Bridget

It’s Election Day in Chicago. Rahm Emanuel is hoping to win reelection after a not-so-great first term as mayor. While his office and political future hang in the balance, Emanuel has already achieved a legendary status in the political world, due mostly to his hard-charging personality and his mouth. Rahm Emanuel is one of the most profane motherfuckers in politics. Emanuel is known for cursing more than any other politician in recent memory. He once said, “I’m fucking good enough. I’m fucking smart enough, and goddamn it, people fear me.” If he’s not mailing dead fish to people or stabbing dinner tables or calling liberals “fucking retarded,” he can normally be found cursing up a storm somewhere. The wonderfully tailored fake twitter page @MayorEmanuel is a testament to his now time-honored foul language.

But let’s be real. All politicians curse.  There are numerous instances of lesser politicians, like state-level representatives, calling their constituents “fucking douchebags.” Things like that happen all the time. But sometimes it’s in Senate hearings about Wall Street shenanigans. Sometimes it’s just a thrown bird at the end of bad election day. Sometimes it’s the “one-fingered victory salute.”

Sometimes it’s in private. We all do it. You shouldn’t trust a politician who doesn’t curse. So, in honor of Rahmbo, let’s take a brief look at the best moments in the “most unparliamentary language.”

Obama

Obama may be all sweetness and light in public, but he’s probably dropping an f-bomb right now. When he’s not figuring out whose ass to kick

he can also be found calling Romney a “bullshitter” or Kanye a “jackass.” The best part of the Kanye video is the room breaking into laughter in the instant Obama realizes that what he just said was uttered in a room filled with reporters.

But my favorite is still the time from a debate-prep during the 2008 presidential race when Obama said,

“I often find myself trapped by the questions and thinking to myself, ‘You know, this is a stupid question, but let me … answer it.’ So when Brian Williams is asking me about what’s a personal thing that you’ve done (that’s green), and I say, you know, ‘Well, I planted a bunch of trees.’ And he says, ‘I’m talking about personal.’ What I’m thinking in my head is, ‘Well, the truth is, Brian, we can’t solve global warming because I fucking changed light bulbs in my house. It’s because of something collective’.”

Obama is also the only president to have read the words “You know that guy ain’t shit. Sorryass motherfucker got nothing on me” for the audio book version of his first memoir.

Bush

W’s cursing was always folksy and perfect.

After agreeing that the New York Times reporter was indeed a “big time” asshole, Cheney’s nickname on the campaign trail thereafter became “Big Time.” Cheney also famously told Vermont Senator Pat Leahy to “fuck yourself” on the Senate floor.

However, W’s most hilarious blue comment can in his “Yo Blair” hot mic moment when he wanted Hezbollah to “stop doing this shit.”

But the best, for good or ill, came on May 1, 2002 when Bush told his press secretary his real feelings about Saddam Hussein.

“I’m going to kick his sorry motherfucking ass all over the Middle East.”

Clinton

The Big Dog once called his impeachment hearings a “fucking coup d’etat.” He was right and it was probably the kindest way he ever referenced the shit show that was the Clinton Impeachment.

George H.W. Bush

In 1984, after then Vice President George Bush’s debate with democratic vice presidential nominee Geraldine Ferraro, Bush was recorded bragging about his performance.

“We tried to kick a little ass last night… woops. Oh god, he heard me… Turn that thing off.”

Reagan

The Gipper was an angel who never cursed, meaning that he was definitely not to be trusted. Apparently Reagan refused to even spell out curse words in his diary. Give me a fucking break.

Carter

When Teddy Kennedy was threatening to primary President Carter in 1980 Carter said,

“I’ll whip his ass.”

This probably the most vulgar the saint-like Carter ever got.

Ford

No one cares, but his wife got shitfaced and danced on the Cabinet Room table one time.

Nixon

Nixon is the reigning champion of political cursing. The term “expletive deleted” was pretty much created to edit the recordings made of conversations he had in the White House. There are too many to name here but he dropped bombs on everyone. Gays, minorities, jews, African Americans. No one escaped Nixon’s wrath. He apparently thought Truman cursed too much and once called Donald Rumsfeld a “son of a bitch.” Nixon also said, “People said my language was bad, but Jesus, you should have heard LBJ.” But the best comes from the time he was watching a Redskins game in the White House Residence.

LBJ

Johnson was crazy. And insanely racist for the president who passed Civil Rights and the Voting Rights Act. Besides knowing the difference between chicken shit and chicken salad, LBJ once said, “I want someone who will kiss my ass in Macy’s window, and say it smells like roses” and “I never trust a man unless I’ve got his pecker in my pocket.” There’s no way of knowing all the wild ways he pioneered new uses for the word “fuck,” but we can always rest easy knowing that he talked freely about his nuts and ass.

JFK

Kennedy probably dropped all kinds of f bombs, mostly during the Bay of Pigs. But he also called an Air Force general to bitch about them letting reporters into Jackie’s hospital room, calling a guy a “silly bastard” and the whole thing a “fuck up.”

Truman

Truman was legendarily foul-mouthed, and once called Nixon “a shifty-eyed goddamn liar.”

