Bridget

Many were a bit shocked last November, when the first ever recordings of Elvis Presley went for more than three times the estimated price, fetching a record $300,000. At the time, the winning internet-based bidder was unnamed, but it has now been revealed to be none other than Jack White, and he is going to make the music available to the public on Record Store Day (April 18).

The 1953 acetate features Presley singing the ballads “My Happiness” and “That’s When The Heartaches Begin” and was recorded at the legendary Sun Records for a mere $4. The King apparently took it to the home of Ed Leek to hear it, as his family did not own a record player at the time. Amazingly, Presley left the record at Leek’s home, and it was passed down to his niece who eventually put it up for auction.

The two songs will be released via White’s Third Man Records as an exclusive vinyl single, and knowing White’s past for making unique vinyl, there will be some tricks and treats as well. In fact, White made the actual delivery of the original quite an adventure, having the original handed to Billboard’s Joe Levy by a mysterious man with a black suitcase tell him to rush to Nashville. Upon arriving at the Third Man offices, White said, “This is the first recording ever made by Elvis Presley. On Record Store Day, Third Man Records will issue this on vinyl.”

While Dave Grohl is technically the ambassador for this year’s incarnation of Record Store Day, there’s no question that the Presley release will be one of the most in-demand items available. Along with the normal hordes of record collectors, with such an item in the mix, it will perhaps help to bring an older or at least different audience into the Record Store Day festivities.

With White putting this piece of music history into a publically available space, it makes the recent shenanigans by Wu-Tang Clan seem all the more childish, as music is meant to be heard, not stored away for centuries in an attempt to be artsy. Perhaps Jack White will find a way to acquire “Once Upon A Time In Shaolin” and give the public even more music they no doubt deserve.

Joel Freimark hosts a daily music-related webseries HERE and you can follow his daily music musings and suggestions HERE as well.

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Cedric Laquieze's first Flower Skeleton

Yet another piece of art that we’d love to see animated using stop motion.

Last spring, a number of experts suggested that a huge El Niño would arrive in late 2014, perhaps similar to the monster event in 1997–'98 that wreaked havoc on weather patterns across the globe, bringing big droughts and floods.

But things didn't quite pan out that way. El Niño is only just now surfacing in the Pacific Ocean, scientists from NOAA's Climate Prediction Center announced on March 5 — much later than expected. That means sea-surface temperatures in the eastern tropical Pacific are elevated, and local rainfall patterns are shifting in response.

And, despite the apocalyptic predictions from a year ago, this looks like a very weak El Niño, with only a 50 to 60 percent chance of lasting through summer, NOAA said. So it's unlikely to alter global weather patterns very drastically. That's good news for some people (fewer floods in Peru, for instance), but bad news for others.

In particular, this weak El Niño is probably emerging too late in the season to bring heavy rain to drought-stricken California, as many people in the state once hoped. At most, El Niño might bring a bit more spring rain to the Gulf Coast:

Difference from average March–May precipitation (left) and how often that anomaly occurred (right) during 10 El Niño years between 1953 and 2010. NOAA Climate.gov graphic by Fiona Martin, based on data provided by Emily Becker, Climate Prediction Center.

The one big question, meanwhile, is whether global warming and this weak El Niño could still combine to make 2015 the hottest year on record. That's possible, though not yet certain.

Global temperatures are already going up over time, thanks to all the carbon dioxide we've added to the atmosphere. According to NASA, 2014 was likely the hottest year on record. But there was no El Niño that year — and El Niño years tend to be a bit hotter than average, as more heat gets transferred from the ocean to the surface. So 2015 could potentially see even higher highs:

(NASA)

This will be a story to watch throughout the year. Below is a more detailed rundown of how, exactly, El Niño works, why it took so long to show up, and how it could alter weather around the world.

A simple explanation of how El Niño works

El Niño is a phenomenon that occurs irregularly in the tropical Pacific Ocean every two to seven years and affects weather all around the world.

To understand how it works, we first need to see what the equatorial Pacific looks like under normal, or "neutral," conditions:

1) Neutral conditions in the equatorial Pacific Ocean:

(William Kessler/NOAA/PMEL)

Normally, the tropical Pacific features strong trade winds that blow ocean water from east to west. All that warm water piles up in the west, near Indonesia. Meanwhile, back east along South America, frigid water deep down in the ocean gets pulled up closer to the surface, cooling the waters around Peru.

The result? During "neutral" conditions, sea levels are about half a meter higher in Indonesia than they are in South America. Sea surface temperatures near Indonesia are also about 8°C (or 14.4°F) warmer than they are near Peru. That temperature difference creates a convective loop in the atmosphere that, in turn, reinforces the trade winds.

