Ideas and technology and politics and journalism and history and humor and some other stuff.
You are currently browsing the yearly archive for 2010.
Cripes!
I have several letters from serial killer Richard Ramirez aka The Night Stalker. I am selling these 5 for $300 or $100 a piece. Some include drawings & pictures on strange stationary. If you are interested, please call me. I don’t check my email very often. Thanks!
Tags: Richard Ramirez
Searching Afflictor for more typos and profanities. (Image by Gflores.)
Afflictor: Trying to figure out what the people want since 2009.
Feore approaches the camera during the spare opening of Franςois Giraud's wry biopic.
The stark opening sequence of Franςois Giraud’s brilliantly impressionistic 1993 biopic, 32 Short Films About Glenn Gould, is an extremely long take of the eponymous classical pianist walking across snowy terrain, beginning as a mere dot in the distance until he’s ultimately in close range of the camera. The scene might be too unsubtle if it wasn’t so offbeat: It’s the filmmaker boldly saying that he will idiosyncratically reveal the titanically talented and remote musician, who abandoned the concert hall for a brief and doomed life of seclusion and eccentricity.
As the title suggests, the film is divided into vignettes, alternates narrative and documentary, allows its lead (Colm Feore) an understated yet suitably unusual performance, and makes plenty of time for odd yet literally titled sequences like “45 Seconds and a Chair.” There’s just as much attention paid to the tics, neuroses and small obsessions that made Gould who he was as there is to his grand moments.
That’s not to say that Giraud glosses over the Canadian musician’s dramatic times; he just doesn’t accentuate them with a heavy hand, needlessly punctuating and underlining. In the key scene that recalls Gould’s last concert, there’s an air of deadpan and matter-of-factness. The whole thing just sort of sneaks up on you, as life often does. (Available by streaming on Netflix.)
More Film Posts:
Tags: Colm Feore, Franςois Giraud, Glenn Gould
An 1895 chart of phrenology.
Over at Edge, economist Richard Thaler asked the science site’s contributors for responses to this question: “The flat earth and geocentric world are examples of wrong scientific beliefs that were held for long periods. Can you name your favorite example and for extra credit why it was believed to be true?”
I think philosopher Eduardo Salcedo-Albarán had the most intriguing and humane answer:
“Phrenology and lobotomy. Even when these were not scientific paradigms, they clearly illustrate how science affects people’s life and morality. For those not engaged in the scientific work, it is easy to forget that technology, and a great part of the western contemporary culture, results from science. However, people tend to interpret scientific principles and findings as strange matters that have nothing to do with everyday life, from gravity and evolution, to physics and pharmacology.
Phrenology is defined as the ‘scientific’ relation between the skull’s shape and behavioral traits. It was applied to understand, for example, the reason for the genius of Professor Samuel B. F. Morse. However, it was also applied in prisons and asylums to explicate and predict criminal behaviors. In fact, it was also assumed that the skull’s shape explained incapacities to act according to the law. If you were spending your life in an asylum or a prison in 19th century because of a phrenological ‘proof’ or ‘argument,’ you could perfectly understand how important science in your life is, even if you are not a scientist. Even more, if you were going to be a lobotomy’s patient in the past century.
In 1949, Antonio Egas Moniz achieved the Nobel Prize of Physiology and Medicine for discovering the great therapeutic value of lobotomy, a surgical procedure that, in its transorbital versions, consisted of introducing an ice pick through the eye’s orbit to disconnect the prefrontal cortex. Thousands of lobotomies were performed between the decade of 1940’s and the first years of 1960’s, including Rosemary Kennedy, sister of President John F. Kennedy, on the list of recipients; all of them with the scientific seal of a Nobel Prize. Today, half a century later, it seems unthinkable to apply such a ‘scientific’ therapy. I keep asking myself: ‘what if’ a mistake like this one is adopted today as policy on public health?