Washington

Old George was really against the troops using profanity. But that didn’t stop him from yelling at a general after the Battle of Monmouth.

“You damned poltoon, you never tried them.”

There are plenty examples of politicians cursing who aren’t the president. Here are a few of the best examples.

Jesse Jackson

Who could forget the time Reverend Jesse Jackson wanted to cut Obama’s nuts off?

Rob Ford

The former Toronto Mayor may smoke crack and talk about eating pussy in front of a bunch of cameras, but he can also curse in fluent Jamaican.

Michael Nutter

Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter is a badass. When Philly police caught a serial killer, he was quoted saying “We got the motherfucker.” Then when sports fans were celebrating a win by the Phillies, Nutter said “You can be joyous. You cannot be a jackass.” Then he went all in and called his constituents “idiots and assholes.”

Michael Bloomberg

Bloomberg couldn’t get through his speech at a Coney Island hot dog eating contest without asking “Who wrote this shit?” Start at 2:30.

Eric Garcetti

While celebrating a Kings victory, the L.A. mayor burst onto the national political scene in the best way possible with the historic line “But there are two rules in politics. They say never ever be pictured with a drink in your hand and never swear but this is a big fucking day. Way to go guys.”

Marion Barry

Then there’s the immortal line from DC’s Mayor for Life.

“Bitch set me up…I shouldn’t have come here…goddamn bitch.”

Rod Blagojevich

Blago is a gruesome little weasel, but he knows the value of a senate appointment.

“This is a fucking valuable thing… I’ve got this thing and it’s fucking golden.”

Huey “Kingfish” Long

The populist Democratic Louisiana governor could give a hell of a speech but he could also sling a mean insult.

“Quote me as saying that that Imperial bastard will never set foot in Louisiana, and that when I call him a son of a bitch I am not using profanity, but am referring to the circumstances of his birth.”

Chris Christie

When Christie isn’t getting into shouting matches with constituents he’s telling people to “get the hell off the beach” and calling people arrogant sons of bitches. Christie always looks like he’s on the verge of just screaming “fuuuuck” into someone’s face at any moment so it’s really only a matter of time before he has a meltdown on the 2016 campaign trail and calls someone a “cockbag.”

John Boehner

The current Speaker of the House is an everyman, so we may never know the full extent of his verbal flourishes, but he did tell the Senate to get off its ass, and he apparently, at a the White House meeting during budget negotiations, told Harry Reid to go fuck himself. Also, when faced with criticism of his congressional leadership, he just lets that shit roll off his back.

Patrick Kennedy

In 2003 the son of Teddy Kennedy and Rhode Island congressman was at a fundraiser railing against the Bush tax cuts.

“I don’t need Bush’s tax cut. I’ve never worked a fucking day in my life.”

John Kerry

The current Secretary of State and former senator and democratic presidential candidate, in an interview with Rolling Stone, tried to explain his Iraq War vote.

“I voted for what I thought was best for the country. Did I expect George Bush to fuck it up as badly as he did? I don’t think anybody did.”

John McCain

They don’t call him “McNasty” for nothing. On top of being everyone’s favorite star-fucking, war-mongering curmudgeon, McCain is also one of the most foul-mouthed presidential candidates in recent memory. He even called his wife a “cunt.” Just read “Game Change.” Seriously, McCain is a one-man “Wolf of Wall Street.”

Rick Santorum

The once and (possibly) future Republican primary candidate and former Pennsylvania senator had a really tense moment with a New York Times reporter in 2012.

“Stop distorting my words. If I see it, it’s bullshit!”

John “Cactus Jack” Garner

One of FDR’s vice presidents once said the office “is not worth a bucket of warm piss.” Baller.

Joe Biden

What can be said about Biden that everyone else hasn’t already said? He’s the Ron Burgandy of the Vice Presidency. He’s kind of a big fucking deal.

So, yeah, fucking politicians… They’re just like us. And though in public they may try to use some of the world’s greatest oratory to appeal to the better angels of our nature, they mostly just talk shit.

Last Thursday, in a New York Times op-ed, neurologist and best-selling author Oliver Sacks revealed that he has been battling cancer in various forms for the past nine years and that it has now metastasized in his liver. "This form of cancer cannot be halted," he writes. But rather than resigning to his disease and letting it slowly drain his will, he has resolved to face it.

"I feel intensely alive," he writes in the New York Times, "and I want and hope in the time that remains to deepen my friendships, to say farewell to those I love, to write more, to travel if I have the strength, to achieve new levels of understanding and insight."

The words are hard to read. Oliver Sacks' contributions to psychology, and especially music psychology, are monolithic. The brilliant storytelling style and compassionate way he dealt with his subjects inspired countless students to pursue psychological research and medicine. Read More

Four days after a report said Rock Band would return to console gaming, another report says Guitar Hero will make a comeback. Kotaku U.K., citing two different unnamed sources, says it may even launch this year.

Kotaku U.K. reports one source saying Activision will announce the series' return at E3 2015. The game will be made for PlayStation 4 and Xbox One and, yes, new instrument peripherals are included in the plans. Visually, crowds and performers will take on more realistic looks, as opposed to the cartoony style of the original series.

