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.
The hidden subtext in the opening minutes of this instructional video? These two erotically bickering couples are going to indulge in a wife-swapping orgy as soon as they finish carving.
You've probably heard of the Russian researcher Ivan Pavlov who conditioned dogs to salivate whenever they heard the ringing of a bell. Less well known, but more appropriate for Weird Universe, are the experiments of Pavlov's American student W. Horsley Gantt, who was a researcher at Johns Hopkins. Instead of making dogs salivate, Gantt had a dog named Nick who became conditioned to develop an erection whenever he heard a tone. Mandy Merck briefly describes the experiments with Nick in her book In Your Face: 9 Sexual Studies:
Gantt's subjects included Fritz the Alsatian, Peter the beagle, a male poodle known as "V3," and especially the mongrel Nick, subject of "the most meticulous and complete case history of a single animal to be found in the conditioned reflex literature." These animals and others like them were subjected to a barrage of procedures to study conflicts of the drives between, for example, experimentally induced anxiety states and sexual excitement... Nick, in particular, exhibited symptomatic erections and ejaculations whenever he encountered stimuli associated with previous situations of anxiety. Years after one such experiment, in which anxious reactions were elicited by requiring dogs to make a difficult distinction between two tones of similar pitch (a distinction that determined whether the dog was fed), Nick would develop a "prominent erection... within a few seconds after the onset of the tone," Gantt enthused. "We could always count of Nick for a demonstration."
Shown is a picture of poor Nick demonstrating his unusual talent.
You've probably heard of the Russian researcher Ivan Pavlov who conditioned dogs to salivate whenever they heard the ringing of a bell. Less well known, but more appropriate for Weird Universe, are the experiments of Pavlov's American student W. Horsley Gantt, who was a researcher at Johns Hopkins. Instead of making dogs salivate, Gantt had a dog named Nick who became conditioned to develop an erection whenever he heard a tone. Mandy Merck briefly describes the experiments with Nick in her book In Your Face: 9 Sexual Studies:
Category: Movies, Sexuality, 1970's, South America