Snob

Illustrations by Jenny Hirons

If you decide to get any kind of arts or humanities degree at college you will probably have to read postmodern, neo-Marxist, social and literary critics who write in the kind of language that makes your head cry with pain and your body long for porn. As a breed, these people are known as critical theorists.

Now, you might be thinking, I won’t have to read these people; I’ll just read CliffsNotes. In which case, all I can say is: fair enough, you’ll probably do pretty well. There really is barely any reason to read the books, let alone the theory around them. Further education comes cheap (not literally, sadly) these days and you really don’t have to be very smart to get a humanities degree from a decent university.

But if you feel up for doing a little more work than you strictly have to, why not read some stuff that will be hard to understand and may not actually mean anything? After all, that’s what studying is about. A year after you leave school you’ll have no idea what it means, but you’ll have a better, instinctive (i.e., borrowed) understanding of society, and for a brief moment you’ll be able to say: “I read Roland Barthes, and I sort of got where he was coming from.”

With the intellectually challenging end of the library—as with everything at most universities—it may just be best to embrace it and then look back on it with raised eyebrows. "Oh, those were the days," you can chuckle, 40 years from now, as you come across a forgotten copy of Jay Prosser’s Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Transsexuality.

In the meantime, here are some of the characters and situations you’ll run into on your journey into the logic jungles of critical theory.
 
Elaine Scarry

Dear Elaine wields some serious power in this world from her throne at Harvard. Scarry’s big achievement is a book called The Body in Pain, which is about different kinds of pain and how pain is inflicted. The crux of the book is that hurting someone is bad, whereas creating something (anything, unless it is painful) is good. When you do that you “make” the world, whereas when you inflict pain, you “unmake” it. So, if you relentlessly torture someone, then you are not helping the world out, whereas if you write a book about why people relentlessly torture other people, you are totally helping the world out. Still, she is responsible for one of the greatest pieces of Biblical analogy you’ll ever read, in which she compares the creation of God to the making of a table that can think for itself and change its form whenever the time dictates it. Could you have thought of that? No. But you might be able to turn that idea into a zingy sitcom.

Other Languages

Yeah, you’re fucked. Go on all you want about how you took French in school, but Jacques Derrida didn’t write about where the train station is, or if the swimming pool was open on Sundays. He wrote about binary oppositions, rhetoric, deconstruction, and a whole load of other things that Rosetta Stone didn't get into. If you are lucky enough to be doing anything that relates to Ancient Greece or Rome (and academics relate basically everything to those two cultural swamps) you will have to also contend with Latin and Ancient Greek. Latin, at least, is written in the same alphabet you find on the back of your average Friends DVD. Greek is written in a bunch of antique wingdings, so good luck with that. Further afield, if you can’t throw a few Old Norse quips into an essay on the Viking sagas, then you aren’t fit to ride my longboat to Asgard. And if it’s on Beowulf, the Ray Winstone accent needs to be implied.

Jacques Rancière

No one has done more to explain the role of the spectator, in a complicated French way, than this guy. Yes, the spectator. That’s you at an Atlas Sound gig, or paying Russian girls to strip on the internet. What pissed off Rancière was that the spectator didn’t know the machinations behind the devised theatrical happening (“play”) he was witnessing (“watching”); he just sat there pretending to find Shakespeare’s jokes funny. Rancière wanted to break that fourth wall—a cultural quest which arguably plodded through punk and ended up as Wayne’s World.

POWER

Critical theorists used to be very into the analysis of POWER, in an all-caps-kinda-major-you-can't-escape-it-this-is-how-you-are-placed-in-the-world-and-you-don't-in-fact-have-any-agency sort of way. The stupid ones are still going on about the grand machines of the elite and how they can be found controlling our desires in the novels of Henry James, the music of Beethoven, and the ingredients of our breakfast cereal. Writers like the late Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, author of, I am not lying to you, Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl, moved on from the POWER place to the “the world is a shades of gray" place, while their former disciples still splutter on about the John Malkovich guy in Henry James novels being a forerunner to Donald Rumsfeld.

Walter Benjamin and Michel Foucault

Like Gandalf and Gandalf’s gay son, Walter Benjamin and Michel Foucault (above) are the great wizards of critical theory. Benjamin’s magnum opus, the Arcades Project, wasn’t finished by the time the Second World War (and his subsequent suicide) rolled around, so it was hidden in Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, where it remained, undiscovered, until well after the war. Remember, the “j” in Benjamin is silent. People have been ruined in academic society for fucking that up. Foucault was indebted to Benjamin but created, with his work, a global team of starry-eyed disciples who couldn’t wait to put his pendulous French balls in their mouths. And I don’t blame them. He was an awfully clever man.

Excessive Use of Clauses

When an academic is attempting to say something complicated or, as is often the case, analyze a simple phenomenon in a complicated way, justifying a pointless essay, a number of clauses will be used. Sentences will go on for pages. Ideas, or statements, will pile up on top of one another, agency is taken from the reader, the consumer of the text, the product, as ideas pile up; the statements remain, though, buried, amid the clauses, the clause. In high school you were probably reverentially told about George Orwell and his famous rules for writing good English (be simple, be clear, don’t use metaphors, etc., etc. It always sounded boring to me). Time to throw old Orwell in the trash along with your dreams of a brighter future. There's no room for that short-sentence bullshit in critical theory.

Theodor Adorno

The great, pontificating old goat of 20th-century seriousness may have famously said that after the Holocaust there can be no laughter, and he may also have spent his life furiously pulling apart popular culture, but that didn’t stop his classic tome Minima Moralia ending up artfully scattered around branches of Urban Outfitters. He would have hated that. But then he deserved it. He was a dick.