Guitar Hero was once a cash register for Activision, bringing in $2 billion in revenue, lifetime, by 2009. But its overexposure through annual releases and spinoffs, and the global economic collapse...

Continue reading…

The Windows PC version of Grand Theft Auto 5 will now arrive April 14, while heists are finally set to launch in Grand Theft Auto Online on March 10, publisher Rockstar Games announced today.

The new date for GTA 5 on PC represents the third delay for that version. Rockstar originally announced last June that it planned to release the PC version alongside the remastered PlayStation 4 and Xbox One editions last fall. In September, the company delayed the launch to Jan. 27, and last month, Rockstar pushed the release date back by nearly two months to March 24. The latest delay means that fans will have to wait an extra three weeks.

"Our apologies to PC gamers worldwide who have been counting down the days until the launch of the game,...

Continue reading…

The Brain

Anyone who knows me also knows that I have a huge sweet tooth. I always have. My friend and fellow graduate student Andrew is equally afflicted, and living in Hershey, Pennsylvania – the “Chocolate Capital of the World” – doesn’t help either of us.

But Andrew is braver than I am. Last year, he gave up sweets for Lent. I can’t say that I’m following in his footsteps this year, but if you are abstaining from sweets for Lent this year, here’s what you can expect over the next 40 days.

Sugar: natural reward, unnatural fix

Health and Medicine

Since the uptick in outbreaks of measles in the US, those arguing for the right not to vaccinate their children have come under increasing scrutiny. There is no journal of “anti-vax psychology” reporting research on those who advocate what seems like a controversial, “anti-science” and dangerous position, but if there was we can take a good guess at what the research reported therein would say.

I can’t be the only on that recognized this neighborhood, right? x

Not sure how I missed this one. (x)

On a recent crisp night, guys stuff their hands into their puffer vest pockets as a couple of excited girls, oblivious to the chill, bounce from one bare leg to the other. The requisite red velvet rope delineates where to queue, and a bouncer sits just inside a doorway, checking...

The 1977 Burt Lancaster version of The Island of Dr. Moreau was the first movie South African director Richard Stanley ever saw, and the furious boy wanted his money back. He loved the H.G. Wells novel about a mad scientist surgically blurring the line between human and beast, and years...

The deadliest drug in America is legal in all 50 states, and it's significantly more dangerous than a range of illegal substances much more heavily regulated and policed.

According to research recently published in Scientific Reports and spotted by the Washington Post, alcohol is approximately 114 times more dangerous than marijuana, which remains the only federally controlled substance that has never caused a death by overdose. The authors of the study assessed the "comparative risk" of death that accompanies consuming everything from weed to meth and heroin — and found that marijuana is even safer, relative to those harder drugs, than previously believed.

Researchers drew these conclusions based on something called "margin of exposure," which measures the likelihood of an average user accidentally ingesting a toxic dose. Read More

Lovers Walk
↳"She didn’t even care enough to cut off my head or set me on fire."

Electronic gadgets are cool. Knotted, tangled cables are not. Yet rarely will you find the one without t'other.

Read more...

babygoatsandfriends:

bad-ass-baby:

Baby goat thinks he’s a bunny.

omg

crowfactory:

cyclical.

amy glunt, 2014

a piece in my senior art exhibition.

little grey fox i picked up one night on the side of the road. she was so beautiful. it was my first time ever seeing a grey fox up close. i hung onto her until i envisioned the perfect way to bring her back. i think she looks so peaceful now, and i certainly love her.

BCS 1x04: Jesse’s Hello Kitty phone makes a cameo in the title sequence. 

Pantone 7684 U

lunatictoons:

Bottles

Marina del Rey used to be a somewhat frumpy, aging community for retirees and sea-loving salty dogs.  Lately it has become a new destination for the privileged children of the Westside's "Silicon Beach" tech boom, which is based in nearby Del Rey, Playa Vista, Venice, Santa Monica, El Segundo and...

sixpenceee:

Before & After. (Source & More Information) (More Interesting Posts)

The idea of “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” has never really applied to Apple as a company, as they’ve constantly sought out new ways to alter the majority of their products. Whether it was eliminating CD drives from most laptops, adding a touch screen to iPods, or one of many other innovations, the company rarely seems satisfied with any of their offerings. Due to this, it’s not so surprising that Apple is slowly revealing its plan to turn the iTunes experience into one far more focused on music curation than making available an endless catalog of music.

Though the signs have been slowly building over the last year or so, the clearest piece appeared early this morning, when the company released a job posting for an Editorial Producer in London. While this may seem insignificant to some, the position calls for a “seasoned writer with broad pop culture background” along with “deep contacts in the freelance world with writers who can cover the spectrum of pop culture (music, movies, books, etc.”

Due to the way the listing is phrased, it is the most obvious sign yet that Apple will be shifting away from the current approach of driving sales through the home page, and attempting to become tastemakers across all of popular culture. This now makes the recent poaching of UK DJ Zane Lowe more understandable, as this job posting will no doubt work hand in hand with his hope of, “being able to get great music to an audience on a global level.”

