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By Evan ~ August 25th, 2007. Filed under: world news.
Oh, hello. I didn’t hear you come in. I was just preparing for high tea at noon, why don’t you join me? We can discuss the news and poke fun at people together.
• I was sitting at the laundromat yesterday, drinking my Starbucks and reading the L.A. Times, when I came across this trippy article about two studies which explored using virtual reality to simulate out-of-body experiences. To be perfectly honest, I don’t think I’ve ever read such a cool article in a newspaper before. I mean, everything else in the news section of the paper yesterday was about spy reports, Iraq, the upcoming elections, or earthquakes. Then there was this gem on one of the back pages. It’s like reading an LSD missive. How many times have you opened a ledger or magazine and come across a quote like, “the studies, published in the journal Science, ‘call into question the axiom that everything you are is anchored in your body.’” Heavy, right? That’s not even the best part. “Instead…’what you regard as you is really a transient construct created by the brain from multiple sensory sources.’” I don’t know about you, but this shit sounds like a 1-A news story to me. Read the article. You might see trails. [story]
• In a related study (I’m just kidding, these are in no way related), “Chick magnets today look like cavemen.” I guess that’s good news for Val Kilmer. According to this insightful Yahoo! article, women throughout history “have selected males with relatively short upper faces. The region between the brow and the upper-lip is scrunched proportionately to the overall size of their heads.” I have no idea what that means, but according to them, two of the men who fit this description are Will Smith and Brad Pitt. Really? The gettin’-jiggy-with-it guy? Are you sure about this? [story]
• This sounds like something that might happen to me: A man was smoking on the back porch of his home when some bees flew out of the eaves trough. Instead of simply running into his house to get away from them, he flicked his lit cigarette at them, and it became lodged in the eaves trough, igniting the leaves and twigs that had collected there. The fire leveled his entire house, causing over 60K in damages. Yeah, sounds exactly like what I would do if I smoked and owned my own home. [story]
• A scientist who claims an experiment he performed in 1976 which “proved the presence of active microbial live in the topsoil of Mars” is excitedly studying the results from the two robots that have been snapping photographs of the red planet. Gilbert Levin (nice name, Jew boy!) has long believed that the 1976 mission to Mars found a highly reactive agent in Mars’ surface material was triggered by living organisms. This theory of his is widely panned by his colleagues, so now that the Spirit and Opportunity rovers have transmitted countless images for scientists to mull over, Levin again believes he’s received supporting evidence. Then Levin goes so far as to say we need to be careful if we decide to bring back samples from Mars, because they could be dangerous. Instead, he thinks we should bring those samples to moon and study them there in a moon laboratory. Yeah, good idea, Einstein. I don’t think it’s that easy to set up a manned laboratory on the moon. I mean, no one’s been there since 1969, I don’t think it’s the easiest thing on the world to do. How about studying samples on a space station. I think that would be a more viable option. [story]
• USA Today has a hilarious article on the Class of 2011, and what has served to influence their mindset as they prepare to enter their freshman year of college. For those born in the year 1989 (I was six years old!), Russia has always had a multi-party political system, standard car windows were no longer manually “rolled down”, they have grown up with bottled water, they never saw Pete Rose play baseball, rap music has always been mainstream, stadiums and rock tours have always had corporate names, FOX has been a major network, “Here’s Johnny!” is attributed to Jack Nicholson, not Johnny Carson. [story]
• In response to the USA Today article, Nick Douglas over at Valleywag has written about the Class of 2029, and what has served to influence their mindset as they prepare to enter their freshman year of college. For those born in the year 2007 (I was twenty-four!), no one’s ever worn a digital watch, they’ve always been able to use a cell phone on an airplane (and always had their own phone), they’ve never licked a stamp, they don’t know Fidel Castro or why he was ever a big deal, computers have never been beige, all TVs are “high definition,” quarters have never all looked the same, and they’ve never had to pull over to ask for directions. [story]