Queer Theory

You are not a man. You are not a woman. You are not a neuter. You are a construct. Maintaining your gender is a constant performance. These ideas don’t seem that radical now, but before Judith Butler adapted them from Foucault and laid them out in her 1990 book Gender Trouble, they seemed alien. “What do you mean getting hammered with your pals is a culturally ingrained performance? Are you saying I’m gay? Are you saying I don’t like pounding beers at the bar and then going to the club to throw up on my best friend, Steve, whom I fucking love?" A bro might have said those very words to Judith Butler in 1990. Now, he’s read Gender Trouble and is content as can be sitting around watching Sex and the City with his girlfriend.

So, welcome, friend, to the innermost circle of critical theory. Before you know it, you will be unmasking the terrorism present in your family, analyzing the agency of the police within literature, and drawing a direct and clear line between the book you are reading and the public nap you are taking. You will be left thinking, Yes, of course, I always wondered why I behaved in that way, and now I know it’s because of the way society works, and the way society works is perfectly demonstrated in this book about gender politics and the novels of William Faulkner. And the day you think that is the day you are born.

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Earlier this week, Pope Francis announced that, in the event that we ever do make contact with extraterrestrial beings, he would be more than happy to baptize him some martians. Or, you know, Venusians or Jupiter…ians or whatever. He stated, specifically “When the Lord shows us the way, who are we to say, ‘No, Lord, it is not prudent! No, let’s do it this way’.  Who are we to close doors?”

Yes, who are we indeed to close doors? Except, you know, to gay people and women who might aspire to be priests.

Anyway, our nation’s top UFO cult, the Raëlians (no disrespect the ever-so-fashionable Unarians, of course, but they’re not so much around anymore), have now weighed in on this proposal. Unsurprisingly, they do not approve. Since the Raëlians believe that all of the things human beings worship as gods are actually aliens, they believe it would be more up to the aliens to baptize Pope Francis. Or something.

Via RaelPress.com:

Upon hearing that Pope Francis said he would welcome aliens at the Vatican and even baptize them, the spiritual leader of the International Raelian Movement has issued a correction.
“There will be no need to baptize those he calls “aliens” when they decide to come back,” Rael said in a statement released today by the IRM. “They are the ones who created all religions on Earth, and they were mistakenly taken for gods. Instead of offering them baptism, the pope will have to acknowledge that they are the gods he has been praying to all along.”

IRM spokesperson Brigitte Boisselier, Ph.D, explained that according to Raelian philosophy, all forms of life on Earth were created by the Elohim, highly advanced human beings from another planet.

“They came from another planet and made us in their image,” she said. “The original, Hebrew Bible clearly states that ‘Elohim’ created life on Earth, but this word ‘Elohim’ is in the plural form, not the singular. It means ‘those who came from the sky.’ It was later mistranslated into the singular form, ‘god,’ which led to monotheist religions like Catholicism.”

There is an easy solution for those who really want to know the truth, according to Boisselier.

“By reading the original Bible without the distortion of the monotheist filter, anyone can access the information the Elohim wanted us to preserve,” she said. “Evidence of the their work is worldwide, and we ourselves are becoming creators as new forms of life are now being conceived and created in our laboratories. The arrogance of the pope in wishing to baptize those who sent Jesus shows the level of his ignorance.”

Yahweh, leader of the Elohim, gave Rael important information in 1973, Boisselier said.

“Among other things, Yahweh was highly critical of the Vatican,” Boisselier said, adding that people can read all of Yahweh’s Messages for themselves in Rael’s book “Intelligent Design,” downloadable for free at rael.org.

Oh, well…naturally.

For those of you unschooled in the world of bizarre UFO cults, the Raelians are led by Rael, a former “sports-car journalist” and singer, and they are really into topless ladies, cloning and aliens. They believe in the resurrection of Jesus Christ through a scientific cloning process. I suggest you wait until you have a few spare hours before you start your venture into that particular internet black hole because, really, there’s just so much there.

A finales de los 50 comenzó la fiebre del baile. Una tendencia que, en los años siguientes, llevó a numerosos artistas y bandas a buscar ser los creadores del siguiente baile de moda con sus pasos a juego. Recordamos en este capítulo algunos de los más exitosos. Playlist; Cannibal and the Headhunters (Land of 1000 dances), The Diamonds (The stroll), Jimmy McCracklin (The walk), Johnny Otis (Willie and the hand jive), Tony and Joe (The freeze), Billy Graves (The shag is totally cool), Al Browns Tunetoppers (The Madison), Russell Byrd (Hitch hike), Joey Dee and the Starliters (Peppermint twist), The Champs (Limbo rock), Mark Valentino (The push and kick), Bob and Earl (Harlem shuffle), Shirley Ellis (The nitty gritty), Ray Barretto (El watusi), Rufus Thomas (Walking the dog), The Capitols (Cool jerk), Lee Dorsey (Ride your pony), Jackie Lee (The duck) y Chris Montez (Lets dance).

Rockabilly, Surf, Exótica, Jungle RocknRoll… en el año en que se cumple un lustro de la muerte de Bob Keane nos sumergimos en las valijas de sus sellos Del Fi y Donna Records para recordar algunas de sus estrellas junto a otras jugosísimas rarezas. Playlist; Ritchie Valens (Thats my Little Suzie), Chan Romero (I want some more), Little Caesar and the Romans (She don’t wanna dance no more), Dick Dale (Ooh we Marie), The Lively Ones (Misirlou), The Sentinals (Big surf), Dave Myers and the Surftones (Aquavelva), The Surfettes (Sammy the sidewalk surfer), Bruce Johnston (Original surfer stomp), The James Boys (Ah ah crazy pt.1), The Roller Coasters (Wild twist), Moongooners (Moongoon twist), Bob Ridgley (She was a Mau Mau), Gary Spider Webb (Drum city pt.1), Shalimar and his friends (Voodoo mash), Chuckie Chandler and the Chandeliers (Rockin moondoog), The Bedwells (Karate), Yo Yo Hashi (Yo yo pad), The Rockyfellers (Dont sit down) y Bob Keane (La Bamba).