Because the Pacific Ocean is so vast, this system is a major driving force in the global climate. The large warm pool of water near Indonesia causes the air above it to rise, creating rainfall. And this system shapes the jet streams that guide weather and storms around the world.

But every so often, along comes El Niño to disrupt the usual pattern:

2) El Niño conditions:

(William Kessler/NOAA/PMEL)

For reasons that are still being debated, those prevailing Pacific trade winds can get disrupted every few years.

When that happens, all that warm water that was piled up near Indonesia starts sloshing back toward the east, pulled back down by gravity. What's more, the underwater layer known as the thermocline starts sinking. That means there's less cold water rising up from the deep ocean near South America — so the waters near Peru start warming up.

This causes sea surface temperatures in the east and central Pacific to start rising and the trade winds to weaken further. What's more, rainfall starts following that warm pool of water as it travels eastward. That's why El Niño is usually associated with drier weather in places like Indonesia and Australia, as well as heavier rains in places like Peru.

Scientists typically declare an official El Niño when sea-surface temperatures in the equatorial Pacific Ocean (namely, the Niño 3.4 region) rise 0.5°C above their historical average for three months in a row — and once atmospheric conditions and rainfall patterns shift accordingly.

A strong El Niño often has large ripple effects all around the world, especially in the winter — though it depends on how strong the El Niño actually is. For example, monsoons in the Indian Ocean can weaken. And the jet stream starts stretching from the Eastern Pacific across the southern United States, bringing rainfall and storms along:

Typical effects of El Niño in the winter:

NOAA

In addition, during an El Niño, the warmer tropical waters transfer heat into the atmosphere, which can raise global average surface temperatures. The very strong 1997–'98 El Niño, combined with global warming, helped push global temperatures in 1998 to new highs. (The next record came in 2005, after a weaker El Niño.)

A strong El Niño never showed up in 2014

That's the big question. Back in the spring of 2014, it really did look like a strong El Niño would emerge later in the year.

A series of winds that begin in the Indian Ocean — known as the Madden-Julian Oscillation — began blowing eastward, counteracting and weakening those trade winds in the Pacific. That allowed some of that warm water piled up near Indonesia to start sloshing back toward the east.

As a result, by June, sea temperatures in the central equatorial Pacific (the Niño 3.4 region) had risen 0.5°C above their historical average. It looked like an El Niño was on the way.

But then… things got messy. Atmospheric conditions over the Pacific Ocean didn't shift as expected. Specifically, scientists weren't seeing the change in atmospheric pressure over both the eastern and western Pacific that you'd expect during an El Niño. (See this blog post from NOAA for a fuller explanation.) So they weren't ready to declare an official El Niño.

In August, Kevin Trenberth, a climate scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, told me that the waters in the western Pacific hadn't cooled off as quickly as expected — so we didn't seen the sort of west-to-east temperature gradient that can sustain a strong El Niño.

One possible reason for that? The Pacific Ocean everywhere has been extremely warm all over in 2014. "When the ocean surface is warm all over, there's no strong temperature gradient for the atmospheric component to build from," wrote Angela Fritz of Capital Weather Gang.

But a weak El Niño has emerged in early 2015

It appears so. On March 5, 2015, scientists at NOAA's climate prediction center were finally ready to declare that a weak El Niño was underway.

Specifically, they noted that sea surface temperatures in the Niño 3.4 region have been at least 0.5°C above their historical average since September:

Sea surface temperature departures from average (based on 1981–2010) at the end of February 2015. NOAA map by Emily Becker, Climate Prediction Center.

And, more crucially, the atmosphere was finally responding in turn — with more rain over the central Pacific, and less rain over Indonesia. That had been the missing element thus far. (See this post by Emily Becker for a more detailed explanation.)

NOAA's forecasters note, however, that this is a very "weak" El Niño that is forming far later in the year than it normally does. And it only has a 50 to 60 percent chance of persisting through the summer.

This weak El Niño isn't enough to help California's drought

NOAA's scientists think the impacts will be pretty minimal. "Due to the weak strength of the El Niño, widespread or significant global weather pattern impacts are not anticipated," the agency noted in a press release.

"However, certain impacts often associated with El Niño may appear this spring in parts of the Northern Hemisphere, such as wetter-than-normal conditions along the U.S. Gulf Coast." Becker offered this map showing historical March-May precipitation conditions in the United States:

Difference from average March–May precipitation (left) and how often that anomaly occurred (right) during 10 El Niño years between 1953 and 2010. NOAA Climate.gov graphic by Fiona Martin, based on data provided by Emily Becker, Climate Prediction Center.

