Vicki Larrieux, a 22-year-old student from Portsmouth, claims she is unable to keep to a healthy diet because she is frightened of vegetables.

She suffers from a fear known as lachanophobia, which leaves her sweating and stricken with panic attacks at the merest sight of a sprout or a pea.

Miss Larrieux survives on a diet of meat, potatoes, cereals and an occasional apple but refuses even a single slice of carrot on her dinner plate.

“I have always had an irrational fear of vegetables even as a child I used to properly freak out if some carrots or a few peas were on my plate,” she said.

“But as it continued into adult life I started to think it might not just be a dislike for vegetables but an actual phobia.

“Every time I would see vegetables not just on my plate, but anywhere I would get feelings of panic, start sweating and my heart rate would shoot up.

“People might think it is a bit of a laughable affliction but I have a genuine fear of greens it’s not just that I dislike the taste of sprouts or broccoli, but the actual sight of them fills me with dread and I could never touch them.”

The unusual fear affects just a few thousand people in Britain and treatments for the condition include “psychological re-programming” to control the anxious response to seeing vegetables.

Miss Larrieux’s condition makes routine trips to the supermarket or a night out at a restaurant with her boyfriend Joseph Jade, 25, a major problem.

“It is a bit of an ordeal to go to the supermarket because the veg is usually right by the door,” she said.

“My boyfriend is very understanding and does his best to accommodate me. It is a good job he isn’t a vegetarian because it just wouldn’t work.

Read more of Woman diagnosed with fear of vegetables.
 
(via Arbroath)

Bez from the Happy Mondays has nothing to do with this article.
 
Why would someone do this to themselves? I mean, no wonder! How the hell did this guy expect he’d end up after taking 40,000 E’s?

Doctors from London University have revealed details of what they believe is the largest amount of ecstasy ever consumed by a single person. Consultants from the addiction centre at St George’s Medical School, London, have published a case report of a British man estimated to have taken around 40,000 pills of MDMA, the active ingredient in ecstasy, over nine years. The heaviest previous lifetime intake on record is 2,000 pills. Though the man, who is now 37, stopped taking the drug seven years ago, he still suffers from severe physical and mental health side-effects, including extreme memory problems, paranoia, hallucinations and depression. He also suffers from painful muscle rigidity around his neck and jaw which often prevents him from opening his mouth. The doctors believe many of these symptoms may be permanent.

The man, known as Mr A in the report in the scientific journal Psychosomatics, started using ecstasy at 21. For the first two years his use was an average of five pills per weekend. Gradually this escalated until he was taking around three and a half pills a day. At the peak, the man was taking an estimated 25 pills every day for four years. After several severe collapses at parties, Mr A decided to stop taking ecstasy. For several months, he still felt he was under the influence of the drug, despite being bedridden.

His condition deteriorated and he began to experience recurrent tunnel vision and other problems including hallucinations, paranoia and muscle rigidity. “He came to us after deciding that he couldn’t go on any more,” said Dr Christos Kouimtsidis, the consultant psychiatrist at St George’s Medical School in Tooting who treated him for five months. “He was having trouble functioning in everyday life.”

The doctors discovered that the man was suffering from severe short-term memory problems of a type usually only seen in lifetime alcoholics. But evaluating the full extent of his condition was difficult as his concentration and attention was so impaired he was unable to follow the simple tasks involved in the test.

“This was an exceptional case. His long- term memory was fine but he could not remember day to day things - the time, the day, what was in his supermarket trolley,” said Dr Kouimtsidis. “More worryingly, he did not seem aware himself that he had these memory problems.”
 
Below, Pulp’s Jarvis Cocker sings his wryly observed outsider’s tale of being on E at a rave and not quite getting it, Sorted for E’s and Wizz:
 

 
The strange case of the man who took 40,000 ecstasy pills in nine years

 
I’ve always read that beyond the ages of 3-5, a child cannot develop “perfect pitch” so it’s a very good idea to start ‘em young if you want to raise the next Yo-Yo Ma or Duke Ellington. I was always impressed by friends of mine who made a point to make sure they had things like a complete Beatles CD collection in their babies room or who started their kids with piano lessons at two, but this article, from Science Daily makes the case that expectant mothers might want to start even earlier and maybe evan wear headphones around their tummies!

