Salvador Dali TV Commercial
Salvador Dali—or Avida Dollars if you prefer—shilling for Lanvin Chocolate in the early 70s.
Salvador Dali—or Avida Dollars if you prefer—shilling for Lanvin Chocolate in the early 70s.
Can’t wait to see how Glenn Beck ties this one to the Obama administration (or Van Jones)—pundits at Fox News, start your indignation!
Batteries and dollar bills not included. A grainy Internet photo of an alleged new toy for girls has parents in a tizzy—“Pole Dance,” a doll that, well, dances around a pole. Like a stripper. In the photo, which first appeared on gadget blog Gizmodo.com, the box for the toy depicts a cherubic, brunette doll in a shiny green dress, clutching a pole with a disco ball on top while standing on a small stage that says “Pole Dancer.” The simple graphics on the box include the words “Style,” “Flash,” “Up and Down,” “Go Round and Round,” and “Music.”
Whether or not it’s a hoax or a sign of the apocalypse, posters on parenting Web site parentdish.com were aghast over the suggestive doll sending a horrible message to young girls. A writer for Gizmodo.com told parentdish.com that the new doll is likely authentic—and probably came from Asia. “As far as I can tell, it’s a real product,” said Gizmodo.com’s Jesus Diaz. “It didn’t seem Photoshopped to me. It feels more like the typical Chinese-made product you can only find in low cost stores.”
Via the New York Daily News: Photo Of Pole Dancing Doll Has Parents In An Outtrage
And now watch Pole Dance in her first video!
The current Forbes offers up some interesting theories as to why men and women lie—especially when it comes to that hall-of-mirrors world of online dating. With apologies to Jane, it’s a truth universally acknowledged that a single man will lie about his height and salary, while a single woman will often lie about their age. But why? Well, according to Dennis Reina, author of Trust & Betrayal in the Workplace, men, culturally, are more concerned with their professional status, women their social status.
The playing field’s pretty even (now) when it comes to issues of extramarital affairs and money. Regarding the later, though, men tend to lie about, “bad investments or financial decisions, while women (even if they make as much or more money than the man) will misrepresent their buying habits.”
But there’s also, perhaps, in play here a biological component. Regarding women who alter their appearance with push-up bras and Botox, Mark Frank, a communications professor at the University of Buffalo, suggests, “these small deceptions might be necessary for procreation and social survival. A tiger has stripes that coat its back and blend it into the high grass. It doesn’t wake up one day and say, ‘Shall I put on spots?’”
Hmm…comparing “deceptive women” to tigers. Hey, Dr. Frank: maybe there’s a psychology professor down the hall?
In Forbes: He Lied, She Lied
Bonus: The Knickerbockers’ Lies
Say hello and goodbye forever to the Thylacine (above), and the Quagga (below). These are just two of the thought-provoking photos of long-gone animals gathered at Environmental Graffiti. Echoing Jared Diamond’s Collapse, Graffiti’s Karl Fabricius writes, “With modern photography having only been invented in the 1820s, these snapshots are a visible testament to just how recently the creatures shown were wiped out—and a jarring reminder of the precarious situation for many species still left on the planet.”
Well, all I can say is it’s a good thing cameras have come a long way since 1820! When it’s our time to go, and we need those final pictures, mankind can rely on automatic timers.
In Environmental Graffiti: Rare Photos Of Now Extinct Beats
See also: Jared Diamond speaks @ TED
The brilliant minds who brought us the retro charms of the Look Around You television series, Robert Popper and Peter Serafinowicz are now broadcasting dead from the afterlife for your listening pleasure:
Taking bullets, battling Kinski, is there NOTHING Werner can’t do?! As spotted in the LA Times’ Culture Monster:
Leave it to stubbornly iconoclastic filmmaker Werner Herzog to breathe new life into the well-worn score of Puccini’s “La Boh?ɬ
Yesterday’s paper, in this case the Daily Mail, suggests, finally, some fresh interest in solving the case that is the strange and tragic death of Brian Jones:
Police are reviewing the death of Rolling Stone Brian Jones ?
In what reads like something out of High Castle-era Philip K. Dick, David Swanson describes what the American landscape might have looked like under a third Bush administration. More warrantless spying, escalating military budgets, formalizing policies of preventive detention, Swanson’s list is long—and grim. That’s just the set-up, though, to a far scarier punchline:
This dark fantasy of a third Bush term is also an accurate portrait of Obama’s first term to date. In following Bush, Obama was given the opportunity either to restore the rule of law and the balance of powers or to firmly establish in place what were otherwise aberrant abuses of power. Thus far, President Obama has, in all the areas mentioned above, chosen the latter course. Everything described, from the continuation of crimes to the efforts to hide them away, from the corruption of corporate power to the assertion of the executive power to legislate, is Obama’s presidency in its first seven months.
David Swanson is the author, most recently, of Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union.
Spotted via The Nation: Bush’s Third Term?
