Dance Magers

The 341st Missile Wing at Malmstrom Air Force Base flunked a test when security forces were unable to regain control of a nuclear missile that was captured during a hostile takeover simulation. Since only the president has the launch codes, the main security concern would be the fissile material inside the warhead.

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Star Mark Wahlberg says his new movie about giant robots fighting each will be "more realistic" than previous movies about giant robots fighting each other. Good to know!

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Politicians going after Republican votes know from the polls that opposing capital punishment is a career-ending decision. But, a growing group of conservatives say it's time to reject a policy that they describe as an anti-life intrusion by big government. Is this the future of conservative politics?

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Surgeons from the UPMC Presbyterian Hospital in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, are set to begin suspended animation trials by dramatically cooling down trauma victims in an effort to keep them alive during critical operations.

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Illustrations by Nick Nold

It was one of those rare moments when you realize the predicament you’re in can’t easily be fixed. I was having sex, and then there was a pop. The next minute, I sat stupidly at the end of the bed, staring down at my crotch—eyes wide, jaw hanging open.

“Is it just dye from the condom?”

My then quasi-girlfriend was a little too casual for my liking. I continued to stare at my penis, too stunned to answer.

“No, it’s definitely not the condom.”

After running a quick play-by-play in my head, my worst fears had been actualized. I had pulled out a minute before, hastily tearing off the black condom and smacking the light switch to examine the damage only to find out, to my horror, what looked like a growing blood blister on the side of my most dear possession. There’s only one thing I could do: begrudgingly ask this chick to drive me to the hospital.

Keep in mind, up until this point, I'd successfully managed to dodge my doctor for months. Even now, at the age of 26, my own mother has to lie in order to dupe me into getting somewhat regular check-ups. I’m pretty sure I broke my right hand three years ago, and even though I get shooting pains from my pinky to my elbow, I remain resolute. In this particular instance, I wasn’t going to take my chances. I also happened to be living just up the street from one of the only decent hospitals in Oakland.

After an awkward drive, and a very cautious two-block walk, I hurried through the emergency room, hoping that a broken dick is the triage trump card. Past a half-empty room filled with sickly 30-somethings, I sidled up to the desk to be greeted by the last person you'd want to see in this situation: a tall, bald, and buff Brazilian dude in scrubs and Crocs. Very calm and collected, with the pitch-perfect amount of pep you'd expect from someone wearing a WWJD bracelet, he turned to me. 

“Hey, man. How can I help you?”

He barely got out the question before both my palms were flat on the desk.

“I think I broke my dick, and I need a doctor right now.”

“Pardon?”

“I think I broke my dick, and I need a doctor right now.”

His quizzical head tilt was almost reptilian. This is not a hospital that gets a ton of action. Moments later, I showed this stranger my junk, which was looking worse than it had at the scene of the crash. Understanding the urgency of my condition, he skipped the pager and yelled for a doctor.

I was escorted to a room, where a nurse wearing officially licensed Grey's Anatomy scrubs put me on an IV. Before I could decide whether or not I should trust a medical professional who wears TV-themed uniforms, the on-call doctor was in the room breaking down the situation. Each plausible treatment scenario sounded worse than the last.

“Well, we have to explore the options, but most likely we will give you a shot up your urethra, which will make the veins more visible, and take it from there…?”

At least she can give me Vicodin, I thought.

The on-call doctor went on: “Dr. Cherrie, our urologist, has been woken and should be here within the hour to follow up.”

And so I sat there waiting. Later I’d find out that urologists are notoriously lazy. You know the guys who golf three times a week and phone in the rest? That’s your dick doctor.

By now, the girl who had given me a lift was gone. The nurse gradually cranked up the morphine so that by the time Cherrie strolled in, I was at an 11.

The resident penis expert seemed annoyed to have been summoned and, like everyone else, not terribly concerned. I asked him whether he had hit any traffic on the way here.

“It’s three in the morning—Jesse, is it? Take your pants off, Jesse.”

He inspected my penis for about 20 seconds before shrugging.

“Well, it looks like surgery.”

His professional assessment was as close to folksy as medical language can get. He told me I had a penile fracture, which is the professional way of saying, “Welp, your dick’s broken." He was about as insightful as a mechanic explaining a flat tire to you. In this case, the tire was my penis.

He gave me the option of waiting a week or two (minor tears can self-repair) but noted that the risk of permanent damage increased dramatically. No questions there; I called my friend Nick and told him that I would be needing a ride in the morning. Then I let my head slam back onto the pillow and let the morphine run its course.

The next thing I remember is waking up in post-op. With a sleepy smirk on his face, Nick was there, and like an ace, he was early. He took me back home, where I slept, for what would end up being the last time, next to the girl who had broken my dick.

The next morning, feeling almost a decade younger than I was, the shame settled back in as I waited for my dad to pick me up. As my luck would have it, my mom's car pulled up instead, and I got in.

The ride was deathly silent before my Mom finally spoke up, "Whatever you did, or tried to do, never do it again.”

I spent the next month in bed high and in pain. At my bedside, my dad, who was very sick at the time, had left some of his “You’re gonna die anyway” opiates and weed he’d called “too strong” for his taste, alongside an ice pack.

Why an ice pack? To shrivel up my morning boners, of course. You're not allowed to get those for three weeks after the operation because, if you do, you'll rip the stitches in your penis. There's no reverse Viagra. Just alcohol and ice packs.

I was healthy enough to "get back out there" about four months later, but my heart wasn’t in it until the next fall. It took a full year and a lot of booze to stop worrying at all.

I’ve tried perfecting this as a party story, but it’s a little varsity for polite company, and to be honest, my friends tell it better. If you’re wondering what my dick looks like now (or if it even works, for that matter), then yes, it's totally fine.

Follow Jesse Miller-Gordon on Twitter

This is art student Peiqi Su's "Penis Wall," a wall of 3-D printed johnsons that can dance to music or interact with a viewer. Are you thinking what I'm thinking? "Probably not." I'll give you a dollar to run backwards into the wall as fast as you can.

The "Penis Wall", as it's appropriately titled, consists of a grid of wagging and waving members that frolic to the tune of a Tchaikovsky song or in step with a viewer like a melange of giddy, little phallic creatures. Using an ultrasonic distance sensor, the wall can be programmed not only to dance, but to serve as a visualization for data, such as stock market patterns.

When reached for comment, my roommate Derek's mom said she could service all of them. Keep going for several videos of the dongs doing their thing. Thanks to Diego and Tye, who are already hard at work constructing a vagina wall.

Minnesota has banned triclosan, an anti-bacterial agent found in soap, deodorants and toothpaste. It's the first state to do so. Triclosan is a health hazard and a likely contributor to resistant bacteria — if it even works at all .

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I mean look at it. Look at it. There's no way some deranged wizard doesn't have a few of these things secretly hiding around his magic tower, waiting to attack unwary adventurers (or at least seriously freak them out).

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Pennsylvania State Archives has released never before seen footage of Franklin Delano Roosevelt walking up a ramp at a baseball game in 1937. It's an exceptionally rare glimpse of the U.S. president who did his best to hide his disability from the public.