Science affects people’s lives directly. A scientific mistake can send you to jail or break your brain into pieces. It also seems to affect the kinds of moral stances that we adopt. Today, it would be morally reprehensible to send someone to jail because of the shape of his head, or to perform a lobotomy. However, 50 or 100 years ago it was morally acceptable. This is why we should spend more time thinking of practical issues, like scientific principles, scientific models and scientific predictions as a basis for public health and policy decisions, rather than guessing about what is right or wrong according to god’s mind or the unsubstantiated beliefs presented by special interest groups.”
Tags: Antonio Egas Moniz, Eduardo Salcedi-Albarán, Richard Thaler, Samuel Morse
Before it was transportation affordable to the masses, air travel was apparently really swanky. In this 1959 promo for the Pan Am 707, travelers read complimentary issues of Life magazine, enjoy fine dining, play chess, unwind in the spacious lounge and repair to the clean bathrooms. Today the best you can hope for is that there’s no Midwestern couple doing it in the can when you have to go and that no one has a bomb in their underpants.
Siddhartha Mukherjee, the author of "The Emperor of All Maladies," is an oncologist.
The New York Times has published its list of 100 Notable Books of 2010. Below are the non-fiction books included that I’ve read or most want to read:
“THE EMPEROR OF ALL MALADIES: A Biography of Cancer. By Siddhartha Mukherjee. (Scribner, $30.) Mukherjee’s powerful and ambitious history of cancer and its treatment is an epic story he seems compelled to tell, like a young priest writing a biography of Satan.
THE FIERY TRIAL: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery. By Eric Foner. (Norton, $29.95.) Foner tackles what would seem an obvious topic, Lincoln and slavery, and sheds new light on it.
LAST CALL: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition. By Daniel Okrent. (Scribner, $30.) A remarkably original account of the 14-year orgy of lawbreaking that transformed American social life.
THE BOOK IN THE RENAISSANCE. By Andrew Pettegree. (Yale University, $40.) A thought-provoking revisionist history of the early years of printing.
THE MIND’S EYE. By Oliver Sacks. (Knopf, $26.95.) In these graceful essays, the neurologist explores how his patients compensate for the abilities they have lost, and confronts his own ocular cancer.”
Tags: Andrew Pettegree, Daniel Okrent, Eric Foner, Oliver Sacks, Siddhartha Mukherjee
Werner Herzog, from On the Ecstasy of Ski-Flying: Werner Herzog in Conversation with Karen Beckman:
“How he moves and how he dances is phenomenal…Fred Astaire..it is somehow something else because it’s so absolutely and crazily stylized, it’s so remote from the real world as you can get. For only ten dollars you can remove yourself from reality as far as you can even imagine. And him singing, ‘Don’t Monkey with Broadway,’ and the way they are dancing, it’s just phenomenal. And the face of Fred Astaire is so enormously stupid. I have never seen a face that projects stupidity in such a bold way as he does. And lines of dialogue and the songs they are singing are so phenomenally stupid, and still I love it and I don’t know why. There’s something very dear to my heart. When I even think about Fred Astaire, I become mellow.”
Tags: Fred Astaire, Werner Herzog
The Basement--even lower than the gutter. (Image by Bob Eckstein.)
I just got an email from Bob Eckstein, an old colleague of mine and very witty writer and illustrator, announcing that he’s the editor of a newly launched comedy website called The Basement. The site features a slew of amazing artists, writers and creative people of every sort who will try to make you laugh. These folks regularly work for every excellent publication you enjoy.
Bob has used his talents at Spy, the Village Voice, the New Yorker, etc. He’s the author of a wonderful book, The History of the Snowman, which he’s turning into a movie. In addition to being wildly inventive, Bob’s one of the nicest people I’ve met in the NYC media world. Of course, that may not be the great compliment it seems to be. Others who’d pass for nice in the NYC media world: Idi Amin, Khrushchev and George Steinbrenner’s ghost. But I meant well.
