Respect Authority

I have long been a staunch defender of the New York Post. After all, everyone’s news needs a little spicing up sometimes — and yes, I consider bad puns and shoddy journalism “spicing up.” I like to see more than one dollar-sign “s” per day, and the Post happily provides at least 54 per issue, so it’s my go-to paper for local news and scandal. 

But today’s front-page, yes, front-page, article on “wolf boy” is just taking it a bit too far. 

I understand that to 11-year-old Pruthviraj Patil, who actually has what’s commonly referred to as “werewolf syndrome,” having your face on the front page of a widely distributed newspaper is probably both thrilling and embarrassing. Even though the paper is touting the bravery of the young boy, who has a thick of coat of hair all over his body (save hands and feet), there’s just no way this story isn’t embarrassing. Although I personally found it endearing that Patil still gels his actual hair - on the top of his head. 

The point of the story? Researchers at Columbia University are reportedly near finding a cure for the disease, great news for Patils and werewolves the world over. Still, just in case you thought for a second that Post owner Rupert Murdoch wasn’t more about exploiting the disease than commending its cure, the paper offers a rather unnecessary photo gallery of the boy on their Web site. It is not for the faint of heart. 

No mention of whether they’ve yet discovered how to solve that whole “full moon/murderous rage thing” but my hopes are high.

Remember that dude who got pregnant last summer and decided to shove it in all our faces by posing naked for far too many magazines than I’d care to recall? Well he’s at it again!

Indeed, Thomas Beatie, the world’s first “pregnant man” (made possible, of course, by the fact that he’s biologically a woman), gave birth to his first daughter in June and, wasting no time, is slated to have baby No. 2 next June. Guess there’s no harm in being both the world’s first and second pregnant man.

Beatie tells his tale to (who else?) Barbara Walters Friday in an ABC special, during which he actually reveals the second pregnancy. But good old Barbara, never one to turn down juicy gossip or a ratings boost, spilled the beans on The View Thursday. My favorite part of this clip is Elizabeth Hasselbeck’s unabashed disgust at the prospect of dudes birthin’ babies. And you know Whoopie is just thinking “Shit, if I could have had a baby as a guy, why did I ever bother becoming a woman!?”

  

Move on, nothing risky to see here.

Good news for people who are banging strangers and/or shooting heroin (as if you need any more good news): AIDS has been effectively shot dead.

I know what you’re thinking: “But Lou, you have a history of exaggerating things you read on the Internet and dishonestly pushing those exaggerations on us as facts.” But this time, it’s true. About two years ago, a 42-year-old AIDS patient in Berlin underwent a bone marrow transplant to treat his leukemia. Turns out, in a uncharacteristic stroke of luck for the combo AIDS/cancer patient, the bone marrow donor had a rare genetic mutation that prevents the production of the specific molecule to which the HIV virus bonds, effectively turning the patient’s insides into a non-stick pan for AIDS. Our little miracle has been AIDS free for over 600 days now.

Now, how does this help the rest of us out there, barebacking our way around town with dirty needles in our eyes? Clearly we can’t imprison these mutants and harvest their marrow indefinitely, it’s much too difficult to find them all. However, based on my intense viewership of Fringe, if we can extract stem cells from those lucky mutants we can develop artificial marrow-based vaccines and treatments, solving this mysterious and deadly epidemic within a 40-minute time slot.

Luckily, Bush’s bans on science and learning are set to be overturned soon, which means we can start funding stem cell research and pasting those chapters on the Copernican model back into all those science books! That, coupled with the guarantee that abortions will stay legal, means the only thing we have to fear is the clap itself.

[Wall Street Journal]

You will be missed. Mostly by Lou.

Want to look older? Eat a lot!

A new study released this week shows obese children as young as ten years old have the arteries of 45-year-olds, as well as a series of other abnormalities that raise their risk of heart disease. Considering that about a third of American children are overweight, one-fifth are obese, and we don’t even have enough Social Security left for the actual 45-year-olds, this is bad for both health care and the future of our society, though perhaps good news for Gymboree Big & Tall.