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This is the SlideRider, a set of connected folding mats that turn a staircase into a slide. Basically every kid's dream world. The indoor slide is the brainchild of inventor Trisha Cleveland, who is working with Quirky to make the product a reality. Pretty awesome, right? The only problem is, how do you get back up the stairs after you've ridden? You better hope your house has two staircases, because if mom slides down after you she just converted your two story house into a one story house. That's gonna hurt resale value, and dad's gonna be pissed. Keep going for a pictorial of the slide being set up. Thanks to lilco, who agrees there's only one way to get down the stairs without a slide, and that's riding the banister.

Photos by Jamie Lee Curtis Taete

In 2001, Tom Green was arguably the most popular comic performer in America. He had an MTV show, co-starred in the hit college comedy Road Trip, and somehow crafted a successful song out of the idea of putting your ass on things called “The Bum Bum Song.” He was on top of the world, but as is often the case with these things, it got real messy—like "Rip Torn getting cummed on by an elephant in Pakistan" messy.

Green starred, co-wrote, and directed Freddy Got Fingered, a movie that features Tom licking an exposed broken bone, ripping open a deer and wearing its skin like a coat, and masturbating an elephant to the aforementioned explosive climax. It was not what Hollywood insiders would call a "four-quandrant movie." It was really the only movie Tom Green could make, because it was the only movie Tom Green wanted to make.

Now, with a new talk show on Axs.tv and a career touring as a stand-up comic, Tom invited me to his home in the Hollywood Hills to discuss the creation of a transgressive masterpiece. We talked over expensive Belgian beers for almost two hours, the results of which have been condensed (all of my belches have been removed) into the below.

VICE: Was there a thing in particular that you said or did that convinced people with money to make a movie that the system would never make?
Tom Green: The hardest part about Freddy Got Fingered is that we got people to go along with it. It was a combination of the success of the TV show, the success of Road Trip, and my stubbornness.

So you just say no, and no is an answer they don’t get often.
Pretty much. There’d be arguments. There’d be fights. They’d call my manager, my manager would call me, but no one wanted to say no to me at every single step of the way. But at that time, people were really excited about the TV show. They really wanted to put the movie out. So I really had some power at that time. I think a lot of people would have rolled over. When fights and arguments got to a certain point, a lot of people in that position, unlike me, had probably grown up in Hollywood and grown up around this "just say yes" mentality. You don’t argue with the studio. You just say yes. We dug our heels in and we did it.

It was the perfect storm of opportunity and desire to make a crazy movie. I was being offered these other movies. I didn’t really want to make them, but I did see the opportunity to make the movie. We would stay after work when we were at MTV in New York, my friend Derek and I. It took us about a month of writing every night. There were 10 scripts sitting on my desk from major studios, and they all wanted me to make them, these piles of paper. And I thought, why don’t we just make a pile of paper, send it to them, and say, “This is the one we want to make.” It was a very unique position to be in. Not many people get that chance to have multiple studios wanting you to make a movie with them.

As you’re sitting there with Derek and you’re going through this late at night, and you come up with ideas that are very out there, was there ever a moment where you thought, “should I jerk off the elephant or not?”
There’s always moments like that. I don’t remember specifically what they are, but I’ve never done anything that I have ethical or moral problems with. We never made fun of people who are less fortunate. We’d rather take on authority. It was more about making fun of movies. The whole point was that we were going to make each scene so over the top.

So, you delivered the script to the studio.
The movie didn’t instantly get made. The movie got bought by a major movie studio. They make all the major movies with all the major comedians. We went in for our first meeting and said I wanted to direct the movie. And they said, “What? You wanna what? You wanna direct the movie? Have you ever directed a movie?” Well, I’d directed my TV show, but that’s not a movie. I said I want to direct the movie, and I don’t want to change a thing in the script. Nothing. And they sort of looked at me, and I think they were kind of confused by that. They’d already bought the script.

Needless to say, the next day we got a call. They said, “We don’t think we can make the movie the way Tom wants to make the movie. We have to change a lot of stuff in this. We can’t do this the exact way it’s in the script.” They said they were going to put it in turnaround. That’s a film term for basically giving you a certain amount of time to sell the script to another studio. If nobody buys it after that, we own the script and it never gets made. They gave us a 30-day turnaround. That was them saying, “Screw you. You don’t want to do it the way we want to do it, so we’re basically going to throw it on a shelf.”

It seems strange to me that they bought it in the first place if they read it and saw this was the movie you wanted to make. They bought it and then wanted to change it. That’s counterintuitive.
You’d think it would be the opposite, but that’s not the way Hollywood works. They buy things and then they change it. The corporations and executives take young talent that’s interesting, bring them in, and then make their movie with them. Not make some kid from Canada’s movie. It’s some kid from Canada in their movie. They were going to make it a cookie-cutter studio movie, and I said no. I had an opportunity to make a movie. We’re gonna make our fucking movie and we don’t give a fuck.

In hindsight, would I have done everything the same? I probably wouldn't have, because I would have known the effect it would have on me and my ability to make another movie. I certainly wouldn't have been as cutthroat in my firmness when it came to creative decisions—like walking away from a studio because they wanted to take a couple of scenes out of it.

To everybody’s surprise, New Regency and 20th Century Fox bought the movie the next day. Literally, the next day. And I went in for our first meeting there and I met this really interesting executive named Sanford Panitch who worked for this really, really interesting man named Arnon Milchan. You can look into his story. He’s a very interesting guy, and maverick in a lot of ways. When I asked them if I could direct the movie, they thought about it for 24 hours and said yes. Initially, at that studio, I wasn’t going to direct the movie.

I interviewed five directors to direct Freddy Got Fingered—big comedy directors. When I was interviewing those directors, I was bedridden. They came to my house, two weeks after my lymph node dissection. I couldn’t get out of bed. I could hardly walk for about five weeks. William Shatner was my landlord, just to add an element of absurdity to everything.

How is he as a landlord?
Really cool. He was a nice guy. You can print that.

Did you feel more motivated to have it your way, having the cancer scare? You have this brush with mortality, you need to do it your way and have your big chance to express yourself fully?
I’d like to say yes, but it’s not really true. No. The script had been written already. For about three or four years, I was in a lot more physical pain and stress than anybody knew. When I would meet people, I was kind of standoffish. That was because I was in a bit of a funk. I had a lot of nerve pain from the surgery. I think people might have felt I appeared a bit standoffish. I didn’t realize what was going on other than I was in pain. There is a layer of that that’s probably reflected in some of the movie. In the sense that when there’s guts, there’s more guts. When there’s blood, there’s more blood. When there’s screaming, the screaming is a little bit louder and angrier.

There’s that scene where Freddy’s watching the surgery in his house by himself.
That was my surgery, my intestines. You know how Alfred Hitchcock made a cameo in all his films? Even though I was already in the movie, as the main character, I made another cameo as my intestines.

So the studio sees the cut that you want, what happens next?
The cut of the movie was about half an hour longer. It had a very dark soundtrack throughout. Some of the songs were the same, some different. There were scenes that were removed. A lot of it wasn’t just scenes; it was the length of scenes, the amount of time we held on a certain shot. The tone was completely different. The movie’s choppy now. It was smooth all the way through. Important scenes were removed. Things were made shorter to make them less gross, less shocking, less strange—to keep it moving.

It wasn’t the studio. Arnon Milchan was super supportive of me. We had a screening at 20th Century Fox. Everyone from the studio was there. It was my director’s cut. The movie ended and Arnon Milchan stood up and started clapping. He did a long speech about it being the best movie a first-time director had done in his career. He said it was perfect. He didn’t want to change a thing. It was a great day. Everyone was happy. Then we went to test it. Every movie does it. This is the final stage of making everything as cookie-cutter as possible.

