current-events

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Obama and his cigarettes

Our own Greg Veiss: You Tube Hunter, pointed me to this great piece on Obama and his smoking on Slate. It's a little old, but it's an intriguing question: If the Democrat's superstar drops the habit, will he lose his golden voice? From the piece: Smoking over time transforms a person's voice by thickening and drying out the vocal chords"¦ David Witsell, who directs Duke University's Voice Care Center, notes that the nodules on Johnny Cash's vocal cords that stemmed in part from... READ ON

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Immigrant Superheroes

I saw these on the ever-brilliant Boingboing, and thought the concept was so thought-provoking it deserved to be posted. A photographer named Dulce Pinzon has taken snaps of Mexican immigrants doing their work while dressed up as superheroes. From Pinzon's artist statement: The Mexican economy has quietly become dependent on the money sent from workers in the US. Conversely, the US economy has quietly become dependent on the labor of Mexican immigrants. Along with the depth of their sacrifice, it... READ ON

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Bulletproof Textbooks

I know I just posted on how people have made weapons from LEGOS (with both a bit of awe and apprehension), but how unbelievably sad is it that this idea of bulletproof textbooks actually makes sense in these times? Proposed by Bill Crozier, a retired veteran and candidate for Oklahoma State Superintendent's Office, the notion would be to create kevlar lined textbooks to prevent Columbine-style attacks from taking even more lives. The whole idea of kids wanting to take other kids' lives is so utterly... READ ON

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The Igs are coming!

Keeping on the Nobel path from this morning, it's just about time for the 16th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize Awards. The ceremony will take place this Thursday, the 5th of October, at the Sanders Theater, Harvard University. You might recall the Ig Nobels from a post I wrote some moons ago about an opera called Atom & Eve, written by Marc Abrahams, who also organizes the annual award ceremonies. As Abrahams says on his website, Improbable.com, an Ig Nobel "winner has done something that first... READ ON

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Angelina Jolie: the new royalty?

I don't know about where you all live, but here in LA, more and more tattoo removal parlors are opening up around town. Which might make you think ink is passÃ©, right? Well, not for celebs. In fact, Heather Locklear, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie all emerged from the summer with new ones. Jolie is known to have at least a dozen, including a Tennessee Williams quote, a large tiger, and her latest: the latitude and longitude coordinates of the countries where her adopted children were born. So... READ ON

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Us against the world

If you owned a trendy boutique and found yourself in a PR drought, how would you get back in the spotlight? Create a new fall line? Buy a city? Nah. You sue for... READ ON

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The internet: apparently, nothing but lies

If you haven't heard of Lonelygirl15 yet, crawl out from underneath that virtual rock. Beguiling video blogger and supposed naif LonelyGirl has been called "the Mona Lisa of YouTube," and her blogs -- around thirty of them since early summer -- have been viewed millions upon millions of times (that's, like, finale of 'Seinfeld' big, for you Nielsen ratings nerds out there). So what hooked everyone? There are differing theories (I'll leave out the ones about Scientology and mind-control) but the simplest... READ ON

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The day I left home, 9/12/01

Forgive me if today I blog about something a little more serious, and somewhat less _Flossy, than usual. It was exactly five years ago that I packed everything I owned into a station wagon and left home for good. This is a short piece remembering 9/11's less infamous but for me no less momentous neighbor, 9/12, accompanied by photographs I took along the... READ ON

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The certainty of chance

Can one person really change the world? The answer, claims Princeton's parapsychological Global Consciousness Project, is no. At least, not just by thinking about it. But results of recent experiments by the GCP hint that the combined mental energy of millions may indeed have some impact upon world events. After measuring the readouts from random number generators stationed all over the world for the past seven years, the group found spikes of decidedly non-random activity surrounding a number of... READ ON