Tags: Bob Eckstein
Jacko: not long for this world. (Image by Chris huh.)
In 1895, Jacko, a randy Brooklyn monkey with an eye for the ladies, took ill near Prospect Park and met his maker. Locals provided a touching and ridiculously excessive funeral for him. A reporter from the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, who somehow had nothing better to do, recalled the monkey’s demise in the June 30 issue. An excerpt:
On Memorial Day some children who live on Prospect Park slope decorated the grave of Jacko, a little South American who most unwillingly left his native country, his parents and kindred to come to Brooklyn. He had many exceedingly endearing traits of character, and although he lived here but a short time, when he died he had a grand funeral and many sincere admirers mourned his loss.
Jacko was a monkey and this is how it came about that he left his sunny home to come to Brooklyn: Uncle Foster had at one time been a sea captain and frequently told his wife and their little nieces and nephews of the strange countries he had visited. Mrs. Foster wished very much to have a small monkey. So the captain asked a friend who commanded a vessel that went to South America to get a midget monkey for him and in course of time Jacko arrived.
He had been dreadfully seasick on the journey north. One day he got out of his cage. The sailors had to get long poles that would reach the high places in the saloon upon which the little fellow climbed, and beat him almost to death before he would come down. Jacko never forgave the men for their cruelty, and through the rest of the voyage he refused to take food from any one except the captain or the stewardess. Sailors and subordinates he scornfully turned his back upon.
Lincoln's funeral wasn't this elaborate.
He was given a warm reception by all the friends of the Fosters from far and near. To their very faces he mimicked their vanities and affectations, but they laughed at him and loved him. Had death not cut him off so soon he was destined to be a great gallant, for he manifested his strong preference for women and little girls. Quick as a flash he would jump into a woman’s lap, up on her shoulder, twist his long tail round her neck and commence expressing, in his monkey language, his admiration of the way she arranged her hair. His style of courtship was better understood by himself than appreciated by the women. Several were badly frightened by the five pound dandy. Their hysterics Jacko could reproduce to perfection, which, on the spot, he promptly did, but swooning was too much for his young dramatic abilities. Had he lived longer he might have attempted the emotional, but farce was evidently his forte.
Jacko took cold after the first fall rain and went into quick consumption. Every effort was made to save him, but it was not to be. In his last hours he was not content in any place except in his mistress’ lap. His little body wasted away to a mere nothing. He would rack himself almost to death coughing, then look pleadingly into his mistress’ face as if to say ‘Don’t you see how sick I am?’ The last thing he ever did was to stretch out his hand to her as if to say ‘Goodby.’ Then he died softly and noiselessly as a thistle down floats on a summer’s breeze.
Jacko was slightly too large to flush down the crapper, but I still would've tried. (Image by Usien.)
The children took full charge of the funeral, and it must be confessed that all was conducted according to the dictates of love and grief. Jacko was put in a little coffin covered and lined with pink satin. His poor little brown hands and throat were tied with pink and white ribbon. Pink and white flowers were in his hands and yards of smilax twined around the table and over his coffin. The poet and artist nephew of the family designed and executed a real work of art, a card, upon which one might read:
‘Jacko Foster is my name,
South America is my nation,
Brooklyn was my dwelling place,
Heaven is my expectation
When I am dead and in my grave,
And all my bones are rotten,
One little wish is all I ask,
Don’t let me be forgotten.’
Uncle Foster was at first inclined to resent the relationship implied in the inscription. But he found consolation by thinking of the great Darwin and mumbling to himself that it is not worth while to take notice of trifles.
The coffin was carried to the back yard by the pall bearers, lowered into the grave with ropes, earth was shoveled in and a mound formed. So ended the brief career of poor little Jacko.”