We all flew out to Phoenix to see the movie with all these people who’ve been selected to come in and play film critic for the day. Some guy comes out and says, “Was there too much blood?” Yes, there was too much blood. “Was it too gross?” Yes, it was too gross. “Was it too long?” Yes, it was too long. “Was it funny enough?” No, it wasn’t funny enough. “Do you like this character? No? Then we’ll just take him out.”

They’re always going to say the thing that they think is the most appropriate thing to say. It went over everyone’s head that this movie was not meant to be focused. It was supposed to piss off every one of those questions. Every question on a traditional focus group page, we were trying to do the opposite of what you’re supposed to do.

So they took a whole character out?
Well, the uncle owned the cheese sandwich factory. When I originally got to Los Angeles, there’s a scene with my uncle played by Stephen Tobolowsky, who’s hilarious. He introduced me to the cheese sandwich factory. Then we did the I Love Lucy machine sandwiches thing. But they didn’t like that scene. So we get to the factory and I’m just putting cheese on my head.

And then it’s over.
And then it’s over and it just seems strange, right? So the critics looking at the movie don’t understand the process I had to go through. There’s a much better movie in there that I actually made. The ending…

When the kid gets chopped up by the propeller, he says, “I’m fine.” Was that added after the fact?
Of course it was. He wasn’t fine. He was dead. He ran into an airplane propeller. He was dead. There was an arm that flew into the shot. His arm got chopped off. His father was screaming, then an arm lands. It was more over-the-top crazy stuff.

The movie came out and it cost $14 million. It made $14 million. Everyone considered that to be a failure. The critical onslaught was immense. Everyone said it was the most puerile, offensive, grossest, worst movie ever made. It was very extreme.

What do you do in that situation?
The weekend the movie came out. It’s not the blockbuster people had wanted it to be, but if you do the math, not as big of a failure as it seems. If a movie cost $80 million and make $14 million, that’s a failure. When a movie costs $14 million and it makes $14 million at the box office, then $30 million on DVD—that not been reported by anyone. I have talked to the studio. The movie has actually profited. It’s not a financial failure. Nobody ever says that.

So, people were saying mean things in the paper the weekend the movie came out, which baffles me to this day. If you’re a writer who writes about movies, and every weekend ten movies come out and they’re all exactly the same, then this thing comes out which is like an aberration. It’s not the movie you wanted it to be in your mind, but at least give it the credit that it’s different. Don’t be so unrelenting with your criticism that you can’t admit that it’s different.

I actually consider all of that more successful than I had anticipated. It pissed off more people than I thought it was going to piss off. It pissed off everybody. I thought it would piss off half the people, but we got a lot of joy when we’d go to screenings and when I’m swinging that baby around. Right when I bite the umbilical cord and the blood comes out, four old ladies would get up and walk out of the movie. Me and friends would be screaming into our fucking hands.

But you saved the day.
Exactly. But we loved it when people walked out of a movie, to get that kind of a reaction, where people get angry. Who makes a comedy movie to try to piss people off?

So I got a call after the reviews came in, and the box office receipts were counted and it was a call from Arnon Milchan. He said, “Tom, I want you to know you should be very proud of this movie and that I made a movie once called the King of Comedy. When that movie came out, it got bad reviews. It didn’t do well. Roger Ebert gave it a thumbs down. 10 years later, people looked at it different. Now it’s become a classic film. It was the only movie at the time Roger Ebert revised his thumbs down on. Be proud of it. In 10 years, people may come to you and say they liked the movie.”

And sure enough, the only other movie he changed his mind on was Freddy Got Fingered. He didn’t 100 percent change his mind, but he did come back five years later and he said, basically that it was ambitious.

Follow Dave Schilling on Twitter.

"Mad Jack" on the far right, clutching a claymore sword. Photo via WikiCommons

The first thing the Nazi garrison on Vågsøy Island, Norway, would have heard when the British No. 3 Commando battalion landed on December 27, 1941, was the sudden blaring drone of bagpipes. One commando stood at the fore of the landing craft, facing the impending battle and playing the peppy, martial “March of the Cameron Men.” Upon coming to a halt onshore, the soldier jumped from the craft, hucked a grenade at the Germans, then drew a full sword and ran screaming into the fray.

That maniacally fierce soldier was 35-year-old Lieutenant Colonel John Malcolm Thorpe Fleming Churchill, and his stunts at this battle, known as Operation Archery, were hardly the most bizarre and semi-suicidal of his life. Over the course of World War II, “Mad Jack,” as he came to be known, survived multiple explosions, escaped a couple of POW camps, captured more than 40 Germans at sword point in just one raid, and in 1940 scored the last recorded longbow kill in history. And that’s just the CliffsNotes on his wartime rap sheet.

For many war junkies and badass aficionados, Mad Jack’s exploits are the epitome of military romanticism. His recorded statements, full of swagger like “Any officer who goes into action without his sword is improperly dressed,” and, “I maintain that, as long as you tell a German loudly and clearly what to do, if you are senior to him he will cry ‘jawohl’ and get on with it enthusiastically and efficiently,” seem like the physical manifestation of some midcentury boy’s adventure tale. The Royal Norwegian Explorers Club found him such a paragon of brawn and endeavor that, in a book released this March, they named him one of the greatest adventurers of all time.

Photo via Wikimedia Commons

Not much is known about Churchill’s youth, save that he graduated from Britain’s premier Royal Military Academy Sandhurst in 1926 and, at age 20, was shipped off to Burma, where he spent the next few years driving his motorcycle around the region. Possibly bored by a long peacetime, Churchill left the army for a period in 1936 and spent some time as a Nairobi newspaper editor, male model, and a bagpipe-playing, arrow-shooting extra in films like The Thief of Baghdad and A Yank at Oxford. By the end of the decade, he’d become so obsessed with the pipes that he took second place in a 1938 military piping competition at the Aldershot Tattoo, causing a mild scandal because an Englishman had beat out so many Scots. The next year, his archery habit landed him a place as Britain’s shooter at the World Archery Championship in Oslo.

As soon as the Nazis invaded Poland and war became imminent, though, Churchill rushed to the battlefield. The longbow came out almost immediately during the Allied retreat to Dunkirk, France, in mid 1940. He took to practicing guerilla tactics, staging raids, and earning commendations for his bravery, even surviving a clipping by machine gun fire. Then, while watching a German force advance from a tower in the little village of L’Epinette, Churchill signaled his attack by shooting a Nazi sergeant through the chest with a barbed arrow, immediately followed by a hail of bullets from two fellow infantrymen in tow.

The next year, in 1941, Churchill volunteered to join the newly formed British commandos, with whom he launched his screaming Nordic raid. After emerging from the battle unscathed, a British demolition “expert” accidentally detonated a charge next to him, sending shards from the bottle of wine he was drinking into his forehead. But he was back on his feet soon after, joining the 1943 campaign in Italy, where he snuck out one night with a corporal, creeping from one German post to the next and surprising the guards with his claymore. By the end of the night he’d captured 42 prisoners with a sword and soon after earned the Distinguished Service Order.