Okay, that doesn’t exist.

“As the old saying goes, you’re as old as your arteries are,” Dr. Geetha Raghuveer of a Kansas City children’s hospital told The Associated Press. Despite the fact that I would hardly classify that as an “old saying,” the doc has it right. Kids these days are just piling on the pounds that the rest of us earned after hard-fought battles with “adult things” like beer, and nacho cheese. Read More ›

So your city’s going to collapse in a massive wave of unpreventable and unpredictable destruction, and no one will listen to you warn them about it. What to do… Ah yes, throw a party!

Geologists in Los Angeles will put a longstanding desire for popularity ahead of the whole “actual science” thing this Thursday, when some five million people in the city will participate in the “Great Southern California Shakeout,” a disaster drill built around a mock 7.8-magnitude earthquake that reads more like a ride at Universal Studios. (Fun Fact: The actual “Earthquake” ride at Universal was renamed “Disaster!” in 2007 to, I shit you not, incorporate new holographic technology of Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, among other things).

The earthquake drill, during which people will be told to dive under their desks, cover their heads and all that other jazz reminiscent of the day when our parents prepared themselves for nuclear attack by kissing their asses goodbye, will be followed by what event organizers call a “Get Ready Rally,” because everyone knows after an earthquake there’s nothing to do but live it up in the cracked and crumbling streets.

The event will include “rumbling” designed by a special-effects studio, and participants are free to design their own homepage on the ShakeOut Web site, invite friends and for the truly sadistic — watch earthquake videos. They can also play computer games “After Shock” and “Beat the Quake,” because we all know that life’s threats aren’t real until they’re made into video games. Read More ›

Reading the sordid tale of the caked up lush and her high-flying hijinks we posted earlier gave me some pause. For one thing, I was so cracked out myself that I had forgotten I knew how to read, so that was shocking in its own right. At first, I seriously regretted never doing drugs before boarding an airplane after realizing how easy it actually is and how relatively lax the punishments are. But then I also realized almost immediately afterwards how utterly terrifying most drugs would be while on a plane.

Drugs are interesting in that they can be tons of fun when you’re sitting on your couch next to a comforting bag of Cheetos, but get thrown in the back of a squad car… without any Cheetos… and you’re suddenly in a horrifying nightmare world, traveling at light speed and the puke-stained seat you’re cuffed to is trying to eat your ass. Mix enough marijuana and Benadryl (not necessarily a recommendation) and you’ll feel like you’re on a plane as it is, so I literally shudder at the thought of how quickly this combination would turn you into a frantic, twitching mess on an actual aircraft. It’d be like the time I crapped myself on the flying airplane ride at the local carnival — a very bad experience to say the least.

Now, because Respect Authority is a harm-prevention website (this is actually completely false), I decided it would be helpful to come up with a list of drugs that would go especially well with flying, and the drugs that would be best to avoid unless you particularly enjoy feeling like droves of spider hatchlings are splitting your skull in half for six hours straight.
Read More ›

I’ve seen every episode of Sex and the City. Yes, every single one. I know what show Miranda watched on TiVo, and that Charlotte looked at her pores for at least an hour every night. I know how Samantha and Smith met, and I know that sometimes Carrie wore midriff-exposing shirts that were bizarrely unfashionable, even for the 90s.

And according to a study released this week, all of this knowledge makes me two times as likely to be a slut.

I’m sorry, to get pregnant. In what The Associated Press dubbed “groundbreaking research,” a new study shows that pregnancy rates are much higher among teenagers who watch “a lot of TV with sexual dialogue and behavior than among those who have tamer viewing tastes.” Unsurprisingly, Sex and the City was one of the shows used in the so-called research.

Rand Corp. behavioral scientist and lead study author Anita Chandra said teens who watched the “raciest shows” were twice as likely to become pregnant over the next three years as those who watched few such programs. The study involved 2,003 12- to 17-year old girls and boys nationwide, questioned by telephone about their TV viewing habits in 2001. Teens were then re-interviewed twice, most recently in 2004. Among girls, 58 became pregnant during the follow-up and among boys, 33 had gotten a girl pregnant.