 

 

So the other day I discovered a bunch of kittens under my shed. I didn't think it was my birthday yet...

Comrades, if you are willing to take a moment of your precious time and read what I have to say, please, lay down your weapons of expression. Ignore the bourgeois clutter and focus on the text. OKComrade, created on May 5, 2014 already boasts over 4,000 members. If you’re interested, check out this Facebook group. Link with each other. For the workers. Down with the system. Bring forth a revolution.

Photograph: Elana Lepkowski

Sangrita moves from lowly shooter to a full-fledged cocktail in this smoky, spicy and refreshing beer-based pitcher drink.

Note: Sangrita base will taste best if used within one day of making. Harissa is a Tunisian hot pepper paste, available at grocery stores and specialty food shops. If you prefer your drinks spicy, increase to 1 teaspoon.

Special equipment: pitcher, whisk, highball glasses

Ingredients

serves serves 5, active time 10 minutes, total time 2 hours

• For Sangrita Base:
• 1/2 teaspoon harissa, or more to taste
• 8 ounces tomato juice
• 6 ounces freshly squeezed juice from about 2 grapefruits
• 1/4 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
• 4 ounces freshly squeezed juice from about 2 oranges
• 1-1/2 ounces freshly squeezed juice from 2 lemons
• 2 ounces freshly squeezed juice from 2 to 3 limes
•  
• For each cocktail:
• Grapefruit wedge
• Coarse smoked sea salt
• 4 ounces Sangrita Base
• 4 ounces India Pale Ale

Procedures

1. For Sangrita Base: In a pitcher, whisk together harissa, black pepper and tomato juice. Add grapefruit juice, orange juice, lemon and lime juice. Stir to combine. Refrigerate for at least 2 hours, or up to 8 hours maximum.

2. For Each Cocktail: Wet the rim of a highball glass with grapefruit wedge, dip moistened edge in smoked sea salt. Add ice and 4 ounces of the sangrita base. Top with 4 ounces of IPA. Garnish with grapefruit wedge and serve

Gawk at the unholy burger combinations of PornBurger. (disclaimer: not at all porn, but NSIH --Not Safe If Hungry)

Some “study” that I found on the Daily Fail just now, based on 12,000 eHarmony profiles, claims to have found the top ten personal descriptors most likely to attract potential dates. Or, rather, the type of people who are on eHarmony, which–let’s just say it–is not us. Like we’d pay to join a dating site founded in part by the Heritage Foundation, with commercials directed by Fred Durst. Not to mention the fact that the friendly founder dude that’s in all the commercials claimed that gay marriage “damaged” his company. Gross.

Anyway, should you happen to be on eHarmony, here are the most “enticing” words to use in order to get yourself a hot date.

MOST ENTICING WORDS USED BY WOMEN

Sweet +46%

Ew. Sweet is number one. What kind of adult human calls themselves “sweet?” Probably one who is either very boring or who tends to talk in a baby voice. I could be wrong, but I feel like you’d also have to be short, because I–at least–would feel a tinge odd being 5’8″ and referring to myself as “sweet.” However, perhaps it is enticing for the explicit reason that it reads as “willing to put up with your shit.”

Ambitious +39%
Thoughtful +30%
Spontaneous +30%
Physically fit +22%
Funny +21%
Outgoing +19%
Optimistic +17%
Hard working +17%
Passionate +16%

MOST ATTRACTIVE WORDS USED BY MEN

Physically fit +69%

Really? I guess this is OK if that’s what you’re into, but I would be terrified that someone who specifically referred to themselves as physically fit would like, try to get me to go camping with them or have a conversation with me about their abs. It also seems a tinge shallow.

Ambitious +64%
Perceptive +63%
Passionate +53%
Optimistic +44%
Funny +38%
Spontaneous +33%
Thoughtful +21%
Affectionate +17%
Outgoing + 17%

If you ask me, many of these words seem like words boring people describe themselves. I give most of them a solid “meh.” Which may be why I am single.

It’s kind of a bummer, I think, that funny ranks so low on both of these lists. Personally, I can’t think of a single thing else that even matters. You could have two heads and a prison record and I’d probably swoon if I think you’re hilarious. Just so long as you don’t seem like the type that is going to make me go camping. Though to be fair, I don’t think that anyone who was actually hilarious would go on eHarmony and specifically call themselves funny. I think, for the most part, people who are funny just say  (or write) something funny rather than telling people they are funny. It’s more of a show-don’t-tell characteristic.

Still, it’s probably better than describing yourself as someone who “loves to laugh,” which is a thing you see a lot on dating profile things, and which I don’t understand at all. I mean, I think most people are generally pro-laughing, so unless your job is guarding Buckingham Palace, you probably don’t need to specify that.

Then again, given that my co-worker Joe Veix garnered so many suitors pretending to be a literal dog on Tinder, maybe these descriptors don’t matter as much as one’s intrinsic desire to get laid does.

 

SIDENOTE HAVING PRETTY MUCH NOTHING TO DO WITH THIS POST: While looking for images for this post, I noticed something super weird. All the people in their ads are white, with the notable exception of *one* Asian lady on an ad geared specifically towards eHarmony’s “Asian Dating” section. I’m not saying eHarmony is racist, but that’s pretty creepy if you ask me.