In 1944, Churchill was sent to assist Josip Broz Tito’s forces in Yugoslavia, leading a full frontal assault on a well-defended tower on the island of Brač. Leading a charge through strafing fire and mortars, he was one of only seven men to reach the target and, after firing off every bullet he had, found himself the last man standing. So he stood playing “Will Ye No Come Back Again?” on his pipes until the advancing Germans knocked him out with a grenade blast. The Nazis reportedly ignored orders to kill him out of respect, but it probably helped that they assumed he was a relative of Winston Churchill, which prompted them to send him to Berlin for interrogation. After proving he had no valuable intel and causing panic by lighting a trash fire during one of his moves, he was sent to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp.

He promptly escaped the camp, shimmying under a wire fence, and attempted to walk about 125 miles through Nazi territory to the Baltic Sea. He was captured just miles from the shore and transferred to another camp, this time in Italy. As should have been expected by then, he escaped in 1945, sneaking away during a power outage and walking about 100 miles using a stolen rusted can to cook what he considered liberated vegetables looted from Nazi-held fields until he found an American regiment in Verona and convinced them he was a British officer.

While his equipment might have seemed outdated, it did serve its purpose on the battlefield. “Both the longbow and the claymore were extremely effective in the right circumstances,” says British weapons historian Mike Loades. “Both are capable of maiming and killing.” Based on images of Churchill, Loades suspects he used a lightweight bow with a draw weight under 40 pounds, versus the 100-pound of medieval bows and 180-pound modern warbows. But, says Loades, “unarmored German troops during WWII present a softer target than men in armor during the middle ages. Consequently a really heavy bow would not be necessary.” Modern bowhunters say a 70-pound draw bow can drop a deer easily at 20 yards, and a 40-pound bow would have a greater range, if lesser impact, so its killing potential in early modern times was still notable. Plus the bow had the benefit of silent firing.

Churchill probably didn’t use his bow for stealth warfare, though. This was a man known to charge enemies waving a sword and screaming “Commando!” at the top of his lungs. Loades thinks this sort of bravado might have been a tactic used to intimidate the enemy into fearing the charge of an unexpected madman. But that tactical pomp and ceremony had limited utility, and wearing a sword could bog one down in landings and hamper movement through tight presses of men. “WWII infantry warfare entailed a lot of crawling on your belly and maneuvering into ambush positions,” says Loades. “The clatter and clutter of a sword would not be helpful in such situations… That is why I refer to [Churchill’s] advocacy of the sword in modern battle as Romantic affectation.”

Loades still recognizes and admires Churchill’s bravery. But his survival may have had just as much to do with his assumed insanity as it did with his skill and true grit. Bill Millin, the Scottish piper who played on the beaches of Normandy as memorialized in The Longest Day, later met German prisoners who’d seen him on the beaches. They told him they didn’t fire because they thought he was obviously crazy. Similarly, there may be as much pity and confusion as intimidation and fear on the other side of the stories of Mad Jack.

Then there’s the grim twist just under the surface of Churchill’s Romanticism and braggadocio. The last of his famous lines is a brief requiem for the end of his beloved war: “If it wasn’t for those damn Yanks, we could have kept the war going another ten years.” As Loades rightly points out, little glimmers into Churchill’s psyche like this suggests his madness wasn’t all fun story fodder worthy of lionization.

“Shooting someone with a longbow as the overture to opening up with rifles doesn’t suggest a specific advantage for using the longbow in that situation,” says Loades, “but rather a macabre curiosity of using the situation to see what it was like to kill someone with a longbow. Of course to the enemy, they were going to die either way, but I’m not entirely sure this is the clear-cut, honorable boy’s adventure story it first appears to be.”

If there was a glint of psychopathy in Churchill during the war, he kept a tight lid on it later in life. After the war, he continued to bounce from adventure to adventure. He showed up briefly in Burma again before training in his 40s to become a parachutist. But his new pursuits involved a lot less blood, and sometimes even outright nonviolent heroism, as when he moved to Palestine and protected a medical convoy and evacuated hundreds of Jewish doctors during the violence surrounding the formation of Israel. Years later he eschewed active battle completely, moving to Australia, where he paid the bills as a land-air warfare instructor but spent much of his time fostering a love of surfing. He’d later return home to England to design his own boards and surf the five-foot tidal bore of the River Severn while working a desk job for the military. By the time he’d retired in 1959, Churchill had mellowed out enough that we was content to spend the last 37 years of his life sailing coal-fired ships along the Thames with his wife, piloting radio-controlled model warships, and raising a family. Whether or not, in his shockingly placid sunset years, he still broke out the bow and blade form time to time for some old kicks remains unknown.

We know that everybody picks their noses, and now we know that everybody farts too — especially at work. In fact, if this poll is to be believed, people fart at work in lots of places you wouldn't expect.

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Steampunk, which first popped up being used as a word in 1987, finally made its way into the dictionary this week. But just how did it arrive there? It turns out, with a lot of help from the movie Hellboy.

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Illustration via Josh Begley

After his recent tour of the world’s mainstream media outlets to promote his new book, No Place to Hide, the primary keeper of Snowden’s documents, Glenn Greenwald, along with journalists Laura Poitras and Ryan Devereaux, released a stunning story about the NSA’s ability to monitor phone systems in the Bahamas, Mexico, the Philippines, and Kenya, along with one mystery country that The Intercept is refusing to reveal.

The program that the NSA uses to vacuum up the phone calls of an entire nation, codenamed SOMALGET, is part of a larger NSA program called MYSTIC. The MYSTIC program was reported on by the Washington Post earlier this year, but the Post decided to not name any of the nations that MYSTIC was monitoring en masse. The Intercept took it one step further.

That one step, however, was evidently not far enough for Wikileaks. In a heated Twitter back-and-forth between John Cook (the Intercept’s Editor-in-Chief), Jacob Applebaum (once a Wikileaks hacker, now someone who has "access" to the Snowden documents and has detailed the ways in which mysterious people have broken into his apartment), Wikileaks itself, and Glenn Greenwald, the voice behind the Wikileaks account berated the Intercept team for redacting the name of the final country. Applebaum went as far as calling that redaction “a mistake.”

You can read the entire back-and-forth here.

In the words of Wikileaks, the group has condemned “Firstlook for following the Washington Post into censoring the mass interception of an entire nation.” This battle is not the only backlash Firstlook media is facing from internet activists right now.

In 2011, 14 individuals from the hacktivist group Anonymous were charged with launching Denial of Service attacks against Paypal (that never actually took the site down completely), because PayPal blocked money transfers to Chelsea Manning and to Wikileaks. The 14 were charged under the controversial Computer Fraud and Abuse Act—the same act that led to such egregious and unreasonable charges against the late Aaron Swartz—which was written in the 1980s before computers as we know them even existed.

Firstlook’s founder, Pierre Omidyar, who also started eBay, PayPal’s parent company, was quoted at the time as saying the 14 deserved leniency. In the end, the PayPal 14 have been stuck with a bill of just over $80,000 to pay in restitution to PayPal, even though many of the PayPal 14’s defenders see their DOS attacks as a form of digital protest. There is an ongoing fund-raiser to cover the 14’s costs. That charity drive is part of a new campaign, started by various online activists, which has also taken aim against Firstlook and Pierre himself for standing to profit from digital activists while owning and operating a media outlet that strives to expose government secrets.

I can see why some may see that as a bit hypocritical on the part of Firstlook media.

Now, as The Intercept rages on with stories that aim to rip away the secrecy of the NSA, Wikileaks and its supporters are furious at the Intercept for censoring the name of a country whose communications are being surveilled en masse. Glenn Greenwald tweeted yesterday that “we were *very convinced this 1 would —> deaths,” meaning that they received convincing information that publishing the name of the fifth country would almost certainly result in people getting killed.

