Requiem for an Editor

The Chair: A Uniquely American Way of Execution

2020-05-23T15:00:00.000-04:00

Again came that click as before, and again the body of the unconscious wretch in the chair became as rigid as one of bronze. It was awful, and the witnesses were so horrified by the ghastly sight that they could not take their eyes off it. The dynamo did not seem to run smoothly. The current could be heard sharply snapping. Blood began to appear on the face of the wretch in the chair. It stood on the face like sweat.

The capillary or small blood vessels under the skin were being ruptured. But there was worse than that. An awful odor began to permeate the death chamber, and then, as though to cap the climax of this fearful sight, it was seen that the hair under and around the electrode on the head and the flesh under and around the electrode at the base of the spine was singeing. The stench was unbearable.

--Excerpt From New York Times article, "Far Worse Than Hanging"

Sketch of William Kemmler's execution on August 6, 1890, via AC current. Image: Wikipedia

Ever hear of William Francis Kemmler?

He's the "unconscious wretch" described above. Kemmler has the grim distinction of being the first person in the world to be legally executed by electrocution, specifically, the electric chair, a uniquely American invention.

Kemmler (May 9, 1860 – August 6, 1890) had had a hard life. He eked out a living peddling vegetables from a cart in the slums of Buffalo, New York.

He murdered a woman on March 29, 1888.

He woke up that morning suffering from the hangover of hangovers. Kemmler, in his demented state, thought his girlfriend, Tillie Ziegler, was conspiring against him -- stealing from him and preparing to ditch him for one of his own friends.

The two, Kemmler and Ziegler, were arguing face to face and the volume of their ranting kept rising. Then "Kemmler calmly went to the barn, grabbed a hatchet, and returned to the house. He struck Tillie repeatedly, killing her. He then went to a neighbor's house and announced he had just murdered his girlfriend," as the New York Times reported at the time.

Kemmler was convicted of murder.

In its August 7, 1890, story about Kemmler's death in the first electric chair execution, the New York Times, in a story on the front page (which in those days was covered by a veritable sea of words, broken up by few images), described the method as "far worse than hanging."

Kemmler's resulting murder trial proceeded quickly. He was convicted of first-degree murder on May 10. Three days later he was sentenced to death, destined to be the first person executed in an electric chair under New York's new execution law replacing hanging with electrocution. A chair was ready at the Auburn state prison. The leading developers of electrical power, including George Westinghouse, did not want to see their new product used in this manner. A lawyer filed an appeal claiming the electric chair violated the Eighth Amendment's prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment.

"Probably no convicted murderer of modern times has been made to suffer as Kemmler suffered."

The Times is glazing over a much more complex story. Saying that "leading developers of electrical power" were opposed to the use of electricity in executions is not really true. Westinghouse did indeed protect this use of electrical power.

But he had a major rival who had worked full-throttle to create the electric chair: Thomas Edison.

More then a century ago Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse were engaged in a titanic battle over alternating and direct current (AC/DC). Both knew that only one electrical system was needed to bring electricity into every American's home.

Edison, the fiercely competitive entrepreneur, decided to knock down for the count, once and for all, his great competitor Westinghouse. He chose to do this via “a great political, legal and marketing game” that involved death by AC power, Westinghouse's system, as Smithsonian magazine reported.

The famous inventor Edison chose the path of propaganda by staging the public killings of various animals -- dogs, horses, even an elephant -- using Westinghouse’s AC power system.

"The two men would play out their battle on the front pages of newspapers and in the Supreme Court, in the country’s first attempt to execute a human being with electricity."

Race to AC or DC System
Edison developed the DC system in 1879, when he launched the "first practical incandescent light bulb." That single-handedly stimulated a massive effort to construct hydroelectric plants across America to generate DC power primarily for cities. The realization of this goal "practically guaranteed Edison a fortune in patent royalties."