In particular, Becker notes that the news isn't very good for California: "Only about 3 of the past 10 El Niño years exhibited above-average rainfall in California during March-April-May," she notes. "Especially since the rainy season in the West is winding down by March, it is unlikely that these current El Niño conditions will lead to substantial, drought-breaking rains.

But even a weak El Niño could make 2015 the hottest year on record

Thanks to global warming, the Earth's average surface temperature has been going up over time. But there's a lot of variation from year to year. El Niño years tend to be a bit hotter than average. La Niña years tend to be a bit cooler than average. Like so:

(NASA)

Why is that? As humans put more greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, we're trapping more and more heat on the Earth's surface. But more than 90 percent of that extra heat is absorbed by the oceans. So subtle interactions between the ocean and the atmosphere can make a big difference for surface temperatures.

During La Niña events, more of that heat is trapped beneath the ocean surface. When a strong El Niño hits, more of that heat is essentially transferred to the surface. That's why the Earth's average surface temperatures reached new highs in 1998 — due to the combination of global warming and an extremely strong El Niño.

What was remarkable about 2014 is that it was likely the hottest year on record even without an El Niño event — a sign that the Earth keeps getting warmer overall. That suggests that an El Niño in 2015 could push temperatures up to new highs.

In January, NASA's Gavin Schmidt explained at a press conference that temperatures typically peak about three months after an El Niño event. And, he added, it's possible that a weak El Niño could help 2015 set a record. But we'll have to wait and see.

Further reading: NOAA's ENSO blog is a terrific source of information for updates on El Niño.

Keys is a MIDI keyboard, built with aspiring piano students in mind. It's a pretty small guy, making it a great traveling companion (who says you can't play a keyboard by the campfire?). But the coolest thing about Keys is it incorporates gestures—so you can travel up and down octaves by just waving your hands.

Read more...

The most amazing thing about Harrison Ford's crash-landing at Penmar Golf Course in the northeast corner of Venice on Los Angeles' congested and dense Westside is that he survived— and nobody on the ground was killed. Officials say the pilot (they aren't confirming it's Ford)  The long, skinny golf course...

plizm:

Iceland, Blue Lagoon Spa, 2012
Mauricio López

Plants and Animals

The discovery of a new family of moth is one of the most exciting finds in entomology in the past 40 years. It was found not in some remote and unexplored region of Australia, but right in our backyard on Kangaroo Island in South Australia. The island that is only 100km from Adelaide and 13km from the mainland, that has been settled since 1836 and is one of the loveliest destinations for a holiday.

arieces:

Ohmygod

blazepress:

Musical notes waterfall.

The best part of having a pet (besides someone to blame your farts on) is the bonding you can feel when you do when you're participating in their favorite activity. For dogs (playing fetch) and cats (getting the shit scratched out of you) it's easy. But how do you bond with your adorable turtle?

Read more...

"Bitter Honey" by Bob Doucette….check out the bee with the top hat….cracks me up every time!

An octopus is getting quite a bit of attention this week for its photography skills. After noticing a camera placed in its enclosure to photograph it, the eight-legged creature grabbed the camera, turned it around, and unintentionally captured a portrait of the photographer.

This past Monday, a digital media producer at Middlebury College in Vermont named Benjamin Savard set out to shoot some photos of an octopus on campus that some neuroscience students have been studying. He placed a GoPro with a waterproof case inside the tank, pointed the lens at the octopus, and left it to capture a series of rapid-fire photographs.

The octopus noticed the camera, reach out with a tentacle, and turned the camera away from itself and toward Savard, who was holding a DSLR and observing the octopus.

Amused by what he had accidentally captured, Savard shared the photos online through Reddit, where they became extremely popular. The story has since hit the mainstream press, with everyone from NBC News to the Washington Post talking about the little octopus that could (take pictures).

When people began accusing Savard of faking the story, he responded by posting a sequence of photos showing what happened:

Savard also created an animated GIF with the sequence of photos to show it as a video sequence:

It doesn’t appear that the octopus was aware of the art it was creating, though. Savard tells the Washington Post that immediately after pointing the camera at him, the animal tried to eat it.

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P.S. This definitely isn’t the first case of an octopus stealing a photographer’s camera. We’ve previously shared stories of this happening out in the ocean here, here, and here. They generally don’t capture any usable shots though, so this octopus wins in that category.

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Image credits: Photographs by Benjamin Savard/Middlebury College

@m.obstr


@m.obstr

Mobstr

We don’t have enough hours in a day to listen to all the new music that is out today, but we will do our best to share with you a small sampling of our favorite. Today’s Music Dispatch features a special performance and remix of Purity Ring, an amazing cover by Violent Femmes, an experimental demo by Blood Orange, and a truly insane interview by ESPN with Action Bronson. Read on and have fun.