This decision has led to a very interesting conversation about the responsibility of journalists like Greenwald, who are already publishing full, nearly uncensored materials that have leaked from secret government agencies, when it comes to filtering information. A new media shield law in the US is being written to specifically exclude journalists that write for places like the Intercept—as such brazen, ballsy publishing does not equal journalism in the eyes of highly protective US lawmakers.

Whether or not you agree that the Intercept should have published the fifth country, it appears as if Wikileaks has been angered to the point of dropping the information on the world “in 72 hours” from the publication date, which means by Thursday, we may know whom else the US is spying on. While it’s not clear how Wikileaks knows the name of the country, Business Insider has some guesses as to where that info may have come from.

If Glenn Greenwald is correct in his appraisal of the situation, this information could cause a revolutionary uprising in an already volatile country, or, at the very least, a handful of deaths. This purely speculative scenario has some very dangerous potential consequences, and it has further revealed the impact that Snowden’s leaks are having on the world—now that his files are in the hands of people like Glenn and, perhaps, Wikileaks.

We know that Snowden chose Greenwald for a reason and avoided the New York Times for their shelving of a warrantless-wiretapping story at the behest of the Bush administration. While shelving a story and omitting a crucial detail are very different choices, evidently the Intercept has upset the more hard-line activists by censoring the fifth country. One can only guess what Snowden thinks about this, or what the fifth country is, for that matter.

So I guess we’ll see what happens on Thursday.

Follow Patrick McGuire on Twitter.

This is a video of Michael Jackson's hologram performing 'Slave To The Rhythm' at yesterday's 2014 Billboard Music Awards. He looked pretty lifelike. So lifelike I'm not convinced it wasn't actually Michael Jackson. Maybe he finally got bored of pretending to be dead and just wanted to perform again. I can respect that. I just wish Biggie would do the same. Keep going for the performance. Thanks to val and Tracie, who wants to see a Wu-Tang concert complete with ODB.

In news that's sure to be the talk of the galaxy, Pope Francis (seen here looking suspiciously like an aged Fonzie) has announced he would baptize aliens if they asked for it. But only if they asked for it. Me? I'm going to find and blow up their home world whether they ask for it or not. Whatever aliens, you should forgive me because that's what Jesus would do. Yeah, and he would also bring me food and wine. Ooh -- and rub my feet.

During his weekly homily on Monday, Franics said that aliens -- which he imagines could be "Green, with that long nose and big ears, just like children paint them" -- should be baptized just like anyone else who asks for it, because it's not up to any human to decide who should receive the Holy Spirit. The Vatican's astronomer -- the same one who dismissed 'Intelligent Design' as 'bad theology' -- said in 2010 that he'd baptize an alien because "any entity - no matter how many tentacles it has - has a soul."

The message wasn't meant to be alien-specific necessarily, but to illustrate that the church shouldn't refuse any outsiders who want God in their lives. At least I think. There's also the possibility that the Pope knows something we don't. You ever read The Da Vinci Code? Wasn't that about aliens? "Not at all." Dammit, I didn't read it. But in my mind it's about the church and an alien conspiracy. Thanks to tony pepparoni, who would be delicious on an Italian sub.

A meta-analysis including nearly 1.3 million children posted online last week in the journal Vaccine has demonstrated, once again, that there's no causal link between vaccines and autism.

Read more...

“My therapist told me the way to achieve true inner peace is to finish what I start. So far today, I have finished 2 bags of M&M’s and a chocolate cake. I feel better already.” -Dave Barry

They say that the milk chocolate melts in your mouth, not in your hand, but the colored candy shell will seriously melt pretty much on anything even close to body temperature. As Great Lake Swimmers would sing, it’s pretty difficult to avoid the

Changing Colours.

But what if you’re a bee? Under normal circumstances, your senses would lead you to the nectar at the hearts of flowers, and you’d return to your hive with plenty of nutrients to produce honey. Also, you’d be covered in pollen while you did that, much of which would wind up in the honey as well.

Go and see what happens to honey when M&Ms become a bee’s primary food source instead.

Whatever you're doing, drop it and watch the brand-new trailer for Interstellar. Go, go, go! Holy smokes, Christopher Nolan isn't just taking us to space—he wants to save humanity on a massive and majestic scale.

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Raquel Meyers Makes Art with a Commodore 64

Should we get rid of expiration dates? A new proposal set to go before the agricultural ministers of the EU next week says this would reduce food waste. Reuters got a look at the proposal, which points out that almost half of the food on grocery shelves is tossed out, unused.

Read more...

The Anonymous Instagram User Who Calls Out Rappers with Fake Watches

This Man Documented Over One Hundred Burritos He Ate in a Year

In 1991, Kazakhstan became the last Soviet republic to declare independence. Six years later, the government moved from the Almaty to Astana (formerly known as Aqmola). There, with the help of architects like Norman Foster, they built a futuristic city on the remains of old buildings from the Soviet era.

Read more...

In 1995, Congressional Republicans shut down the Office of Technology Assessment. For 23 years, this agency had published reports that provided legislators with nonpartisan analyses of science and technology issues. Last week, Rep. Rush Holt (D-NJ) tried to reopen the agency with minimal funding.

Read more...

Michael with Ron Jeremy.

If you were a teenager in the 90s, your porn came from three trusty sources: magazines shamefully bought from newsstands and hidden inside a newspaper on your way home, those soft porn B-movies on late-night TV—when utter, unavoidable desperation hit—the lingerie section of the Victoria's Secret catalog, and back page boob-job ads in your mom's magazines. Besides being ball-clenchingly embarrassing to look back on, it was a comparatively innocent time: the Brideshead Revisited of pornography to today's internet-enhanced Cannibal Holocaust. 

That shift to online didn't only make us pick up on fetishes that older generations went to their graves unaware of and normalize hardcore smut that would have Mother Teresa spinning furiously in her grave, but also made porn instantly more accessible, driving up viewers' demand. YouPorn is now estimated to account for 2 percent of all web traffic, which probably doesn't shock you too much, but is an insane statistic considering that's one website and the internet is a pretty big place, all things considered.

The shift had a bigger effect on some than others, like Michael Leahy for example, a man who developed a crippling porn addiction and managed to ruin his entire life with just an internet connection and his right hand. Clearly this is just about the most extreme case you could ever come across—it's not like five minutes a day is going to make everyone in your life despise you (unless you have inexcusably boring friends)—so I called Michael up to see how he got from where he was to the author, speaker, and expert on pornography addiction he's become.   

Michael and his family in the 80s.

VICE: So, Michael, how did your crippling porn addiction start?
Michael Leahy: My story really begins at the age of 11, when I first encountered adult material. It was hard back then, in the late 60s, to get hold of it. It was about finding a stash of magazines at your friend’s dad’s place or in the woods, or whatever, so my exposure was pretty limited. I was a recreational user of porn for a long time, even at college when video came along. Later on, higher quality porn and digital distribution on CD-ROMs increased my usage, but it wasn’t until the internet arrived that the real problems began.

What was it about internet porn that changed things?
This was the early 90s and it was like the Wild West days of internet porn. We could literally watch the number of sites that were available grow right in front of our eyes, to the point where, pretty soon, we couldn’t see the edges of it. That was the beginning of the end for me. The internet changed everything. Within a fairly short period of time, I found myself watching up to eight hours of pornography a day, every day.

