Cooper Griggs

d0rkyg1rl:

fallarcy:

thetalkingpoltergeist:

midgardmorningstar:

amnesia-amethyst:

 

omg i fucking love this

It’s like in the second to last gif the owl is saying “I got kissed by a really cute boy”

"…oh my" 

is this DIsney in HD

Look how cute and pretty this sweet little owl is!

At $360 a pop, Medicare has spent a total of $172 million on penis pumps over the last five years, Samantha Bee learned in a recent report for the Daily Show. That’s a total of 477,777 federally-funded penis pumps.

Bee interviewed NARAL president Ilyse Hogue about the double standards in the debate over the Affordable Care Act’s contraceptive mandate. Some lawmakers believe women should have to pay for their own birth control. Viagra and penis pumps, however, should remain covered.

So why the discrepancy?

“Statistics show that probably some members of our congress have a vested interest in having penis pumps covered,” Hogue explained as images of several white-haired congressman rolled across the screen.

What do you think? Should penis pumps be covered by Medicare when birth control is not?

Check out Bee’s hilarious investigation here.

Maddie is weird 🐔

IF you stick this Nicholas Cage animation into gifmelter wow http://bit.ly/1elFK0g

The Star Tribune has a fun interactive that recommends Minnesota brews, based on five key beer characteristics. Use sliders to enter your preference of bitterness, aroma, etc and the results come in radar graph form.

Whether you're a creature of habit or always up for something new, this tool will help you get to know what’s brewing in Minnesota. We’ve catalogued more than 100 beers from 36 Minnesota breweries and sorted them by five characteristics.

I fully expect someone to expand this to the rest of the world.

riebeckite:

veronicaslides:

gray-firearms:

Train don’t give a fuck

CHOO CHOO MOTHER FUCKER SUCK MY DICK

~Dashing though the snow~

GET THE FUCK OUT OF MY WAY

Lady Gaga’s Born This Way Foundation may sound great in theory, but it doesn’t look great on paper, according to BTWF’s latest federal tax report, which reveals most of the charity’s donations were pissed away on lawyers, publicity, and “other” in 2012.

According to the breakdown published exclusively by Showbiz 411, the Born This Way Foundation took in nearly $2.6 million in 2012 (it claimed $2.1 million in net assets) and only donated a measly $5,000 on “grants to organizations or individuals.” That’s less than 1 percent.

Gawker’s Rich Juzwiak provides a thorough breakdown of what, exactly, BTWF did beyond the scope of monetary donations that year. Aside from donating $5,000 in pocket change, the Foundation sponsored the Born Brave Tour Bus, described as a “roving tailgate party,” launched a line of “empowered” office supplies at Office Depot, and inspired Mother Monster herself to tweet half naked photos of herself to raise awareness for teenage eating disorders.

Here’s the full rundown of where BTWF’s funds ended up in 2012, conveniently laid out at Gawker:

$300,000 in strategic consulting

$62,836 on stage productions

$50,000 on social media

$50,000 on event coordination

$406,552 on legal

$150,000 on philanthropic consulting

$60,000 on research

$58,768 on publicity fees

$78,000 on travel

$72,000 on salaries

$808,661 on “other”

$5,000 on grants to organizations or individuals

It’s important to note that BTWF never officially claimed to provide a bulk of its donations for charitable grants, but it’s even more important to note that it spent $50,000 on “social media.” How the hell does one spend $50,000 on social media? Or $808,661 on “other,” for that matter? What even is “other”? Pepto-Bismol in bulk?

But we guess there’s some sort of silver lining. Showbiz 411′s Roger Friedman suspects most of BTWF’s donations came from Lady Gaga’s earnings (there’s no detailed list of contributors) and on top of that, she officially made a $10,000 donation to pay expenses.

Seems like a lot of trouble to go through just to donate $5,000 to a worthy cause.

Last night, Gaga’s mother, BTWF president Cynthia Germanotta, released a statement reaffirming that BTWF’s mission is not to provide grants:

“There is quite a bit of inaccurate information out there right now that misinterprets the essential mission and critical work of a very special organization that was founded several years ago by Stefani Germanotta, whom you all know as Lady Gaga. First and foremost, we are an organization that conducts our charitable activity directly, and we fund our own work. We are not a grant-maker that funds the work of other charities, and were never intended to be.”

Cool story, mom.

I think my local Target is trying to tell me something. [x]

earthstory:

Whale graveyard reveals Miocene mass strandings.