Purity Ring lit up the Late Night With Seth Meyers stage last night, performing “Begin Again” off their recently released second album, Another Eternity. While the performance was on point, the show was stolen by Corin Roddick’s futuristic, impact-responsive, illuminating drum kit. Any one else suddenly in the mood to watch Blade Runner? [Pigeons and Planes]

Half the fun of a synthpop album release is hearing other artists’ reinterpretations of the tracks. For Purity Ring, we are treated to DJ Fei-Fei’s astrally expansive remix of “Push Pull”. Fei-Fei provided Nerdist with her thoughts on the track, stating, “Purity Ring’s new album Another Eternity is pure gold. Megan and Corin continue to inspire me on so many levels–even way back when I started writing my first album.  Hope you all enjoy my remix of ‘Push Pull’. It’s one of my favs.”

Some bands get better with age, some lose their appeal. And some, like Violent Femmes, remain comfortably in a place of absolute perfection. The band is releasing a four song EP, after 15 years without a new record, for April 18th’s Record Store Day, titled Happy New Year. The band has shared they will be recording more new work and touring with Barenaked Ladies. This first track, “Love Love Love Love Love” is actually a cover of LA’s Jake Brebes. [BuzzbandsLA]

Florence + the Machine played four new songs, including two debuts, at London’s Tufnell Park Dome. Among the new, explosive tracks were How Big How Blue How Beautiful’s title track and “What Kind of Man”, which we had heard before, as well as “St Jude” and “Third Eye” (above). Visit SPIN to watch them all.

As we reported earlier, Weezer’s Rivers Cuomo is developing a pilot based on his life with Twentieth Century Fox Television. That pilot, Detour, now has it’s Rivers: British actor Ben Aldridge of the musical adaptation of American Psycho, fan-favorite Lark Rise to Candleford, and other productions probably. [Deadline]

Action Bronson visited ESPN’s Highly Questionable to discuss his new album, Mr. Wonderful. I could tell you what was discussed, or I could just share this quote, out of context: “There it is. Boom. It’s like you strike gold. Yahtzee. From there on, I was in a trance. There was salvia involved, there was sage being burned, there was indians coming in and singing with tribal anthems.” [Stereogum]

We are digging this intriguing demo from Blood Orange, which blends easy-listening keys with looping classical strings. Take  listen to “Delancey” and let us know what you think in the comments below.

Antemasque, the new offshoot band from members of the Mars Volta and At the Drive-In, is being investigated after accusations and video (above) arose of the band throwing a plastic kettle of boiling water into the crowd during a show in Auckland, New Zealand. The kettle collided with a group in the audience, inflicting burns on at least one person. People, unless you’re defending a castle, please don’t throw kettles of boiling water. That’s just a dangerous and generally shitty thing to do. [Consequence of Sound]

Annie Clark, aka St. Vincent, interviewed one of her favorite musicians, post-punk Gang of Four’s Andy Gill, for the Talkhouse Music Podcast. It’s very endearing to hear one music icon nerd-out over guitars with another music icon. [Talkhouse]

Now that Aphex Twin is in the groove of putting out tracks again, he cannot be stopped. Next up will be a white label 12″, featuring “MARCHROMT30a Edit 2b 96″, a bonus track from the Japanese deluxe edition of Syro, and a new version of “XMAS_EVET10 [120]”. [Pitchfork]

Good news, rabid Nirvana fans! The price of Kurt Cobain’s childhood home has dropped from half a mil to $400k! Experience the sheer joy of living in Aberdeen, Washington, with the satisfaction of knowing you paid four times the average market price for a house in that area! Check out the full listing here. [Stereogum]

And finally, we leave you with this little anecdote: McDonald’s asked indie-darlings Ex Cops to perform at their SXSW showcase. Being featured in a massive showcase would usually be a pretty big honor for a band at SXSW. The only problem was, McDonald’s, a $97 billion company, did not have a budget to pay the talent. Ex Cops responded with this perturbed facebook post, which has since gone viral [CBS]. Enjoy:

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Feature image via Frencpresspodcast.com

Actor Harrison Ford, 72, was seriously injured after crash-landing a small plane on a golf course near the Santa Monica Municipal Airport in Southern California, as first reported by NBC News. Ford was alert and conscious at the scene, a fire official said at a news conference late this afternoon.

The Associated Press cites local authorities saying the Ryan PT-22 Recuit vintage flier went down "around 2:30 p.m. [PST] Thursday on the green at Penmar Golf Course in the Venice area of Los Angeles." No one on the ground was injured.