The problem was that DC power had limitations, as Edison himself knew. The primary challenge was the difficulty of transmitting DC over long distances without massive energy loss. Edison turned to a recently hired employee, a 28-year-old Serbian mathematician and engineer named Nikola Tesla, to help solve this problem. Edison tasked Tesla with designing a more practical way to transmit power.

"With a background in mathematics that his inventor boss did not have, he set out to redesign Edison’s DC generators. The future of electric distribution, Tesla told Edison, was in alternating current—where high-voltage energy could be transmitted over long distances using lower current—miles beyond generating plants, allowing a much more efficient delivery system."

Edison told Tesla his ideas, though “splendid” were “utterly impractical.”

Tesla departed Edison in 1885 (announcing that Edison had cheated him by not compensating him as promised for his work). He worked toward the goal of raising enough money to create his own company -- until he was approached with an offer he couldn't refuse.

George Westinghouse of the Westinghouse Electric Manufacturing Company stepped in. He believed in AC power and purchased some patents off Tesla, with the goal of commercializing the system for the common American. So Edison partly created the rivalry himself by refusing Tesla’s ideas. For at the time, "Westinghouse had both ambition and capital, and Edison immediately recognized the threat to his business.".....

Spotting the Trump Leaker's "Tell"

2017-08-08T10:27:00.005-04:00

The Mooch popped his head up yesterday... just... like... that.... to make one of his trademark bizarre not-well-thought-through comments -- about cocaine, no less!

Then, he deleted it!

The Anthony Scaramucci era of the Trump White House was over before it even began.

But the Mooch's ability to both simultaneously demean himself and make us laugh continues unabated.

His latest volley was to assure us that he and his family "take the subject of cocaine and its use very seriously."

The Mooch’s statement is linked to an iTunes page for one of his podcasts, titled “The Motivation Inside.”

Don't look for the tweet, though, he deleted it.

We got all this from Death and Taxes, a news site.

It noted: "The link Scaramucci provided leads to an iTunes page featuring four episodes he recorded in 2016. Apparently, there was an episode about the booger sugar, but it was deleted almost immediately after going live."

The counter-tweet that called the Mooch out....

The Mooch, you will recall, was obsessed with leaks and threatened to fire staffers who handed out unauthorized information to reporters.

He reserved his own personal breakdown for The New Yorker, where he poured his guts out.

The subsequent story begins ....

On Wednesday night, I received a phone call from Anthony Scaramucci, the new White House communications director. He wasn’t happy. Earlier in the night, I’d tweeted, citing a “senior White House official,” that Scaramucci was having dinner at the White House with President Trump, the First Lady, Sean Hannity, and the former Fox News executive Bill Shine. It was an interesting group, and raised some questions. Was Trump getting strategic advice from Hannity? Was he considering hiring Shine? But Scaramucci had his own question—for me.

“Who leaked that to you?” he asked. I said I couldn’t give him that information. He responded by threatening to fire the entire White House communications staff. “What I’m going to do is, I will eliminate everyone in the comms team and we’ll start over,” he said. I laughed, not sure if he really believed that such a threat would convince a journalist to reveal a source. He continued to press me and complain about the staff he’s inherited in his new job. “I ask these guys not to leak anything and they can’t help themselves,” he said. “You’re an American citizen, this is a major catastrophe for the American country. So I’m asking you as an American patriot to give me a sense of who leaked it.”

With that, it was off to the races. (Meaning, it was all downhill from there, as they say.)

You can read the breakdown of the meltdown here:

Anthony Scaramucci Called Me to Unload About White House Leakers, Reince Priebus, and Steve Bannon

The Mooch (or, as some believe, President Trump, who is a lot more ruthless than you probably know, via Scaramucci) with surgical precision then tore into two people. one of whom was cut loose from the administration -- Priebus -- and the other guy, if you know anything about him, Steve Bannon, meaning ... let's just say some pundits refer to Bannon as "President Trump's Brain."

And I've no doubt Bannon wrote the Mooch's obituary before hanging up the phone after Lizza called for comment.

