Ass-smoke
“Blowing Smoke Up Your Ass” Used to Be Literal
by Terynn Boulton
When someone is “blowing smoke up your arse” today, it is a figure of speech that means that one person is complimenting another, insincerely most of the time, in order to inflate the ego of the individual being flattered.
Back in the late 1700s, however, doctors literally blew smoke up people’s rectums. Believe it or not, it was a general mainstream medical procedure used to, among many other things, resuscitate people who were otherwise presumed dead. In fact, it was such a commonly used resuscitation method for drowning victims particularly, that the equipment used in this procedure was hung alongside certain major waterways, such as along the River Thames (equipment courtesy of the Royal Humane Society). People frequenting waterways were expected to know the location of this equipment similar to modern times concerning the location of defibrillators.
Smoke was blown up the rectum by inserting a tube. This tube was connected to a fumigator and a bellows which when compressed forced smoke into the rectum. Sometimes a more direct route to the lungs was taken by forcing the smoke into the nose and mouth, but most physicians felt the rectal method was more effective. The nicotine in the tobacco was thought to stimulate the heart to beat stronger and faster, thus encouraging respiration. The smoke was also thought to warm the victim and dry out the person’s insides, removing excessive moisture.
Blainef†ckery
Money Moon
The Moon Is Full of Money
Capitalism in space.
BY POPE BROCK / ILLUSTRATIONS BY VEDANTI SIKKA
I was slung in my favorite deck chair, drink in hand, having a gawk at the night sky. Andromeda, Pisces … I trawled the constellations, mind abandoned, still aware in some curve at the back of my brain that the world is coming apart at the seams and we’re all fucked, and enjoying the gentle paradox of it, the clink of the ice in my glass and the slumber of the dog.
By and by I found my gaze resting on the moon. There it was, the great provider: breeder of wonder, werewolves, and all those songs. The place where beauty meets philosophy, where hope and despair alike are lost.
Gnawing through the romance though was a little something I’d read not long before. An astrophysicist had claimed that the moon could save our planet. Not immediately: This would be in about 4.5 billion years when the sun explodes and roasts us in wrath and fire unless we get out of the way.
Frankly, the notion of Earth making a break for it seemed implausible to me, but this Canadian professor said we could do it by shooting off an army of rockets on the far side of the moon. Slammed out of its orbit by the collective blast, the moon would sail off with Earth, yoked by gravity, trailing behind it. A thousand years’ travel and we’re out of harm’s way—albeit dark and freezing unless we initiate phase two of the plan. As the sun receded in the distance, we would replace its rays with a trillion lunar argon arc lamps. A flip of the switch and the moon would become the sun: blue sky, puffy clouds, everything just as before.
Help me, Obi X Kenobi. You’re my only hope.
Why Generation X Might Be Our Last, Best Hope
Caught between vast, self-regarding waves of boomers and millennials, Generation X is steeped in irony, detachment, and a sense of dread. One of their rank argues that this attitude makes it the best suited to preserve American tradition in these dark new days.
by RICH COHEN
Demographics are destiny. We grew up in the world and mind of the baby-boomers simply because there were so many of them. They were the biggest, easiest, most free-spending market the planet had ever known. What they wanted filled the shelves and what fills the shelves is our history. They wanted to dance so we had rock ‘n’ roll. They wanted to open their minds so we had LSD. They did not want to go to war so that was it for the draft. We will grow old in the world and mind of the millennials because there are even more of them. Because they don’t know what they want, the culture will be scrambled and the screens a never-ending scroll. They are not literally the children of the baby-boomers but might as well be—because here you have two vast generations, linking arms over our heads, akin in the certainty that what they want they will have, and that what they have is right and good.
The members of the in-between generation have moved through life squeezed fore and aft, with these tremendous populations pressing on either side, demanding we grow up and move away, or grow old and die—get out, delete your account, kill yourself. But it’s become clear to me that if this nation has any chance of survival, of carrying its traditions deep into the 21st century, it will in no small part depend on members of my generation, Generation X, the last Americans schooled in the old manner, the last Americans that know how to fold a newspaper, take a joke, and listen to a dirty story without losing their minds.
Hyatt’s Gone
40-year-old East Rochester video store to close its doors
by Carlet Cleare
East Rochester, N.Y. – One of the largest and last local video stores in this digital era is closing.
