Gaza zoo replaces zebras by painting donkeys.

Drunk man wakes up with penis tattoo on leg.

Police believe the vandals meant to carve a swastika next to President Barack Obama’s name on the 18th hole; however, the symbol was backwards and means hope and peace in some Eastern countries.

A 63-year-old homeless Russian man has gone from street life to stock market trader after collecting thousands of empty booze bottles for cash.

New study finds mustachioed Americans make more money and spend more of their income than the bearded and the cleanshaven.

Former funeral director charged with corpse abuse.

19-year-old girl chopped off her tongue inside a Shiva temple to invoke the god’s blessings to marry the person she desired instead of the match fixed by her parents.

White shark breaching about 300 yards off Sunset Blvd in LA.

New vaccine may immunize addicts from cocaine’s pleasurable effects.

Anna Nicole Smith was so weak in her final days that she was being fed Pedialyte with a baby bottle, it was revealed Tuesday.

The regulation of hypnotherapists in the UK is so lax that even a cat can become accredited.

Zoophiles love and have sex with animals. Will the world ever accept them?

Mexico City puts 1,300 overweight police on a diet.

Alex Mensaert is addicted to amputation and his wife Melissa doesn’t mind. [videos]

Global warming and risks of severe acne. More: A complete list of things caused by global warming.

At the U.N. climate talks in Bangkok, Saudi Arabia asks for aid if world cuts dependence on oil.

Scientists propose guardrails for how far mankind can push the planet tomorrow, while others examine how far collapsed civilizations pushed it yesterday.

Report documents the risks of giant invasive snakes in the US.

Decades after Mahatma Gandhi called them Harijan (people of god), nearly 160 million Indians continue to be socially ostracised. Thousands of Dalits still clean shit with their bare hands and carry it on their heads. So how come a 9 per cent growth rate economy can’t generate alternative professions for them?

Healthy neighborhoods may be associated with lower diabetes risk.

The suicide rate among the company’s 100,000 employees is in line with France’s national average. Still, unions say that the relocation of staff to different branches of the company around France has added pressure onto employees and their families.

People who work after retiring enjoy better health, according to national study.

New study of the brain shows that facts and beliefs are processed in exactly the same way.

New research shows that memories are constantly being re-written by our minds.

Artificial black hole created in Chinese lab.

What happens when the gods of high finance dump a gigantic pile of gold on the richest university in the world? It is what actually happened to Harvard University, along with a few of its elite competitors, over the last 20 years. Related: America’s 25 douchiest colleges.

Major U.S. banks and securities firms are set to pay their employees about $140 billion this year. That’s a record level, just passing the pay levels of the boom year of 2007.

The rumours of the dollar’s death are much exaggerated.

Google CEO: We paid $1 billion premium for YouTube.

Adobe now makes it possible to create applications for the Apple iPhone using the Adobe Flash CS5.

At a time when many retailers are still cutting back or approaching strategic shifts with extreme caution, Disney is going the other way, getting more aggressive and putting into motion an expensive and ambitious floor-to-ceiling reboot of its 340 stores in the United States and Europe — as well as opening new ones, including a potential flagship in Times Square.

Bloomberg, the global financial data and news empire created by New York City Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, is the winning bidder for BusinessWeek.

When is the best time in an interview for police to reveal the evidence they have to a crime suspect?

Darwin’s On the Origin of Species evolved over the course of several editions he wrote, edited, and updated during his lifetime. This piece is a simpler version of a larger effort that looks at the changes between editions.

Two tribesmen from Papua New Guinea sued Jared Diamond, the well-known biologist and author, for $10 million in damages, claiming that he had defamed them in an April 2008 article in The New Yorker.

The significance of unity and diversity for the disciplines of Mathematics and Physics.

Clausewitz ’s On War has become something of a classic, often cited, discussed in numerous recent books, seen in the company of Sun Tzu’s Art of War (thought to be circa fourth century BC), and studied in military academies.

Shakespeare’s Othello speaks to one of the most salient confusions of our time: the conflict between transparency and secrecy.

150 different Italian pasta shapes.

Japanese restaurant’s unusual rule: You get what the person before you ordered.

Case study: A man suffered paralysis from drinking too much Earl Grey tea.

A guide to fall apples.

Five human achievements that could top walking on the Moon.

Hirst’s solo show takes self-veneration to a new level, with the artist contributing almost $400,000 to allow the public free access to his exhibition.

Skatetown USA, 1979.

Major Lazer, “Pon De Floor.”

COCO.

Banksy painting sprayed over by graffiti artists.

Postcards from 1910 which depict life in the year 2000.

Radisson/Picasso.

What Should be Done with the Bodies of the Dead (1936).

Queer Fuckers Magazine, Salt Lake City, Utah.

I like the dog. If he can’t eat it, or fuck it, he pisses on it. Shit my dad says.

What special affinities appeared to him to exist between the moon and woman?