Bannon is the guy who if Trump fires, you can expect the sht is really, really going to hit the fan.

This is the last guy Trump would cut loose...

Bannon is an evil genuis of epic proportions.

He's an ultra-right-wing lunatic (we're talking hardcore white supremacist nationalist right wing; John Birch Society stuff, Minutemen Project stuff, though Bannon would have his own thing).

He was in the Marines (he thinks that makes him a warrior, but he never saw combat). He graduated from Harvard Business school, worked for Goldman Sachs and finally minted his fortune in Hollywood doing the finance shtick.

There's a false narrative in the Devils Bargain, one of the fastest selling bios available now. In it, Bannon uses historical events to justify who he is. (Former colleagues call him "human garbage" in the book.)u

Bannon, an independently wealthy man, later takes a job running Breitbart News Network (known commonly as Breitbart News, Breitbart or Breitbart.com). (See latest nonsense here.)

Breitbart is more than a far-right American news, opinion and commentary website founded in 2007 by Andrew Breitbart.

The site has published MULTIPLE falsehoods and conspiracy theories (see these Wikipedia footnotes: [9][10][11][12]), as well as intentionally misleading stories.([13])

On the political fringe, a lot of weird shit happens below the radar. I'm talking about, literally, "fake news." Breitbart isn't the only site to publish it. There's another news site, for example, called The Daily Caller, I read it I wonder -- what was the agenda for this story?

"Bannon is one of the smartest people I know," Scaramucci himself said of Bannon back in March. Bannon has read "every book" at Barnes & Noble twice.

Scarmucci praised Bannon's writing ability, and said he is able to discern Bannon's style in some of President Trump's best speeches. (I didn't know Trump had any of those. But Bannon's influence was probably crafting the whole "fake news" angle. They knew they'd be playing fast and loose with the truth, so they needed an excuse, a way to literally shake up the mainstream media. Bannon is the source of the nuttier stuff Trump says.)

If this is a topic of interest for you, go to this link and watch the video.

Bannon is "free and clear," meaning he has earned enough F-U money to never have to work again.

So the guy goes around doing whatever he wants. And it's not courting beautiful women, or gambling, or enjoying the millions he's earned. It's making America safe for the rightwing lunatic fringe, a demographic he's obsessed with. He's also obsessed with hating the Clintons.

Bannon, many believe, is the man most responsible for putting Trump in the White House.

And he's heading for disaster, as longtime Trump pundits have pointed out The Donald's lengthy history of forging tight alliances based on loyalty, then cutting them lose in a split second. Historically nearly every Trump partner gets screwed. And hates Trump....

The Trump administration is one of the leakiest admins in American history.

Which brings us to the point of this piece today. The excerpt, recognizing the tell of one of Trump's leakers, came from a read we highly, highly recommend: Devil's Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the PresidencyAfter reading it, you will have a greater understanding of the Trump presidency.

Some really goofy shit will make sense.

We have issues with the book that we will detail probably in other stories, but for today, we want to finally deliver the nugget to you.

First, we set the stage: it's 7:22 pm last Election Day in the war room in Trump Tower.

"It will take a miracle for us to win," someone in the Trump corner told CNN -- and the cable news network was playing it up for all it was worth.

And that night it was worth a lot....

From Devil's Bargain:

Bannon didn’t have to guess at the culprit. He simply assumed it was Kellyanne Conway, Trump’s campaign manager, and how the hell would she know? Conway was a pollster by trade, but she tested messaging, not horse race, and the campaign had cut her off weeks earlier because Trump preferred to see her spinning on TV. If Bannon cared to—and right now, he did not—he could have watched Acosta’s full report and looked for the Tell. That’s what always gave her away. Because Conway was the only woman on Trump’s senior staff, reporters avoided using gender pronouns when quoting her anonymously, lest an errant “she” slip out and reveal their source. Instead, they employed the awkward but gender-neutral “this adviser” or “this person,” and by the third or fourth reference what they were doing became pretty obvious. That was the Tell. Some of Trump’s advisers had long ago caught on and joked about it.