I have so many issues with this study that I could almost do a study on the fundamental deterioration of studies in the 21st century. Read More ›

Lisa: "I'm afraid my space boyfriend is cheating on me with his wife, I'm thinking about kidnapping her." Virtual Therapist 5000: "SOLVE YOUR MALFUNCTION... COMPLETE MISSION."

Low Earth oribit, the perennial frontier. These are the voyages of the Soyuz space closet Soyuz II. Its continuing mission, to maintain orbit, stare at known worlds and exercise. To boldly go… not insane. Baaa da da dum ba ba ba.

Funny? Well not for the poor crazy astronaut muttering to himself several miles above you. That’s why Harvard researcher Dr. James Cartreine is building a virtual therapist for all those kooky astronauts trying to keep their heads in their space helmets.

Cartreine and his team have created a sophisticated automated flow chart that astronauts can use to engage in a popular therapy method called “problem solving treatment”. One problem though, according to Dr. Mark Hagel, “problem” is a word that’s apparently incompatible with the treatment of intense, motivated and problem free astronauts.

Hagal, the virtual therapist himself, spent hours shooting retakes of his advice snippets in order to avoid addressing an astronaut’s mental problem as a “problem” but rather as a “malfunction” or “challenge” — words that astronauts responded to more viscerally.

No word yet on how exactly a AIM chatbot is supposed to help astronauts suffering from long term isolation and debilitating feelings of dehumanization.

[AP]

Ah planet Earth, ever the freak show. The Cabrillo Marine Aquarium in Southern California recently found this little nightmare.

And starting this November, you can have one of your very own at participating McDonalds restaurants! Introducing the McSquid Extra Value Meal: stop by your local McDonalds and let us drag your hunger to the depths of the abyss with ten powerfully strong tentacles. Meal includes french fries and a medium soft drink.

Scientists at the aquarium are calling it the Piglet Squid, Helicocranchia pfefferi, whereas I think something like, oh maybe, Great Ctulhu, the dreaded spawn of the stars, would fit just as well. Whichever, really, I like them both.

The following is a snippet of the press release the Aquarium put out as a poor excuse for an apology for unleashing this horror upon human kind.

This funny looking squid is about the size of a small avocado and can be found most commonly in the deepwater (greater than 100 m or 320 ft) of virtually all oceans. Its habit of filling up with water and the funny location of its siphone with a wild-looking ‘tuft’ of eight arms and two tentacles had prompted scientists to name it the piglet squid.

Anecdotal evidence (read: shitty horror movies) tells me that anything this simultaneously cute and unfathomably weird thrives on fooling people with its disarming looks and then pounces, feasting on their flesh once their guard is down. Squids and I have long had a respectful hatred of each other; I hardly needed this Star Trek looking mother fucker coming along giving me even more reasons to move as far from an ocean as geographically possible.

[Zooillogix]

Tonight I ask you to pass legislation to prohibit the most egregious abuses of medical research: human cloning in all its forms; creating or implanting embryos for experiments; creating human-animal hybrids; and buying, selling or patenting human embryos.

Like the Terminator warning a strong and beautiful Sarah Connor, President Bush warned us in 2006. George valiantly and absurdly cautioned us about letting scientists toy with our embryos, least we be overrun by killer human-animal hybrids… terminators.

The future is now. The uprising has begun. It started in Japan. Watch in horror:

"I'm not a monkey."

Although I still consider my cat to be completely ignorant of its existence, apparently chimps “have a capacity for high-level abstraction.” In other words, they can understand that a banana exists in a time and space beyond its immediate, delicious satisfaction. They supposedly have feelings, empathy, and are capable of acts of good will.

The article further questions whether or not these “human-like” cognitive phenomena warrant the extension of human rights to chimpanzees or other “thinking” animals.

Universal living thing rights aside, I’m not sure many people would pass the decency criteria for peoplehood. Exhibit #1: one of the article’s comments:

Correction bubbles, he’s running for president.

[Wired, Science]