These two realities may also shed light on exactly why Jimmy Iovine has remained with the company since Beats Music was purchased, and it may also be the key to understanding what the relaunch of both iTunes and Beats Music Service will be. While it existed, Beats Music had far more focus on the curation of music for users, while iTunes was basically a warehouse, and if the two were properly merged, it would bridge the gap many see between Apple’s product and streaming services like Pandora and Spotify.

Along with again making themselves a one-stop-shop of sorts, with the hiring of an editorial staff on the journalistic side, it can be implied that Apple is going to try and up the quality and quantity of their reviews and overall information. Perhaps they’re going to try and edge their way into the world of delivering content via iTunes that connects to other Apple products like iBooks and Newstand, in an effort to provide a completely closed, almost Walmart like experience for their users.

Regardless, with the expected reveal coming this fall, there’s no question that Apple will once again be changing the face of the music industry in almost every conceivable area.

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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The internet loves animals. Like a lot. It loves otters and sloths and bears and slow lorises. It really loves cats. "The Internet’s preference for cats runs so deep," Gideon Lewis-Kraus notes at Wired, "that when Google’s secretive X Lab showed a string of 10 million YouTube images to a neural network of 16,000 computer processors for machine learning, the first thing the network did was invent the concept of a cat." But just in general there's a strong affection for just about anything cute and/or fuzzy.

This predilection can lead us to ignore the overwhelming evidence that many animals are just monsters. Murderer, rapist, necrophiliac monsters. Now, even monsters deserve protection, and efforts to save these creatures from extinction are admirable and worth promoting. But we should be clear-eyed about the evils our furry brethren are capable of. Here are seven of the more disturbing adorable species:

1) Dolphins are unspeakably evil

Danielle Bradbery, winner of season 4 of The Voice, tempts fate. (Mike Aguilera/SeaWorld San Diego via Getty Images)

Dolphins are, as Business Insider's Jennifer Welsh put it in one of the greatest headlines of all time, "dangerous animals that could rape you and kill your baby."

That's a little unfair; the evidence that dolphins have tried to rape humans is not very compelling. But basically every other awful thing you can imagine a dolphin doing, they've done. "Gangs of male dolphins may isolate a female, slap her around with their tails, and forcibly copulate with her for weeks," The Straight Dope's Cecil Adams notes. Dolphin specialist Justin Gregg disputes that this counts as rape, but even he notes some horrific elements of coercion in dolphin sexuality: "Dolphins might use other tactics to persuade a female to mate with them, including committing infanticide (ie, killing calves) so that the females will come into estrus and be more receptive."

Dolphins are also known to brutalize baby porpoises. This is weird. They don't eat the porpoises, the porpoises aren't rivals for key resources, and the porpoises don't antagonize them at all. Dolphins are just assholes. One video captured by vacationers shows the dolphins sending the porpoise's "body spinning round with such force that its back was broken and its soft tissue shattered." A research team described injuries on a dolphin-ravaged porpoise as "perhaps the worst example of inter-specific aggression any of us had ever seen. This young female had literally had the life beaten out of her."

The scariest part is that dolphins are very, very smart. That only makes them more effective recreational killers. The marine biologist Ben Wilson at the University of Aberdeen told the Telegraph's Nigel Blundell that "dolphins use their incredible ultra sound abilities to home in on the vital organs of their victims that will cause most damage."

…yeah.

2) Ducks are brutal rapists

Forgive these ducklings, they know not what monsters they'll become. (Junko Kimura/Getty Images)

Talking about rape in the animal kingdom is tricky; we usually don't think of non-human animals as moral agents capable of consenting or not consenting to activities. But as long as we're anthropomorphizing, let's talk about how male ducks are brutal rapists.

In a 2012 paper on duck reproduction, the University of Massachusetts' Patricia Brennan and Yale's Richard Prum note that "up to 40 percent" of sex between wild mallards observed by researchers is forced. A 1983 paper, "Forced Copultation in Waterfowl," by Frank McKinney, Scott R. Derrickson and Pierre Mineau, describes the process in grisly detail. It often involves fast aerial pursuits, multiple aggressors, and male spectators:

When the mate was absent, the male often walked casually over to the female and proceeded to mount without pausing. Wild melees were often witnessed as males came in as 'spectators' and subsequently attempted FC [forced copulation]. Up to three males were seen piled over one another attempting to copulate with the same female and groups of 20 or more spectators commonly gathered.

Male mates of victimized female ducks sometimes try to intervene but often decline to help if the attack is big enough; McKinney et al cite a study that found that male urban mallards defended their mates "in 56 percent of 25 FC attempts involving 1 male but in only 27 percent of 64 multi-male attempts."

Female ducks can resist by "hiding for hours, undertaking long flights in an attempt to rid themselves of unwanted males and struggling during forced copulations," Brennan and Prum note. But attacks are common nonetheless, and the trauma of forced copulation attacks, Brennan and Prum write, is enormous:

Females may lose their social partner and the direct benefits he provides—including feeding, territory defense, protection and, in some species, parental care. Females may even abandon their current reproductive effort with high levels of FEPCs [forced extra-pair copulations]. Finally, females can be injured or killed by males.