The plane, seen below in a tweet from KTLA executive producer Christine Miceli, appears mostly intact. Other images show the nose of the plane having taken the brunt of the impact. Read More

The Artiphon Instrument 1 is revolutionary. The name says it all: It's the one and only instrument you'll ever need. Thanks to groundbreaking technology, Instrument 1 transforms into any instrument, from guitar to drum to piano — even a sitar or saxophone. And unlike a lot of new instruments, it sounds and plays amazingly well.

Source: Artiphon/KickstarterLifelong musician Mike Butera invented Instrument 1 after earning his doctorate in sound studies at Virginia Tech, according to a Kickstarter project video. He noticed that what was missing from modern instrumentation was a multi-use instrument that anyone could use and for any purpose at all.

That led Butera and his Nashville-based Artiphon team to start work on a prototype four years ago. On Tuesday, they launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund large-scale production of the result. Read More

Here's what's happening in L.A. this weekend. [ more › ]

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Photo by Ben and Kaz Askins via.

Smokers, as any variety-club comedian will tell you, are a dying breed. Just under 18 percent of adults in the United States now voluntarily suck carcinogenic fumes into their breathing apparatus, compared with around 37 percent in the 70s. Cigarettes are being nubbed out under the sharply swiveling soles of a generation that prefers the taste of fresh air to an air of insouciance, that somehow acknowledges the essential meaningless of the universe and pointlessness of existence but doesn't take it as carte blanche to actively do their lungs in.

Yes, despite motivational gurus sparking widespread confusion with their "winners never quit" spiel, quitting smoking is a growth industry. E-cigarette shops are springing up like cancerous cells in our cities, there among the head shops, bookies, tattooists, and bargain boozers administering the populace's soft addictions.

I've been successful at giving up smoking myself. Three times, actually. The first time, I was still a teenager, still immortal, before I came to realize that the cure for death—a.k.a. religion—was a hoax. So I hit the burners again. I enjoyed it for several years, too. Then I stopped enjoying it but carried on anyway. Later, I read a book that told me I'd never really enjoyed it. All I'd done was assuage cravings and give myself temporary relief. That one after a slap-up meal? With the cappuccino and paper? Down the at the bar with that first cold beer? All fleeting satiation.

That book's title was The Easy Way to Stop Smoking (EWTSS), which I'd serendipitously spotted in the library the same day a forlorn government-sponsored SmokeFree Quit Kit had struggled through the letterbox, promising to tackle one of the most addictive substances on the planet with a plastic hand toy called "tangles." Apparently, more than 13 million copies of EWTSS have been shifted—a fraction over the number of cigarettes its author, 100-a-day former accountant Allen Carr, had sucked the tar from over his 33-year smoking journey—while it claims to have helped 53.3 percent of its readers quit.

How does Carr do it? Well, he actively encourages you to smoke as you read the book, while hitting you with short, sharp chapters drumming home the point that smoking's nothing to do with habit but just a straightforward chemical addiction, anthropomorphized as the Nicotine Monster. You gotta slay the Monster (more scientifically: stop nicotine hijacking the brain's dopamine circuitry). Yes, the Monster will be lurking malevolently, but after three days he gets weaker, and after five you're more or less free of his grasp. (Incidentally, this is why e-cigs, patches, gums, and suchlike are, in Carr's view, pointless: You're simply swapping one dependency for another.)

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A woman smoking an e-cig. Photo by Michael Dorausch via Wikipedia

There are no scare stories—"We smoke when we are nervous," Carr writes. "Tell smokers that cigarettes are killing them and the first thing they will do is light one." Only the relentless demystification of the so-called benefits and the percussive message that, once you realize what you're actually doing, stopping doing it is, in fact, easy. There's no hair-shirt sacrifice, no heroic struggle; it's a pleasure, a great release, a joyous gambol into the fragrant meadows of a snout-free future.

EWTSS may have been the deal-sealer, but there were already several elements in place. Glib as it sounds, you first have to really, really want to do it, not simply flirt with the notion. I was primed and ready, and not by staring at images of emphysema on my cig packet. Nor by the prohibitive cost. Nor the social stigma of skulking around in the smoke-cages, for there are still options, places where the smoker is still embraced, still valued: somewhere like Greece, say, where, just as in the UK and the US, the ostracized minority are forced outside—the non-smokers, it's true—and where Stigma's just another tobacco brand.

No, the impetus for quitting was wheezing. Increasingly, as the cold, damp fingers of English winter mornings reached in to tickle my chest, it sounded like a set of samples for some Aphex Twin concept album: the sleeping bag zipper; the plaintive seagull; the howling alleyway; the Peruvian pan-pipe-band sound-check; the sliding tarpaulins; the basketball court jostling; the cellar door. Not an attractive post-coital soundtrack.