A discovery of the remnants of four separate whale beaching events over an estimated 10,000 years in the Miocene 6-9 million years ago has been excavated in sandstones right next to the Pan Americana highway in the Atacama desert of northern Chile after construction work first unearthed them. The Dozens of skeletons of several species were found at four separate levels, and are thought to have died from eating toxic algae during a plankton bloom before being washed into a beach estuary, now called Cerro Ballena (whale hill). Such blooms are common, with rivers providing the nutrients washed out of the Andes in a wetter era than the present. The repetitive nature of these events quantified by this find is as far as I know, unique.

Loz

Image credit: Adam Metallo/Smithsonian Institution

http://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/feb/26/baleen-whale-graveyard-fossil-treasure-atacama-chile
http://www.sci-tech-today.com/story.xhtml?story_id=00200075B6WM
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/archaeology/mystery-behind-astonishing-fivemillionyearold-whale-graveyard-revealed-9153714.html

retrowar:

Ryan Seacrest Catches Up With ‘Captain Phillips’ Star Maersk Alabama On Red Carpet

[lbandoni]

99 falling wolves.. & a fox aint 1 

Here's a great history of English mispronunciations that became the received pronunciations. The piece makes the important point that English has no canon, no unequivocal right way or wrong way of speaking -- a point that is often lost in Internet linguistic pedantry and literacy privilege.

I'm as guilty as anyone of thinking that my English is the best English, but the next time I wince at "nukular," I'll remind myself that "bird" started out as "brid" and "wasp" started out as "waps," but were mispronounced into common usage.

Adder, apron and umpire all used to start with an "n". Constructions like "A nadder" or "Mine napron" were so common the first letter was assumed to be part of the preceding word. Linguists call this kind of thing reanalysis or rebracketing.

Wasp used to be waps; bird used to be brid and horse used to be hros. Remember this when the next time you hear someone complaining about aks for ask or nucular for nuclear, or even perscription. It's called metathesis, and it's a very common, perfectly natural process.

8 pronunciation errors that made the English language what it is today [David Shariatmadari/Guardian]

(via Hacker News)

(Image: Double bitted felling axe, Wikimedia Commons/Luigizanasi CC-BY-SA)

Fire Dragon - an #experiment in #long #exposure #photographs with #fire #performers and #panning my #canon #650d #t4i
#culvercity #losangeles #california

Fire Cobra - Another #long #exposure #experiment with my #canon #650d #t4i
#cobra #snake #fire #performers #firespinning #culvercity #losangeles #california #experimental #night #longexposure

via http://www.tumblr.com/dashboard/8/28563406388

S - An #experiment with #long #exposure photos.
#fire #performers #culvercity #losangeles #california #canon #650d #t4i #longexposure #experimental #series

Ads by Project Wonderful! Your ad could be here, right now.

C'mon, Steve. C'mon dude.

awkwardsituationist:

four examples of deap sea bioluminescence in a sea worm and three comb jellies (ctenophores), known 1-4 as: tomopteris; mnemiopsis leidyi; beroe forskalii; lampocteis cruentiventer. from the IMAX documentary ‘into the deep’

Americans have become huge. Between the 1960s and the 2000s, Americans grew, on the average, an inch taller and 24 pounds heavier. The average American man today weights 194 pounds and the average woman 165 pounds. The growing girth has led to the creation of special-sized ambulances, operating tables and coffins as well as bigger seats on planes and trains. Almost a third of American children and teens are overweight, but 84 percent of parents believe their children are at a healthy weight in one study. Why? The adults are probably overweight too.

Still there are scientific reasons why Americans are blimping up and they aren’t limited to eating too much and exercising too little. Here are a few areas under suspicion.

1. Antibiotics in food and as medicine. A recent article in the New York Times confirms suspicions that the antibiotics routinely given to livestock to make them fat do the same thing to people. Antibiotics are thought to fatten by changing gut bacteria to make absorption of nutrients more efficient. In 1974, an experiment was done on several hundred Navy recruits to see if they would gain weight on antibiotics and, after only seven weeks, they did. An experiment was also done, unethically it sounds, on “mentally deficient spastic” children in Guatemala in the 1950s, reports the Times. The children gained an extra five pounds over a year compared with children who were not given antibiotics. Denmark researchers found babies given antibiotics within six months of birth were more likely to be overweight by age seven.

Most researchers blame over-prescription of antibiotics for excessive human exposure; US children get as many as 20 antibiotic treatments while they are growing up, says Martin Blaser, a leading antibiotic researcher at New York University Langone Medical Center. But studies show there are antibiotic residues in US food too, especially in meat and milk, and the government tests for them. That means even if you avoid unnecessary antibiotics from the doctor, you could be getting them from the grocery store.