It's horrible. But female ducks also have an unusual ability: they can stop the sperm of their attackers from fertilizing their eggs. They can "shut that whole thing down" in cases of "legitimate rape," in the words of former Rep. and Senate candidate Todd Akin (R-MO).

To understand how it works, you have to know a bit about duck penises (whose existence is kind of strange; most bird species don't have males with penises). They're these corkscrew-like contraptions that are stored internally most of the time, but then will spring out when needed. They're also exceptionally long; Prum notes that they can be "up to 40 centimeters, which is over a foot long on a duck that is itself not even a foot long." Here's a duck penis bursting forth:

(Patricia Brennan via Gawker)

Duck penises are coiled counterclockwise. But in turn, female ducks have evolved vaginas that are coiled clockwise, "literal anti-screw devices," as Prum puts it. They also, Prum writes, have "dead end cul-de-sacs, so that if the penis goes down the wrong direction it’ll get bottled up." Meanwhile, with wanted partners, "sexually receptive females contract and relax their cloacal muscles in a way that could help the male achieve full penetration." The system makes female ducks enormously successful at resisting fertilization by unwanted mates. "Even under captive conditions where females are less able to escape FEPCs," Brennan and Prum write, "only 6–11% of offspring were sired by forced copulation males."

Oh, and one more thing: male ducks also sometimes engage in necrophilia. Well, it happened once, in any case. It's probably not fair to tar all male ducks with this one, but the account by Kees Moeliker in his seminal paper, "The first case of homosexual necrophilia in the mallard Anas platyrhynchos (Aves:Anatidae)" is too bizarre not to share (hat-tip to Donald MacLeod at the Guardian):

Next to the obviously dead duck, another male mallard (in full adult plumage without any visible traces of moult) was present (Fig. 2a). He forcibly picked into the back, the base of the bill and mostly into the back of the head of the dead mallard for about two minutes, then mounted the corpse and started to copulate, with great force, almost continuously picking the side of the head (Fig. 2b). Rather startled, I watched this scene from close quarters behind the window (Fig. 1) until 19.10 h during which time (75 minutes!) I made some photographs and the mallard almost continuously copulated his dead congener. He dismounted only twice, stayed near the dead duck and picked the neck and the side of the head before mounting again. The first break (at 18.29 h) lasted three minutes and the second break (at 18.45 h) lasted less than a minute. At 19.12 h, I disturbed this cruel scene. The necrophilic mallard only reluctantly left his 'mate': when I had approached him to about five metres, he did not fly away but simply walked off a few metres, weakly uttering series of two-note 'raeb-raeb' calls. (the 'conversation-call' of Lorentz 1953)

3) Polar bears eat other polar bears

Polar bears adorable nibble at fruit snacks placed on a Christmas tree at Hanover Zoo in Hanover, Germany. When the time comes, these beasts will devour each other as well. (Alexander Koerner/Getty Images)

A lot of polar bear violence is pretty routine, as these things go. They attack and eat baby seals. Males fight viciously over female partners. Standard stuff, all around. But polar bears also have a penchant for cannibalism.

A 1985 paper by Mitchell Taylor, Thor Larsen, and R.E. Schweinsburg detailed dozens of instances of polar bears eating each other. The most common type of attack appeared to be adult males eating cubs, but basically every kind of cannibalism you can imagine is covered. Malnourished mothers have been observed eating their own cubs — usually just one of a two-cub litter (one really incompetent malnourished mother killed two of her cubs and didn't eat them). Two cubs ate their immobilized mother bear.

"While the frequency of cannibalism among polar bears is unknown," Taylor et al write, "Observed levels of Trichinella larvae in polar bear populations across the circumpolar basin suggest that cannibalism is not rare." Of 1,333 polar bears the authors analzyed in several different studies, 38.9 percent were infected with Trichinella. Common polar bear prey, like seals, have comparatively much lower levels of Trichinella, meaning they're not likely the main vector of transmission. Cannibalism, by contrast, makes a lot more sense as an explanation. "We suggest that cannibalism could be an important if not the primary vector of Trichinella propagation in polar bears," the authors conclude.

More recent research continues to find polar bears eating each other, with some researchers arguing that the practice is on the rise due to global warming. "As the climate continues to warm and sea ice continues to break up and melt at earlier dates, thus making seals less available earlier in the summer," Ian Stirling and Jenny Ross write in the December 2011 issue of Arctic. "the frequency of intraspecific predation and cannibalism may increase."

4) Hippos are incredibly deadly

"Mama, will you teach me how to kill man for sport?" (Anthony Dorian/Taronga Western Plains Zoo via Getty Images)

"Hippopotamuses are difficult to study in the wild," Slate's LV Anderson writes, "both because they tend to attack humans who get too close to them and because so much of their lives take place underwater." It's true. Hippos are bloodthirsty murderers who sometimes viciously maul people, sometimes without any provocation. They're also herbivores. They don't eat the people. They're just huge assholes.

