First, yesterday got new hosting for this blog. Should be stable from now on, since I got a damn good host company (yeah, click on the link if you need or want hosting, it is an affiliate link and I will make money if you purchase hosting). Got everything loaded up last night (took some time since there are so many files and folders on this blog). So without further ado, I will start posting some good stuff for all my readers.
###
What’s the Big Idea?
The legal status of medical marijuana in the United States is very hazy these days. 16 states plus the District of Columbia allow the use of medical marijuana, but there is a great discrepancy as to who is allowed to smoke it and how much they are allowed to possess. 17 other states have pending legislation that promises to add to the chaos. Then there is the federal government, whose policy represents “one incongruity after another,” according to Dr. J. Michael Bostwick, Professor of Psychiatry at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota.
Professor Bostwick has spent a year researching what he calls a “think piece” that was recently published in the February, 2012 issue of Mayo Clinic Proceedings. Bostwick’s article points out that Marijuana is unique among illegal drugs due to its political symbolism and widespread use, which has prevented a thoughtful analysis of its perceived value versus its perceived danger.
Marijuana is currently classified as a Schedule 1 agent under the federal Controlled Substances Act. This classification means marijuana has “high abuse potential” and no “currently accepted medical use.” When this declaration was made in 1970, the decision was based more on a Depression era Reefer Madness-esq mix of superstition and propaganda than it was on rigorous scientific evaluation.
###
CNET “CNET is the premier destination for tech product reviews, news, price comparisons, free software downloads, daily videos, and podcasts.”
Female mosquitoes bite people in order to get blood so they can lay their eggs. The female mosquitoes needs amino acids in blood to make protein for her eggs. Male mosquitoes do not sting people but spend their time drinking nectar from flowers. Mosquito saliva is injected and the enzyme in it prompts an immune reaction that brings mast cells to the wound. The mast cells release histamine, with causes itching and a red rash.- Provided by The World Almanac 2012
Free Advertising for your site, blog or forum at the Daily Website.
###
At last night’s special Oscar Edition of Jimmy Kimmel Live!, host Jimmy Kimmel unveiled the trailer for the greatest film ever made that will, sadly, never actually get made.
Starring (and I kid you not): Pretty much every person working in show business today.
###
Trinidad Moruga Scorpion: Hottest Pepper on the Planet
The Trinidad Moruga Scorpion may sound like a deadly arachnid, but it has a sting of a different sort. This super-hot chili averages 1.2 million units on the Scoville heat scale, earning recognition as the hottest pepper on the planet. By comparison, habanero peppers fall in the 100,000 to 350,000 range on the Scoville scale. Most people would never consider eating an entire one of these mouth-searing peppers, but a select few are willing to endure the pain for the endorphin rush brought on by its heat. Are you bold enough to try one? More …
###
Pickin’ & Trimmin’ features a classic barber shop in Drexel, North Carolina, and the men who have been meeting there to play bluegrass music, tell stories, and get an occasional haircut, for decades. Matt Morris, the director of the documentary, talks about the making of the film and what has happened at the shop more recently in a brief interview below. Don’t miss Morris’s new documentary, Mr. Happy Man, about 88-year-old Johnny Barnes and his commitment to spending hours every morning wishing Bermuda’s commuters well.
The Atlantic: How did you find this story and decide to tell it?
Matt Morris: I came across The Barbershop when it was written up in the local newspaper in Wilmington, North Carolina. It sounded interesting and I was looking for a film subject so I took a trip up to the mountains. Visiting The Barbershop in Drexel was like traveling back in time. It’s the living embodiment of Mayberry. The barbers were just as friendly and talkative as could be and the bluegrass music in the back room was so much better than I had imagined it would be. It was a dream come true, you could sit back and eat peanuts, tell stories, and listen to great music for hours. No pressure to ever get your hair cut there. In fact, Herb Lambert, the mandolin player you see ripping up a tune in the film, has never gotten his hair cut there.
How are they doing now?
Lawrence, the head barber, passed away a few years ago but David continues to cut hair at the shop and Lawrence’s son Carroll keeps it in good shape. A few years ago the shop fell into disrepair and there was some concern that they couldn’t afford to fix it up. I made a short video when I passed through town and visited the shop and helped to solicit donations towards keeping the shop open. So far we’ve raised $1,500 and Carroll has done lots of renovation in the back room but there’s always more to be done and any help is appreciated. Carroll just started a Facebook page for the shop and it’s my new favorite thing on the internet — every week he uploads new clips of the boys jamming in the back room. The Atlantic.
