Bagel head
There’s a bit of science involved in this, but mostly it’s just grotesque.
The Huffington Post recently reported on a “hot new beauty trend” in Japan, although that description plays fast and loose with the word “beauty.”
Body modification enthusiasts — generally speaking, folks who get their whole bodies tattooed, split their tongues, stretch their earlobes and/or get Teflon implants under their skin — have found a new and temporary way to look different. All it takes is a sharp needle and a bunch of saline solution.
Practitioners inject the saline solution into patients’ foreheads. The solution gathers beneath the skin, forming a bulge so big it looks like a pimple swollen to about 500 times its normal size. Then the doctor pushes in the center of the bulge with his thumb. The saline is forced out of the center, leaving a ring-shaped protrusion on the forehead.
The bad news is that the whole thing seems painful and unpleasant. The good news is that the effect isn’t long-lasting; within about 16 hours, the saline is absorbed into the body and the protrusion disappears.
All photos courtesy of National Geographic by way of the Huffington Post.
Roswell, part six
Here's one of the cutest contestants in the Roswell pet costume contest. I wrote down the name of the dog and its owner, but like I said, I was fuzzy headed; I don't remember what I did with that information. The costume contest is fun, though. It was emceed by a woman wearing a uniform from "Star Trek: The Next Generation." She milked the contest for all it was worth, asking each pet questions. It was outside, though, and very hot, so we left before the winner was announced. Apparently there's a guinea pig that does well every year.
Roswell, part five
All right, so I Instagrammed this. Here you see my niece reacting with faux fear to the alien display at the museum. Hokey? Yes. But deal with it. In point of fact, the only thing my niece found truly frightening was one of the speakers who was in town for the festival: a kindergarten teacher who writes erotic fiction about aliens and whose talk was titled, "How to Love an Alien."
Roswell, part four
My lovely niece poses with an alien outside the Roswell Space Center, which sells all kinds of UFO swag. It's also home to the Roswell Space Walk, described online as "an immersive art installation in black light, for the interest, edification and delight of the entire family that transports them through time and space, following future from the past into outer space and beyond."
Roswell, part three
Frankly, I have no idea what this is supposed to be. It's one of the displays from the UFO museum, but that's all I know. Maybe we should have a caption contest. Offer up your explanation for this pic. You can be funny or informative, if you happen to know what this really depicts.
Roswell, part two
For my money, this is the coolest display in Roswell's International UFO Museum and Research Center. Several grays stand outside a hovering space craft. From time to time, the aliens are surrounded by fog blasted from a smoke machine. It should be noted that despite its impressive title, the museum is rather rustic, more like a small town heritage museum than, say, the Oklahoma History Center.
Roswell, part one
Earlier this summer, while en route to Taos, my wife, niece and I stopped by Roswell, N.M., to check out its annual UFO Festival. It was beastly hot, and I was already developing pneumonia, so I didn’t get to see a whole lot while we were there. My memory of our visit is kind of fuzzy, too. Maybe I was abducted and lost time.
Anyway, Roswell is ground zero for UFO conspiracy theorists in America. Maybe in the world. In 1947, the story goes, at least one UFO crashed on a Roswell ranch. Witnesses reported seeing aliens dead and alive. The wreckage included lightweight beams imprinted with some sort of hieroglyphics and a foil-like material that could be crushed but would spring back to its original shape. The military got involved, sending out a news release proclaiming that an alien craft had been recovered. Soon after, the military corrected the initial report, saying what they had were the remains of a weather balloon. Locals claimed they were cautioned by Men in Black not to speak of what they saw, and over the years the whole thing blew up into a major deal. Roswell has been the subject of documentaries, books and movies and is the setting for an eponymous sci-fi TV series starring a young Katherine Heigl. The government’s current position is that the wreckage stemmed from a top secret operation called Project Mogul, in which microphones were carried aloft by air balloons to try to detect audio evidence of Soviet nuclear tests.