I ordered Javier Marías's Dark Back of Time from an online bookstore, based almost entirely on the title. I know that goes directly against traditional book-buying advice, but that’s really a hell of a title, and it turned out to be one of the best things I’ve read in a long time. Aside from its name, the book stood out for its description, which mentions how the author considers it a “false novel,” and that its story opens with his contemplating the effects of publishing his previous novel, All Souls. I was immediately struck by the idea of a “false novel,” which kind of inverts the idea most people have about a novel being false, or at least imagined, full of constructions and artifices. An author directly calling his novel “false” seemed to develop around it an immediate mystique, a Borgesian sense that the book could be something of a trap door, or a false mirror, behind which something other than simple fiction lurks.

The fact that it acknowledges itself, and the author’s previous novel, is a breaking of the third wall that immediately brings to mind associations with Orson Welles’s F for Fake, Nabokov’s Pale Fire, and Bret Easton Ellis’s Lunar Park, all self-referential objects that break into bizarre ground simply by talking about themselves.

But where Dark Back of Time begins its exploration in this manner, in the end it has more to do with the effect fiction—and its mirage-like incorporation of reality—has on the world around it. Marías, at least as he appears as a narrator in this novel, explains how All Souls caused a stir among his local community when it was published, because many people assumed it was based on them. It is set in the town where Marías himself actually lived, and characters resemble various persons at Oxford College, where the author taught. So it makes sense that many saw themselves there on the page, and viewed the novel as a thinly veiled appropriation of Marías’s actual opinions about them, a window into his brain and life. Even if this perceived depiction wasn’t at all flattering, they were happy to believe themselves immortalized in such a fashion, to have had enough effect, positive or negative, on the author to appear now in print, forever.

But Marías, the narrator of this novel about the novel, doesn’t believe All Souls has any basis in the actual lives of people in his community. He believes such an idea is ridiculous, useless, even sick.

“It is always said,” he writes, “that behind every novel lies an episode, however pallid or tenuous or intermittent, in the life or reality of the author, though it may have been transfigured. This is said as if in distrust of the imagination and the inventive faculties, and also as if readers and critics needed something to hang onto, to keep from falling prey either to the strange vertigo of that which is absolutely invented and without experience or basis—as if they did not want to feel the horror of something that appears to exist as we read it, that breathes and whispers and sometimes even persuades, yet has never been—or to the ultimate absurdity of taking seriously what is only a representation, as if they were struggling against the lurking awareness that reading novels is a childish pastime, or at least inappropriate to the adult life that is always gaining on us.”

For Marías, it seems, the act of creating fiction is not to understand what has already happened, because you cannot, but instead to solidify and strengthen the strange wires that connect the world. Much of the book, in the midst of attempting to parse its own impact, veers off into holes in its own material; there might be three pages suddenly recounting the contents of a novel written by a guy who believed himself to have appeared in Marías’ previous book. The death of the same man by a bullet through his eye takes on as much attention as the opening premise of the book, as do countless other tiny scenes and facts as they appear in the author’s memory.

The effect creates a kind of flood of impressions, histories, and ideas, more so than any story. Fans of W. G. Sebald will recognize the loose narrative structure of something like a walk through memory as Marías stacks layers and layers of the world into the flow, creating a kind of open network meant not to contain the world, but to extend it, knit it together. Anecdotes of history stand alongside more hearsay, snippets of the author’s childhood, passages of other authors’ fiction Marías has read, literary rumors, rants by insane Nazis attempting to define truth… all of it held together solely by Marías’ consideration, his somehow tranquilizing prose. The line between the fiction and the reality it considers are at once separate and distinct, while also bound together in a mass by what Marías thinks of as a continuity containing all possible experience, a ghostly underbelly or “dark back of time” standing underneath all points of the world.

The world, as a result, is much larger and more incalculable, less bent on bullshit like who appeared when or where. Small things like making art or believing in oneself hold less value than simply being, going on in the flood of time. “What does it matter, nothing is really that strange, and who would be interested, there are no hidden forces guiding anything or leading anyone to the place of his death, all possibilities are contained in the passage of that, that is, in the past and future,” he writes. “What a pity to want to soar without knowing how, it happens to most of us.”

The inherent darkness of these conclusions—if they can be called conclusions—serve as a great resolution, having come from what at the beginning of the book seemed something so trivial and petty as people searching for representations of themselves in a novel. There is no uplifting premise here, no way out, and if anyone is crushed in the expanse that’s been created, it is the author, who claims to not know why he exists. And yet, despite whatever futility may seem rampant as a result, the consolation is that this time we have not been bullshitted, or pulled around. There is no ego here but in its negation, the sacrifice of any story into the totality of time, and we’re all better off having to hear it.

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photo via Flickr user Hamed Saber

Two big news stories just came out about potential causes of Colony Collapse Disorder, the mysterious plague resulting in the deaths of billions of bees, and triggering an endless stream of environmentalist hysteria. One news story focused on mites; the bigger story blamed pesticides. 

Now that the list of suspects is being narrowed, a rift is forming between apologists for the pesticide industry, and the same bleeding-heart environmentalists who've been making noise about this all along. After years of wait-and-see news reports, things are getting cinematic: The evil chemical corporation might be the bee murderer after all, but if it is, it's not going down without a fight.

These dying bee stories with no certainty in sight have been background noise for years. Even when a dire New York Times article came out in 2013 saying perhaps half of all bees needed for agriculture had died, it sounded too familiar to really shake us. Conversely when the news earlier this year was that deaths had slowed a little, we didn't really notice that either. 

But it's been an exciting few weeks in the world of All-the-Bees-Are-Dying News. 

April: It's The Mites.

photo via Flickr user Gilles San Martin

On April 29, Congress received testimony from a bee expert working for the Bayer corporation, a manufacturer of pesticides. Unsurprisingly, they did not blame pesticides. They blamed varroa mites, an exotic pest introduced into American crops in the 1980s. The mite is no joke. It infects bees with a disease called Varroosis, and takes over their colonies. 