###
Johnny Cash didn’t live lightly.
From picking cotton to help his impoverished, Depression-wracked family; to his exhausting tour schedule; to struggling with a serious drug addiction; to his songs about guns, murder, revenge, punishment and repentance—Johnny Cash was a troubled man who sought redemption through his music.
To commemorate what would be the county-music master’s 80th birthday on Feb. 26, several celebrations, projects and events are scheduled throughout the year. Cash’s boyhood home in Dyess, Ark. is being restored. Columbia/Legacy will release a series of archived recordings, starting with a collection of his gospel and spiritual songs from 1970s and ’80s called Bootleg IV: The Soul of Truth, which will be available in April. A Johnny Cash Museum is scheduled to open this summer in Nashville.
And here on LightBox we have rare and unpublished photos of the Man in Black from the Sony Music Archive. Many of these images were taken by Don Hunstein, a prolific music photographer at Columbia records for 30 years, and date from the late ’50s to the early ’70s; they include pictures of Cash and his wife June right after she gave birth to their only son, John Carter Cash, in 1970, as well as the musician at home in California or fishing on his farm in San Antonio.
Johnny Cash was born to farmers in Kingsland, Ark. on Feb. 26, 1932. As the fourth of five children, he recalled in a 1969 TIME article that although his family was dirt poor, “I was never hungry a day in my life….at breakfast it was just fatback and biscuits—but that was plenty.” After high school, Cash worked at an auto plant in Pontiac, Mich. (where, as far as we know, he did not actually construct a car from stolen parts, as he later pretended to in his 1976 song “One Piece at a Time”). He joined the Air Force for a few years, and then in 1954 he married Vivian Liberto and the couple moved to Memphis.
MORE.
###
There are places on this planet that are stranger than the most alien landscapes we have ever imagined. Places that make your skin crawl. Places that induce heavy breathing and paranoia, before anything has even happened. We walk the dark, dusty steps of old castles and houses. We roam the halls of asylums and tunnels, hoping to glimpse something otherworldly. But sometimes, we wish we wouldn’t. Sometimes, our curiosity gets the better of us in the beginning, and is then squashed by a feeling that no human ever wants to be familiar with: absolute terror.
We hear screams in the night, footsteps in the hall. We see shadows flit by, and fog taking the shape of something eerily familiar. We breathe, we pray, and step lightly. We scream, we curse, and we sprint. Some encounters are mysterious, others violent, all terrifying. Why do we insist on investigating places such as these? Mere curiosity only gets us so far, and then we need a driving force embedded much deeper into our psyche in order to power on. Would you spend the night alone in these places?
The History
The Riddle House in Palm Beach County, Florida, was originally a funeral parlor. The Victorian house was dismantled and rebuilt in Yesteryear Village at the South Florida fair grounds. In the 1920’s the house became privately owned by Karl Riddle.
The Terror
Joseph, one of Riddle’s former employees, committed suicide by hanging himself in the attic of the house. Joseph, for whatever reason, hated men, and displays this hatred by attacking men who enter the attic. One man had a lid flung at his head, and men are now no longer allowed in the attic. Other places in the house are haunted as well, with furniture being frequently moved.
MORE.
###
Of course, the only reason you even bothered watching the Oscars last night was to catch the grand unveiling of it girl Kate Upton’s spicy Carl’s Jr. TV spot, right? Well, since you probably called it a night around the time Billy Crystal made his first appearance in blackface — i.e. five seconds into the show — here it is in a convenient Crystal-free format for your viewing pleasure.
###
The handful of female war correspondents whose beat is whatever hellhole leads the news—Christiane Amanpour, Marie Colvin, Janine di Giovanni, et al.—are as tough as any of the guys. But there’s a difference in how they work, the way they love, and the risks they run.
By Evgenia Peretz
They work in places like Kosovo and Grozny, but they live—most of them, at least—in London’s Notting Hill, a neighborhood better known for its Victorian-camisole street fairs than its rocket-propelled-grenade launchers. The town house of CNN chief international correspondent Christiane Amanpour, the world’s most famous war reporter, is smartly appointed, with African sculptures and socially conscious photography books stacked just so on the coffee table. Even the vase on the hallway floor works—but only after you hear the backstory: it’s the 155-mm. howitzer shell that landed two doors down from Amanpour at the Sarajevo Holiday Inn during the war in Bosnia. “If it had exploded, I and everyone else in that wing would have been killed,” says Amanpour, feet on coffee table, hands behind head.