Walking into Hyatt’s Classic Video on West Commercial Street feels a bit nostalgic, with its extensive collection of VHS tapes, DVDs, cassette tapes and VCRs.
Technology has run through Bob Hyatt’s veins since the 1960s, when he started selling home theater equipment out of his house.
“When a lot of the chain stores like Norman Brothers and Century started selling components through catalogs,” Hyatt said, “we saw the handwriting on the wall and we went into video.”
The 85-year-old owned and operated the family video store in East Rochester for 40 years. His four children were also raised in the business.
“We moved into this building on the night of the Ice Storm in 1991,” he said.
Hyatt worked through the struggles of big box competitors and, now, streaming, keeping afloat through converting content on VHS tapes onto DVDs.
At one time, they had 35,000 titles. Now, the Hyatts are closing.
The Biggest In A Century
Largest asteroid in a century to whiz by Sept 1
The largest asteroid in more than a century will whiz safely past Earth on September 1 at a safe but unusually close distance of about 4.4 million miles (7 million kilometers), NASA said
The largest asteroid in more than a century will whiz safely past Earth on September 1 at a safe but unusually close distance of about 4.4 million miles (7 million kilometers), NASA said.
The asteroid was discovered in 1981, and is named Florence after the famed 19th century founder of modern nursing, Florence Nightingale.
“Florence is the largest asteroid to pass this close to our planet since the first near-Earth asteroid was discovered over a century ago,” said a US space agency statement.
It is one of the biggest asteroids in the Earth’s vicinity, and measures about 2.7 miles (4.4 kilometers) wide—or about the size of 30 Egyptian pyramids stuck together.
“While many known asteroids have passed by closer to Earth than Florence will on September 1, all of those were estimated to be smaller,” said Paul Chodas, manager of NASA’s Center for Near-Earth Object Studies.
Party At The Tower!
Devil’s Tower UFO Rendezvous aims to attract all the UFO enthusiasts
HULETT, WYO. (KOTA TV) – Something out of this world is coming to Hulett, Wyo., and the Devil’s Tower Area, so if you’re a UFO enthusiast you better save the dates.
September 14-16th, 2017, will be the 1st Annual Devil’s Tower UFO Rendezvous.
The convention will last all three days and does require registration fees for activities like field investigation training and attending any of the featured keynote speakers.
On the last day there will be a festival with many free activities throughout Hulett, including a UFO alien themed parade, costume contest with a small fee, a close encounters tower building contest, a barbecue cook-off and live music. Cash prizes will be awarded to the best parade float and costume.
Lost Languages Found
Scientists discover lost languages at Egyptian monastery
by Tom Whipple, Science Editor
The library at Saint Catherine’s monastery has been in continuous use for 1,500 years / KHALED ELFIQI
Ancient works not read by humans since the Dark Ages have been found at an Egyptian monastery, using a technique that allows researchers to reconstruct documents long ago scrubbed off parchment.
The finds at Saint Catherine’s monastery on the Sinai peninsula hailed a “new golden age of discovery”, according to the scientists behind the research, who believe that the methods could reveal many other lost texts.
They have been chronicling the monastery’s library, which has been in continuous use for 1,500 years, but which is today threatened by growing Islamic fundamentalism and attacks on Christians in the region.
Among the discoveries were three ancient Greek medical texts that were previously unknown to scholars, as well as the earliest copies of some from Hippocrates.
Tobe Hooper Gone
‘Texas Chain Saw Massacre’ Director Tobe Hooper Dies At 74
Tobe Hooper, one of the pioneers of the horror genre, died Saturday at age 74. He passed in Sherman Oaks. Hooper made two of the most distinguished films in the fright genre. His low budget 1974 film The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, which gave a glimpse of the frightful potential of a power tool, and became a favorite on the drive in theater circuit. Made at a cost of $300,000, the film grossed over $30 million at the domestic box office. He also directed Poltergeist.
Tobe Hooper, one of the pioneers of the horror genre, died Saturday at age 74. He passed in Sherman Oaks. Hooper made two of the most distinguished films in the fright genre. His low budget 1974 film The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, which gave a glimpse of the frightful potential of a power tool, and became a favorite on the drive in theater circuit. Made at a cost of $300,000, the film grossed over $30 million at the domestic box office. He also directed Poltergeist.
Trans-Thrillers
Why Men Pretend to Be Women to Sell Thrillers
Over the last decade, female writers have come to dominate crime fiction, a genre traditionally associated with men. But their appeal goes beyond the byline.
