April 2008 Archives

"I am a white woman, a blond, blue-eyed white woman, and I have a first name strongly associated with black women. My mother, a southerner by birth, never stopped telling me she made the name up. The fact that she truly could not remember ever hearing the name before, is a testament to the strength of southern segregation. It is likely she heard it once or twice, and simply forgot it until later. And so, even at 50 years old, I have a name that makes people do a double-take. "You're _____?" is something I have heard all my life. "Yes, that would be me," is what I say, as they look confused. I have upset the social order. Names, I have learned, are a big, big part of it."

Rumors of penis theft began circulating last week in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo's sprawling capital of some 8 million inhabitants. They quickly dominated radio call-in shows, with listeners advised to beware of fellow passengers in communal taxis wearing gold rings.

Purported victims, 14 of whom were also detained by police, claimed that sorcerers simply touched them to make their genitals shrink or disappear, in what some residents said was an attempt to extort cash with the promise of a cure...

"But when you try to tell the victims that their penises are still there, they tell you that it's become tiny or that they've become impotent, (said Kinshasa's police chief, Jean-Dieudonne Oleko.) To that I tell them, 'How do you know if you haven't gone home and tried it'," he said.

I drive a 12 year old Pontiac convertible to my place of work, so I get quite the panoramic view. I was waiting for the light to change across from a storage complex, when I noticed how the end of Cream's "Glad" matched so beautifully with the tube man on top of the storage complex's roof as he waved his pneumatic arms and whipped his pneumatic head back in an unbridled expression of glee and air-filled pride.

Sure enough, it's a kid's book about grass. But the book is actually a lot more thoughtful than the provocative premise might seem to be at first glance.

"It's Just a Plant" is a children's book that takes a similar approach to sex education in talking about another difficult topic. That is, the book explains that marijuana can be a positive and healthy thing for adults, but it's not for children. In twenty years I haven't seen anything quite like this in how it approaches the topic.

What if we told you that a guy with no background in science or medicine-not even a college degree-has come up with what may be one of the most promising breakthroughs in cancer research in years?

Well it's true, and if you think it sounds improbable, consider this: he did it with his wife's pie pans and hot dogs.

His name is John Kanzius, and he's a former businessman and radio technician who built a radio wave machine that has cancer researchers so enthusiastic about its potential they're pouring money and effort into testing it out.

Here's the important part: if clinical trials pan out-and there's still a long way to go-the Kanzius machine will zap cancer cells all through your body without the need for drugs or surgery and without side effects. None at all. At least that's the idea.

A New York woman involved in a divorce battle spilled secrets about her husband, his family and their intimate life in a "scary, new step" in user generated content, attorneys said.

Tricia Walsh-Smith can be watched on YouTube lashing out at her husband, Broadway executive Philip Smith, in a teary and furious clip that has been viewed more than 150,000 times.

Local 6 reported that lawyers can't think of another case like Smith's and are calling it a "scary, new step."

>During the video, Walsh-Smith goes through their wedding album on camera, accuses her husband of trying to evict her out of their apartment, and even makes embarrassing claims about their intimate life.

Saint John police spent an hour on Tuesday night trying get an intoxicated man down from a rooftop.

Police arrived at the home on Duke Street West to find a man dancing on the roof.

The man then took off his clothes and danced a bunny-hop across the roof while slapping his buttocks, police said.

The man was drinking out of a bucket he said contained tequila, police said.

Despite police efforts to convince the man to come down, the man remained on the roof until a friend arrived and talked to him.

He was arrested and charged with indecent exposure and causing a disturbance, police said.

Police are not releasing the man's name.

He is expected to appear in court in Saint John on Wednesday.

The Rules of Thumb, a website created by Rules of Thumb author Tom Parker, is off and running, with thousand of user-submitted rules of thumb. Some are more useful than others, but they are almost always interesting.