The daughter of an Iranian father and British mother, Amanpour is part of a small brigade of women who have trooped, more or less as a group, from misery to misery, from Iraq to Bosnia to East Timor to Chechnya and, lately, to Afghanistan and Israel’s West Bank. They have shared rooms and deep friendships. They have elbowed each other out of the way to get the story, and gossiped behind one another’s backs. And they all think an article about female war correspondents is pretty lame. “Safari Susans!” exclaims Amanpour facetiously.
Amanpour and her colleagues are reporters, they insist, not women reporters, as rugged as any man, and they’ve got the war stories to prove it. Take Afghanistan alone. Amanpour discovered what she believes were “mini– training camps” and a trove of documents about how to make chemical and nuclear weapons. The BBC’s newest sensation, a confident and exuberant 37-year-old Brit, Jacky Rowland, completed her mission of being one of the first Western correspondents into that country after September 11.
MORE.
###
One billion people worldwide live in slums, a number that will likely double by 2030. The characteristics of slum life vary greatly between geographic regions, but they are generally inhabited by the very poor or socially disadvantaged. Slum buildings can be simple shacks or permanent and well-maintained structures but lack clean water, electricity, sanitation and other basic services. In this post, I’ve included images from several slums including Kibera slum in Nairobi, Kenya, the second largest slum in Africa (and the third largest in the world); New Building slum in central Malabo, Equatorial Guinea; Pinheirinho slum – where residents recently resisted police efforts to forcibly evict them; and slum dwellers from Kolkata, Mumbai and New Delhi, India. India has about 93 million slum dwellers and as much as 50% of New Delhi’s population is thought to live in slums, 60% of Mumbai. — Paula Nelson (55 photos total)
###
is giving the finger still offensive?
First published online by Stuart Jeffries.Many years before Adele stuck it to the suits at the Brit awards, the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein and the economist Piero Sraffa were travelling on a train from Cambridge to London. It proved to be a key moment in 20th-century philosophy. They were chatting about Wittgenstein’s idea that every proposition had to have a precise place in the axiomatic order of rational language, independently of the various contexts in which it may be employed. And then, according to fellow philosopher Norman Malcolm, “Sraffa made a gesture, familiar to Neapolitans and meaning something like disgust or contempt, of brushing the underneath of his chin with an outward sweep of the finger tips of one hand”.Sraffa’s point was that there are many things in heaven and earth that didn’t fit in Wittgenstein’s philosophy. Any philosophy of language must account for hand gestures, not just Neapolitan ones, but the Reverse Churchill not V for Victory but the other way round, the Bras d’Honneur, the Grecian Moutza sticking five fingers at the insultee, Onanism’s Fisty Homage you know the one, L for loser and the eloquently Italianate Forearm Jerk and Accompanying Chin Flick. It also needs to make sense of why the Fig Gesture making your thumb peep between index and ringer finger in a closed fist is obscene in France, Greece, Japan, Russia, Serbia and Turkey, but betokens good luck in Portugal and Brazil.
MORE.
###
Last summer a friend of mine was driving his elderly mother from the north coast to Cairo and on the way his mother, a diabetic, suddenly felt ill. He looked for a pharmacy and when he found one he went in and found a bearded pharmacist. My friend asked him if he would give his mother an insulin injection. Amazingly, the pharmacist answered, “Sorry, but I don’t give injections to women because that’s against sharia. Go find your mother a female doctor.”
My friend tried his best to persuade the pharmacist, telling him they were in a remote area and it would be hard to find a female doctor, and that his mother, more than seventy years old, surely would not represent a sexual temptation to the pharmacist. Still, he refused to administer the insulin.
Another incident: A while back the newspaper Al Masry Al Youm published an article about hospitals in Ramadan where employees working in the intensive care, emergency and accident units left work after breaking their fast and wouldn’t return for two hours, so that they could say the taraweeh prayers in the mosque. They left their poor patients alone during this time. They considered performing the taraweeh prayers much more important than anything else, even the life of an innocent patient for whom they were responsible. The patients’ conditions might deteriorate and they might even die while the doctors and nurses worshiped in the mosque.
MORE.
###
###
Unlimited human eggs ‘potential’ for fertility treatment.
Report: New Intifada in Palestinian areas? – .
14 ½ Non-Deadly Injuries That Make Your Stomach Turn.
###
###
US spy agencies see no clear evidence of Iran building nukes « intelNews.org.
Study: Ancient horse shrank in global heat.
Afghan protests rage on despite US apology for Koran burning .