Rafael Marchante / Reuters
Almost 10 years ago, Martyn Waites, a British crime writer, was having coffee with his editor. Waites, who was at something of a loose end project-wise, was looking for new ideas. His editor, though, was looking for a woman. Or, more specifically, a high-concept female thriller writer who could be the U.K.’s Karin Slaughter or Tess Gerritsen.
“I said I could do it,” Waites recalls. His editor was skeptical. But then Waites outlined an idea for a book based on a news story he’d once read, about a serial killer targeting pregnant women and cutting out their fetuses. The concept, he admits somewhat bashfully, was a gruesome one.
“That’s exactly what we’re looking for,” was his editor’s response.
That idea became The Surrogate, a crime thriller published in 2009, and Waites simultaneously became Tania Carver, his female alter ego. Before he started writing, he embarked on a period of research, reading novels by popular female crime writers, and made “copious notes” about their various heroes and villains. Waites was an actor before he was a writer, and “Martyn” and “Tania” soon became different personas in his head, almost like characters. He’d sit down to write as Tania and then realize the concept was much better suited to Martyn. Martyn books, he explains, “were more complex, more metaphorical. The kind of things I like in writing.” Tania books were simpler: mainstream commercial thrillers aimed at a female audience. And they rapidly became more successful than any of Waites’s previous books had been.
The case of a male author using a female pseudonym to write fiction was relatively unheard of when Tania Carver emerged, but the explosion of female-oriented crime fiction in the last five years has led to an increasing number of male authors adopting gender-neutral names to publish their work. Last month, The Wall Street Journal’s Ellen Gamerman considered the phenomenon, interviewing a number of writers who fessed up to being men: Riley Sager (Todd Ritter), A.J. Finn (Daniel Mallory), S.J. Watson (Steve Watson), J.P. Delaney (Tony Strong), S.K. Tremayne (Sean Thomas). The trend is ironic, Gamerman pointed out, because the history of fiction is littered with women writers adopting male or gender-neutral pseudonyms to get their work published, from the Brontë sisters to J.K. Rowling.
Aphex Technical Equipment Supply
How A Small Town Record Store Quietly Released An Exclusive Aphex Twin Record
Working away from a cultural capital comes with significant upsides.
by SCOTT STERLING
Well beyond the obvious tropes of Motown, techno and hip-hop icons, evidence of metropolitan Detroit’s reputation as a music city could historically be found within the confines of its record stores. Legendary and sadly long-gone record shops in and around the city were often nearly as important and influential as the music sold in them.
Today, a new crop of budding independent record stores is taking the torch for new and innovative music in southeastern Michigan, none more interestingly than Technical Equipment Supply, which recently made its home in an unlikely place.
Ypsilanti, Mich., is a small Midwestern town of less than 23,000 residents, 36 miles from Detroit and situated just a few miles east of Ann Arbor. “Ypsi” still retains much of it’s mid-20th century charm, and has yet to get caught up in the waves of gentrification sweeping cities across America, primarily in what’s known — both positively and derisively, depending on who’s doing the talking — as “New” Detroit.
James Cameron – Disturbing
“Terminator 2: Judgment Day” Is Still a Deeply Upsetting Blockbuster
“It’s in your nature to destroy yourselves”
by BILGE EBIRI
Say what you will about James Cameron, but the man commits. Stories of the director’s perfectionism, his control-freak mania, and his sheer drive are legion, but I’m talking about something more fundamental to the work itself. Whereas most action filmmakers are content to let emotion and morality play second fiddle to the more immediate, commercial elements of their movies, Cameron refuses to relegate such things to the background. The love story in Titanic isn’t just an excuse to stage an extravagant disaster flick; it becomes the picture’s raison d’être (and, not coincidentally, a key factor in its success). The environmental and anti-colonial overtones of Avatar aren’t there merely to provide some character shading; they practically take over. And now, back in theaters and converted to 3-D, is Cameron’s classic sequel Terminator 2: Judgment Day — not just a movie about fighting to prevent nuclear apocalypse, but a movie obsessed with nuclear apocalypse.
Maybe that wasn’t so clear back in 1991, when it originally came out. The Iron Curtain had recently fallen, effectively ending the Cold War and seemingly lifting the nuclear threat. I distinctly remember Sarah Connor’s occasional ruminations on the fate of the human race eliciting chuckles in my theater at the time. Today, however, the overwhelming despair of T2 is impossible to ignore. This is one of the most upsetting blockbusters ever.