How? Were you unemployed or just doing it at night?
No, I was doing it at work. I was working for a big corporation and we had something that was very rare back then: a high speed internet connection.

Didn’t you get caught?
This was long before companies realized what people were using internet connections for, so there was nothing to stop you accessing any sites you wanted and there was nobody checking up on us.

Michael in the early 90s.

What effect did it have on your work?
It wasn’t unusual for me to be on a business trip and stay up until 3 or 4AM watching porn, knowing full well that I had an 8AM meeting the next morning where I was making a presentation to sell multi-million dollar software to corporate directors. I'd literally nap for a couple of hours, wake up, tired, put my suit on, and go to the clients. I’d maybe schedule a trip for three or four days and only see half a dozen clients, then spend the rest of the time watching pornography. As you can imagine, I began to find it pretty hard to hold down a job.

Yeah, I bet. How did porn change your sexual behaviour in real life?
One of the fetishes I picked up online was voyeurism, so I would often schedule business trips around that. I'd be able to expense hotels at $185 per night, but I would choose to stay in $60 motels in a seedier part of town because I knew that the rooms were crammed together, buildings looked over each other and there was little privacy. I’d spend hours and hours looking into other windows, masturbating and waiting for someone to walk by their window undressing.

What was the peak of your addiction?
The addiction escalated into an affair with a woman who I met online. The relationship was exclusively about sex; she was nothing more than porn with skin on. It was like a 24/7 high as opposed to the occasional high that I was getting from watching porn. When you’re having an affair and you’re hiding the relationship from your wife and kids, there’s an adrenaline rush and a buzz that you get from doing it. That was the peak. When my wife found out about the affair, I admitted to my pornography addiction and my compulsive behavior. I’d say I was going to stop every day and I made myself believe it, but I continued going back to porn.

Was there anything loving about your affair? You describe her as porn with skin on, as if she were an object. 
What made her pornographic to me was that she was exactly like the woman I'd been searching for every time I browsed the internet. She was the epitome of it. It wasn’t until my wife had divorced me that I realized my affair partner was also an addict, of a kind. I discovered at the bottom of my depression that she was seeing about five or six other guys who were married with kids. I got exactly what I was asking for: that perfect porn woman who doesn’t want any ties or a long-term relationship. Of course, I was so attached to her by then that I wanted commitment, but it was the last thing on her mind.

Michael at one of his lectures.

So by this point you’d lost your wife and become estranged from your kids; what made you turn it around?
It was when I was lying on the floor of my apartment in Atlanta having suicidal thoughts. I was thinking seriously about walking over to the Wal-Mart not too far from where I lived, buying a gun, sticking it in my mouth and pulling the trigger. It was when I started thinking about writing a suicide note to my boys—that, thank God, is when I woke up. I decided that it wasn’t the legacy I was going to leave to my kids: the father who killed himself because of an addiction to porn.

And you’re better now?
I might be “recovered,” but I still see counselors and go to group therapy. I’m sure I’ll be in counseling for the rest of my life. It’s kind of cathartic to be able to talk about it and revisit some of it, but some of it is still painful. I have a really hard time talking about my boys and the price they paid. I’m reconciled with them again, but my wife started seeing someone else and eventually remarried, which closed the door on that. We’re friends, but it’s sad to think of what might have been. You know, the sitting-on-the-porch conversations about the kids as you grow old together.

You now tour the US speaking to college students about your experience; isn’t that painful?
It’s painful, but it’s important for people to hear about because these are some of the consequences you don’t think about when you’re a college student. You think you’re going to meet the person of your dreams and won’t need porn anymore because you’ll have this wonderful wife who you can have sex with whenever you want, but it just doesn’t work like that.

So you're saying porn is damaging?
Well, sex is a permanent fixture in our consciousness and our relationships. To abuse that part of who we are is just asking for trouble. That’s why even porn on a recreational level will damage you, probably in ways subtler than it did to me, but it will do damage. You’ll feel a level of sadness when you catch yourself thinking about your old girlfriend, or Miss November, or a porn star, or whatever, when you’re having sex with your lover. You’ll know that connection wasn’t there, that intimacy wasn’t there, and she'll sense that too.

So what’s the answer? Ban porn?
In my speaking tours and books, I make it clear I’m against censorship, that I’m not interested in morality discussions and that I’m not here to tell anyone how to live their life. What I’m interested in is the facts, how pornography affects our brain chemistry, our physiology, our relationships. I very much bought into that whole porn culture. I didn’t think there was anything wrong with it, I didn’t believe I was hurting anyone and yet eventually that lie would end up costing me a 15-year marriage, my two boys, and my career.

Thanks, Michael. I'm glad things are working out for you.

Follow Alexander on Twitter: @alexwalters

A still from Viral Loads

Treasure Island Media is a gay-porn studio based out of San Francisco that has always specialized in making films that pirouetted on the edge of outrage, but its most recent release, titled Viral Loads, headed straight into the abyss. It's an extremely hardcore video starring Blue Bailey, an allegedly HIV-positive man who's status is curiously exempt from the film's presser and—well, here's an excerpt from the studio's description of the film:

The willing, hungry lad gets gang-fucked by a roomful of studs. Most are poz [HIV-positive], some are neg. Who the fuck cares? Not Blue, that’s for fuckin’ sure.

To finish up his man worship initiation, we bring out a brimful jar full of more than 200 poz loads. Blue’s good buddies Dayton O’connor and Drew Sebastian carefully squirt every fucking drop up Blue’s knocked-up ass. Max X slurps Blue’s jizz-leaking ass throughout, establishing himself as the new world’s felching-champeen.

I called Treasure Island head honcho Paul Morris to ask what the heck was going on here, and he in turn asked if I was cut or uncut.

What follows is an excerpt from our conversation. I should say that getting in touch with him was challenging, which he later explained by telling me, “This is the first phone call I’ve taken in years. I don’t meet people, and I don’t talk to them. I deal with the men that I work with. It’s very rare that I meet somebody.”

VICE: Hey, Paul, thanks for talking to me. I’m flattered.
Paul Morris: Toby, I assume that you’re uncut.

Yep. A lot of us Australians have hoodies.
That’s kind of wonderful, isn’t it?

Yeah, it’s all right. You’re pretty shy on the phone. I understand your reserve; your porn doesn’t always receive the warmest reception.
I find the most offensive reaction to what I’ve done is people saying that I clearly don’t understand the suffering and what was lost due to HIV. The vast majority of my acquaintances and friends and lovers died. It isn’t that I’m untouched. It’s that I’m so deeply touched by it that I believe in the necessity of remembering what it is that they and I all explored—and not forgetting it. That’s crucial to me. The most painful thing for me to hear is I’m callous, or I’m doing this to make a buck on the deaths of other people or something like that. That’s horrifying to me.

In one scene in Viral Loads, there’s a jar of 200 different loads labeled “POZ CUM.” It is poured directly into Blue Bailey’s ass. You can see how that would upset people.
The number of men who have written to me asking to be the recipient of gallons of semen is virtually uncountable. These aren’t the incidental fantasies of a small fringe of outliers. These speak to the heart of the sexual imagination of most queer men. It wasn’t made for you. There’s no reason for you to see it. For you, it would read as an irrational stunt. But for the straight world, much of what comprises queer culture and life is incomprehensible. Regrettably, the same can still be said for many of the older members of the gay world. Years ago I stated that all gay men are HIV-positive. That is, every gay man alive today is defined as much by the viral load narrative as by any external homophobia. If you wonder at the meaning of a jar filled with poz loads being poured up the ass of a happy, intelligent, and more-than-willing young gay man, the primary meaning is that there is no reason or excuse for continuing to live in fear of a virus.