A paper by Adrian Treves and Lisa Naughton-Treves in the Journal of Human Evolution examined wildlife attacks in Uganda from 1923 to 1994. They mostly focused on large carnivores like lions and leopards, but included some data on hippos too. They found that hippo attacks had the highest mortality rate of any animal examined. 86.7 percent of the 30 hippo attacks examined were fatal, compared to 75 percent of the lion attacks and only 32.5 percent of leopard attacks.

It's hard to know how many people are at risk of hippo attack, and thus to calculate the rate at which those people are in fact attacked by hippos, but there's nonetheless plenty of cases of hippos killing or severely injuring humans.

In a 1999 article in the Journal of Travel Medicine, David Durrheim and Peter Leggat reviewed press records to count wild animal attacks on tourists in South Africa from 1988 through 1997. Over that 10 year period, there weretwo fatal and five nonfatal hippo attacks on tourists. In none of the cases did humans actually try to hurt the hippos.

During May 1991 a Johannesburg businessman visiting Mabalingwe Reserve, Warmbaths, was bitten, and suffered eight broken ribs, while walking along a river-bank and unwittingly blocking a hippo's path to water.

Perhaps the saddest case involves someone who tried to tend to an injured hippo's wounds. The hippo showed his appreciation by trampling the guy:

A 69-year-old tourist from Howick, near Durban, was attacked in the KNP [Kruger National Park] by an injured hippo when he got out of his car to inspect its wounds. His concern was rewarded by being trampled but he miraculously suffered only minor injuries.

Durrham and Leggat do say that tourists were "more fortunate" than villagers, against whom "hippos are responsible for many attacks."

There are also first-person accounts by researchers of hippo aggression. The late zoologist Stewart Keith Eltringham, who in his book The Hippos: Natural History and Conservation recounts several instances in which he, personally, was menaced by hippos. For example:

I once met a hippo head-on at night in Queen Elizabeth Park, Uganda. It appeared out of the darkness and hammered the front bumper, to which a radio antenna was attached with steel bolts. The bolts were bent back by the force of the collision, demonstrating the tremendous power generated by a ton and a half of fast-moving hippo but the encounter was not completely one-sided as there were blood stains on the bolts. On another occasion, in daylight, I was subjected to an unprovoked charge from a hippo as I drove past its wallow. Glancing in my driving mirror as I tried to escape, all I could see was the inside of the hippo's throat shortly followed by its muzzle as its jaws closed over my rear light, which was sliced off as neatly as if chopped off with an axe.

Terrifying!

5) Seals rape penguins

You think seals are cute, right? Of course you do. Look at this seal befriending a dog:

And you think penguins are cute too, no? Here's a super-cut of them being adorable:

So it might trouble you to learn that seals hunt and eat penguins. They "repeatedly beat them on the surface of the water" in part because they don't have strong enough teeth to cut up prey, and thus need to violently beat penguins to "tear and rip off the flesh":

Unsettling, but what are you going to do? Seals are carnivores. They eat other animals without any preferences as to those animals' adorableness. What's truly bizarre is that seals have recently taken to raping female penguins. In a recent article in Polar Biology highlighted by the BBC, William Haddad, Ryan Reisinger, Tristan Scott, Marthán Bester, and PJ Nico de Bruyn describe four instances of sexual harassment of king penguins by Antarctic fur seals. These are brutal affairs; in one case, "penetration was seen at least once and blood was evident between the bird's legs immediately after the interaction." In another case, the seal killed and ate the penguin after copulating with it.

There are videos of these attacks at the BBC site which you should not watch. I did and regret it deeply.

6) Otters are murderous, necrophilic aqua-weasels

They hold hands to gain strength for their crimes. (Joe Robertson)

The evils of these disease-ridden, murderous, necrophilic aqua-weasels are explained in much greater detail here. Other species may do more killing. But few species are violent in quite as disturbing a way as the otter.

For one thing, sea otters murder other animals even when they don't get food out of it, just for fun or something. A 2010 article from veterinarian Heather Harris and her coauthors Stori Oates, Michelle Staedler, Tim Tinker, David Jessup, James Harvey, and Melissa Miller in Aquatic Mammals documented about 19 cases of sea otters attacking baby seals. In one particularly egregious case, well:

A weaned harbor seal pup was resting onshore when an untagged male sea otter approached it, grasped it with its teeth and forepaws, bit it on the nose, and flipped it over. The harbor seal moved toward the water with the sea otter following closely. Once in the water, the sea otter gripped the harbor seal’s head with its forepaws and repeatedly bit it on the nose, causing a deep laceration. The sea otter and pup rolled violently in the water for approximately 15 min, while the pup struggled to free itself from the sea otter’s grasp. Finally, the sea otter positioned itself dorsal to the pup’s smaller body while grasping it by the head and holding it underwater in a position typical of mating sea otters. As the sea otter thrust his pelvis, his penis was extruded and intromission was observed. At 105 min into the encounter, the sea otter released the pup, now dead, and began grooming.

To recap: the sea otter attacked and raped a baby seal for an hour and a half until it died, then began licking its paws like a goddamn serial killer.

Female sea otters are often similarly victimized. Another study found that, over an observation period from 2000 to 2003, 11 percent of otter deaths were caused, primarily or in part, by mating-related trauma. "Copulation normally occurs in the water where the male sea otter will approach the female from behind, grip her around the chest with his forepaws, and grasp her nose or the side of her face with his teeth," Harris and her coauthors write. That biting can be fatal.