Environmentalist publications like Friends of the Earth flipped out about Bayer's testimony, calling it "stacked against science." They blame Bayer, and the family of pesticides called neonicotinoids, not all of which are manufactured by Bayer. In 2012, studies started blaming neonicotinoids for bee deaths, and the pesticides are currently banned in Europe as a sort of continent-wide experiment.

For years, neonicotinoids have been the far left's scapegoat for this whole mess. What could be a more perfect target than a cheap and widely used industrial poison made from nicotine. Just hearing about the nasty-sounding stuff makes me want to blame everything from Israel-Palestine to my irritable bowel syndrome on it. But that would be a knee-jerk reaction not based on evidence.

Ask an environmentalist what the cause of any ecological disaster is, and you'll inevitably receive the same tried-and-true answer: Corporate greed with the help of a corrupt government that fails to regulate it because of intimidation or payoffs by powerful lobbies. We've heard it all before, enviros. 

May: No, It's Really the Pesticides.

Then on May 9, the results of a major experiment from Chengshen Lu of the Harvard School of Public Health followed up on previous studies into whether neonicotinoid pesticides are the culprit. His report showed that they probably are. And he means it this time.

Lu's previous study in 2012 had suggested that the bees were merely being injured by the pesticides during nice weather, and then dying only months later from the long term effects of their condition, perhaps exacerbated by those pesky varroa mites.

But the new findings suggest that the pesticides are flipping on some other biological mechanism that's killing them, seemingly without the help of mites. "We demonstrated again in this study that neonicotinoids are highly likely to be responsible for triggering CCD in honey bee hives that were healthy prior to the arrival of winter," the report said. It has an air of certainty, and maybe that's what's made it so sensational.

To its credit, the USDA website features a report acknowledging the possibility of blaming neonicotinoids, but the pesticides are mentioned only below the section on varroa mites. I called them to find out how they were responding to Lu's study, and they refused to comment on short notice. The person I spoke to hadn't read the report.

Bayer has, and they issued a response:

screencap from Bayer Crop Science

Essentially, they don't consider it valid because Lu used too much of their chemical.

Lu's new study did in fact use seven times the concentration of neonicotinoid pesticide his 2012 study had used. But it's worth noting that the chemical was added to the food supply left out for the bees, and they ingested it voluntarily.

Bayer can certainly claim that this is ten times the amount a bee is likely to encounter in the wild, but it's hard to imagine how they could possibly control the concentration or amount used by any given farmer. The bees involved in the experiment digested that amount, and then behaved normally for months, before exhibiting all the signs of colony collapse disorder—mostly lying still and decomposing, although there's also the part where all the healthy bees flee the hive.

Lu's study certainly isn't enough to justify a ban, just more experiments. Taking an example from history, after the publication of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, it took ten more years to ban DDT. If Bayer puts up a fight while opinion turns against their pesticide, there'll be plenty of time to become certain. Assuming the bees can hold out until then.

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Llegué, como otras veces en los últimos meses, a la zona más ruinosa de Ferrol, en este caso es la Calle de Carmen Curuxeiras, Ferrol. Una calle por la que discurría (ahora vallada en unos cincuenta metros) el Camino Inglés a Santiago de Compostela, ahora interrumpido esos metros por motivos de seguridad (peligro de derrumbe), más adelante vuelve dicho Camino a discurrir por esa calle. Quería ver si había habido alguna novedad desde mi última visita, no hacía mucho tiempo. Una noticia en ese lugar es básicamente que se venga abajo un edificio...

En otras ocasiones he visto gatos en ese mismo espacio, que ofrece un silencio curioso, como si estuvieras a mucha distancia de la ciudad, ya que no llegan los típicos sonidos urbanos, salvo los graznidos de unas aves carroñeras, muy comunes en Ferrol, que dominan los cielos ferrolanos (mejor, dicho los tejados) a su antojo y que también están presenten en Ferrol Vello, faltaría más. Un pájaro de esos, tan familiares en Ferrol, estaba ayer a un lado de la calle, postrado y sin poder moverse, como si tuviera las patas destrozadas. Todo el orgullo que exhiben cuando vuelan se había esfumado.

Una gaviota yacía al lado de la valla de que impide el paso a ese tramo de la Calle de Carmen Curuxeiras, Ferrol Vello

Los gatos de esa zona, conté cuatro ayer, se acercaban con sigilo a la gaviota, tanteándola y estudiando el terreno. El pájaro se defendía soltando enérgicos picotazos al aire, aunque sabedora de que sin poder andar y echar el vuelo su final sería cuestión de tiempo. Los animales no son muy distintos a nosotros y saben cuándo su final está cerca. Los gatos, sigilosos y precavidos como ellos solos, se echaban para atrás ante la legítima defensa de la gaviota.

Los gatos disimulan y la gaviota vigila su territorio, en este caso su propio cuerpo

Aunque los gatos saben que pueden invadir el espacio vital del pájaro, ya que está impedido, se retiran cuando el pájaro les dice basta

Los gatos huelen la muerte y son pacientes...

Al final se ve resignación en la gaviota y una fiereza refrenada en el gato, que tendrá su momento, como se suele decir ahora, cuando caiga la noche, en la cual las gaviotas ya no se sienten tan seguras...

Los gatos, sabedores de que yo estaba cerca, se escondían en una puerta cercana, controlándome con miradas que parecían querer decirme qué demonios hacía yo en ese sitio, que sin personas viviendo en esa calle, ellos son los dueños de ese desierto humano.

La mirada de un gato siempre es cautivadora y misteriosa, parece que ven más allá de lo material. Te escudriñan cuando no los ves, si hay vegetación quedan ocultos, en este caso yo también les observaba.