Then why the controversy?
We’re at a point where it’s altogether possible, given the simple strategies like PrEP, to render HIV a nonissue. And the gay world is panicking because too much money, too many institutions, too much of the gay mainstream has based itself on terror and fear and grief. It’s a cultural identity crisis. It’s a mass version of agoraphobia. A world that’s suddenly free of fear is daunting and very large.

Have any of your performers contracted HIV during one of your videos?
You’d have to ask my performers that question. I know everything about them. Everything.

Then surely you know this.
Yes. I do know this.

And?
And that’s between myself and those people. When people come to me, we have one of the most extensive interview processes of any company in porn. We get to know not just what their health status is—whatever “health” means—but we find out who they are. We talk with them about what books they’re reading. “Why are you coming to do porn?” We encourage people not to do it if there’s the slightest indication this isn’t something they really want or should do. Then they tell us everything. We put them into situations they want to be put into. Everyone who’s in one of our pieces is doing exactly what they most want to be doing. Now, what they tell me is extremely private. You’re asking me to tell you the most intimate information about the people with whom I work?

It’s hardly intimate in this context. You advertise this. You market it. It’s the kink in the middle of Viral Loads.
Why would you call it a kink? What does a kink mean? No. no, no, no. First of all, you’re not the person for whom this video is made, Toby.

Is that relevant?
The point is that this was made for a community of men who understand what it means.

What does it mean?
Some of the people that I’m most interested in right now are young, intelligent gay men who are educated, bright, upper-middle class. They refuse HIV meds because they’re proud of their viral load. Is that something you can understand?

It is. I get it.
Explain it to me.

If it were me? You’re right, I’d go crazy trying to live a normal life with a killer virus waiting to take me out.
Interesting. One of the elements of Viral Loads that I think from the outside might not be immediately apparent—is the term. “Viral load” is something that the entire gay world has held on to and labored under for two generations. One of the reasons I made this title was to simply say, exactly as you did, “Enough is enough.” We're living with this; let’s just be open and clear about it. I don’t see anything controversial about that, do you? If it seems odd to some people; they’re not the people I’m really interested in. Certainly they’re not the people I’m working for.

They’re part of your community. You should give a shit.
There are people who are locked for various reasons into archaic and counterproductive ways of thinking and living. I had an acquaintance who was in his late 70s; he was a fellow who hated my work. He assured me that he would only have safe sex because he didn’t want to become HIV-positive. A few weeks after we had that conversation, he died of a heart attack. I think he was insane. Gay men in their 50s and older are addicted to the notion that sex equals death, and the culture has to live under the burden of terror. The only wildness that is acceptable is the wildness of drag queens.

In gay culture, there’s never been more of an almost hysterical centering of life around two things—drag queens and marriage—both of which are unfortunate misogynistic parodies of heteroseuxal life. Gay men have completely lost the sense of who they are because they’ve been immersed in terror, because they’ve been living under a viral load for two generations.

Is HIV inextricably linked with the gay identity?
No, and in 20 years it’ll be all but forgotten. It is right now, and what I’m saying is, we’re more than this. The point of Viral Loads was for those people to whom it would make sense to look at it, say it, own it, and fucking move on. Fucking move on! In 20 years, there will be references to HIV, and young gay men will astonish and horrify people who are now in their 20s when they say, “What the fuck are you talking about?” And the men will say, “I remember the day when it was a big deal. I remember the day when if we had just fucked somebody and come up their ass, we were worried about HIV.” My point is: Time to fucking move on. Somebody said, “How safe does it have to be for you before you’ll just fuck somebody?” My answer is: It’s there! We’re there. We’ve been there. Now the important thing is to break the mould of stigma and terror and knee-jerk reaction.

Follow Toby McCasker on Twitter.

Besides yesterday being Mothers’ Day yesterday, I had a lot of grant stuff to do, which means that this one will be a quickie. On Saturday, a reader sent me a link to one of the most useful sites I’ve ever encountered. I realize that over the weekend it’s spread around the skeptical blogosphere like the proverbial wildfire, which is unfortunate (for me) given that I’ve made it a personal rule that I don’t post on the weekend any more, barring amazing developments. Still, this one tempted me. It’s a website called Spurious Correlations, and it is exactly what it claims to be. Its usefulness wil become apparent quickly.

One of the key arguments—if not the key argument—made by antivaccinationists is that correlation of the onset of the “autism epidemic” (i.e., the large increase in prevalence of autism and autism-spectrum disorders beginning in the 1990s) with the expansion of the vaccine schedule is strong evidence of causation. In other words, correlation equals causation. Of course, correlation can equal causation, but you need to have a lot of other evidence to show that. Most correlations don’t equal causation, and that’s where Spurious Correlations comes in. It has thousands of such spurious correlations, complete with graphs, numbers, and even correlation coefficients, many of which are well about 0.9, which is considered a very strong correlation indeed. For example, on the front page right now is a correlation between U.S. spending on space, science, and technology and suicides by hanging, strangulation, and suffocation, and the correlation coefficient (r) is 0.992082 (for a perfect correlation, r=1.0; no correlation, pure randomness, r=0; negative numbers mean a negative correlation in which one variable’s increase is correlated with the other variable’s decrease):

Amusingly, you can look for your own spurious correlations. I wanted to look for more spurious correlations to autism, but I couldn’t find it. So instead I looked for things that correlate with per capita high fructose corn syrup consumption (because HFCS is considered evil in alt-med circles) and found it correlated with (among other things):

• Pedestrians killed in collision with car, pick-up truck or van (r=0.980767)
• Murders by hanging, strangulation and suffocation (r=0.952419)
• US crude oil imports from Venezuela (r=0.884883)
• Deaths caused by lightning (r=0.805254)
• Deaths during surgical operations with anastomosis, bypass or graft (r=0.845314)

Clearly, if I ever go back to doing abdominal surgery I’ll have to be careful about operating on people who consume a lot of HFCS, and people who consume a lot of HFCS need to stay indoors during thunderstorms. Meanwhile, HFCS demonstrated strong negative correlations with (among other things):

• Number of lawyers in New Mexico (r=-0.988915)
• US spending on science, space, and technology (r=-0.977791)
• Biology/biomedical doctorates awarded (r=-0.976231)
• Total ABA Lawyers Nationally (r=-0.962795)
• Suicides by hanging, strangulation and suffocation (r=-0.961062)
• Math doctorates awarded (US) (r=-0.943426)

Hmmm. Perhaps there is something to all that HFCS fearmongering. After all, as HFCS consumption falls, look at how there are more lawyers, more bomedical doctorates, and less suicide by hanging!

Ah, you ask, but what doesn’t correlate with HFCS consumption? Ask no more! Here they are:

• Hang-glider accidents killing occupant (r=0.00802163)
• Number of people killed by an exploding pressurized tyre, pipe or hose (r=-0.0000909672)
• Number of people killed by agricultural machinery (r=-0.0604786)
• Drownings caused by an accident involving a canoe or kayak (r=0.0205583)
• Deaths caused by cataclysmic storm (r=0.0240487)

I think that last one was messed up by the spike in deaths in 2005 due (clearly) to Hurricane Katrina. As for the rest, if you want to go hang gliding, work with agricultural machinery, or go canoeing or kayaking, drink those sugary drinks up!