In 1984, Cameron’s original Terminator played a key role in turning Arnold Schwarzenegger into a massive global star, and it was a nasty, brutish little beast of a movie — an R-rated horror flick posing as a sci-fi thriller. But it worked (and became a hit) because, playing a killer super-robot sent from the future by our machine overlords to murder the young woman (Linda Hamilton) who would give birth to the leader of the human resistance, Schwarzenegger used his considerable limitations as an actor to his advantage. Thus did Arnold become an icon of Reaganite, muscles-and-guns spectacle: a terse, emotionless robot racking up an insane body count with an assortment of heavy weaponry.
Reggae Healing
Reggae helps heal mental wounds of torture for migrants in Italy
Ibrahim Jalloh of Sierra Leone sings during a performance of the Medu Music Band in Rome, Italy. – Reuters
ROME – In a tiny makeshift rehearsal studio in a residential neighborhood of Rome, Nigerian asylum seeker Sylvester Ezeala let slip a smile as he drummed a pair of claves to the mesmeric beat of African reggae.
“I love music. Music is life. It makes you relax and calms your nerves,” said Ezeala, 28, who credits music for obliterating the feelings of loneliness and loss that had brought him to the verge of suicide just a few months earlier.
Ezeala is a member of a band set up by medical charity Doctors for Human Rights (MEDU) to help migrants who experienced torture and extreme violence before fleeing to a new life.
For an increasing number of migrants arriving in Italy bear mental as well as physical scars due to abuse experienced in their country of origin or on their way to Europe, mainly in Libya, according to the Rome-based non-government organization.
MEDU coordinator Alberto Barbieri said most suffer from depression and post-traumatic stress disorder, which can cause nightmares, flashbacks, insomnia, guilt and isolation.
“All together these symptoms seriously impair people’s social, work, affective and interpersonal life and … increase isolation,” said Barbieri.
The Village Voice Gone
End of an Era: Village Voice Will No Longer Be in Print
by
The Village Voice’s Aug. 16-22, 2017 issue
The alt-weekly changed ownership in 2015.
Peter Barbey, who purchased The Village Voice in 2015, has decided to no longer produce a print edition of the alt-weekly. The publication, which was once considered an important voice and platform, has long been distributed for free around New York City.
“For more than 60 years, The Village Voice brand has played an outsized role in American journalism, politics, and culture,” Barbey said Tuesday in a prepared statement. “It has been a beacon for progress and a literal voice for thousands of people whose identities, opinions, and ideas might otherwise have been unheard. I expect it to continue to be that and much, much more.”
The Village Voice, like most historically print-focused publications, has struggled with the shift to less-remunerative digital advertising. The paper was once reliant largely on classified advertising.
“That business has moved online — and so has the Voice’s audience, which expects us to do what we do not just once a week, but every day, across a range of media, from words and pictures to podcasts, video, and even other forms of print publishing,” Barbey said.
Don’t Look At The Fireball
How to Watch the Solar Eclipse Like a 1960s School Kid
Caption from LIFE. Fifth-graders at the Emerson School in Maywood, Ill. line up with backs to the sun and their eclipse / Francis Miller—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images
If you are one of the lucky Americans in position to see Monday’s total solar eclipse —which will touch 14 states as it crosses the country from coast to coast — you’d do well to take a tip from 1963’s fifth grade class of the Emerson School in Maywood, Illinois. Wielding cardboard boxes and knives that today would surely get a kid suspended, the kids demonstrated for LIFE’s readers how to safely look at an eclipse.
During the solar eclipse of 1960, hundreds of people had suffered permanent eye damage from looking directly at the sun. With help from the Illinois Society for the Prevention of Blindness, Emerson students avoided the same fate by building Sunscopes, pinhole camera-like contraptions that indirectly project an image of the sun. The magazine offered instructions for those desiring to replicate the project at home:
She Got Legs
ZZ Top Reveals Meaning Behind Classic Song ‘Legs’
HOUSTON—More than three decades after the song was a chart-topping smash and became an instant classic-rock staple, ZZ Top finally revealed to fans Tuesday the meaning behind its iconic hit “Legs.” “People have been coming up with all these crazy interpretations for 30 years, so we’ve finally decided to just come out and say that the song’s about a woman’s sexy legs and how much they make us want her sexually,” said lead vocalist Billy Gibbons, acknowledging that spelling out the meaning of “Legs” might take away from its longstanding mystique.