Iba en son de paz, solo quería inmortalizar esos momentos que el azar me puso ahí

Me encantó esa mirada a un solo ojo, al gato le llegaba para tenerme controlado

¿Quién es el enjaulado? Yo ya no lo tengo tan claro

Un barrio, el de Ferrol Vello, que es la mayor ruina de Ferrol. Las pocas personas que residen en esa zona tiene que pagar el IBI al Concello de Ferrol como si vivieran en una zona "normal", vergonzosamente no hay un descuento importante de ese impuesto por residir en un entorno en esas pésimas condiciones. La situación catastrófica de Ferrol Vello no admite más dilación. Las Administraciones tienen que actuar ya, ciñéndose al trazado original y salvando lo salvable, que es más de lo que parece y haciendo casas nuevas que sean similares a las que existen en ese casco histórico de Ferrol, germen de lo que fue la futura ciudad.

Escenas como ésa, que es como se expresa la Naturaleza en todas sus formas y tamaños, también se pueden dar en ese mismo entorno, pero sin la ruina absoluta que presenta desde tantísimo tiempo. Los gatos sobreviven incluso en zonas hiperdegradas, se adaptan a cualquier entorno, a la gente de Ferrol le ha sucedido algo parecido, son supervivientes en una ciudad decadente. Es necesario transcender esta adaptación a la decadencia y caminar por senderos nuevos, que hagan que Ferrol tenga futuro.

Los gatos, aún siendo animales muy independientes, también necesitan al ser humano. Se merecen un entorno mejor, al igual que los residentes de Ferrol Vello.

Un saludo a todos los habitantes de ese castigadísimo barrio, que en cualquier ciudad portuaria es la joya de la Corona, símbolo de orgullo para una ciudad con mar e imán para los turistas, pero que en Ferrol presenta una ruina tremenda, reflejo de la baja autoestima y dejadez, que por lo general, tienen los políticos ferrolanos, reflejo siempre de quienes les votan, y que son cualidades negativas originadas en la mayoría de las ocasiones por ser un pueblo dependiente de el Estado, que fue quien lo echó a andar y es quien le está dando la puntilla. Se puede cambiar esa tendencia, de todos nosotros depende. Que no haya que "esconder" ninguna zona a las cruceristas que arriban al Puerto de Ferrol, cada vez con más frecuencia, afortunadamente.

Una zona portuaria que sea un modelo para Galicia, que dinamice a Ferrol y sea un orgullo para la ferrolanidad, tanto la residente como la de la diáspora, que está ahí y que ama a su ciudad en la distancia.

¡¡¡FERROL VELLO EXISTE!!!

El concurso de tapas se celebrará entre el 6 y el 21 de junio e incorporará una ruta en coche

Hai 100 anos Galicia contaba con 1,5 millóns de ovellas e cabras, máis ca vacas. Hoxe quedan pouco máis de 190.000 e decrecendo. Entrevistamos Carlos A. Rodríguez Rodríguez, técnico da Asociación de Criadores de Ovino e Caprino de Galicia (OVICA) e un dos mellores coñecedores do sector en Galicia.

Feijoo aseguró ayer en «Vía V» que «o que está ocurrindo en Santiago terá consecuencias nas próximas eleccións»

Each generation should be wiser than the last.

Someone with a cold sore, a result of the herpes virus. Photo via Wikimedia Commons

I can't see many people bettering David Golding's break-up story. After his then-girlfriend found out that he’d given her herpes, she dumped him, reported him to the police, and watched as he was jailed for 14 months for passing on the STI. The reason the sentencing was so severe is because Golding was charged with (and pled guilty to) grievous bodily harm (GBH), which usually means stabbing or beating the shit out of someone—not passing along a virus that roughly 25 percent of the UK’s sexually active population already has.

Unsurprisingly, sexual-health organizations weren’t very happy about the verdict, claiming it contributed to the wrongful stigmatization of what is really a pretty “trivial” condition. Those same organizations were just as outraged last week when the Court of Appeal rejected Golding’s appeal against his conviction. Lord Justice Treacy, sitting next to two other judges, said that even though Golding had acted “recklessly rather than deliberately” in giving his ex the virus, his original conviction was appropriate (though he did reduce his sentence to three months).

I called up Marian Nicholson, director of the Herpes Virus Association, to see how this latest verdict has gone down in the herpes world.

Marian Nicholson, director of the Herpes Virus Association

VICE: What do you think about the judge’s decision to reject David Golding’s appeal?
Marian Nicholson: I find it to be absolutely shocking.

Do you think the sentence itself was disproportionate to the offense of giving someone herpes?
I don't want to comment on the length of the sentence itself, because I don't know enough about proper sentences for GBH. But I don't believe this case was in the public interest; the judge even said that Golding didn't give his girlfriend the virus deliberately.

Does the judge's decision to reject Golding's appeal pose a threat to others in the future who might find themselves in a similar case? 
Of course. It's a disaster for common sense. The sexual-health doctors are all with us on that. We're conferring with all the top sexual-health doctors from an organization called BASHH [British Association for Sexual Health and HIV]; they're all horrified at the ridiculousness of basically taking someone to court for passing on a cold sore.

[Genital herpes] is incredibly common. It's almost impossible to prove who you got it from; anyone with a cold sore on their face doing oral sex could give it to a partner on the genitals. So, basically, they're saying that anyone with a cold sore on their face could end up in the dock.

Do you think the stigma attached to herpes might have had something to do with the original sentence and the rejection of the appeal?
Medically, a cold sore is incredibly unimportant. Up until the invention of antiviral drugs in the early 80s, there was no stigma associated with having a cold sore on any part on your body. To this day, any doctor who knows about the condition will tell you it's better to get it down below because, on your face, it's a much more serious condition. 

It's better to have genital herpes?
Yes, and this isn't good news when you've spent millions developing an antiviral drug. So the stigma was created by the drug companies while advertizing genital herpes treatment. I'll give you an example: A medical book for nurses printed in the 70s doesn't include the word herpes in the index. Once the drug companies created all the fuss, they started doing caesarean sections for mothers with genital herpes, and yet they allowed a mom with a facial cold sore to kiss her newborn baby.