DIRECTION CONVEYS TIME AND EMOTION
In advertising, art and photography, the direction the subject is looking or the flow of the composition can affect the tone of the image. Left is the past, right is the future, up is positive, down is negative. For example: a subject looking up and to the right is looking positively into the future. Submitted by: Jeremy Reid, Graphic Designer, Belleville, Ontario, Canada

MAXIMUM VALUE OF A SERVICE

The value of any service is highest *before* the service has been rendered.

FINDING SMALL THINGS ON THE FLOOR
To find something very small that you have dropped on the floor, lay a flashlight on the floor and rotate it. A small object looks a lot bigger when it has a shadow too.

WALKING WITH SMALL CHILDREN
When walking with small children who are falling behind, the slower you walk, the slower they will walk, until they stop. If you maintain your pace, they will keep up with you, albeit somewhat behind.

A research fellow at the Natural History Museum in London and at the University of Sydney, Parker is a leading proponent of biomimetics--applying designs from nature to solve problems in engineering, materials science, medicine, and other fields. He has investigated iridescence in butterflies and beetles and antireflective coatings in moth eyes--studies that have led to brighter screens for cellular phones and an anticounterfeiting technique so secret he can't say which company is behind it. He is working with Procter & Gamble and Yves Saint Laurent to make cosmetics that mimic the natural sheen of diatoms, and with the British Ministry of Defense to emulate their water-repellent properties. He even draws inspiration from nature's past: On the eye of a 45-million-year-old fly trapped in amber he saw in a museum in Warsaw, Poland, he noticed microscopic corrugations that reduced light reflection. They are now being built into solar panels.

Parker's work is only a small part of an increasingly vigorous, global biomimetics movement. Engineers in Bath, England, and West Chester, Pennsylvania, are pondering the bumps on the leading edges of humpback whale flukes to learn how to make airplane wings for more agile flight. In Berlin, Germany, the fingerlike primary feathers of raptors are inspiring engineers to develop wings that change shape aloft to reduce drag and increase fuel efficiency. Architects in Zimbabwe are studying how termites regulate temperature, humidity, and airflow in their mounds in order to build more comfortable buildings, while Japanese medical researchers are reducing the pain of an injection by using hypodermic needles edged with tiny serrations, like those on a mosquito's proboscis, minimizing nerve stimulation.

To determine a network status, Hubble sends test messages "around the world" to look for computers that can be reached from some but not the entire Internet, a situation that is described as "partial reachability". Katz-Bassett said that short communication blips are ignored. However, if a problem surfaces in two consecutive 15-minute trials, it is listed as a "problem". The research team found that more than 7% of computers worldwide experienced this type of error at least once during a three-week period in fall of 2007.

There's no more sure-fire way to kill something's intrinsic comedic value than to try to examine what makes it funny. The minute you start thinking, you stop laughing. So why, then, have Nerve and IFC.com devoted an enormous amount of time, manpower, monetary resources, server space and posh catered lunches to the pursuit of ranking the boob tube's finest sketch comedy offerings?  
 
In part, we're here because magical new technology (*coughYouTubecough*) allows us to do more than just pontificate for paragraphs on end -- now we can pontificate for paragraphs on end and provide audiovisual evidence to back up those pontifications. We provide the context, share our thoughts and feelings, and let you commence with the guffawing and, naturally, the disagreeing. After all, the comedy sketch -- short, sweet, completely silly or shot through with social commentary -- worms its way into the public mind like nothing else, and has easily made the leap to the web when other forms have faltered.  
 
Any list is bound by the limitations set on it -- consciously and unconsciously -- by its creators: we kept our 50 selections to stuff that's appeared on television by choice, and to what's appeared in English out of necessity. One must also bear in mind the availability of material; who knows what comedic treasures are lost to us because they simply don't exist anymore?

This is the repaired inner mechanism of a Vichy automaton made in France in 1875. The complete automaton depicts a lady who breathes, closes her eyes, turns her head, fans herself, and lifts her glasses to her eyes.