Sure enough, Acosta cited “a senior adviser from Donald Trump’s inner circle,” followed by a trifecta of “this adviser”s, with nary a “he” or a “she” to be heard. Even before he’d finished talking, CNN—Trump’s obsession and bête noire—had billboarded the “take a miracle” quote in a banner that stretched across the screen.

But Bannon had already moved on. He could never fathom why people like Conway worked so hard to win goodwill from reporters (most of whom, he thought, were idiots with no earthly idea of what was going on) or why they cared so much about appearances....

NEXT TIME: THE REAL REASON TRUMP RAN FOR PRESIDENT

That (Sickly) Sweet, Distinctive, Unforgettable Smell

2017-06-20T15:46:00.000-04:00

It started with an odor blossoming like a noxious flower near a garage attached to an apartment building.

A cable television repairman, in the area for his job, called the police.

When they arrived they found a revolting scene.

A dead, decaying body was swathed inside a garbage bag stuffed inside that odoriferous garage.

The next day, two more bodies were found, one in the basement of a vacant house, the other in the backyard of another house. Both also were inside bags.

One killer most likely was responsible. It didn't require a genius to decipher that. The victims were all African-American women and were found within 100 yards to 200 yards of one another.

Michael Madison (born October 15, 1977) was the man responsible. He's an American serial killer from East Cleveland, Ohio, who committed at least those three murders.

On July 19, 2013, after a standoff with police at his mother's house, Madison was arrested.

The cable tv repairman who made the initial call that led to the arrest joined an exclusive club. Members generally include law enforcement investigators, first-responders, pathologists, students, and of course the occasional stumbling non-professional (as well as some very twisted individuals, psychopaths, serial killers, etc.)

Chances are, you're not a member...

But here's a quick test for you: have you ever smelled death? Death’s smell is distinctive, instantly recognizable and unforgettable.

But if for whatever reason, you want to smell it for yourself, there's a way to experience that rotting bod bouquet without, um, getting your hands dirty.

Would you believe there's a plant that emits an odor so similar to the smell of death, that it's called the Corpse Flower? It's technical name is the Titan Arum (Amorphophallus titanum) and there's a damn good reason why it emits corpse odor...

But first check this out:

The Corpse Flower sprays its stench of rotting corpse

The reason this plant is so unique is that it draws bugs that feed on dead animals.

It flowers for two days only. But it can grow three to four inches each hour of those days. The plant only grows on Sumatra, an Indonesian island west of Java and south of the Malay Peninsula, which is known for its rugged tropical terrain, wildlife and smoldering volcanoes.

Of course, the English can access it, too....

Currently there are two biomes that feature plants from diverse climates and environments. The project is located in a reclaimed Kaolinite pit about 1.2 miles from St Blazey and 3 miles from St Austell, Cornwall.

The flower's extreme scent also has been described as rotting fish.

And now amazingly the Corpse Flower's essence has been bottled. Eau de Titan is marketed for men and is designed to draw attention to the rare plant.

A spokesperson for the Eden Project, which is responsible, said they they have gone "where no perfumer has gone before" by creating a scent from the corpse flower."

Over 800 chemicals make up the smell of death, according to a forensic anthropologist at the University of Huddersfield in England.

The death-smell cocktail requires multiple stages of death, and each with a different chemical signature. The stages are tweaked by a multitude of environmental conditions: moisture, air temperature and treatment of the body.

Despite the variability and complexity, important scents in different stages of decomposition have been identified by researchers.

"Real" Vampire-Killing Kits: All One Needs to Battle the Undead

2017-06-18T03:55:00.000-04:00

Around the year 1970, movies and TV series starring Dracula -- especially the English films from Hammer starring Christopher Lee -- helped to fuel a wave of interest in vampires not seen since the decades-later launch of the Twilight books.

This kit was designed for one purpose...Or was it....

