he listens intently and carefully. Periodically, his face will collapse into a benevolent grin.
More ST-J on A MILLION LITTLE PIECES
Sam Taylor-Johnson: ‘I’ve lost people very dear to me through addiction’
The film-maker on adapting James Frey’s controversial rehab memoir A Million Little Pieces, whether she’s still making art and the joy of chickens.
by Tim Lewis
Since leaving the art world to become a film-maker, Sam Taylor-Johnson has shown impressive range. Her debut feature film, Nowhere Boy (2009), was a tender depiction of John Lennon’s childhood. She followed it with the less tender Fifty Shades of Greyin 2015. Now she’s back with A Million Little Pieces, an adaptation of James Frey’s scandalous semi-memoir about his rehab after years as an alcoholic and drug addict. Taylor-Johnson co-wrote the screenplay with her husband, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, who also stars in the film. They live, most of the time, in Los Angeles.
You read A Million Little Pieces when it came out in 2003. It obviously stayed with you?
Yeah, it did. I remember reading it and being really overtaken by it; I think is the right word. I was in the world with him and on the journey. Then when it got optioned by whatever studio it was and it was going to be made into a big movie and there was this director and that director, I’d always have a tinge of jealousy. Even though I wasn’t a film-maker then, I’d be like: “What an amazing piece of material to have.” So I tracked it for a long time and I’d always keep my ear to the ground.
Loud Enough To Knock You Down
Colorado Race Track’s ‘Largest Burnout’ World Record Claim Denied by Guinness
A total of 170 cars performed a simultaneous burnout at the KBPI Rock & Roll Car Show in Colorado, but they all forgot to do one thing.
Earlier this week, several videos shared to social media claimed to have broken the official Guinness World Record for the most cars to perform a simultaneous burnout. The video’s creators claimed that it was an “official world record attempt,” but now it turns out Guinness has reportedly denied the claim simply because there wasn’t an official judge present at the event.
The videos seen below show the record attempt at the KBPI Rock & Roll Car Show this past weekend at Bandimere Speedway in Jefferson County, Colorado from both the air and from spectators on the ground. An alleged total of 170 cars lined up along the base of a hill next to the Speedway’s main dragstrip. As the videos depict, a huge plume of white tire smoke can be seen from the line of cars as they all perform a stationary burnout.
Sketch Artist
Who Is Loretta Fahrenholz, the Artist Who Directed Kim Gordon’s New Music Video?
By Helen Holmes
Musician, style icon and provocateur Kim Gordon is practically inextricable from the art world. As the vocalist, bassist and guitarist for Sonic Youth, she helped solidify a streak of 1990s’ cool into an instantly legible visual aesthetic. Now, with the release of her debut solo album on the horizon, this week Gordon released a music video directed by the German experimental artist Loretta Fahrenholz that adds a fascinating new layer of nuance to her combative, bruising body of work. Fahrenholz, who is represented in New York by the gallery Reena Spaulings and in Berlin by Galerie Buchholz, may not be as well known as one of the biggest rock stars in America, but her perspective is just as demandingly intense.
Frey and Taylor-Johnson on A MILLION LITTLE PIECES
“We Were Living And Breathing It”: Sam Taylor-Johnson On Making A Million Little Pieces With Her Husband
by LIAM FREEMAN
Vogue sat down with James Frey, author of the infamous 2003 memoir A Million Little Pieces, and his friend Sam Taylor-Johnson, who has directed her husband Aaron Taylor-Johnson in a hotly-anticipated film adaptation hitting cinemas next week.
The response to James Frey’s 2003 memoir A Million Little Pieces is the stuff most authors only dream of. His unflinching retelling of his alcoholism, drug addiction and subsequent rehabilitation, aged just 23, spent 15 consecutive weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. Three years later, in 2006, controversy hit when it was revealed that Frey had embellished certain details. Yet, while he was publicly criticised for this – in particular by one of his most ardent supporters, Oprah Winfrey; at the time, A Million Little Pieces was the fastest-selling book in her television books club’s 10-year history – his captive audience only grew, and to date it’s sold more than 10 million copies worldwide.
Frey sold the film rights to A Million Little Pieces in the early 2000s, however, the movie was never made. Until now. Directed and co-written by Sam Taylor-Johnson, a friend of Frey’s and director of Nowhere Boy and Fifty Shades of Grey, the film debuted at the 2018 Toronto International Film Festival. Taylor-Johnson collaborated on the script with her husband Aaron Taylor-Johnson, who stars as Frey, and he’s joined on screen by Charlie Hunnam, Juliette Lewis and Odessa Young as Frey’s fellow patient and girlfriend Lily.