Four years I went without a cigarette—four years without the desire for a cigarette—only I didn't completely slay the Monster. Like some slasher-movie psycho-killer, he was waiting at the bottom of the garden for me to leave the door ajar. You allow yourself one here, a couple there (followed by the magic five days off to convince yourself you're on top of it), and that's it: His foot was not only back in the door; he was sleeping on my sofa. Indefinitely. Smokes: here to stay.

It was probably after about six months' smoking as a non-smoker before I became a smoker again. (it's like the Sorites paradox: If you remove one grain at a time from a heap of sand, at what stage does it cease to be a heap?) And once my smoking was smoking—fully fledged, dedicated, non-negotiable—that frisson of smug self-satisfaction you get from answering "no" when people ask, "Are you a smoker?" was nixed. Gone in a puff of smoke. And no matter how clean the next break, I didn't think I'd ever get it back. Yep: back on the hamster wheel. Ich bin ein smoker.

Another resource I could no longer fall back on was the demonization of the smoker, a central tactic of Carr's that had not only helped wean me in the first place, but also cocooned me from relapsing. In moments of weakness I'd contemplate the old men with cracked leathery faces and brown teeth hacking up greenies outside bars; I'd watch the smokers' mugs—the mug smokers—outside A&E departments, putting up with the rain, the cold, the noxious fumes of cars for their urgent hourly tug, smoking as though about to board a 12-hour flight. Smoking as if their lives depended on it.

Of course, shame makes you want to quit again almost immediately (as soon as those four cartons of duty-free run out, anyway). So you revisit your old savior, your panacea: The Easy Way to Stop Smoking. Only, this time it's not so easy. Suddenly, you're immune to its rhetorical sledgehammers. Second time round, "the five-day rule," previously a marker of the freedom on the horizon, becomes the point at which the Nicotine Monster rears its head, suggesting you have a reward for your abstinence: perhaps a few drags on a sweet, sweet cigarette?

[youtube src='//www.youtube.com/embed/2jxPvmV0rrQ' width='640' height='360']

Watch this and try to resist having a cigarette

The book became the self-help equivalent of a condom: usable only once. Paradoxically, Easy Way made you realize that quitting smoking gets more and more difficult each time. First time, you're faced with the improbability of a future free of those heavy chains. Second time, you know you've previously done it—and thought you'd beaten it—but there's also the recent knowledge that you hadn't beaten it. Because there you were doing it again, idiot. No worries, though. Since you've given up once before, you're sure you can do it again. So you carry on smoking. You get complacent. The sense of jeopardy is lost. Old Nic' sneaks in again. And the more you smoke, the less confident you'll slowly feel that you can ever pull it off, so the more you defer it... Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck.

A friend in the midst of an OD-flavored nervous breakdown once said to me, somewhat surprisingly: "The thing that depresses me most is the cigarettes." They were of course symbolic of his self-destructive tendencies, yet he couldn't take the risk of trying to quit because to do so and fail would be psychologically more harmful than contemplating one's chronic inability to quit. At least while you're smoking you have the hope that you'll soon knock it on the head. When you've crashed and burned—crashed a butt, burnt your esophagus—there's only abjection. As the old proverb goes: better to have never tried than to have tried and failed. The addicted smoker tormented by, yet flirting with, quitting is thus always trying to get to the penultimate cigarette, not the last one (I've smoked a few last ones, and my last last one didn't turn out to be my last after all, though maybe the next last one will).

And here's the rub. Each time you succumb, trudging with guilty avidity to the corner store for some smokes, the mountain gets higher, the slope more slippery. You'll always feel like shit for having fallen off the wagon, for having bought those last-gasp gaspers. You'll feel like the Monster will never leave you alone. So don't rush in. Be ready. Know your enemy. Read Sun Tzu. Get it right. This is a worthy fucking adversary, and unless you treat it as such, you're fucked. And remember: If you can stop, breathing will feel like a breath of fresh air.

Follow Scott on Twitter.

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Wall Street intern cum porn star Veronica Vain. Photos courtesy ArrangementFinders.com

Porn has entered the final stages of its takeover of all aspects of society. One of the clearest examples of this was Pornhub's entry into the music industry by launching a record company last October and shooting an NSFW hip-hop video with Coolio. Now another dating website is blurring the lines further. In January, ArrangementFinders.com appointed Kayden Kross—an award-winning porn star—as its president. What initially seemed like a publicity stunt soon had real consequences: Last month, the company shot its first ArrangementFinders.com-sponsored porno, Screwing Wall Street: The ArrangementFinders IPO.