Of course, the reason skeptics are suspicious of correlations is not because correlation never equals causation. It’s just that we realize that there really are lots of spurious correlations like this, far more than the average person realizes. A person who hasn’t taken the time to understand just how common such correlations are and how easy it is to mine various data to find them will find correlations compelling, particularly if they have a modicum of seeming plausibility, as the vaccine-autism link once did before so many studies demolished it. A skeptic, however, will realize that such a correlation is only a starting point that probably doesn’t mean anything but might. Further evidence, in the form of testing other data sets, doing controlled experiments (when they are possible to do), and other means of testing are essential to determine whether what is observed is just a spurious correlation as opposed to a correlation that really does imply causation. We also know that confounding factors can easily lead to the appearance of correlation, such as steady increases in two different variables over time that just happen to occur over the same time frame but have nothing to do with each other, such as, for example, computer or cell phone use and autism. This sort of spurious correlation can lead to other correlations, such as increasing wifi exposure and autism, given that the increase in computer and Internet use over the last 20 years has led to the proliferation of wifi hotspots and increasing exposure to radio waves from cell phones. The list goes on and on.

I really wanted to go into the data and see if, for instance, autism really does correlate with vaccination or whether brain cancer correlates with mobile phone use. More importantly, I wanted to find a bunch of ready-made spurious correlations for those two conditions for me to use to demonstrate the principle that just because there’s a correlation does not mean the relationship is causal, such as when I suggest that autism also correlates with Internet usage, home computer ownership, CD sales (at least until around 10 years ago, when CD sales started to take a nosedive and sales of downloadable digital music took off), and a variety of other conditions. Similarly, given that the incidence of brain cancers doesn’t appear to be significantly increasing—actually, quite the opposite, it appears to be decreasing—the suggestion that cell phone radiation causes brain cancer seems no more convincing that the long-refuted claim that vaccines cause autism, and that’s leaving aside the monumental physical and biological implausibility of the claim on the basis of simple physics alone.

Then I thought: Maybe that’s the point. If this website had the data for the sorts of things for which cranks often confuse correlation with causation, like cancer, autism, asthma, and autoimmune diseases (to name a few), then the site would risk going from being a useful tool to teach critical thinking skills by allowing readers to explore and find the most ridiculous spurious correlations they can, thus demonstrating that correlation is not the same thing as causation, no matter how much the human brain likes to grasp onto such correlations, to a site that cranks can data mine to support their favorite pet hypotheses. That, of course, would be bad. On the other hand, it would allow people with me to demonstrate all the other things that correlate with autism prevalence, thus allowing me to ask antivaccinationists why they think it’s vaccines that are the culprit rather than all the other things or that correlate with cancer, thus allowing me to ask why it has to be cell phones or any of the other bogeymen on whom cancer is blamed rather than all the other—heh, heh—spurious correlations. Of course, to cranks their correlations can’t be spurious and must be strong evidence of causation, while all those other correlations are obviously nonsense.

In any case, I think it would be a fun exercise if you, my readers, would play around with the Spurious Correlations site and find the most interesting or bizarre spurious correlations for use in educating people in critical thinking. And, remember, the per capita consumption of cheese in the US correlates strongly with the number of people who died by becoming tangled in their bedsheets (r=0.947091). So, please, people whatever you do, don’t eat cheese right before going to bed. Oh, and if you are unfortunate enough to be confined to a wheelchair, either temporarily or permanently, whatever you do, don’t you eat cheese either!

Painting by Kunisada Surimono. Image courtesy of Wikipedia Commons

If you aren’t masturbating right now, you should be. May is International Masturbation Month, which means if you have been celebrating properly, you should have carpal tunnel and a very sticky laptop. If you haven’t, you should clear your weekend plans for some five-knuckle shuffle.

Good Vibrations, a sex toy shop in San Francisco, declared May 7, 1995 to be the first National Masturbation Day, after President Bill Clinton fired Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders because she suggested that masturbation be included in sex education as a way to combat the spread of AIDS. Obviously, one day was not enough to dedicate to the practice of self-love, so the entire month was soon devoted to rubbing one out.

Since I think everyone should take advantage of their right to masturbate all month long, I have rounded up the best masturbatory tools for your pleasure. It’s time for you to spend some quality time with you.

 

Fresh Brew Love Skin® Masturbator Vagina

Want to masturbate discreetly on your morning commute or during a boring meeting? You can do it with this masturbator that is disguised as a coffee cup. No one will even notice you're dunking your dick in the java like a jelly doughnut. Buy it here for $11.

 

XM Midi Ring Vibrator

This is the only ring that matters during Masturbation Month. It will give you more pleasure than a bulky carbon stone any day. All your friends will be jealous. Buy it here for $74.95.

 

Keith Haring Tenga

Tenga makes your dick feel like it’s been sucked up by a vacuum cleaner—in a good way. This one is extra special because it was designed by Keith Haring, so you can keep it around for decoration or regift when you’re finished. Buy it here for $9.99.

 

Lovelife Smile Discreet Vibrator

All women need this Smile vibrator in their life. It knows you better than you know yourself. It has adjustable speeds and fits in your pocket. I think God created it. Buy it here for $59.

 

Bordello Saskia

Who doesn’t want to fuck a lady piledriver-style? Plus the description says she is an educated conversationalist who loves to laugh. Clearly this fine little lady will keep you entertained for hours and won’t complain about cramping up. Buy it here for $118.

 

Cheeky Pets Three Speed Vibe

This is for all the animal lovers out there. This three-speed vibrator comes in various shapes such as bear, alligator, and walrus. If you ever had the urge to shove a cute creature into your vagina, here is your chance. You can even cuddle it when you’re done. Buy it here for $28.82.

 

"Getting Off: A Woman's Guide to Masturbation"

A little reading material between petting the pussy will help you have an even better orgasm the next go-round. Buy it here for $15.95.

 

Realistic Tongue Vibrator

I was drawn to this product because it’s shaped like a tongue, but after further observation, the color makes it look like it belongs to Gollum. I think some chicks dig that, so I am keeping it on the list. Buy it here for $14.39.

 

Lonely and Lusty Inflatable Love Doll

Masturbation Month is a time to embrace being lonely and lusty. This love doll has a ribbed love tunnel and a deep throat. Just look at that face. You might have to call off of work for this one. Buy it here for $86.01.

 

Penthouse® Secrets Bath Bliss

This kit is all about relaxing and romancing. Light a candle, blow up the bath pillow, and give yourself the best orgasm of your life with the multi-speed massager. Buy it here for $29.99.

 

Misty Stone Butt Fleshlight

This is an exact replica of Misty’s gorgeous booty hole. If you are looking to get some backdoor action, this is the obvious way to go. Just close your eyes and you'll really feel like you're inside of her large intestine. Buy it here for $59.96.

 

Animal Delight Dual Rotating Vibe

This new product also incorporates animal buddies into your orgasms. This time they just vibe on your girly parts as a cute little reminder they’re there. Buy it here for $69.99.

I hope you have a great time playing with yourself. Happy Masturbation Month!

Follow Erica Euse on Twitter.