It turns out that when babies are born, they’ve already been absorbing the sounds that go on around them, in particular the sounds of their mother’s voice. So much so that they are, in a sense, already speaking their parents native tongue as the exit the womb. Researchers can hear it in their first gurgles and cries:

From their very first days, newborns’ cries already bear the mark of the language their parents speak, reveals a new study published online in Current Biology. The findings suggest that infants begin picking up elements of what will be their first language in the womb, and certainly long before their first babble or coo.

“The dramatic finding of this study is that not only are human neonates capable of producing different cry melodies, but they prefer to produce those melody patterns that are typical for the ambient language they have heard during their fetal life, within the last trimester of gestation,” said Kathleen Wermke of the University of W?ɬ

 
Make of this what you will. It certainly seems plausible enough to me, but the article doesn’t really quote any pharmacological experts so that always raises my eyebrow. Valid information or merely anecdotal evidence that probably shouldn’t be a major newspaper until it’s a bit more solid? You decide:

“I first took coke when I was 18 and at university. I remember two friends who did chemistry told me I should get really drunk first because it would mix into this new chemical in my blood and make me even higher,” a 30-year-old woman who works in publishing told the Observer yesterday.

What her friends did not tell her is that the combination of cocaine and alcohol in her then teenage body will have left a highly toxic chemical in her liver called cocaethylene.

While few outside the world of pharmacology have heard of the chemical, fewer still are aware of its life-threatening properties. Now, however, its side-effects, discovered in 1979, are threatening to become tragically familiar as they take their toll on users in their 30s and 40s.

Drug addiction clinics say they are becoming increasingly concerned by the health risks associated with the chemical ?

 

 
Here’s an amusing Flickr pool dedicated to crappy bootleg DVD covers.
 
(via Nerdcore)

 

 

 
From The Big Picture:

Since 2006, NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) has been orbiting Mars, currently circling approximately 300 km (187 mi) above the Martian surface. On board the MRO is HiRISE, the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment camera, which has been photographing the planet for several years now at resolutions as fine as mere inches per pixel. Collected here is a group of images from HiRISE over the past few years, in either false color or grayscale, showing intricate details of landscapes both familiar and alien, from the surface of our neighboring planet, Mars. I invite you to take your time looking through these, imagining the settings - very cold, dry and distant, yet real. (35 photos total)

Martian landscapes

Slender Man is an internet meme created on the Something Awful forums and who now haunts the depths of 4chan’s /x/ forum. A net-brewed urban legend, Slender Man is a morbidly tall and thin man in a black and white suit who haunts forests, playgrounds, and anywhere he can blend in with scenery to leap out and drag away unsuspecting victims.

From the Mythical Creatures Guide:

The Slender Man was created at the Something Awful Forums in a thread entitled “Create Paranormal Images.” He is described as wearing a black suit strikingly similar to the visage of the notorious Men In Black, and as the name suggests, appears very thin and able to stretch his limbs and torso to inhuman lengths in order to induce fear and ensnare his prey. Once his arms are outstretched, his victims are put into something of a hypnotized state, where they are utterly helpless to stop themselves from walking into them. He is also able to create tendrils from his fingers and back that he uses to walk on in a similar fashion to Doc Ock, the Spider-Man villain in the Marvel Universe. The superhuman stretching ability could also be seen as a similiarty between himself and Mr. Fantastic of the Fantastic Four. Whether he absorbs, kills, or mearly takes his victims to an undiclosed location or dimension is also unknown as there are never any bodys or evidence left behind in his wake to deduce a definite conclusion.