It seems that the future of porn is in product placement. The next time you go to your favorite tube site and feverishly type in "gangbang," you may soon encounter close-ups of an energy drink while your hands are down your pants. Thirsty?

[youtube src='//www.youtube.com/embed/grBAL5vI7DE' width='640' height='360']

The adult-entertainment industry has changed dramatically over the past half-decade. When YouTube launched, in 2005, its porn equivalent was bound to surface. Within a year, three such sites existed, and adult DVD sales began to plummet. The number of porn-centric tube sites where you can fulfill nearly any sexual fantasy for free (see Rule 34 of the internet: if it exists, there's a porn version) is now in the thousands.

In 2014, Pornhub claims, it had 78.9 billion video views (that's about ten porno views per person on earth). Meanwhile, adult production companies are now facing bankruptcy and are desperately looking for new ways to profit from their films. Unless you partner with a tube site, latch on to the camming trend, or make high-quality content that's so effed up people want to pay for it because they can't get it anywhere else, you're shit outta luck.

Could some carefully displayed branding change all that?

"Product placement is just not in porn, and there's a lot of room for that to happen," Kross told me. "It's not only daring and risk-taking, it's incredibly smart because most people do watch porn. More searches are for porn than any other one subject, so a lot of people are going to hear about ArrangementFinders without meaning to."

ArrangementFinders.com, a sugar-daddy dating website that helps young women coordinate relationships with older, wealthier men, is no stranger to using porn stars for endorsements. Previously it's had deals with Bree Olson, Charlie Sheen's ex, and Sydney Leathers. However, this is the first time the company has gone as far as appointing a porn star to run the company.

Kross has been in the adult industry since she was scouted while attending the University of California in 2006, and has been in more than 100 films since. But her off-camera skills are also impressive—she's been published in the New York Times and was a host on G4. Almost immediately upon taking her seat at the helm of ArrangementFinders, Kross successfully pitched the Toronto-based company the idea of putting its brand in an adult film, but she knew it had to be with the right starlet.

Remember that Wall Street intern who got caught taking nudes at the office where she worked, quit, and declared to the world, via Twitter, "I left finance because if I'm going to take it up the ass for a decade, I'd prefer to get into a hall of fame for it"? Well, meet the star of Screwing Wall Street: The ArrangementFinders IPO: Veronica Vain (a.k.a. Paige Jennings).

Vain was approached by a number of major adult film companies with lucrative offers before making her decision. "I started thinking that if maybe if I took one of the other deals, I would have been furthering the current porn business model for girls," Vain told me over the phone in Manhattan while walking to do some last-minute filming in the financial district. "The biggest perk to me for the deal was that it was something that was unprecedented in the industry—the first product placement in a porn film,"

The film itself plays on Vain's notoriety, placing her in the role of a Wall Street broker trying to manipulate the shares of a company. That's where the branding comes in—the company whose shares she is fucking with is ArrangementFinders.com. The first clip was released on Pornhub on February 13; in its first 48 hours, it was viewed a million times—a new record for a first-time adult star.

"[In the past] maybe you went out and got porn quietly and hid it under your mattress or wherever," Kross said. "People talk about it now. People follow porn stars on Twitter, which is an admission that they watch porn... It's a snowball thing, and it's taking off."

Kross and Vain agree that the porn industry is evolving—in the sense that it's meshing with everyday culture and that the business side is on the verge of a major transformation.

"If the movie is being partially funded by product placement, you don't have to worry so much about your costs, and therefore your profitability goes up, which could be immediately really amazing for the industry," Vain explained to me. She said the potential options for product placement is limitless: e-cigarettes, lube, condoms, and even energy drinks.

Screwing Wall Street: The ArrangementFinders IPO will be released serially over the course of the next month and is slated to come out on DVD in April. Though it's the first porn release with product placement, it certainly won't be the last­.

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The rhythm game genre seemed unstoppable for a number of years as both Activision's stable of developers and Harmonix cranked out sequel after sequel to the Guitar Hero and Rock Band franchises, respectively.

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Photos of a frog riding a beetle have been flooding the Internet over the past month. Think it looks cute and adorable? Reactions to the series of photos have been split between blind praise and outrage over the authenticity of the photo-story and welfare of the subjects. So, did this scene really occur naturally as claimed? We don’t think so, and here’s why.

In compiling this article, we spoke to herpetologists (those who study amphibians and reptiles, including frogs and lizards), and particularly frog experts for their take on these photos. These are people who spent most of their lives studying frogs, and there are no better people who understand the anatomy and biology of frogs.

Question #1. Would the frog jump onto the beetle?

