As everyone probably knows by now, Marge Simpson appears on the current cover of Playboy.  In order to capitalize, I suppose, on this pop-cultural moment, The Huffington Post launched a “Who’s Hotter?” slide show contest whereby its readers could rank their favorite, “celebrity models—from actresses to TV personalities to still-hot supermodels-turned moms.”

Well, as the eagle-eyed folk at Sociological Images note: “Ironically, the slide show did not contain the Playboy cover that inspired the Simpson drawing.  Behold Darine Stern (above), the first black woman on the cover of Playboy (1971). “

And, for those of you keeping score, other than Marge’s “yellow,” the HuffPo’s slide show was composed exclusively of white women.

 

 

 

 
From Good:

The ongoing battle between medical marijuana advocates and law enforcement has begotten some tricky legality, which has lead to all sorts of uncertainty regarding growth and distribution, and, ultimately, prosecution (or non-prosecution) of distributors. Meanwhile, in places like Northern California?

Dangerous Minds pal Charles Hugh Smith announces the publication of his new book Survival+ at his Of Two Minds blog. You can buy Survival + as a physical book, as an Amazon Kindle file, online in HTML or download the text in the form of a free PDF. Here’s what some respected thinker such as our current Dangerous Minds guest Michael Panzner have to say about Survival+:

“I’ve been a big fan of Charles Hugh Smith’s insights since the day I first stumbled across his Of Two Minds blog. In Survival+, he sets out a thoughtful and provocative vision of our future that should not be missed.”     Michael J. Panzner, author of When Giants Fall and Financial Armageddon

“Charles Hugh Smith is the savviest blogger in the USA these strange days. Nobody puts out a consistently wiser, truer, better-written message, day after day, than CHS. His views on surviving the hardships we face in economy and society are of the highest value and could not be more timely or astute.”     James Howard Kunstler, author of The Long Emergency and World Made by Hand

“Charles Smith provides a balanced, thoughtful, and prescient view regarding the dilemmas facing our fragile economy. From the collapse in the housing market to the growing power of the banking sector, our economic landscape is changing. Mr. Smith?

A picture of the artificial hymen Photograph: Mohamed Al Rahhal

“Mohamed Al Rahhal,” the pseudonym of a blogger for the Guardian who lives in Egypt, writes of the furor caused in that country around the topic of… an artificial hymen:

Recently, news of a $15 Chinese-made artificial hymen sent ripples across the Egyptian media and blogosphere. China has been manufacturing this very same product for years, but it was an advertisement for a Chinese company offering shipping into the Middle East that started the discussion here in Cairo.

Conservative MPs took the debate into parliament, requesting a ban on imports of the product ?

 
A little more than a year after its ill-fated debut, the Large Hadron Collider is getting ready to roll again. The controversial device, including an 18-mile circular tunnel—bigger than the London Underground’s Circle Line—is housed in the gigantic CERN laboratory in the Jura mountains just outside of Geneva, on the border of France and Switzerland. Using the particle collider, the largest ever built, would allow scientists to re-create conditions that existed a trillionth of a second after the big bang, as well as prove the existence of the spooky “Higgs boson” entity, also called the “God Particle” which give “things” (including living things like you and me) their mass. It is further anticipated to solve the mystery of “dark matter” and shed light on many other quirky physics conundrums.

On Sept. 19, 2008, just days after the Hadron’s launch, a small piece of electrical cable providing power to the magnets broke loose, sending a shower of sparks across the wiring. This caused temperatures within one of the tunnels to rise quickly, followed by the release of helium cooled to -271 degrees. The results weren’t pretty, causing nearly $60 million in damage to the $9-billion project. Now, with hope, everything is back on track. Within the next few weeks, bunches of protons should be loaded into the device, and it’s expected to be operational near the Christmas holiday. Fully up to speed, the particles should move just a hair slower than the speed of light.

Not everyone is happy about the Hadron’s snappy comeback. Some scientists fear the experiment could cause several tiny black holes to form, which would grow and devour the entire Earth. Still others, like Dr. Holger Bech Neilson of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen believe that the manufacture of Higgs bosons may be so “abhorrent” to nature,” as Dennis Overbye wrote in the New York Times, that their creation would cause ripples backward through time to stop the collider before it could produce one, much like the paradox of a time traveler going back in time to halt his own birth by killing his grandfather. Neilson calls the collider’s problems an “anti-miracle” and adds, tongue-not-entirely-in-cheek, that the collider’s epic failure in 2008 might actually have proved the existence of God. Got your head around that one?

What is even scarier about the Large Hadron Collider, however, is that one of the CERN physicists working on the project (his name has not been released) was arrested Oct. 12 on suspicion of having Al Qaeda connections. Gulp!