Mosaic Studio
1,200-Year-Old Mosaic Studio Reveals a ‘Snapshot’ of Ancient Construction Methods
Photogrammetric composite image of the ‘House of the Tessarae’, trench P. The numbers relate to different archaeological features. © The Danish-German Jerash Northwest Quarter Project
The eruption of Mount Vesuvius at Pompeii in 79 A.D. isn’t the only example of life in the ancient world being preserved by the aftermath of a natural disaster. An article in the August 2017 issue of the scientific journal Antiquity reveals how a set of recently uncovered residential buildings in the city of Jerash, Jordan, abandoned after an earthquake in 749 A.D., are shedding new light into the little-known organization of Roman, Byzantine and Early Islamic-era mosaic workshops.
For the first time, according to the article’s authors Achim Lichtenberger and Rubina Raja, scientists have found evidence of what appears to be a mobile mosaicist workshop, confirming previous theories that artisans of the era worked in situ to create tile murals and flooring.
Another one…
Huge Asteroid to Pass Closely to Earth on September 1st, 2017
BY: Anthony Bouchard
An artist’s impression of a large asteroid passing by the Earth. Image Credit: Marcelo6366/Pixabay
Don’t panic, but a massive asteroid more than 2.7 miles across is about to get up-close and personal with the Earth.
While it sounds alarming when we put it that way, NASA assures all of us that the asteroid will harmlessly pass the Earth on September 1st.
The asteroid goes by the name Florence, and it’s one of the largest near-Earth asteroids that come within hair-raising distances of our planet every so often.
“While many known asteroids have passed by closer to Earth than Florence will on September 1, all of those were estimated to be smaller,” said the manager of NASA’s Center for Near-Earth Object Studies (CNEOS), Paul Chodas.
“Florence is the largest asteroid to pass by our planet this close since the NASA program to detect and track near-Earth asteroids began.”
Bots Win Again
A bot just defeated one of the world’s best video gamers
by Jackie Wattles
An artificial intelligence program just annihilated its human competition at a world championship video game contest.
The AI win stunned the gaming community, because bots are generally considered inferior to expert human players.
This one from Open AI — a nonprofit artificial intelligence research firm known mainly for its backing by serial entrepreneur Elon Musk, of Tesla (TSLA) and SpaceX fame — is a different story, and possibly a cautionary one.
Open AI says its mission is to promote “responsible” AI development.
Or, as Musk puts it, to ensure that AI doesn’t grow unchecked and become the death of humanity.
Musk said Saturday via Twitter that AI is “more [of a] risk than North Korea.”
To test out some harmless uses for AI, one Open AI team taught a bot to play Dota 2.
Dota 2, for those unfamiliar, is an online multi-player battle game. It works kind of like a complex virtual version of capture the flag. Teams of players use powerful characters, called “heroes,” to battle each other. The game ends when one team has taken down a structure, called an “Ancient,” in the opposing team’s home base.
No drones L.A.!
Should the LAPD use drones? Here’s what’s behind the heated debate
by Kate Mather
For more than three years, a pair of drones donated to the Los Angeles Police Department was locked away, collecting dust after a public outcry over the idea of police using the controversial technology.
Seattle police saw a similar backlash when they wanted to use the devices, grounding their drone program before it even took off. And recently, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department’s use of a drone has been criticized by activists as well as civilian oversight commissioners who want the agency to stop.
On Tuesday, the LAPD again waded into the heated debate, saying the department wanted to test the use of drones in a one-year pilot program.
Drones have been hailed by law enforcement across the country as a valuable technology that could help find missing hikers or monitor armed suspects without jeopardizing the safety of officers. But efforts to deploy the unmanned aircraft have frequently drawn fierce criticism from privacy advocates or police critics for whom the devices stir Orwellian visions of inappropriate — or illegal — surveillance and fears of military-grade, weaponized drones patrolling the skies.
The LAPD saw that resistance Tuesday even before department brass unveiled details of their proposal to the Police Commission. About three dozen activists gathered before the board’s morning meeting to denounce any use of drones by the department. When the presentation ended, some of those activists leapt to their feet.
“Drone-free LAPD, no drones L.A.!” they chanted.
Wish You Were Sad
I love planking.