Not much is known, as no specific information is given within the thread about origins, but his objective and habitat are made very clear. He has the need to kidnap children, and is seen right before the disappearance of a child or multiple children. He seems to prefer fog enshrouded streets and wooded areas as a way to conceal himself from being noticed. It should also be noted that children have been able to see him when no other adults in the vicinity could. Children also have dreams or nightmares concerning The Slender Man before their disappearance. Confiding these stories to their parents are met with the usual parental admonition: overactive imaginations.

Even though The Slender Man is a total fabrication, people have already claimed sightings. He appears to the unwitting mostly at night, and most always peering out of wooded areas or near rivers. He has also been reported to peek inside left open windows and to walk out in front of lone motorists on long uninhabited roads. The Slender Man or men, have appeared everywhere from Japan, Norway, and America to name a growing few.

Somebody hold me!

Lucifer’s Friend was a seventies prog-metal band that… OK, you stopped reading at “prog-metal.” I know, I know. But hear me out… these guys were one of the best of the whole lot, and are criminally underrated. I heard their album Banquet a couple years ago, and it’s irresistible, like Sammy Davis Jr. fronted Traffic or something.

Allmusic gives the backstory:

A German outfit fronted by a British singer, Lucifer’s Friend first gained minor notoriety, and later major cult status, as both early practitioners of heavy metal and progressive rock. Formed in 1970 Hamburg, by former German Bonds members Peter Hesslein (guitar), Peter Hecht (keyboards), Dieter Horns (bass), and Joachim Rietenbach (drums), the group was initially dubbed Asterix and recorded an entire album’s worth of material before connecting with singer John Lawton, whose then band, Stonewall, was playing a residency at the city’s famed Top Ten Club. Lawton’s vocals would grace Asterix’s only, eponymous album later the same year, and all involved were excited enough by the results that they immediately began collaborating on more material with which to relaunch the band under the provocative new moniker of Lucifer’s Friend…

Click the sample track below?

Rokk ?ɬ? Reykjavik is an excellent documentary about the Icelandic post-punk scene in the very early eighties. The film strings together interviews and concert footage from a couple dozen post-punk bands, including ?

 
Charlie Brooker’s Screen Burn columns in The Guardian are always funny, but this week’s is especially hilarious. Brooker writes on a new British telemovie that imagines the trial and death of Britain’s most notorious pedophile, former popstar Gary Glitter, whose 1972 hit “Rock and Roll Pt 2” is still to this day played by the unwitting at sports events big and small across America:

Don’t know about you, but sometimes I can’t sleep at night for wondering what it might be like if Gary Glitter were executed. I just can’t picture it in quite enough detail for my liking. Would they fry him? Gas him? Or pull his screaming head off with some candy-coloured rope? I can never decide, and it often leaves me restless till sunrise. Thank God, then, for The Execution Of Gary Glitter (Mon, 9pm, Channel 4), which vividly envisions the trial and subsequent capital punishment of pop’s most reviled sex offender so you don’t have to.

I can’t believe what I’m typing: this is a drama-documentary that imagines a world in which Britain has a) Reinstated the death penalty for murder and paedophilia, b) Changed the law so Britons can stand trial in this country for crimes committed abroad, and c) Chosen Gary Glitter as its first test case. It blends archive footage, talking-head interviews with Miranda Sawyer, Garry Bushell and Ann Widdecombe, and dramatised scenes in which Gary Glitter is led into an execution chamber and hanged by the neck until dead.

He’s not just swinging from a rope, mind. The Glitterphile is all over this show, like Hitler in Downfall. There are lengthy scenes in which he argues with his lawyer, smirks in court, plays chess with the prison chaplain, weeps on the floor of his cell, etc. Visually, we’re talking late-period Glitter, with the evil wizard shaved-head-and-elongated-white-goatee combo that makes him resemble a sick alternative Santa. It would be funnier if they showed him decked out in full 70s glam gear throughout, being led to the gallows in a big spangly costume with shoulder pads so huge they get stuck in the hole as he plunges through. I assumed the Glittercution would feature dry ice, disco lights, and a hundred party poppers going off as his neck cracked. But here there’s not so much as a can of Silly String. This is a terribly serious programme.

 
Read the whole thing at The Guardian