Otters have also been known to practice necrophilia. "In one prior report on breeding-associated mortality," Harris et al write, "a tagged territorial male sea otter held a struggling female underwater until her body became limp and then copulated repeatedly with her carcass. Ten months later, this same male was observed with the carcass of another female sea otter."

Sometimes otters have an underlying motivation for their crimes; it's not all just for the hell of it. For example, biologists Heidi Pearson and Randall Davis describe a case in which a male otter forced a pup under water as its mother dived for food, in an attempt to extract some of that food for itself.

Otters, man.

7) Humans are responsible for unbelievable mass slaughter

Think about what you've done, baby. (Shutterstock)

So otters sometimes viciously attack baby seals. And dolphins kill porpoises for sport. But when it comes to mass carnage, no species comes close to humans.

Sure, humans might be getting less brutal toward each other; both individual and state-level violence is on the decline. But we're pretty damned good at killing other animals. A recent World Wildlife Fund study found that the number of mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians and fish in the world fell 52 percent from 1970 to 2010. The primary threats causing these population declines, the WWF finds, are human exploitation (eg hunting and fishing) and habitat degradation or loss (which is primarily human-caused). Climate change and pollution are also factors, albeit smaller ones. Humans, in other words, are the driving factor behind the precipitous drop in vertebrate populations.

To a certain extent (hunting/fishing, for example) this can be characterized as food-gathering behavior by an omnivorous species, and just as I avoided condemning the carnivores above merely for being carnivores, maybe humans should get a pass there. But that can't account for the entire decline, and it doesn't come close to excusing humans' roles in causing outright extinctions. Plant and animal species are going extinct at about 1,000 to 10,000 times the rate they did before humans came around. In fact, we may be causing the sixth mass extinction event of the past half billion years — and the first five all involved over three quarters of the world's species vanishing:

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YouTube user Porsche Indrise was just chilling out on the shores of the the Western Australian town of Yallingup and caught some footage of this little crab sunning itself on the rocks and generally enjoying life. Unfortunately, that life came to an abrupt end as a terrifying octopus just scurried out onto land, grabbed the poor bastard, and dragged it back to its watery lair while it finished devouring the little guy.

We already knew that octopi can squeeze through impossibly small holes,now we know that they can scurry onto land and into our nightmares.

Goodbye little crab, we hardly knew you.

 

[h/t Uproxx]

[body_image width='1500' height='1103' path='images/content-images/2015/02/20/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/20/' filename='you-can-stay-in-a-tent-in-las-skid-row-for-10-a-night-220-body-image-1424457940.jpg' id='29624']

When I saw that artist Barry Boen was using Airbnb to rent out a tent in LA's homeless-dominated Skid Row district for $10 a night, I knew it was a stunt. I just wanted to know what kind.

The listing promised guests their own "private tent near the corner of Sixth and San Pedro," which would "give you the experience of what life is like living on Skid Row." Check-in time was 5 PM; checkout was promptly at 8 AM, when you'd have to dismantle your tent, per city regulations. The listing also mentioned a "concierge" named Dice, who would be there "to help you settle into to this new way of living and be able to answer any questions you may have."

It seemed like a dick thing to do. Skid Row has the largest concentration of mentally ill and homeless people in America, and it can resemble Third World–esque refugee camp 1.5 miles from where the Lakers play. Boen's listing took poverty tourism to its logical extreme: Spend a night in Skid Row and sleep on the ground with real-life junkies! Eat the authentic garbage food! But when I met with Boen to see the tent for myself, he didn't think of it in that way at all.

[body_image width='596' height='398' path='images/content-images/2015/02/20/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/20/' filename='you-can-stay-in-a-tent-in-las-skid-row-for-10-a-night-220-body-image-1424457861.png' id='29619']

The original Airbnb listing

Boen, who is 37 years old, lives with his girlfriend, Brittney, and an aging greyhound in a tall apartment building in the heart of Skid Row. The area in the Airbnb listing, around the corner at Sixth and San Pedro, is bustling on account of the neighboring Midnight Mission, one of three in the immediate area. When I met Boen and Brittney at the tent site, a woman behind me began puking more than seemed humanly possible.

After a good minute she was empty, and walked off, smiling dreamily. "There's a lot of vomiting here," Boen explained. "If there's good drugs there's vomiting; if there's no drugs there's vomiting."

We turned down San Julian Street, where drug use is a little more tolerated than it is elsewhere. The neighborhood is still in flux, with people seemingly settling back into their digs. "They just bleached the streets," Boen told me.

He was referring to Operation Healthy Streets: Four times a year, the city gets everyone to temporarily pack up their belongings so they can give the sidewalks a hosing down. In Skid Row, it's a constant battle against the trash and bodily fluids. "There's one public bathroom on San Pedro, but there need to be more," Brittney said.

I asked Boen about the Airbnb listing. Was he trying to make light of the squalor here?

"I don't think this is a joke," he said defensively. "I live right here"—albeit not on the literal street.