Tags: Jacko Foster, Mrs. Foster, Uncle Foster
"Where & when is the party?"
hello god bless you for reading this page i will used the name )) Taylor (( i want to put up a ad every day about all gypsy news that go’s on in the world…..but i dont want to make trouble!
think’s that i will post only with your help……
who’s black ball,
who had a fight,
whos lock up & why?
where &when is the party,
why did that guy punch him in the face>?
a lot of stuff like that!!!
Soldiers enjoy Thanksgiving meal in NYC in 1918.
Thanksgiving as an official holiday was born of an event that occurred in the poorer quarters of New York City in 1850, according to the humongous Burrows and Wallace tome, Gotham. The Ladies’ Home Missionary Society held an event in an infamous slum that would eventually lead to President Abraham Lincoln designating Thanksgiving a national holiday. An excerpt:
“In 1850, backed by wealthy contributors like Daniel Drew and Anson G. Phelps, the LHMS opened a Five Points Mission in a rented room diagonally across from the infamous ‘Old Brewery.’ There, under the leadership of the Rev. Louis M. Pease, the ladies ran prayer meetings and Bible study classes, opened a charity day school, sponsored temperance speakers, and went out to comfort the sick. Closely attuned the virtues of publicity, they issued regular accounts of their work–filled with stories of miraculous conversions and deathbed repentances–and on Thanksgiving Day paraded hundreds of scrubbed Sunday school students before benefactors. Then the ladies fed their charges turkey dinners, inaugurating a ritual that would lead, a decade later, to Thanksgiving’s establishment as an official (and feminized) holiday.”
Tags: Abraham Lincoln, Anson G. Phelps, Daniel Drew, Edwin G. Burrows, Mike Wallace, Rev. Louis M. Pease
Feminism needed a boost in 1974, and this crappy exploitation flick about lady cop Lacy Bond was there to provide it. As the trailer says about female police officers of that era: “Fighting for survival with men who want them home and women who want them dead.” The guy who screams after Lacy kicks him in the onions is pretty much the Brando of guys getting kicked in the onions. Sultry star Sondra Currie had a role in The Hangover and will be in its sequel.
Tags: Sondra Currie
Phil pardoned, if briefly. (Image by Lawrence Jackson.)
Phil the Turkey, who was pardoned by President Obama this morning at the White House, was shot and killed later in the day during a meth deal gone wrong outside of Baltimore. You always sucked, Phil. I knew you’d die alone.
Tags: Phil the Turkey, President Obama
Emma Goldman speaks in Union Square in 1916.
The great Long Form just posted a link to Luc Sante’s “My Lost City,” an amazing 2003 article in the New York Review of Books about living in NYC during the ’70s and ’80s, as the place changed from gritty to gentrified. It’s my favorite essay ever about New York. I once interviewed Sante about another matter entirely, but I asked him if he knew that this filthy, fascinating city he loved so much would disappear so quickly. “No,” he said, “I thought it was prelude to even greater things.” An excerpt from Sante’s article about street-level history lessons:
“When old people died without wills or heirs, the landlord would set the belongings of the deceased out on the sidewalk, since that was cheaper than hiring a removal van. We would go through the boxes and help ourselves, and come upon photographs and books and curiosities, evidence of lives and passions spent in the turmoil of 1910 and 1920, of the Mexican Border War and Emma Goldman’s Mother Earth and vaudeville and labor unions and the shipping trade, and we might be briefly diverted, but we were much more interested in the boxes on the next stoop containing someone’s considerably more recent record collection.
One day something fell out of an old book, the business card of a beauty parlor that had stood on Avenue C near Third Street, probably in the 1920s. I marveled at it, unable to picture something as sedate as a beauty parlor anywhere near that corner, by then a heroin souk.”
Tags: Emma Goldman, Luc Sante
Cigar-puffing plutocrat.
I have been trying to find high-grade, excellent quality caviar (like beluga) here in the city for months, but no one’s got it! This is so weird! If you can’t find it in NYC, where can you find it?!? I have a big function coming up and wanted to get the good stuff, not the inferior sevruga, osetra, etc. Does anyone know where to go?!?