Why hasn't it been destigmatized?
Because the condition is so medically unimportant that you don’t have a concerted effort to destigmatize it—such as the campaign we saw in the late 80s with HIV. It was important to destigmatize HIV because it kills, and you need to get people aware of it to treat it. Doctors can’t be asked to do something about destigmatizing a cold sore; they know it’s only a cold sore. Sadly, the judiciary are just as affected by the herpes stigma as any other layperson.

Do you think this case might make the demonization worse?

I don’t think it's going to get worse. We get people ringing us up on our helpline who are very concerned that they'll never have a partner again. And that’s been happening long before this case; it's been happening ever since the helpline was established in 1985. I don’t think it can get worse, because it’s already pretty bad.

What would you like to see happen to improve the situation?

We would like to see education. By the age of 25, seven out of ten people carry this virus, statistically. By the age of 35, it would be very hard to find a woman who does not have this virus. If you've had seven partners, statistically we would expect you to have simplex herpes type 2 [which produces most genital herpes]. The reason you don’t think you have it is that only one person in five gets it badly enough to be diagnosed. So [going by the Golding logic] this is basically going to put a fifth of the population in court. 

Follow Jack Gilbert on Twitter.

¡Hola parejitas jugonas!

Hoy nos centraremos en un hermano pequeño que tiene todo lo imprescindible para ser equiparado a su hermano mayor en cuanto a la sensación de juego. Hoy jugamos a Mr. Jack pocket.

Nº de jugadores: 2

Tiempo de juego: 15 minutillos de nada.

Autores: Bruno Cathala y Ludovic Maublanc

Empaquetado: Una cajita chiquitita en la que hay muy poquito aire, el justo para que las fichas de turno y de los personajes quepan bien y con bolsita. Todos los materiales: losetas de calle, cartas de personajes y las fichitas redondas varias son de cartón gordote muy resistente. Materiales de muy güena calidad.

¿Y qué viene dentro de la caja? Tendremos 9 cartas de calle, que serán donde se encontraran nuestros sospechosos de los crueles asesinatos que arrasan Whitechapel, por un lado serán solo calle y por el otro mostraran   la cara de uno de los personajes. También tendremos 9 cartas de personaje, que les otorgaran su coartada a todos menos uno. 3 fichas de detective, en este caso tendremos a Sherlock, Watson y su perrito Toby, un sabueso muy listo bien entrenado en el arte de cazar malechores. 4 fichas con acciones por las dos cartas, que nos indicarán que acciones podremos realizar en la ronda. 8 fichas de tiempo que nos permitirán marcar en que ronda nos encontramos y le otorgaran puntos a nuestro despiadado asesino.

Al igual que en su hermano mayor, nuestro objetivo dependerá de si somos los investigadores o el asesino. El objetivo del investigador es descubrir que disfraz ha cogido nuestro despiadado asesino Mr. Jack para escapar impune del crimen. El objetivo de Mr. Jack es que el investigador pierda todo el tiempo posible y conseguir escapar.

Lo primero que deberemos hacer será colocar las losetas de calle al azar sobre la mesa/superficie sobre la que jugaremos (recomendamos una mínimamente plana) con la cara de los sospechosos mirando hacia arriba. Cuando vayamos descartando sospechosos le iremos dando la vuelta y se libraran de nuestra vigilancia. Las calles no tienen porque tener continuidad, aunque recomendamos que no todas se vean interrumpidas.

El investigador cogerá las 3 fichas de investigadores: Sherlock, Watson y Toby, y las colocará con una separación entre una y otra de 3 lados. Es decir, así:

Mr. Jack cogerá una de las cartas de sospechoso y esa será su identidad. A partir de ese momento su objetivo será esconderse entre la multitud lo mejor posible para no ser descubierto.

Las 9 fichas de tiempo se colocan con los números a la vista de los jugadores. Por el otro lado hay relojes de arena que le servirán como puntos a Mr. Jack. Si en algún momento de la partida, Mr. Jack tiene en su poder 6 relojes de arena (sin contar el de la carta que escogió como identidad) ganará la partida.

Una vez hecho esto podremos comenzar a jugar.

De las 9 rondas de juego, las impares las comenzará jugando el investigador y las pares Mr. Jack.

Al comienzo de las rondas impares el investigador cogerá las 4 fichas de acción y las lanzara como si de la resolución de cara o cruz se tratara. Las 4 caras que queden bocarriba serán las que se podrán realizar ese turno.

Las acciones puedes ser:

Una vez el investigador ha lanzado las losetas, elegirá una de las fichas de acción llevando a cabo la acción que en dicha ficha venga indicado, tras esto, Mr. Jack realizará dos acciones seguida, y la última acción corresponderá al investigador.

Tras esto, Mr. Jack debe declarar si está visible o no. ¿Cómo estará visible? Muy fácil, será visible si se encuentra en la línea de visión de cualquiera de los investigadores. La línea de visión de los investigadores se verá interrumpida por muros y barricas pero no por otros personajes.

Si Mr. Jack está visible, todos los sospechosos que se encuentra fuera de la línea de visión de los investigadores serán declarados inocentes y se le dará la vuelta a su loseta de calle. El investigador se quedará con la ficha de turno, quitándole el reloj de arena a Mr. Jack.

Si Mr. Jack está invisible, el investigador le dará la vuelta a los que se encuentran en su línea de visión. Además, la ficha de turno se la lleva Mr. Jack y con ella, un preciado reloj de arena que le hará estar un poquito más cerca de su huida.

¿Y cómo se gana?

El investigador ganará si logra descubrir a Mr. Jack. Esto se producirá cuando solo quede una de las losetas de calle bocarriba.