The Airbnb listing came about after Boen noticed that a homeless man who lived on the street near him, 20-year Skid Row resident Dice, was advertising tent rentals on a chalkboard for $10 a night. Boen partnered up with Dice and offered to put the scheme online.

[body_image width='1500' height='1125' path='images/content-images/2015/02/20/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/20/' filename='you-can-stay-in-a-tent-in-las-skid-row-for-10-a-night-220-body-image-1424457579.jpg' id='29616']

Dice is, of course, the aforementioned "concierge." He also acts as security (he sleeps in the next tent), and his wife is the cook. Dice is also there to make sure guests have their tents promptly dismantled by 8 AM, which is a city requirement.

He's adamant that guests eat his Southern cooking, because "the Mission's food is terrible." As for security, he said San Pedro Street is safe because drug use is kept to the adjacent blocks, "and I know when something is jumping off." He splits the $10-a-night fee with Boen.

Although Boen's had seven or eight people book the tent since he put up the listing in November, nearly all of them have backed out, some at the moment they saw the tent. So far only one woman, a sociology student, actually stuck it out for the night.

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Barry Boen and Dice

When I asked Boen and Dice to name the biggest issue on Skid Row, it wasn't lack of food or services or blankets or safety or even access to drugs or drug treatment. It was housing.

The shuttering of many mental health institutions in the 80s created "an open asylum for the mentally ill" in Skid Row, as Lamp Community outreach founder Mollie Lowery pointed out in the documentary Lost Angels. But the area's problems stretch back farther than that—Skid Row has a 100-year history of being LA's home base for low-income and transient populations on account of its proximity to factories and Union Station. Residents used to rely on cheap single-unit housing in the neighborhood, but during LA's downtown revitalization have been put on the streets as more and more of that potential housing is either left undeveloped or converted to lofts like the one Boen lives in.

Boen wants people to view the tent-rental project as a comment on gentrification and not a gross form of poverty tourism. At least he's publicizing the issue instead of quietly squeezing out the locals, as the city and county have by acquiescing to real estate developers. In 1985 Skid Row had approximately 6,000 units of low-income housing; now that number is around 3,400, according to a 2014 LA Weekly story.

When we'd finished touring the street, Boen took me upstairs to his loft, six stories above the Skid Row tents. The space was clean and industrial and bleak, save for his art decorating the walls. We talked about the people below, and they told me that except for the "interesting nudity," Skid Row's residents aren't confrontational or violent. If people could get past their own deep aversion to the area, they could see it safely for themselves, they told me.

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Barry Boen and Brittney in their loft apartment

I asked to go back down to the street to see the Airbnb tent, which Dice had been keeping inside his own tent. When we got there, Dice was gone—his gift-shop table overturned, the food splattered, and his belongings strewn out onto Sixth Street. Dice's wife was crying. They'd had a fight, things had gone wrong. The police were there. That night when I got home, I saw the listing for the tent was gone.

Before I left, I brought up how easy it was to view this sort of stunt as a crass form of slumming. Boen understood, and said he'd been inundated with messages accusing him of that sort of thing since he had put up the listing.

"Getting people to talk about it is all I'm shooting for," Boen said. "Skid Row's not as scary as it is sad."

Follow Jacob Harper on Twitter.

fuckyeahdochammer:

(via Century Guild)

Opening August 2: Doc Hammer

Classical oil paintings from his Saints series.

Public Show Hours

Saturday August 2, 2014 7pm - 10pm

Friday August 9, 2014 2pm - 8pm

Saturday August 10, 2014 2pm - 8pm

Location:

6150 Washington Blvd. in the heart of the Culver City Arts District in Los Angeles, CA

Although he hasn’t been with us in human form for more than two decades, Kurt Cobain still remains one of the most talked-about and creative musicians of our time.

This week, the former Nirvana frontman would’ve turned 48 years old. (His birthday was February 20.) Regardless of whether you prayed at the altar of ’90s-era flannel or simply admired what the guy stood for, you could probably spend hours—nay, days—hypothesizing about what the illegally talented grunge icon would be doing today.

Would he still be making music? Would he still be married to Courtney Love? Would he be living off the grid in a passive solar earth house in the high-desert wilderness of Northern Arizona?

Regardless of where he would’ve ended up, one thing’s for sure: We’d still be totally captivated by Cobain.

To celebrate his day of birth, the good people at Pigeons And Planes asked bands to cover their favorite Nirvana song so they could put it together on a compilation mixtape called Teenage Angst Has Paid Off Well.

The result is a Nirvana covers album filled with a diversity of artists, like Kevin Abstract (“Something In The Way”), Kwamie Liv (“About A Girl”) and Kevin Garrett (“In Bloom”). The entire playlist can be streamed and downloaded below.

In addition to the upcoming anniversary of Cobain’s death on April 5, another posthumous milestone will be the release of Kurt Cobain: Montage Of Heck, an HBO documentary that premiered at Sundance this year. Not only did Cobain’s family give unprecedented access to the filmmakers, but daughter Francis Bean serves as an executive producer on the project.

Montage Of Heck will premiere May 4 on HBO.

[H/T: MTV Unplugged, Empire Online]