Giddy up! Photographer Hendy Mp captured this daring frog hop a ride on a beetle and it even stuck its front leg in the air cowboy-style. –Daily Mail

This frog, Rhacophorus sp., is nocturnal. In the day, it is not active and will not hop around, much less onto a beetle. Even if placed beside the beetle, it would remain indifferent to the beetle unless it were provoked or hurt… in which case, it would jump away rather than onto the beetle.

Question #2. Can the frog’s mouth remain open in so many of the shots?

Frogs could possibly open their mouths like what’s seen in the photos, but aside from when they are eating something, it is a sure sign of distress. The only time when the frog had its mouth open naturally is when a frog is incredibly distressed — like when it’s being eaten by a snake.

Question #3. Are the positions of the hands natural?

The fingers on the raised hand are in a very unnatural position and not possible on the frog’s own accord. It is like twisting a human’s fingers to awkward positions that are impossible without external force.

Question #4. Were the subjects discovered in the wild?

There is strong evidence posted by the photographer himself that the frogs and many of his subjects were captive animals (i.e. “pets”). Those photos are not published here due to privacy reasons.

Here’s one of the quotes from a herpetologist we spoke to:

I can’t stand these images. To someone very familiar with frogs, it’s really sad to see the poor frog in this situation. I don’t believe that these photos are of a naturally occurring situation. To me, they appear to be highly staged, and there is evidence that the frog is distressed. Frogs are so amazing without being used as props, it’s upsetting that they felt it necessary.

Staged photography is not prevalent only in certain countries. Sony Photography Awards 2014 shortlisted a similar and highly dubious entry from Europe.

How a supposedly prestigious photography award by a well-known brand shortlisted such an entry in the “Nature and Wildlife” category is inconceivable. However, at least this was clarified to be shot in a controlled environment during a workshop.

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This article is not a personal attack against the photographers — each of them is talented in his or her own right. The purpose of this post is to discourage such genres of fake nature photography and to educate the public on the ethical questions involved.

We also hope that the various news sites, platforms and camera brands would STOP promoting these fake nature photos using BS stories. Nature is already intriguing and beautiful on its own, that staging such unnatural scenes is an insult to mother nature herself.

The next time you see a similar photo that claims to be natural, please share this article for everyone to understand the questionable ethics involved in taking such “perfect timed shots”.

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About the author: This article was contributed by an anonymous group of nature photographers who have started a campaign against faked nature photography. You can follow along with their efforts through the new Facebook page “Truths Behind Fake Nature Photography.” This article originally appeared here.

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Image credits: Photographs by Hendy Mp/Solent News

The difficulties in giving justice to the crossover between music and art as a visual exhibition are clearly evident in “Björk,” MoMA’s retrospective of the prolific Icelandic musician opening in New York City this Sunday, March 8. The show was conceived and organized by Klaus Biesenbach, Chief Curator at Large at MoMA and Director of MoMA PS1, who, beginning with Kraftwerk in 2012, has made ambitious advancements in creating an immersive sound experience in the museum’s physical space.

In 2013, Australian architecture firm Studio505 completed the Lotus Building, a community center set atop an artificial lake in Wujin, China. The city government commissioned the sculptural building to serve as a public park and multi-use space with exhibition and conference rooms that are open to the public. The building extends two stories under water and visitors must enter it from below and ascend to a cathedral-like peek with large windows that allow for plenty of natural light. A creative architectural creation, the Lotus Building is a modern-day landmark in an age when architecture is typically minimalistic and functional.

Cat That Is Secretly Plotting To Kill You

Cat That Is Secretly Plotting To Kill You

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Cat That Is Secretly Plotting To Kill You

Cat That Is Secretly Plotting To Kill You

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Cat That Is Secretly Plotting To Kill You

Cat That Is Secretly Plotting To Kill You

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Cats That Secretly Plotting To Kill You

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Cat That Is Secretly Plotting To Kill You

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Cat That Is Secretly Plotting To Kill You

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Cat That Is Secretly Plotting To Kill You

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Cat That Is Secretly Plotting To Kill You

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Cat That Is Secretly Plotting To Kill You

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Cat That Is Secretly Plotting To Kill You

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Cat That Is Secretly Plotting To Kill You

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Cat That Is Secretly Plotting To Kill You

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Cat That Is Secretly Plotting To Kill You

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Cat That Is Secretly Plotting To Kill You

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Cat That Is Secretly Plotting To Kill You

Cat That Is Secretly Plotting To Kill You

Cat That Is Secretly Plotting To Kill You

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Each September the Alaskan wood frogs freeze. Two-thirds of their body water turns to ice. If you picked them up, they would not move. If you bent one of their legs, it would break. Their hearts stop beating, their blood no longer flows and their glucose levels sky rocket. BUt then during the spring, they thaw out and return to normal. (Source)