Vogue sat down with Frey and Sam Taylor-Johnson to hear about the making of the long-awaited big screen adaptation.
Chicken Wars
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.
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.
A MILLION LITTLE PIECES Director on FIFTY SHADES
Sam Taylor-Johnson would never want to repeat Fifty Shades directing experience
Sam Taylor-Johnson says she had an “intense and maddening” experience while working on the first instalment of the Fifty Shades of Grey’ film series
Sam Taylor-Johnson would “never want to repeat” the time she spent working on ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’.
The 52-year-old filmmaker, who is married to Aaron Taylor-Johnson, 29, confessed that her intense experience directing the first instalment of the erotic drama film series, based on the novel trilogy by E.L James, is not one she wishes to repeat.
In an interview with the Sunday Times’ Stella magazine, she said: “Making that movie taught me so much that I didn’t want to learn and I would never want to repeat those lessons, but it did make me focus on what I do want to do.
“It was an intense; maddening experience – but then, would I have made this movie had not gone through that? It’s that thing of never looking back.”
The ‘Nowhere Boy’ director recently worked on 2018 drama film, ‘A Million Little Pieces’ – based on the novel by James Frey – which follows a young drug-addled writer coming to the end of his time at a detox facility.
Sam’s husband Aaron plays James and Sam revealed that after reading the book originally following its publication in 2003, she knew immediately that she wanted to transform the story into a film.
My Little Porny
People livin’ in competition
How Life Became an Endless, Terrible Competition
Meritocracy prizes achievement above all else, making everyone—even the rich—miserable. Maybe there’s a way out.
by Daniel Markovits, Professor at Yale Law School
In the summer of 1987, I graduated from a public high school in Austin, Texas, and headed northeast to attend Yale. I then spent nearly 15 years studying at various universities—the London School of Economics, the University of Oxford, Harvard, and finally Yale Law School—picking up a string of degrees along the way. Today, I teach at Yale Law, where my students unnervingly resemble my younger self: They are, overwhelmingly, products of professional parents and high-class universities. I pass on to them the advantages that my own teachers bestowed on me. They, and I, owe our prosperity and our caste to meritocracy.
Two decades ago, when I started writing about economic inequality, meritocracy seemed more likely a cure than a cause. Meritocracy’s early advocates championed social mobility. In the 1960s, for instance, Yale President Kingman Brewster brought meritocratic admissions to the university with the express aim of breaking a hereditary elite. Alumni had long believed that their sons had a birthright to follow them to Yale; now prospective students would gain admission based on achievement rather than breeding. Meritocracy—for a time—replaced complacent insiders with talented and hardworking outsiders.
Easy Rider Gone
R.I.P. Peter Fonda
The “Easy Rider” himself, Peter Fonda, has died – the famed actor passing away at 79 from lung cancer.
Fonda had an interesting childhood – a difficult and distant relationship with his famous father Henry Fonda, he accidentally shot himself in the stomach and nearly died on his 11th birthday,
He made his Hollywood debut in 1963 with “Tammy and the Doctor” co-starring Sandra Dee along with WW2 drama “The Victors” the same year followed by Robert Rossen’s “Lilith” in which he received acclaim. He turned biker for Roger Corman in 1966’s “The Wild Angels” and a role in the Jack Nicholson-penned “The Trip”.
Fonda and Dennis Hopper then conceived, co-wrote with Terry Southern and raised the finance for counterculture hit “Easy Rider” which made over $60 million worldwide over three years from a $400,000 budget.
O Youth!
Plants Are Clocks
Plants can tell time even without a brain – here’s how
Anyone who has travelled across multiple time zones and suffered jet lag will understand just how powerful our biological clocks are. In fact, every cell in the human body has its own molecular clock, which is capable of generating a daily rise and fall in the number of many proteins the body produces over a 24-hour cycle. The brain contains a master clock that keeps the rest of the body in sync, using light signals from the eyes to keep in time with environment.
Plants have similar circadian rhythms that help them tell the time of day, preparing plants for photosynthesis prior to dawn, turning on heat-protection mechanisms before the hottest part of the day, and producing nectar when pollinators are most likely to visit. And just like in humans, every cell in the plant appears to have its own clock.
[ click to continue reading at Yahoo! News ]
Neuralink
Elon Musk’s ‘Brain Chip’ Could Be Suicide of the Mind, Says Scientist
By Sissi Cao
Almost exactly a month ago, Elon Musk introduced a room of engineers and curious consumers to a sci-fi-sounding invention made by his neurotechnology startup Neuralink: an implantable “brain chip” that will “merge biological intelligence with machine intelligence.”
Per Musk’s description, this chip will be installed in a person’s brain by drilling a two-millimeter hole in the skull. “The interface to the chip is wireless, so you have no wires poking out of your head,” he assured.