So too was another series of films about a sort of modern-day ripoff of the Count from the Transylvania wilds -- one Count Yorga (from Bulgaria).

Initially conceived as a skin flick, the producers were impressed with the box office horror films were doing and decided to change the concept. The result, quite amazingly, was the creation of two rather good, scary vampire films set in 1970s Long Angeles.

So successful was the formula, the blaxploitation genre decided to appropriate it with films like Blacula.

Despite what you may think, Blacula, if you watch it alone at 2 am one night will scare the living shit out of you.....

Blacula is a quite effective horror film with a strong, imaginative premis.

In that time period the following vampire films were released:

Dracula: Prince of Darkness (1966) – in which Lee returns from the dead.
Dracula Has Risen from the Grave (1968)
Taste the Blood of Dracula (1969)
Scars of Dracula (1970)
Count Yorga, Vampire (1970)
The Return of Count Yorga (1971)
Dracula A.D. 1972 (1972)
Blacula (1972)
Scream, Blacula, Scream (1973)
The Satanic Rites of Dracula (1973)
The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires (1974) – Lee refused to return as the Count, so John Forbes-Robertson took his place for the opening in Transylvania.

The Count Yorga flicks were genuinely chilling. Originally
conceived as a porn flick, the first was recut to be horror.
A prelude to a girl-girl scene remains in the final cut though.
The Count Yorga flicks are definitely worth watching today.

Quick thinking and imaginative entrepreneurs sought to capitalize on this burgeoning interest in the vampiric by creating a market for antique items seemingly designed expressly to kill the undead. Worn wooden boxes held various weapons to kill the fanged unholy ones.

Some were marketed as centuries-old portable kits presumably for traveling vampire killers.

Prices reportedly reached tens of thousands of dollars and Van Helsing wannabes (presumably having had the crap scared out of them watching all those vampire flicks on the big screen) spent untold amounts on these things. Presumably, they were purchased as conversation pieces as opposed to actual devices for murdering vampires.

Vampires are fictional inventions.... right?

The kits generally included various items such pistols and silver bullets -- or would wooden bullets work, too? The oldest standby, wooden stakes, were included, along with other mainstays: Bibles, crucifixes, rosaries, bottles of garlic powder, holy water, and herbal potions.

Dozens of the kits found their way to museum collections, allegedly, where visitors reportedly flock to eyeball them.One potentially major problem so far hasn't reportedly slowed these terror tourists down: in recent years academics have perused archives and conducted scientific tests on the items.

Turns out, many of the kits were not what they seemed.

In short, they're late-20th-century novelties versus hundred-year-old weapons to annihilate the undead.

Despite the in-depth articles and museum labels explaining the objects’ origins, “belief is stronger than objective evidence,” the British weaponry expert Jonathan Ferguson says. He is the curator of firearms at the Royal Armouries in Leeds, which owns a vampire-killing kit that he describes as“inspired by the movies, not Victorian stories, and folklore.”

The museum acquired it in 2012, knowing that it was probably cobbled together in the 1970s or ‘80s. The mahogany box, partly lined in velvet, contains a pistol, bullet mold and prayer book that date to the 1850s.

The rest—bottles with cryptic labels, a handwritten psalm quote about slaying enemies, banged-up wooden stakes—can be considered handsome Halloween kitsch.

Keeping these invented artifacts on view nonetheless has scholarly value, Ferguson says; they represent the public’s enduring gothic fascination with “supernatural creatures and the means to defeat them.”

Winterthur Museum in Delaware has a vampire-killing kit on display in its show, Treasures on Trial: The Art and Science of Detecting Fakes.

The set surfaced in the 1980s as a donation to the Mercer Museum in Doylestown, Pennsylvania. On its leather case's yellowed paper label, the German manufacturer, professor Ernst Blomberg, lists its contents including “silver bullets,” a supply of his “new serum” and a gun made by the Belgian gunsmith Nicholas Plomdeur.