Jean Balukas puts on a special exhibition at Grand Central Station in 1966.
Jean Balukas is the Brooklyn-born pool prodigy who was wowing spectators from the time she was tiny. In this photograph. six-year-old Jean puts on a display of her cue work at Grand Central Station. And her amazing talents didn’t dry up in youth: Balukas had one of the greatest careers in the game’s history. She was also known as a strong-willed individual who rebelled against the accepted dress codes for the sport’s women and eventually burned out on the game because of too much self-imposed pressure to win each match. She retired to manage her family’s pool hall in Bay Ridge.
In the video below, Balukas shares her talents (and great Brooklyn accent) with Steve Allen on I’ve Got a Secret.
Tags: Jean Balukas, Steve Allen
Fidel Castro receives some very shocking news! Actually, halved ping pong balls cover the eyes of biofeedback guru Jack Gariss. (Image by "Life.")
The article, “Flow Gently, Sweet Alpha,” published in a 1972 issue of Life magazine, is a participatory journalism piece by Jane Howard about the biofeedback craze of the time. Howard travels to several locales–New York, Los Angeles and Laredo, Texas–having electrodes glued to her head, learning to “program her dreams,” taking imaginary excursions through cubes of metal and enrolling in a “Mind Control” course in search of enlightenment. Being hooked up to a biofeedback machine for 45 minutes cost $145. Jack Gariss, one of the L.A. spiritual gurus featured in the article, had an earlier career as a screenwriter, earning a credit for The Ten Commandments. An excerpt from the piece:
“Mind Control does not use hardware. ‘Those machines are hopelessly obsolete already,’ one instructor told the 50 or so of us in my class. ‘We’re light years ahead of them. In these four days we’ll open up a channel that will make you feel like you can walk on water. You’d better start with puddles, though, until you’re used to being at your alpha level.’
The Silva Mind Control Institute of Laredo, Texas, was founded a year ago by a visionary electronics technician. ‘None of what you’ll learn here is new,’ our instructor told us in the New York City branch. ‘But José Silva is the first man in history to arrange these ideas in their proper sequence. It took him 26 years’ research.’
Mind Control has 50,000 graduates in 50 states and three foreign countries. In four days we would be graduates, too. We would learn all sorts of things. But first we had to stand up, one by one, and say what our zodiacal signs were, what we did for a living, and why we had come.
‘I’m a Gemini and a barber, and I heard this course was really far out.’
‘I’m a Serpico and a stockbroker, and I figured all this alpha stuff might give me insights about the market.’
‘I’m a waitress, Pisces with Capricorn rising, and I’ll try anything once.'”
Tags: Jack Gariss, Jane Howard, José Silva
This horrifying 1971 Remco toy was apparently used to help crazy middle-class girls gin up the courage to murder their bourgeois families as they slept. “Remco” is a portmanteau of “remote control,” but there was no controlling Baby Laugh-A-Lot, remotely or otherwise. She was gonna fix you but good.
Derrick Mason holds the record for all-purpose yards by a wide receiver in a single season.
The Sports Economist pulled a smart exchange from a recent Baltimore Sun Q&A that Kevin Van Valkenburg conducted with Derrick Mason, a member of the Ravens. The Sun wisely asked the NFL veteran about that awful cliche that you hear announcers use when a team from a downtrodden city wins a championship–that a victory by a local sports franchise will somehow uplift the area and solve its problems. Mason wasn’t having it. An excerpt:
“Q: You’re from Detroit. You were born there, grew up there, went to college at nearby Michigan State, and still have family there. Obviously Detroit is a city that’s dealt with its share of problems in recent years. I’ve seen a lot of people in my profession write stories about how the success of a profession sports franchise can uplift a city, and inspire it’s residents in difficult times. We saw it happen a ton when the New Orleans Saints won the Super Bowl last year, but those same stories were written when the Tigers made the playoffs, when the Pistons won an NBA title, and when Michigan State made the Final Four. What do you think about that?