Cross posting this from Brand X

 
No word yet if, as was the case with his prior successes, producer Barrie Osborne (The Matrix, The Lord Of The Rings) plans to build a trilogy around the Prophet Mohammed.  I’m guessing, though, that even a stand-alone film will attract its share of uproar:

Qatari media company Al Noor Holdings used Sunday’s closing of the Doha Tribeca Film Festival to announce its launch into the movie biz with a $150 million feature about the Prophet Mohammed, to be produced by Barrie Osborne.  Osborne and Al Noor execs are in discussions with a number of studios, distributors and ten-percenteries about boarding the English-language project.

Al Noor thus becomes the latest link between Hollywood and the Mideast, where companies are anxious to provide work for local filmmakers and to offer a more positive portrayal of Islam around the world.  Muslim cleric and TV personality Sheik Yousef al-Qaradawi will serve as a technical consultant.  “He was a profound genius who founded a religion whose name in Islam signifies peace and reconciliation,” Osborne said. “This is what our film will aspire to do.”

And while the film will cover the years from his birth to his death, a Mohammed biopic will prove especially tricky considering the Prophet himself cannot be in it.  In accordance with Islamic law, neither Mohammed nor direct members of his family can be visually depicted.

In Variety: Al Noor Sets Mohammed Feature

 
As mentioned earlier on Dangerous Minds, OR Books will soon be releasing as a possible antidote to Palin’s own Going Rogue, “Going Rouge: An American Nightmare.”

Sarah Palin has many faces: hockey mom, fundamentalist Christian, sex symbol, Republican ideologue, fashion icon, ?

 
“I went there with a friend to do an interview, and suddenly we were the ones being interviewed by Ondine.”  So says Cathy Naso of her initial visit to Warhol‘s Factory as a high school senior.  Naso went there hoping to research an article for her French class, but wound up—as these things happen—leaving as a receptionist, where she worked for the next two years.  Her duties during that heady period included eating lots of yogurt, transcribing Warhol’s James Joyce-inspired a: A Novel, and hanging out with The Velvet Underground.

As a reward for her efforts, Warhol gifted Naso with a self-portrait (above), which hung on her wall briefly before she stashed it in a closet for safe-keeping.  Now, after 40-plus years, Naso’s selling it off through Sotheby’s, where experts think it can fetch an estimated $1-1.5 million (Umm…estimated value of hanging out at The Factory for 2 years?  Priceless!). 

Before Warhol gave his self-portrait to Naso, he signed it: “To Cathy ?

The Sweet Smell of Success is one of the great screenplays, and films, of all time. It’s an absolutely vicious piece of work about a powerful New York gossip columnist (Burt Lancaster) and a sleazy impresario who spends the film trying to scrape his way into his good graces (Tony Curtis, in a rare villainous turn). The level of 50s slime out-does anything in “Mad Men” and the dialogue cuts with every nasty, New-York-Overdrive quip. Plot summary follows:

A classic of the late 1950s, this film looks at the string-pulling behind-the-scenes action between desperate press agent Sidney Falco (Tony Curtis) and the ultimate power broker in that long-ago show-biz Manhattan: gossip columnist J.J. Hunsecker (Burt Lancaster). Written by Ernest Lehman and Clifford Odets (who based the Hunsecker character on the similarly brutal and power-mad Walter Winchell), the film follows Falco’s attempts to promote a client through Hunsecker’s column—until he is forced to make a deal with the devil and help Hunsecker ruin a jazz musician who has the nerve to date Hunsecker’s sister. Director Alexander MacKendrick and cinematographer James Wong Howe, shooting on location mostly at night, capture this New York demimonde in silky black and white, in which neon and shadows share a scarily symbiotic relationship—a near-match for the poisonous give-and-take between the edgy Curtis and the dismissive Lancaster.

The screenplay by Odets and Lehman is one of the most incredible pieces of writing I’ve ever read/viewed, surpassing, perhaps, even classics of nasty dialogue (and I’ll go out on a limb here) like The Lion in Winter and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? There’s just no comparison to any other film and I think this is the ultimate flick for ANYBODY who works in the media. Check out the trailer below to see what I mean.

(Amazon: The Sweet Smell of Success)

 
Chinese HAARP-ists meteorologists say let it snow!  Yesterday, using high-powered artillery, the ominous-sounding Weather Modification Office seeded rain clouds with 186 doses of silver iodide, triggering Beijing’s earliest snowfall in a decade.  And while this effort was primarily initiated as “drought relief,” the resulting blizzard disrupted road, rail and air travel.  For some BBC footage of post-snowfall shoveling, click here.

And while their footage may be unembeddable, the BBC’s graphics are not.  For those days when sunshine “inexplicably” turns to snowfall, here’s a handy cloud seeding chart:

 
1. Silver iodide is fired into cloud using flares on planes or from the ground
2. Water droplets then attach to these particles
3. They fall as snow if surface temperatures are below or near freezing, or as raindrops at warmer temperatures
4. Heat released as the droplets freeze boosts updrafts, which pull more moist air into the cloud
5. Despite the use of the cloud seeding technique, many scientists remain skeptical of its effectiveness (my bold)

Scientists “Cause” Beijing Snow

Bonus: Kate Bush’s Cloudbusting