The label boasts that the kit will help ward off Eastern Europe’s rash of “a particular manifestation of evil known as Vampires.”

Ferguson concluded that in the 1970s, a British antiques dealer with a vivid hematological imagination invented the Blomberg-Plomdeur fable to up the value of worthless guns in his inventory.

On the Mercer kit, a Winterthur team found a variety of scientific red flags: the adhesives are modern, Plomdeur’s “silver” bullets are pewter, and Blomberg’s paper labels could only have been printed after 1945.

Still, some mysteries remain.

No one knows what lurks inside the glass vials; Linda Eaton, the museum’s director of collections, says no one wanted to damage the waxy seals to investigate the serum ingredients.

Sleuths who specialize in debunking vampire legends, including Anthony Hogg, have posted detailed denunciations of the kits.

Sometimes wooden multi-compartment cases are obvious fakes, adapted from antique desks or boxes used for tools, guns, pens, cosmetics, jewelry or musical instruments.

Sometimes the bullets would not actually fit into the barrels of the accompanying guns.

Some potions come in bottles with modern screw-top lids, and the stakes and mallets were made of wood recycled from furniture legs.

At the Winterthur show, the kit appears in a gallery section called You Be the Judge.

The curators’ label suggests that well, you never know, it’s a weird world, and maybe there were 19th-century anxious travelers girding themselves for potential danger as they headed into Eastern Europe. The museum’s text notes that the modern components in the leather box, after all, “might just represent replacements and repairs,” and Blomberg kits “have been sold through reputable auction houses.”

In 2004, Sotheby’s sold a Blomberg kit for $26,400. This despite what the catalog noted:

Neither the existence of Professor Blomberg nor that of the gunmaker Plomdeur can be confirmed. Also open to question is whether these kits were ever employed successfully in the killing of vampires.

In 2011, an unsigned vampire killing kit, with 32 components including a map of Transylvania and two crucifixes, sold for $25,000 via Sotheby’s.

A Blomberg kit at Sotheby’s in 2012 sold for $13,750. The catalog described it as Continental, circa 1900 and later and had no comment on whether the makers were fictional.

David Walker, head of the auction house’s 19th-century furniture department in New York, says he remains skeptical of stories that travelers ever used the kits for self-protection. He describes the material as “very theatrical” as well as “rather elaborate and quite whimsical,” and he adds that they generate conversation when they’re on view and media attention whenever they come up for sale.

Mercer Museum says the kit boosted attendance for decades.

It serves as a spooky prop during Halloween programs and has been used to explain centuries of misconceptions about the causes of wasting diseases.

The bottom line:

It is better to have a vampire-killing kit and not need it than not have one only to find, one dark and stormy night, that you need(ed) it.....

Inside Super-Secret "Tinder Select" Dating App for CEOs, Supermodels, "Elites"

2017-06-17T23:16:00.002-04:00

Tinder, the "hook-up dating app" that involves swiping photos of potential mates left or right depending on whether you like their profile, has been operating a members-only version of the platform called Tinder Select.

TechCrunch, which first revealed the existence of Tinder's "secret tier," reported that it "is meant to serve only the elite users on the app, including CEOs, supermodels, and other hyper-attractive upwardly affluent types."

One source using the app said it’s “for celebrities and people who do really well on Tinder.”

Tinder invited people to the platform, the article says, adding that some of these elite members are empowered to "nominate’ others." But the nominated can’t nominate anyone else -- which prevents the exclusivity of the members-only layer from spreading uncontrollably.

"It’s unclear exactly how Tinder decides who gets invited and who doesn’t, but the common thread among those on the Select app is that they’re generally attractive and relatively high-profile," TechCrunch reported.

So how does Tinder know who to invite?

Here it gets a little tricky.... One's Tinder Elo score, the app's proprietary algorithmic rating system, may come into play, the story posits.

