Frontline has done so many fascinating documentaries for PBS and the latest is no exception. It’s called “The New Asylums” and explores the American prison system and asks why there are so many mentally ill inmates in prison. Although a little less than 55,000 Americans receive treatment in psychiatric wards, almost ten times that many mentally ill adults are in jails and prisons across the country. Here’s a bit from the Frontline website:

Of the nearly 2 million inmates being held in prisons and jails across the country, experts believe nearly 500,000 are mentally ill. According to the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill (NAMI), 16 percent of the prison population can be classified as severely mentally ill, meaning that they fit the psychiatric classification for illnesses such as schizophrenia, major depression, and bipolar disorder. According to staff at city and community jails, 25 percent of the jail population is severely mentally ill. However, when other mental illnesses, such as anti-social personality disorder, borderline personality disorder and depression, are included, the numbers are much higher, and NAMI puts the number of inmates suffering from both mental illness and substance abuse the percentage at well over 50 percent.

You can watch the full program online.

Staying on the Google-track today, here’s another map-oriented site of theirs that promotes Green traveling (or at least advertises eco-friendly businesses, I’ll let you be the judge).

Most interesting to me was the New York City page. Once there, click on E. Ozo rental cars, and check out their video. According to Voice-Over Guy (who could use a few elocution lessons, by the way, or maybe some NoD-ozo-s), Ozo is New York City’s first car service to go Green, utilizing a fleet of hybrid vehicles.

I also liked this page from Orlando, Florida. I suggest checking out B the video on Disney’s Port Orleans eco-resort.

Anyone else find the drummer more entertaining than Voice-Over Guy?

Will Japan face a population decline? There’s definitely a shortage of babies. 

“Japanese people simply aren’t having sex,” Dr. Kunio Kitamura, director of the Japan Family Planning Association, was quoted as saying by the Japan Times, an English language daily.

An association survey of 936 people between the ages of 16 and 49 showed 31 percent had not had sex for more than a month “for no particular reason” — a condition known as “sexless.”

Japan’s fertility rate — the average number of children a woman bears in her lifetime — fell to an all-time low of 1.25 last year. Demographers say a rate of 2.1 is needed to keep a population from declining.

The magnitude of the problem didn’t quite hit me until I realized that Yahoo! couldn’t even find a good image of Japanese people being intimate. The picture they used with the article was two people looking at beluga whales. If that’s what Japanese people have to do when they have sex, maybe that’s the problem.

So, why would anyone pay $750,000 for a loft with concave floors (meant to throw you off-balance), misplaced light switches (you have to grope around for), and a garish aesthetic only a McDonald’s Playland could appreciate. Well, because it’s all supposed to make you live longer of course! According to architects Shusaku Arakawa and Madeline Gins, “comfort leads to degeneration, and ultimately, death” so they designed a house that keeps your brain sharp and your body on your toes. They also advise that you fumble through the loft at least once a day in complete darkness. But before you start shaking your head too dismissively, studies with lab mice and humans suggest that living in an “enriched environment” which throws curves at your body and mind, can hinder the effects aging.
(via June’s Wired magazine)

This blog is mostly written by guys, and I bet you guys don’t read the New York Times Styles section, and hey, I can understand that, because you’re guys, but — this is the lede of the Times’ current “Critical Shopper” column:

The first time I ever came across the term “penis bone” — in JT Leroy’s novel “Sarah,” the main character wears such a bone on a necklace — I thought it was made up, a novelist’s surreal fictional version of perma-Viagra.

Later it turned out that JT Leroy was made up, but the bone is real, the animal world’s answer to successful propagation. Many mammals (homo sapiens excluded) have a bone within the erectile tissue, called a baculum, which helps during copulation. The largest baculum in the animal world belongs to the walrus, and it can grow as long as 30 inches.

Who said smarts and shopping don’t mix? I can personally testify that the store being reviewed here (Evolution, in NYC’s SoHo) is fantastic, as is the rest of the article, particularly the part where Alex Kuczynski wonders if there’s a sister store in Dover, PA called “Intelligent Design,” and figures it probably sells office furniture.

This morning I was Googlemapping some coordinates when I happened upon my new favorite website (of the day): NextBus.

Using GPS technology, the site enables you to follow real buses in real cities, as they inch toward their destinations. For example, check out the Muni #22 line in San Francisco, now, in real time, as at least a dozen commuters wonder “what’s taking the darn thing so long?!”

I highly recommend clicking around the radio buttons, too, and trying “Hybrid” mode for even more fun.

 Our friend Alex over at Neatorama asks where this picture was taken. Any idea? Let me know because I want to ride that train. I mean it’s triangular.

Ah, the South in the summertime — land of creeping kudzu, stifling humidity, and the fire ant:

In the 70 years since the imported red fire ant sneaked into Mobile aboard a ship from Brazil, no insect has been more vilified or subjected to such a relentless chemical assault from Southern homeowners, gardeners and farmers. Even the government joined the quest to kill the pest, but through it all, the fire ant has not merely endured, but prospered, expanding from its original beachhead in Alabama to populate 320 million acres in 18 states. … In retrospect, some researchers conclude that the assault may actually have aided the spread of fire ants by eliminating competition from more than 50 species of home-grown ants.

The only vaguely successful attempt to control them, at least that I know of, unfortunately involves introducing another pest: the “coffin fly,” a humpbacked pest that lays its eggs in the ants’ heads, and also in human corpses. Even Faulkner couldn’t have come up with this stuff.

A couple of weeks ago, a writer named Jason Feifer formulated a hypothesis that all of us have probably also come up with: (a) YouTube videos are almost uniformly terrible, therefore (b) an awesomely terrible video posted to YouTube could conceivably hit it big and make the filmmaker famous. Unlike the rest of us, Feifer decided to actually test the hypothesis:

One week ago, at almost exactly midnight, I uploaded this stupid video and officially launched Operation Shockless and Awful, an experiment to see if intentionally crappy videos would gain any traction on YouTube. Since then, it’s been viewed more than 7,000 times, it was once the day’s 38th most discussed video, some heavy metal dude did a cover of my song, and a girl named ohmyitsstephie offered her hand in marriage.

There’s now a tribute offering in Spanish as well. I think Feifer may have created the new Numa Numa dance.