A: I don’t think there is any truth to it. When you’re winning, honestly, people are excited. But it’s not going to do any good for jobs. It’s not going to bring General Motors, Chrysler and Ford back. If their team is winning, that just gives them something to enjoy on a Sunday. Or something to talk about. But as far as uplifting a city, I haven’t seen it happen. Even in New Orleans. People said when the Saints won the Super Bowl it would regenerate the economy down there in the city. For a time being, it did help the city. But New Orleans is still in the same situation they’re in now, just like a lot of other cities. Especially in this economy, a sports team is not going to lift up a city to where it’s going to come out where it was. It will lift it up to a point, but once the season is over with, they’re done. That uplifting is gone.”
Breaking coverage of the Teapot Dome Scandal.
Before Frederick Lewis Allen became Editor-in-Chief of Harper’s in 1941, he published a pair of popular histories. The one I’m going to excerpt from is a 1933 tome called Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920’s. It covers the zeitgeist from the end of WWI to the stock market crash of 1929. Pictured is a 1959 paperback version, which then cost 95 cents. (In 1940, Allen published a follow-up, Since Yesterday, which looked at the Great Depression.)
In this excerpt from Only Yesterday, the author describes the rebelliousness of the younger generation in 1920’s America, which sounds very much like an apt description of their grandchildren 40 years later. The passage is from a chapter titled “The Revolution in Manners and Morals”:
“A first-class revolt against the accepted American order was certainly taking place during those early years of the Post-war decade, but it was one with which Nikolai Lenin had nothing whatever to do. The shock troops of the rebellion were not alien agitators, but the sons and daughters of well-to-do American families, who knew little of Bolshevism and cared distinctly less, and their defiance was expressed not in obscure radical publications or in soap-box speeches, but right across the family breakfast table into the horrified ears of conservative fathers and mothers. Men and women were still shivering at the Red Menace when they awoke to the no less alarming Problem of the Younger Generation, and realized that if the Constitution were not in danger, the moral code of the country certainly was.”
Tags: Frederick Lewis Allen
"U R a dickhead if you don't buy this one!!" (Image by Per Erik Strandberg.)
Challenger tool box fits most truck beds best quality made beats out Delta, etc, all of them. It lists for $413.00. New never installed bought about 3 months ago for my son in law you know how that goes. Cant do anything right for no-one!!! Just sitting in yard. Come take it away. We are clearing out all extra things. Some tools some furnitre some stone for siding or chimney, etc. All cheap cheap cheap!!!!! Cash talks!! Tool box today only 150 cash. If U R looking for one U R a dickhead if you don’t buy this one!! My loss is UR gain if U R smart enough!!
Boxes. (No public-domain images available of software designers Bob and Carolyn Box.)
Before I put Hackers, Steven Levy’s 1984 book about the rise of renegade computer wizards, back on the shelf, I want to provide one more excerpt. This one is about married couple Bob and Carolyn Box, who decided to make software their livelihood after working as gold prospectors, among other things. They quickly taught themselves to be star hackers at Ken Williams’ gaming company, Sierra On-Line. Even by the eccentric standards of the time, these two had colorful backgrounds. An excerpt:
“Of all Ken’s new programmers, none exemplified his zeal for reforming lives by computer power as much as did Bob and Carolyn Box. Bob Box was in his fifties: they had lived in the area for well over a decade and worked at their ranch-style home five miles from Oakhurst, in the almost undetectable hamlet of Ahwahnee. Bob, who had dark hair, soulful eyes, and a nose of basset-hound proportions, was approximately four feet in height. He was a former New Yorker, a former engineer, a former race car driver, a former jockey, and a former Guinness Book of World Records champion in gold panning. Carolyn Box was slightly over five feet tall, had long brown hair and a world-weary attractiveness, and was the current Guinness Book of World Records champion in gold panning. They’d married twenty-six years ago, when Carolyn was fifteen. For the past few years, they’d been running a gold-prospecting supply business and searching for gold in the Fresno River, which ran in their backyard. The Oakhurst-Coarsegold area was on the southern rim of the California mother lode, and the gold the Boxes dredged up from the river one morning they came up with two thousand dollars’ worth in a half hour financed their programming courses at a Fresno trade school.