Musk argued that such devices will help humans deal with the so-called AI apocalypse, a scenario in which artificial intelligence outpaces human intelligence and takes control of the planet away from the human species. “Even in a benign AI scenario, we will be left behind,” Musk warned. “But with a brain-machine interface, we can actually go along for the ride. And we can have the option of merging with AI. This is extremely important.”
Home Movies, sigh…
Campus Fight Night
Inside student fight night where young men box unlicensed in front of glamorous women
EXCLUSIVE: Boxing’s governing bodies are deeply concerned about the lack of control surrounding white-collar events – but for ungrads in Cardiff, it is the night of the term
By Lucy Clarke-Billings Deputy News Editor
Blood splatters across the ring as crowds of barely-clad women scream hysterically.
Two sweaty undergraduates are fighting for glory and their reputations are at stake.
Men clutching cans of Stella jump to their feet, bellowing “hit him” and “go on, son” at their flailing flatmates.
As the referee raises his whistle, a confused woman shouts: “Who won?”
“I’m not sure it matters,” comes the reply. “They’re both getting laid tonight.”
At one of the most popular university fight nights in the UK, students are battling it out to the delight of their peers.
Between bouts, glamorous undergrads in skin-tight mini-dresses dance in the walkways, swinging bottles of wine among friends.
Organisers of the event say they take a number of safety precautions including on site medical professionals, an accredited referee and insurance.
But the event is unlicensed and unregulated by the governing body for amateur boxing, which has repeatedly warned of the dangers.
Three fighters told Mirror Online none of them were medically assessed either before stepping into the ring or after.
Machete-maritan!
Actor Danny Trejo of ‘Machete’ fame pulls young boy from overturned car
LOS ANGELES, Aug 7 (Reuters) – Hollywood actor Danny Trejo, known for his tough-guy roles in such films as “Machete,” helped rescue a young boy who was trapped in a car that overturned in a Los Angeles traffic collision on Wednesday.
Trejo, 75, told television station KABC-TV he was on his way to an auto mechanic in L.A.’s Sylmar neighborhood when he saw a motorist run a red light and crash into another car, which flipped over onto its roof in the intersection.
The boy, strapped into his car seat in the back of the car, and his grandmother, who had been driving, were both trapped in the overturned, partially crushed vehicle.
“He was panicked, and I said, ‘OK, we have to use our superpowers,’ and so he screamed, ‘Superpowers!’ and we started yelling, ‘Superpowers,'” Trejo recounted. “We got kind of, like, a bond, I guess.”
No Robots! No Robots!
The Last Robot-Proof Job in America?
Fish: the final frontier in food delivery. At this point, you can get warm cookies, vodka, and locally grown rutabaga brought to your doorstep in minutes, but try getting a fresh red snapper. Until recently, if you could obtain the fish, it would likely have been pre-frozen and shipped in from overseas. (Such is the case with at least eighty-five per cent of the seafood consumed in this country, both from grocery stores and in restaurants.)
A new tech startup is aiming to remedy this situation. The company is based not in a Silicon Valley lab but inside the Fulton Fish Market, a two-hundred-year-old seafood wholesale market that was once situated in lower Manhattan and is now at Hunts Point, in the Bronx. It is the second-largest fish market in the world, after Tsukiji market, in Tokyo. Historically, it has served restaurants and retailers in the New York City area, operating at night so that chefs and fish-store owners can get there. The startup, called FultonFishMarket.com, allows customers in the rest of the country, both restaurants and individuals, to buy from the market, too, cutting out a chain of regional seafood dealers. The fish is shipped fresh, rather than frozen, thanks to an Amazon-esque warehousing-and-logistics system. Mike Spindler, the company’s C.E.O., said recently, “I can get a fish to Warren Buffett in Omaha, Nebraska, that’s as fresh as if he’d walked down to the pier and bought it that morning.”
There is one thing, however, that the sophisticated logistics system cannot do: pick out a fish. If Warren Buffett orders a red snapper, the company needs to insure that his fish is fresh, fairly priced, and actually an American red snapper—and not some other, day-old red fish that a vender is trying to pass off. (According to the ocean-conservation organization Oceana, more than twenty per cent of the seafood in restaurants and grocery stores in America is misidentified.) For this task, the company has enlisted one of the old-timers: Robert DiGregorio, a forty-seven-year veteran of the business, known in the marketplace as Bobby Tuna. DiGregorio, sixty-eight, is the author of “Tuna Grading and Evaluation,” an industry standby. He possesses a blend of discernment and arcane fish knowledge that, so far, computers have yet to replicate. Over the years, he said recently, “I’ve bought and sold literally millions of pounds of fish.”