Mr. Jack ganará si consigue reunir 6 relojes de arena o si al final del octavo turno aún es invisible. Esto indica que se ha podido camuflar en las sombras y huir de Whitechapel.

En el raro caso (a nosotros nunca nos ha pasado) de que los dos jugadores consigan su objetivo al mismo tiempo:

-        Si es en el octavo turno. Mr. Jack ganará si es invisible y los investigadores lo harán si Mr. Jack se encuentra visible.

-        Si ninguno consigue su objetivo al final del octavo turno, gana Mr. Jack.

El juego es única y exclusivamente para dos, y funciona de maravilla. Las partidas siempre serán extremadamente tensas y darán lugar a que le perdedor clame venganza y pida la revancha. Su corta duración y lo poquito que ocupa, incluso una vez desplegado en la mesa, lo hace muy cómodo para viajes en tren o avión (si hay bandejita delante).

Opinión de Farko: Al principio me gustaba menos que su hermano mayor, pero con el paso de las partidas, este gana en rejugabilidad y ganas de sacarlo a la mesa. Es más pequeño, más rápido y te da básicamente las mismas sensaciones, por lo que es un más que digno sucesor en tu ludoteca si te encuentras en un espacio que se va reduciendo con el paso del tiempo. Un muy buen juego por un precio más que agradable.

Opinión de Fayzah: Me encanta el juego. Al ser más pequeñito y transportable que su hermano mayor hace más visitas al exterior. Es extremadamente fácil de explicar, la primera partida no sabes que hacer y estas bastante perdido. Tras esto ya ves la maldad del juego y se convertirá en un vicio ideal con un café o una tinto delante.

Reseña del juego en la BGG: Mr. Jack pocket

Reseña en Jugando para 2: Mr. Jack pocket

Reseña del juego en Diario de WKR: Mr. Jack pocket

Reseña del juego en 2 maracas D10: Mr. Jack pocket

Na svidenje!

 

 

When a kitten says this to you, it's devastating. Flickr member Wendy dresses her cat in different costumes, including the Doctor, Daenerys Targaryen, Jon Snow, and Gandalf. You can see more photos of her here. Now we're here to rescue you, so let's get moving.

-via Fashionably Geek

Once again, we have a scientific look at a fantasy that explains the utter impossibility of one of our pop culture icons. Godzilla in his 2014 incarnation is the biggest monster we’ve seen yet, which breaks the laws of biology and physics.

Since his first awakening, the radioactive, fire-spewing kaiju has grown 200 feet and put on more than 150,000 tons. Godzilla is now 30 stories tall and weighs as much as a cruise ship. No actual animal could take the pressure of being so massive: It would overheat, its organs would implode, and it would need to mainline butter to get enough calories. For fun, we surveyed scientists to help us break down the beast's biology. If Godzilla were real, he would be an incredible specimen.

Read the nuts and bolts of the Godzilla analysis at Popular Mechanics. -via Laughing Squid

(Image credit: Stephanie Godot/Andrew Rae)

La edila defiende que el gobierno está haciendo una gestión «brillante». Con este argumentario tratan de contrarrestar la imagen del banquillo en el que se sentarán siete concejales el próximo lunes

O noso país comparte nome con Galitzia, Galicia ou Galicia dos Cárpatos, unha rexión en Europa Central que, tras ser parte do Imperio Austro Húngaro e moitas outras vicisitudes históricas, atópase hoxe dividida entre Polonia e Ucrania. O seu nome apareceu recentemente nas noticias de moitos medios internacionais ao fío do recente golpe de estado e crise separatista en Ucrania.  Cando as tropas nazis comezaron a sufrir falta de homes na súa ofensiva contra a URSS, os xenerais de Adolf Hitler empezaron a saltarse a prohibición de enlistar cidadáns de pobos non arios no exército alemán.  Así, en abril de 1943 creábase a Waffen-Grenadier-Division "Galizien", o xenitivo de Galicia. Estaba formada sobre todo por voluntarios ucranianos, que vían na invasión fascista unha solución para escapar do domino ruso na URSS.  Politicamente, estaba apoiada sobre todo por nacionalistas e polas igrexas gregas e ortodoxa de Ucrania. Organicamente, formaba parte das SS, as tropas de elite que non dependían do exército, senón directamente do organigrama nazi. Tras sufrir enormes baixas durante a ofensiva soviética en 1944 e participar na represión da resistencia polaca e ucraniana, foi traslada a Eslovaquia. Aló a División Galicia gañouse unha terríbel fama, pola súa feroz represión dos partisanos e da poboación civil. Afortunadamente para moitos dos seus soldados, a maioría conseguiron rendirse aos Aliados, escapando das represarias que os soviéticos tomaron con todos os colaboracionistas nazis, podendo emigrar aos Estados Unidos e a Canadá. Esta historia gañou recentemente actualidade. En abril o gobernador da cidade de Lviv, parte do partido nacionalista do actual primerio ministro "Svoboda", fixo un chamamento a cancelar os actos de homenaxe aos socios dos nazis. Con todo, un milleiro de persoas, moitas mozos con estética neonazi, marcharon o 28 de abril polas rúas de Lviv. A manifestación foi organizada polas organizacións ultras "Terra Nativa" e "Irmandade de Estudantes Stepan Bandera", nomeada así en referencia ao polémico líder nacionalista ucraniano, a quen rendiron homenaxe diante dunha estatua. Non houbo incidentes graves, pero si intres de tensión entre os activistas e os cidadáns que lles recriminaban a homenaxe aos nazis. Así que, malia que Lviv atópase en Galicia, nunha zona con escasa presencia de rusofalantes, tamén houbo contramanifestación, na que participaron un cento de persoas.  Velaquí un vídeo con imaxes históricas da polémica formación militar: