The new issue of mental_floss (May/June) has an article about the bizarre history of 3rd-party politics. And one of the parties we highlight in there is the short-lived American Vegetarian Party. As we pointed out in the article, the party was formed in 1947 by 84-year-old restaurant owner John Maxwell. In addition to promoting vegetarianism, they also campaigned against liquor, tobacco and medicine?!?! It’s not any surprise that they didn’t exactly win the hearts of Americans. But even if they had, their candidate could not have legally taken office. Why? Because Maxwell was born in England, making him ineligible. Brilliant, eh? Well the party may have died but vegetarians seem to be thinking a little smarter these days as PETA recently announced a World’s Sexiest Vegetarian competition. I have a feeling Natalie Portman, the frontrunner at this point, might get a few more votes. Oh wait, she’s a little young. Either way, check out the article on page 51 of the new issue b/c it’s got some other funny stories.

Well, it’s official: Little Brown books has announced that it will recall Viswanathan’s now infamous novel, “How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life.” As an author, it is, of course, troubling to think that a writer could be paid half-a-million clams, and no one, not the agent at William Morris, not the editors at Little Brown, not even the fact checkers, spotted the similarities between the works in question.
Not that scrutiny shouldn’t be paid to manuscripts of authors with advances that pale by comparison (read: yours truly’s), but still… In this case, the bouncer at the local Cambridge watering hole probably scrutinized Viswanathan’s fake I.D. card with a sharper eye than the folks at Little Brown.

I’m glad they recalled the book. The occasion is now #2 on my all-time list of most deserving recalls, second only to the Firestone Tire recall of 2000, which was blamed for as many as 150 deaths around the world.

Here is another recent, lesser-known recall you should be aware of:

28 March 2006 — Two flavors of Nestlé Country Creamery Ice Cream purchased from Wal-Mart stores in Texas are being recalled because the ice cream may contain egg not identified on the label.

And if you happen to be passing through New Zealand:
25 April 2006 — Tegel Zoo Animal Chicken Nuggets with batch codes 16073 AM and 16073 PM, have been recalled in New Zealand due to possible contamination with metal fragments.

There’ve probably been several more food-related recalls in the news over the last month, but honestly, I don’t recall.

I saw this skull for sale, via Neatorama… Admittedly, I’m pretty naive about body modifications in different cultures. My knowledge of foot binding and lip plates, for instance, is completely limited to what I’ve seen flipping through National Geographics as a kid (or flipping through cultural anthropology textbooks as a major). Still, I’d never heard ANYTHING about skull binding.  According to the website, skull binding dates back about 9,000 years (this particular skull is from Peru) and was actually the first body modification done by man. Who knew? Apparently, people would bind infants skulls to a flat piece of wood to mold the skull as aesthetically desired. Pretty crazy, eh?

Will, you liked the Coneheads, right? I don’t want to peer pressure you or anything, but this seems like the perfect way to make sure your newborn lands a role as an extra when they finally get around to making a sequel.

We’ve spent countless pages in mental_floss talking about how those old subliminal advertising studies from the 1950’s were totally bunk (they were… the research was fabricated, and after all the hype the hack scientist, James Vicary, could never duplicate his results). But today, I saw this article in New Scientist, that claims researchers from the Netherlands are actually able to steer people towards preffing one brand of beverage over another through subliminal advertising. I was pretty excited about the study (I’m fascinated by this type of stuff!) until I realized that the scientists claimed that a) the people have to want a product in the first place (in this case, they really have to be thirsty and desperately want a drink for you to be able to subliminally persuade them to pick a certain drink), and b) the drink options for the test group were Lipton Ice Tea and something called Spa Rood, and they scientists somehow managed to convince everyone to choose the Tea. In any case, maybe I’m just skeptical because that’s how they want me to feel. Still, I’m fascinated by the possibilities. _{David Israel wants to buy me a Segway scooter. David Israel wants to buy me a Segway scooter. David Israel wants to buy me a Segway scooter.}

Remember those “campaign for real beauty” ads that Dove was pushing a few months ago? They didn’t impress me much. The women were (a) uniformly clean-faced and preppy-looking, (b) uniformly laughing and smiling at some joke that probably started with “knock knock,” and (c) uniformly dressed in bland white undies. They couldn’t say anything about their personalities through their clothes or makeup. We were left to infer personality from their hairstyles: Ooh, she’s got ringlets, she must be the kooky one! It was brave of the women to expose their imperfect bodies in their undies, but the ads weren’t about “real beauty” at all. Yes, there are evo-psych principles that suggest beauty is often symmetrical, even-toned, inoffensive – and that’s undoubtedly true for things like mathematical equations – but in judging an individual person’s beauty, there’s also something to be said for novelty, strangeness, edge. Bereft of the opportunity to express themselves, most of these women didn’t have those.

What’s ironic about the Dove campaign is that it wasn’t that groundbreaking – there were already unofficial campaigns for real beauty out there that proved the power of the eye of the beholder. American Apparel ads, for instance. As recently detailed in the NYT, the models are “young ethnic and mixed-race men and women with asymmetrical features, imperfect bodies, blemished skin and visible sweat stains on the clothes they are modeling” – basically, they’re your friends from college who were really hot but never quite realized it and so remained blessedly down to earth. The ads may be incredibly suggestive, but they’re also progressive in a weird way. I also like Face Hunter (where I found the fanciful mustachioed man above) and The Sartorialist, blogs that feature photos of random people on the street and at parties. Some of them are self-conscious types who make funny faces; some of them are equally self-conscious types who dress up in costume, a la Misshapes. But most are slightly disheveled, off-kilter, flawed but happy-looking people – in a word, beautiful.

I actually have very little interest in cars, but I saw this new vehicle on the New Scientist site, and figured I had to share. The car, which is cleverly called CLEVER (despite the fact that the acronym stands for Compact Low Emission Vehicle for Urban Transport Vehicle and should be called CLEVUTV), is the result of 9 Eurpean countries teaming up with BMW to produce a smaller, greener vehicle. And it looks amazing! It seems like it’s part motorcycle, part go-kart, and part indestructible (unlike “donorcycles,” it tends to crumple up around it’s passengers safely). Even better, it produces even less pollution than a Prius! Of course, it doesn’t have the hype of the  Segway scooter, but maybe that’s because people might actually use it.

Franz Ferdinand (the band) came through Boston a couple of weeks ago, and even though the band was apparently named after Archduke Franz Ferdinand (the racehorse), the concert got me thinking about Franz Ferdinand (the actual archduke). He is, of course, most famous for being shot – his assassination in 1914 sparked World War I – but I find his personal life more intriguing than his role in international affairs. As a young man, he went to a dance and fell instantly in love with one of the guests, Countess Sophia von Chotkowa und Wognin, Duchess of Hohenburg. His family forbade him to continue the affair because Sophie, despite her impressively lengthy name, wasn’t from a currently ruling dynasty and therefore wasn’t aristocratic enough for the ’rents. But Franz wasn’t having it. He called in the big guns – Emperor Wilhelm II of Germany, Tsar Nicholas II of Russia, the Pope – to plead on his behalf, and it worked. The family allowed him to marry Sophie, under two conditions: her children could never sit on the throne, and her arse could never sit shotgun in the royal carriage.

Say what you want about him (and people have: “He has been referred to as a miser, a bigot, and a spoiled child”), F. Ferdinand was right about Sophie being his one and only. Four years into his marriage, he wrote to his stepmother – one of very few royals who had been willing to attend the controversial wedding – that the marriage had been “the most intelligent thing I’ve ever done in my life.” And on his 14^th wedding anniversary, as he lay gasping for breath beside her after both were shot by Serbian nationalist Gavrilo Princip, he could think only of her. His last words were: “Sophie dear, Sophie dear, don’t die! Stay alive for our children!” Alas, they perished together and are buried in the crypts of the Austrian castle Artstetten.

Also, speaking of star-crossed love: Nick McCarthy, guitar virtuoso, sie sind Superfantastisch!

We did our weekly CNN Headline News segment this morning on rising gas prices, because there’s almost nothing else in the news. And I know I posted a gas fact yesterday but here’s an interesting fact to put the US gas consumption in perspective:

If California were a country it would consume more barrels of gasoline than any other foreign country. California by itself! The state consumes about 373 million barrels annually and the US as a whole consumes about 3 billion barrels.

But since today’s Friday, let’s think about happier things so here’s a website with pictures of ponies. It helped me.

While I can play the piano like Schroeder, and have a way with the ladies that’s only rivalled by Peppermint Patty, as Will likes to point out, I’m most certainly the Charlie Brown of travel. My planes are ALWAYS delayed without fail (though I’m always at the airport on time). I’d be willing to bet that I’ve spent more hours in the Birmingham airport than most of the people who work there. But that’s just scraping the surface… I once bought a ticket to Italy from Al Italia, and they gave me a 45 minute stopover in NYC. No problem, I thought! Of course, the ticket they sold me had me landing in JFK, and flying out of LaGuardia (no joke) with the delay occurring during rush hour. Good Grief! Needless to say I missed the connecting flight.

Of course, when God, the weather and Italian airlines aren’t mucking about with my itinerary, I tend to do it to myself (like leaving my headlights on by accident). Anyway, all that rambling’s to badly segue into this: I only seem to have to jumpstart my car when it’s raining, and this seems like the perfect solution. Instead of having to wait for the weather to clear up, and having to remember where the jumper cables are, and how to use them, this new gadget makes everything effortless. All you have to do is plug it into your cigarette lighter, the cigarette lighter of nearby car, and then start the engines. And while it seems pretty foolproof to me, I’m sure I can find a way around that!

Great. David starts the day talking about the Nobel Peace Prize and I’m all like “hot chicks!” Thanks, David; I feel so very intellectual. 

So according to a new study in Nature, if you show a macho man a picture of one of the aforementioned hot chicks, he becomes a blubbering idiot:

Researchers at the University of Leuven in Belgium asked men to play an ultimatum game, in which they split a certain amount of money between them. High-testosterone men drove the hardest bargain — unless they had previously viewed pictures of bikini-clad models, in which case they were more likely to accept a poorer deal.

This isn’t really all that surprising; I’m sure all of us have seen the equivalent happen at cocktail parties. The truly interesting discovery is this: 

The sight of flesh had less effect on the bargaining tactics of low-testosterone men.

The news article doesn’t speculate as to why, but I am dying to know. Are the less-macho guys smarter? Do they have lower sex drives? Do they have so little confidence that they figure they don’t have a chance with the gorgeous woman and therefore don’t even bother to think about it?

In any case, if a picture of one sexy woman has this kind of effect, I can’t imagine how silly men must get when shown a picture of eight sexy women, like the one above. I’m not expecting this blog to be operational for the rest of the day.