Nude Performance Artist Planks in Philosophical Self-Portraits
by ANDREW NUNES
Afbeeldingen met dank aan de kunstenaar.
Chiara Mazzocchi’s nude artworks are anything but personal.
Though nudity and self-portraiture are staples of the art canon, the way Chiara Mazzocchi incorporates both in her visual and performative works is anything but usual. The Italian artist’s use of her own body is meant to be more than just an exploration of her personal self, instead functioning as an attempt to “express the authenticity of the human being connected and relating with nature and the universe and spaces, as a symbol of purity, energy, and light,” in the artist’s own words.
Jim Carrey – Artist
Jim Carrey: I Needed Color from JC on Vimeo.
Making Sex Dolls
Seeing How Sex Dolls Are Made Is Hauntingly Eerie (NSFW)
by Casey Chan
Being inside a sex doll factory and watching all that plastic nakedness get shaped is much more haunting than it is titillating. It gets unsettling, like if you were trapped inside a scene from a horror movie and couldn’t get out. But it’s also somewhat intriguing, just to see the mixture of products and body parts that they put together in a puzzle to shape a doll.
Black Metal Blues
Asteroid Shave
Asteroid to shave past Earth inside Moon orbit: ESA
An asteroid the size of a house will shave past Earth at a distance of some 44,000 kilometres (27,300 miles) in October, inside the Moon’s orbit, astronomers said (AFP Photo/NASA)
Paris (AFP) – An asteroid the size of a house will shave past Earth at a distance of some 44,000 kilometres (27,300 miles) in October, inside the Moon’s orbit, astronomers said Thursday.
The space rock will zoom by at an eighth of the distance from the Earth to the Moon — far enough to just miss our geostationary satellites orbiting at about 36,000 kilometres, according to the European Space Agency (ESA).
“It will not hit the Earth,” said Detlef Koschny of ESA’s “Near Earth Objects” research team. “That’s the most important thing to say.”
Cool. A whale.
Bio-Def
Dawn of the bionic age: Body hackers let chips get under their skin
BY TIM JOHNSON
Doug Copeland, left, prepares to implant a microchip in the hand of Kyle Spiers at a workshop at the DefCon 2017 convention in Las Vegas July 28, 2017. Hackers who implant microchips are known as “grinders,” a term taken from a comic book. Tim Johnson McClatchy
If you’re prone to forgetting your card key for the office or your computer password, here’s a solution: Get a microchip implanted in your hand.
That’s what Brian McEvoy has done multiple times. He’s got five implants, mostly for functional reasons but one just for fun.
“There’s a glow-in-the-dark implant on the back of my right hand,” said McEvoy, a 36-year-old electrical engineer from St. Paul, Minnesota.
For years, owners have implanted microchips in their pets to recover them if they go astray. Farmers use them in cattle. Now, humans are experimenting with subdermal microchips, which are the size of a large grain of rice, to make modern life easier.
Ever so slowly, a trend that began in the hacker community is moving toward the mainstream. A Wisconsin firm that specializes in designing company break rooms, Three Square Market, announced last month that it was offering implanted chips to all its employees.
Late-night Jam @ Walmart
Olga Pronina G
Russian Woman Known as ‘Sexiest Motorcyclist’ on Instagram Killed in High-Speed Crash
“She was breaching every rule of safety and riding at high speed pretty often,” her friend told local media.
Olga was pronounced dead at the scene of the crash
A woman who gained a reputation as the “sexiest motorcyclist” on Instagram thanks to her risque outfits and even riskier style of riding was killed in a high-speed crash in city of Vladivostok, Russia on Monday, according to The Sun.
40-year-old Olga Pronina, known to her followers on Instagram as “Monika,” reportedly died almost instantly when she lost control of her BMW S1000RR while riding down a motorway in the early evening and struck the middle guardrail at high speed. Pictures obtained by The Sun show the bike was basically obliterated.
A friend who arrived on scene minutes later told The Sun that the force of the crash sent the BMW’s rear wheel bouncing almost 2,000 feet further down the road. Another friend told The Sun that Pronina was “was breaching every rule of safety and riding at high-speed pretty often,” adding that her death is “incredibly tragic.”
Pronina had accumulated over 180,000 followers on Instagram, where she posted pictures of herself modeling with various motorcycles and videos showing her rocketing through traffic at speeds over 150 mph while wearing…well, let’s call it insufficient protection for the task at hand.