Her antiquity in preceding and surviving successive tellurian generations: her nocturnal predominance: her satellitic dependence: her luminary reflection: her constancy under all her phases, rising, and setting by her appointed times, waxing and waning: the forced invariability of her aspect: her indeterminate response to inaffirmative interrogation: her potency over effluent and refluent waters: her power to enamour, to mortify, to invest with beauty, to render insane, to incite to and aid delinquency: the tranquil inscrutability of her visage: the terribility of her isolated dominant implacable resplendent propinquity: her omens of tempest and of calm: the stimulation of her light, her motion and her presence: the admonition of her craters, her arid seas, her silence: her splendour, when visible: her attraction, when invisible.

{ James Joyce, Ulysses, Episode 17 | Continue reading }

photo { Marcus Ohlsson | S magazine }

One reason that real violence looks so ugly is because we have been exposed to so much mythical violence. (…) Contemporary film style may give many people the sense that entertainment violence is, if anything, too realistic. Nothing could be farther from the truth. … [They] miss the most important dynamics of violence: that it starts from confrontational tension and fear, that most of the time it is bluster, and that the circumstances that allow this tension to be over­ come lead to violence that is more ugly than entertaining. (…)

A second myth is that fights are long. (…) Whereas most film and stage dramas compress real time to gloss over the dull and routine moments of ordinary life, they expand fighting time by many times over. (…) In reality, most serious fights on the individual or small-group level are extremely short.

{ Randall Collins | via OvercomingBias | Continue reading }

1) Throughout human history social activities have taken place at night. (In fact more than 60 percent of the people Piffer polled met their latest partner in the evening or night.) The evening is commonly reserved for courtship activity — dancing, drinking, having sex. Over time, the male night owl attends more social events, meets more women, and has more sex.

2) “Eveningness” is a sexually dimorphic trait. Across cultures, “more males than females stay up late at night (due to biological differences involving the timing of peak melatonin levels). Piffer speculates that men evolved to stay up late because the most reproductively successful men pass along their genes to subsequent generations. In terms of Darwinian sexual selection, evening orientation benefits males more because it gives them an increased opportunity to acquire multiple lovers — all at one go, or over time. Women, however, don’t achieve greater reproductive success by having sex with more men (it only takes one to get pregnant), which is why fewer women are evening-oriented. Men with an evening orientation have a competitive advantage over men with a morning orientation.

3) Evening-orientation, Piffer speculates, may also be a direct product of sexual selection. That is, women may actively choose night owls over morning birds. Piffer draws on the “cads-versus-dads” theory; that is, women often go for bad boys, especially at a certain stage of life, and men who stay up into the night are likelier to fall into this category.

4) Being a night owl may also be a form of “handicap signaling.” Staying up late at night (possibly drinking and smoking) can take a toll on one’s health. Only a man who is fit and healthy would be able to compensate for his lifestyle. Assuming a man seems unaffected by little sleep, his evening orientation indicates a strong constitution — a sexy quality.

{ Jena Pincott | Continue reading | Continue reading | Circadian Preference and Sexual Selection: A Novel Evolutionary Approach, by Davide Piffer }

photo { Jessica Craig-Martin }

I try to do what Jeff Koons did when he put 1, 2 or 3 New Shelton Wet/Dry vacuums in a Plexiglas box, and added a title. I put news in Plexiglas boxes, and add titles.

It’s rather an experiment than journalism.

It’s about editing news, about the concept “editing/commenting is creating” developed a century ago when philosophers (Nietzsche, Heidegger, Deleuze, Foucault to name a few) made Philosophy by commenting past Philosophy.

Almost everything is quoted and nothing is signed: French writer Marguerite Yourcenar once said that it doesn’t matter who is writing. What matters is that it is written.

Also: Personality is like a collection of traits that we all share, and that we sometimes borrow from each other, but the totality (of qualities and traits) is peculiar to a specific person. That’s how one differs from another, by creating a different mix of existing traits, by tuning these traits to various degrees.

The word personality originates from the Latin persona, which means mask. We spend our life building this mask, and make it attractive, unique, different, coherent… It’s about editing traits and influences. It’s about creating something new from existing material.

artwork { Jeff Koons, New Hoover Convertibles, New Shelton Wet/Dry 10 Gallon Displaced Doubledecker, 1981-87 | Vacuum cleaners, Plexiglas and fluorescent lights | Photo: Thanks Daniel! }

related { Whether your earwax is wet or dry is determined by a mutation in a single gene, scientists have discovered. }

Sorry for the blackout.

The server has crashed and everything it was hosting has disappeared. There was no backup — besides the google caches. We’ll have to start over from scratch. (The new shelton wet/dry now looks more like a sand mandala than a Jeff Koons artwork.)

I’ll keep publishing every friday. Thanks for your continued support and readership.

New URL is newshelton.com/wet/dry/