2. Other livestock fatteners. If antibiotics used to make livestock fat could make us fat, is there any reason to think other weight-producing drugs for livestock wouldn’t do the same?Ractopamine, marketed as Paylean for pigs, Optaflexx for cattle and Topmax for turkeys is widely used in the US and banned in many other countries. It is given to 60 to 80 percent of US pigs, 30 percent of ration-fed cattle and an undisclosed number of turkeys. There is no withdrawal period for ractopamine before slaughter but Big Ag says the drug is not in the meat because it exits the animal as manure. Okay, but what happens to the manure?

Also banned in European countries are the hormones US cattle growers rely upon, such as oestradiol-17, trenbolone acetate, zeranol and melengestrol. Zeranol may have more actions than just making mammals fat. It is a “powerful estrogenic chemical, as demonstrated by its ability to stimulate growth and proliferation of human breast tumor cells in vitro at potencies similar to those of the natural hormone estradiol and the known carcinogen diethylstilbestrol,” says the Breast Cancer Fund. Translation: it may be linked to US breast cancer rates, too. No wonder Europe doesn’t want our beef.

3. Pesticides and other endocrine disrupters. Some antibiotics and artificial sweeteners are similar molecules to endocrine disrupters—the chemicals used to make fire retardants and plastics that are increasingly in our food and environment. Endocrine disrupters, like BPA (Bisphenol A), banned in some baby bottles, and Triclosan found in Colgate’s Total and many dish detergents, are linked to a host of shocking symptoms like genital deformities in wildlife and infertility, low sperm counts and possible early puberty and diabetes in humans. But they also may be linked to obesity.

s early as 2003, the journal Toxicological Sciences addressed effects that endocrine disruptors have on fetal development that likely play a role in adult obesity. “Obesity has been proposed to be yet another adverse health effect of exposure to endocrine disrupting chemicals (EDCs) during critical stages of development,” echoes an article in the International Journal of Andrology. Pregnant women with high levels of the endocrine disrupter PFOA (perfluorooctanoic acid used in the manufacture of as Teflon and Gore-Tex) in their bodies were three times as likely to have daughters who grew up to be overweight, reported the New York Times’ Nicholas Kristof.

4. Sugar substitutes. Artificial sweeteners have always been billed as a way to cut calories and lose weight. But recent research shows they may do just the opposite. When researchers at the University of Texas Health Science Center studied 474 people who drank two or more artificially sweetened soft drinks a day they found the people gained five times as much as those not drinking diet drinks. Thanks for nothing!

There are three reasons artificial sweeteners may do more harm than good. One is that some of the sweeteners—which tend to be chemicals like acesulfame potassium and aspartame—may slow metabolism, speculate researchers. Secondly, artificial sweeteners separate “food seeking behavior” from the “reward” of real nutrients and can set up sweets addictions because the reward is never received. They literally “train” people to crave sweets. Finally the presence of artificial sweeteners in a product doesn’t automatically mean natural sweeteners aren’t present too. Some food manufacturers use both. Read the label. Marion Nestle, a professor in nutrition, food studies and public health at New York University and leading food expert, told me she isn’t aware of any convincing evidence that proves artificial sweeteners help people to lose weight. One artificial sweetener, Splenda, has similarities to endocrine disrupting pesticides….

5. Industry and government marketing. Most people are aware of aggressive junk food marketing, especially to children, and everyone from Disneyland to First Lady Michelle Obama has spoken out about it. In a study in the journal Pediatrics, children who tasted identical graham crackers and gummy fruit snacks, some with and some without cartoon characters, “significantly preferred the taste of foods that had popular cartoon characters on the packaging.” Who says advertising doesn’t work?

Researchers who studied 500,000 California middle- and high-school students found those who attended schools located near fast-food outlets—surprise!—weighed more. Still, it is not just the food industry that is responsible for our growing national girth.

The USDA, even though it cautions food consumers about high-fat, obesity-linked foods, plays the other side of the street as well and is linked to a group that seeks to get people to double their cheese intake to help milk sales. Dairy Management, a USDA “marketing creation” with 162 employees, according to the New York Times, has helped Pizza Hut, Taco Bell, Burger King, Wendy’s and Domino’s cheesify their menu options!

“If every pizza included one more ounce of cheese, we would sell an additional 250 million pounds of cheese annually,” rhapsodized the Dairy Management chief executive in a trade publication. Though Dairy Management is mostly funded by farmers, it received $5.3 million from the USDA during one year, for an overseas dairy campaign, which almost equals the total $6.5 million budget of USDA’s Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion—the group that cautions us about fatty foods like cheese. Yes, the government is talking out of both sides of its mouth when it tells the public what to put in its mouth.

Martha Rosenberg frequently writes about the impact of the pharmaceutical, food and gun industries on public health. Her work has appeared in the Boston Globe, San Francisco Chronicle, Chicago Tribune and other outlets

via http://fucktum.tumblr.com/post/69078246425