Whatever the truth is, Roswell has captured the imagination of UFO buffs. The city has turned that fascination into tourism dollars.
Anyway, I took some amateur photos while we there. The pics aren’t great, but maybe they’ll give you a hint of what it’s like there. My next several posts will consist of photos from Roswell. Click on them to increase their size.
This little sculpture shows an alien and some wreckage, as well as the decapitated figure of Mac Brazel, upon whose property the UFO allegedly crashed. In person, Brazel's head is intact. I removed his head with my faulty photography.
Iran has been “Thunderstruck”
Two Iranian nuclear plants have been hit by a musical computer worm, according to Gawker and the Huffington Post.
The attack shut down the Natanz and Fordow nuclear facilities and caused infected computers to play AC/DC’s “Thunderstruck” at maximum volume — over and over again.
An Iranian scientist apparently contacted F-Secure, a Finnish cyber security site, and offered this explanation of the attack:
I am writing you to inform you that our nuclear program has once again been compromised and attacked by a new worm with exploits which have shut down our automation network at Natanz and another facility Fordo near Qom.
According to the email our cyber experts sent to our teams, they believe a hacker tool Metasploit was used. The hackers had access to our VPN. The automation network and Siemens hardware were attacked and shut down. I only know very little about these cyber issues as I am scientist not a computer expert.
There was also some music playing randomly on several of the workstations during the middle of the night with the volume maxed out. I believe it was playing ‘Thunderstruck’ by AC/DC.
No word on who is responsible for the attack. One possibility: Tony Stark. The guy’s smart enough to design a worm, and the song is featured prominently on the “Iron Man 2″ soundtrack. I’d be looking at Jon Favreau, too.
Jetpack guy
The folks at Deadspin.com described this perfectly. I can’t do any better. This happened during last night’s Giants’ game.
Oh, Matt Cain threw a perfect game? Sorry, didn’t notice. Was too busy having my head explode after seeing a secret agent fly around the Bay on his personal water-powered jetpack. This was the first inning. You knew it was going to be a special game.”
The deviant sex lives of penguins
“Happy Feet” and “March of the Penguins” don’t seem so pleasant anymore.
A long-buried report by an Antarctic explorer has surfaced, painting penguins as sexual opportunists whose appetites can only be described as extreme.
George Levick, a surgeon and medical officer on Capt. Robert Falcon Scott’s 1910-1913 south polar expedition, penned a four-page pamphlet in 1915 relating his observations of Adelie penguins at Cape Adare. He was so scandalized by what he’d seen that he labeled the pamphlet “Not for Publication.”
It remained hidden for almost 100 years before researcher Douglas Russell recently discovered it at a British natural history museum. Levick’s notes have now been published in the Polar Record journal, according to Fox News.
Turns out our favorite tuxedo patterned flightless birds aren’t so civilized after all.
Levick watched male penguins gang up to abuse their female counterparts and commit necrophilia, among other things.
“I saw another act of astonishing depravity today,” he wrote in 1911. “A hen which had been in some way badly injured in the hindquarters was crawling painfully along on her belly. I was just wondering whether I ought to kill her or not, when a cock noticed her in passing, and went up to her. After a short inspection he deliberately raped her, she being quite unable to resist him.”
At another point, Fox reported, he wrote: “There seems to be no crime too low for these penguins.”
Of course, Levick was anthropomorphizing, taking the penguins to task for actions that would’ve been criminal in humans. Among the things that shocked him was seeing penguins having homosexual intercourse — something that is far from rare in the animal kingdom.
“Homosexual behaviors in animals are no longer cause for hiding data, or even a blush,” according to the Fox story. “Plenty of animals are out of the closet, so to speak, from dolphins and killer whales to bonobos and greylag geese. Some estimates put the number of animal species that practice same-sex coupling at 1,500.”
... which makes this guy the only truly deviant penguin.
