Plant life! Animal love! Prison workout! Potassium Iodide! Food surplus! Teen sleep! Nuclear disaster! And the key to happiness! It's your Tuesday Science Watch, where we watch science—from within a radiation-proof bubble!
Madame Tussauds unveiled a wax statue of Justin Bieber today. The resulting photos of people interacting with an uncanny lump of boy-shaped wax are sort of horrifying.
Filmmaker Ross Ching made a short film in which he "conducts" colorful paint splashes to music. He really just put some paint on stereo speakers, recorded its reaction to sound and then slowed the whole thing down to exaggerate the effects. We've heard of pops of color, but we've never seen any as cool as this.
President Obama is seriously wearing on the patience of America's most war-loving war lovers, the Washington neoconservatives. Why won't Obama be reasonable and just let them have their endless War in Libya? Muammar Qaddafi is strengthening his grip and moving east, so the window of opportunity for invading another decentralized tribal country and then spending a dozen years there while alienating everyone in the region is closing. And so the neocons have banded together to write Obama a sternly worded letter asking for their war, please, now.
The clean-up from Japan's earthquake and tsunami will take forever. Cars, boats, and heavy debris are strewn about the grid of flattened houses and stripped buildings. These photos from the past 24 hours show the true scale of this mess.
It's been quite some time since we checked in with Dustin and Jayden, Manhattan's most obnoxious homosexuals. We bumped into them last night at a bar in Hells Kitchen and they were talking about Charlie Sheen, Lindsay Lohan, and the tsunami. Here's what they had to say.
Mary Elizabeth Williams is a longtime staff writer at Salon. Her job entails finding whatever self-explanatory thing was popular on the internet yesterday, and writing several hundred words today purporting to shed light on it. She could make a great living tutoring layabout high school kids in how to pad two paltry thoughts out into an entire term paper.
The music festival component of South by Southwest kicks off this Wednesday in Austin, where record company people, media, sponsors, and probably Bill Murray will spend the following four days in delirious pursuit of the event's hottest commodity: buzz.
Of the 2,000 or so bands scheduled to perform, a handful have spent the past few months steadily accumulating blog and word-of-mouth hype. Making a good impression here will be an important early step in their ascent (after that, it goes: song placement in Virgin Mobile commercial, appearance on next Twilight soundtrack, Kanye West sample/collaboration). So in honor of the year—but really because it was so hard to narrow it down to ten—here are 11 essential buzz bands playing at SXSW 2011.
Maybe you news junkies have been paying so much attention to the actual major news events in Japan, North Africa, the Middle East and various state governments that you forgot about the incompetent dumpheads in Washington, who haven't been able to accomplish anything beyond funding the government every couple of weeks after days of serial posturing about nothing. So let's get this update out of the way and then return to the news: The federal government will probably get funded for another three weeks. Thank your members of Congress!
Disney's latest animated movie (well, distributed by Disney, produced by Robert Zemeckis's now-defunct ImageMovers Digital) Mars Needs Moms opened this past weekend with receipts of around $6 million. Considering the movie cost between $150 and $175 million to make and release, this is a bomb on the scale of Cutthroat Island. Which is to say, it's a big, big bomb. So is this just some random fluke, or does it say something about a bigger trend? Some folks are saying it does.
Peaches Geldof—the oft-nude British celebutante who shall henceforth be known as Poor Man's Lohan—was questioned by police last night over the alleged theft of a dress from a Camden Town store called Three Amigos. Apparently there was a "misunderstanding" over a "skater-style" dress she had not paid for. This is the fifth "misunderstanding" Peaches has had about clothing she did not pay for in the last five years.
Running easily purchased American guns to Mexican gangs is all the rage these days in the Great American Southwest, so you know it couldn't be long until a border town's mayor, sheriff, and city council got in on the fun.
The good news, which is not really "good" news much at all, is that Japan's Fukushima nuclear reactors didn't all fully melt down in the last 12 hours. That may sound cynical, but if you were following the fast developments in last night's news, a total nuclear catastrophe really did seem imminent. It's still unclear, though, how much radiation is leaking into the air, and another mid-size (6.1 magnitude) earthquake did strike southwest of Tokyo overnight. Meanwhile, U.S. Treasuries are soaring! Here's the latest news.
What hath Charlie Sheen wrought?
Just when you thought he was too busy to deal with anything else, especially something with annoying culture-war implications, Barack Obama went and published an op-ed in this past Sunday's Arizona Daily Star to start a conversation on gun reforms. That does not mean, as he anxiously rushed to note in his column, that he wants to take everyone's guns and repeal the Second Amendment. He just wants "commonsense" reforms, of some sort. Unfortunately, this political process starts by reaching out to the NRA, and guess what? The NRA does not give a fuck about Barack Obama.
If you thought the gloriously auto-tuned, lyrically adventurous stable of teen songs over at the Ark Music Factory were something, then please watch "My Jeans," a video from someone named Jenna Rose, a young actress who, unlike those Ark Music amateurs, has several other videos on her resume. (Most of them are about picking out outfits. Because that is what girls are all about! Remember that, my future daughter.) It's not right to mock a child, so let's not do that. Ms. Rose is a friend of the gays, so snaps to her for that! Anyway, enjoy.
Down Periscope actor Kelsey Grammer and his newly ex-wife, Real Housewives of Beverly Hills star Camille, bought their Avon, CO ski home in 2002 for $5.35 million, and are now selling it, in the ash-strewn aftermath of their very public divorce, for $7.9 million. "Let's make a profit off this bitch!" — Everyone involved in this marriage from the get-go.
