Your assignment: to come up with this company's slogan. I'll volunteer the old Timex one, although it's not quite right: "Takes a licking and keeps on ticking!"
Talk about a mammoth appetite, when most of the world’s large mammals went extinct roughly 10,000 years ago, the vast majority of the vanished species were herbivores. This of course meant that they were no longer around to eat the plants they otherwise would have, and - according to Christophers Doughty and Field from Oxford and Stanford Universities respectively – this freed up an extra 1.4 trillion kilos of food, roughly 2.5% of the net product of all Earth’s dry land. However, the researchers add, this excess had been ‘used up’ by burgeoning human numbers by around 1700 and today we consume six times as much as the Pleistocene critters ever did while simultaneously driving down land productivity by 10% (Nature)(PDF).
That’s not to say that our massive consumption doesn’t have it’s upside, As Vangelis Kapatos of Manhattan discovered when he attempted suicide by jumping from his ninth floor flat, only to survive when his fall was broken by a pile of uncollected garbage. Mr. Kapatos’ timing, from his perspective, couldn’t have been worse, the unusually large garbage pile was due to collections being suspended because of snow. They were due to resume the day after his impromptu dumpster dive (Today Online).
Mind you, we’re not the only animals prone to excess. After finding the bodies of dozens of starlings near the city of Constanta in Romania, locals were concerned that the cause might be bird flu, instead post-mortems of the birds have revealed that they in fact died of alcohol poisoning, having ‘drunk’ themselves to death on the discarded leftovers of the local winemaking industry. A least they died happy (BBC News).
Better than dying happy, though, is living happy, and the secret of that, says the UK’s Office for National Statistics, is having a job. But it’s not the pay but the job security that counts, say the government statisticians, which ironically are facing staff cuts themselves due to the economic downturn. Other key happiness factors, according to the preliminary report, are good personal health and a decent family life. What will we do without these people (Telegraph)?
"The Erotic Awards honour the Stars in the Erotic Universe. Grayson Perry described us in The Times as 'the good people in a gloriously mucky business'. Whilst other awards concentrate on the commercial sex industry, we select artists and pioneers with unique talents, people who are ground-breakers, pioneers and innovators."
I think most regular readers of WU would agree that our contributor Patty is at the heart and soul of this misguided enterprise. She makes terrific posts, and always manages to comment kindly and intelligently on what others do. This blog would not be the same without her.
I've been wanting to send her a little token of thanks, but could not come up with the perfect item--until I was out book-hunting today and came across a copy of the volume pictured to the side.
Patty--send me your snailmail address privately through the SUGGEST LINK mechanism, and this invaluable compendium of "boners" will go out to you in Monday's mail.
Did you know that there were non-human Barbie dolls? Maybe if I were the parent of a little girl, this would be old news to me. But it's not. And to my eyes, it's weird. Does Mermaid Barbie have sex with land-dwelling Ken? Does she leave sea-slug trails all over Barbie's Malibu Dream House? The mind boggles.
Paul Di Filippo
Paul has been paid to put weird ideas into fictional form for over thirty years, in his career as a noted science fiction writer. He has recently begun blogging on many curious topics with three fellow writers at The Inferior 4+1.