Man panning for gold in Alaska, 1916.
They had realized that the gold of the 1980s would be software, and their goal was to work at On-Line. Though Carolyn Box had been apprehensive about dealing with a computer, she instantly understood the required concept, as if computers were a language she’d always been talking. It was almost supernatural. She was the first one in the history of the school to get a 4.0 average in her courses. Bob did well, too: programming was like gold panning, he realized you proceeded in logical steps, and concentrated while you did it.
But when they presented themselves to Ken, he was skeptical. He told them that programmers usually peaked at nineteen and were over the hill at twenty; even Ken, at twenty-eight, was just about washed up. (Not that he believed it.) Ken wanted to give the Boxes a chance, though, because they fit right in with the dream he had about On-Line and the great computer future. So he told them to put up something on the screen using assembly language, in thirty days. The Boxes’ school had taught them programming in high-level languages on mainframe computers; they knew nothing about Apple assembly language. But working day and night, they came up with an 82-line program only five days later. It moved a dot around the screen. Ken asked them to try something else, and, again working almost every waking hour, the Boxes created a 282-line program with a little airplane moving around the high-resolution screen. Ken hired them, and set them to work programming a pet project of his, an educational game.
Soon the Boxes were hard at work getting a little dog, whom they named Dusty after their own dog, to walk across the screen. They would proudly explain to visitors that their hack used a sophisticated technique called exclusive-or-ing, which allowed for zero-flicker animation. They felt they’d given life to Dusty Dog. ‘This dog is like our pet,’ Carolyn Box would say. When Ken first saw Dusty Dog move across the screen, the little basset legs moving with steady, non-flickering fluidity, he almost burst. ‘It’s days like this that make you proud to be in this business,’ he told them. Even these middle-aged gold prospectors could be software superstars … and Ken was the Moses who led them to the promised Computer Land.”
Tags: Bob Box, Carolyn Box, Dusty Dog, Ken Williams
It’s like Saved by the Bell with STDs. Even more STDs, I mean.
(Thanks Found Footage Festival.)
Tuataras often live to be one hundred years old.
Natalie Angier of the New York Times has an interesting article today about the tuatara, one of Earth’s most unusual vertebrates. Found in New Zealand, the tuatara are lizard-looking reptiles with a third eye atop their skulls and are referred to as “living fossils.” An excerpt:
“The tuatara — whose name comes from the Maori language and means ‘peaks on the back’ — is not an iguana, is not a lizard, is not like any other reptile alive today.
In fact, as a series of recent studies suggest, it is not like any other vertebrate alive today. The tuatara, scientists have learned, is in some ways a so-called living fossil, its basic skeletal layout and skull shape almost identical to that of tuatara fossils dating back hundreds of millions of years, to before the rise of the dinosaurs. Certain tuatara organs and traits also display the hallmarks of being, if not quite primitive, at least closer to evolutionary baseline than comparable structures in other animals.
For example, the tuatara has a third eye at the top of its skull, the legendary if poorly understood pineal eye, which is found in only a sprinkling of reptile species and which vision researchers suspect harks back to nature’s original eye — pretty much a few light-sensitive cells on a stalk. A tuatara’s teeth likewise follow the no-nonsense design seen in dinosaur dentition, erupting directly from the jawbone and without the niceties of tooth sockets and periodontal ligaments that characterize the teeth of all mammals and many reptiles. Some researchers are looking at tuataras for clues to how dental implants, which are inserted directly into the jaw, might be improved.”
Tags: Natalie Angier