Women wearing red send signals that attract men – .
Study claims ‘unlimited eggs’ possible .
###
How do you design a utopia? In 1972, John B. Calhoun detailed the specifications of his Mortality-Inhibiting Environment for Mice: a practical utopia built in the laboratory. Every aspect of Universe 25—as this particular model was called—was pitched to cater for the well-being of its rodent residents and increase their lifespan. The Universe took the form of a tank, 101 inches square, enclosed by walls 54 inches high. The first 37 inches of wall was structured so the mice could climb up, but they were prevented from escaping by 17 inches of bare wall above. Each wall had sixteen vertical mesh tunnels—call them stairwells—soldered to it. Four horizontal corridors opened off each stairwell, each leading to four nesting boxes. That means 256 boxes in total, each capable of housing fifteen mice. There was abundant clean food, water, and nesting material. The Universe was cleaned every four to eight weeks. There were no predators, the temperature was kept at a steady 68°F, and the mice were a disease-free elite selected from the National Institutes of Health’s breeding colony. Heaven.
Four breeding pairs of mice were moved in on day one. After 104 days of upheaval as they familiarized themselves with their new world, they started to reproduce. In their fully catered paradise, the population increased exponentially, doubling every fifty-five days. Those were the good times, as the mice feasted on the fruited plain. To its members, the mouse civilization of Universe 25 must have seemed prosperous indeed. But its downfall was already certain—not just stagnation, but total and inevitable destruction.
Calhoun’s concern was the problem of abundance: overpopulation. As the name Universe 25 suggests, it was not the first time Calhoun had built a world for rodents. He had been building utopian environments for rats and mice since the 1940s, with thoroughly consistent results. Heaven always turned into hell.
MORE.
###
In Wired for Culture: The Natural History of Human Co-operation, Professor Pagel says our true difference with other animals is our ability to adapt at the cultural level to different environments as we travel around the world, rather than having to wait for the slower pace of genetic evolution.
This created a species with a suite of adaptations for making use of the prosperous social environment of human culture, among them are our ultra-social nature, our language, morality and even some individual differences in talents and skills.
“These traits wouldn’t exist without our propensity for culture – our ability to co-operate in small tribal societies, enabling us to pass on knowledge, beliefs and practices so that we prospered while others declined,” said Professor Pagel.
MORE.
###
An unfinished autobiography and a 1980s biopic turned Frances Farmer, one of the great golden-era stars, into a lobotomized zombie. The main trouble: Frances Farmer wasn’t lobotomized. An investigation to set one of Hollywood’s most convoluted stories straight.Credit: Lauren Tamaki Frances Farmer was an actress in the 1930s and 1940s, Hollywood’s golden era. A goddess among other goddesses, a beautiful woman with a lower-register speaking voice close your eyes, hear the plangent tones of a French horn. No less a goddess, either, for the relative brevity of her Hollywood career. Frances made only 15 feature films from 1935 to 1942—and a 16th, albeit trashy one, in 1957—appearing in the best of these with such luminaries as Cary Grant The Toast of New York, Bing Crosby Rhythm on the Range, Edward Arnold Come and Get It and The Toast of New York, and Tyrone Power Son of Fury.But she was not just a figure of the ’30s and ’40s; she was one of the ’90s and ’00s, too. “Frances Farmer Will Have Her Revenge on Seattle” is the fifth song on Nirvana’s In Utero; particularly arresting is the line, “She’ll come back as fire and burn all the liars, leave a blanket of ash on the ground.” Full-bore vengeance on untold millions of Seattle innocents. That’s dramatic enough to make you wonder: What the hell happened to Frances Farmer?
MORE.
###
When it comes to infertility, the burden seems to often fall on women. They’re poked and prodded and scoped in an effort to figure out what’s complicating conception.
While it’s just as likely that infertility is related to the male half of the couple, only 20% of men in duos struggling to make a baby get a sperm-count analysis early on or at all, according to data from SpermCheck Fertility, which earlier this month announced the availability of its at-home screening test for men. SpermCheck, which is approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, assesses sperm count with 98% accuracy in 10 minutes and does away with the unpleasantness of conjuring up a sperm sample in a doctor’s office. As SpermCheck’s website puts it, a “trip to a fertility clinic for a semen analysis is not for everyone. These tests can be expensive (costing hundreds of dollars and not typically covered by insurance), inconvenient and are often embarrassing.”
MORE.
###
Originally posted 2012-02-27 11:44:32. Republished by Blog Post Promoter