Chances are, most of us wouldn't dare want to know what our score is. So reports FastCompany, in a story called I Found Out My Secret Internal Tinder Rating And Now I Wish I Hadn’t: The dating app uses data to give every user a desirability rating. Here’s how it works—and what happened when I discovered my number.....

Read that story here.

TechCrunch also noted that it obtained photos of Tinder Select, describing it as looking "way better than regular Tinder in terms of design. It features a gradient navy blue ‘S’ at the top, where the Tinder flame is normally found, and other blue accenting in place of the usual orange. Users who have access to the Tinder Select layer of the app can toggle on Tinder Select from the top bar.

"These users can switch back and forth from regular ol’ Tinder and Tinder Select, which makes sense considering Tinder Select may have a smaller pool of users in certain markets."

Tinder Select has been around for almost six months at least. Reportedly, Tinder is not seeking to build "hype" with the Select version. Rather, it's "a truly stealthy layer of the platform for the most attractive, eligible 1 percent. After all, six months (at least) seems like an inordinate amount of time to test a product without announcing it."

Screen shot of an actual invite of one of the chosen few....

Business Insider has revealed an inside look at Tinder select in a story posted this week, on June 14.
The writer of the story, Inside the secret version of Tinder for celebs and other VIPs — here’s what the invite-only 'Tinder Select' is like, seems to be a bit clueless about TechCrunch's report about the app allowing certain "elite" members" to nominate people for Select. But the nominated can’t nominate anyone else, etc.

So don't feel bad.

Nathan McAlone, who wrote the BI report, noted:

For the last few months, I've been testing Tinder Select, a secret version of the popular dating app...

To be clear, I am none of those three things. But Tinder Select has definitely made it easier for me to match with people, thanks to its supercharged algorithm.

Tinder has never officially acknowledged Tinder Select exists — Tinder declined to comment for this article — and there's a lot of misinformation out there about it. But here is what Tinder Select is actually like, from someone who has used it.

The way some press reports have described Tinder Select is like a virtual VIP section of the app, where celebs and high rollers can pop metaphorical overpriced bottles, and talk about how this club is "okay, but really only in the VIP."

That's not really what it is.

The first thing to note about Tinder Select is that it functions more or less the same way regular Tinder does. There is no separate feed where you can swipe only other denizens of Select World.

So when you fire up Tinder Select, what you get is a Tinder feed that looks the same as your normal one except for a few color changes. The most visible difference is that when you run across someone who is also a Tinder Select member, they appear with a blue border around their picture, and a badge that says "Select" along the top.

These people are few and far between, even in New York City, which suggests it's very much still in beta. In fact, there are so few people in Tinder Select, that when putting together this post, I couldn't find the profile of a Tinder Select member to screenshot and blur. That said, most of the Tinder Select members I've seen in the past worked in tech or in PR.

However, there's a supercharged algorithm

But even though you can't filter the feed, there is a huge way that Tinder Select changes your experience: the algorithm. In short, if you are a Tinder Select member, the algorithm is stacked in your favor — and I'm not talking about a little bit. It feels like some giant Cupid is sitting on your side of the scale.

The first evening I got Tinder Select, I swiped a few people, and it didn't seem that different. My feed felt a bit more curated, and front-loaded with people who likely were popular on Tinder. But it wasn't that noticeable. All in all, the experience felt largely the same.

But then I went to bed and woke up with over 20 new matches. I'm certainly not normally that popular, and that hadn't ever happened to me before.

My theory is that Tinder Select pushed my profile toward the front of the feeds of people I had swiped "yes" on, and it was working through my back catalog of swipes. Speaking with other Tinder Select members who wished to remain anonymous, they all said they noticed the same thing. That apparent boost has continued over the last few months using Tinder Select, and I've found that often if I spend some time swiping, a few hours later matches will start to pop up.

But it's not just people I have already swiped right on. I also feel like I run across more people who have "liked" me already as well. But it's hard to tell. One indication that my profile is getting preference in other people's feeds, even those I haven't yet come across, is that more people are "super liking" me than used to before I was in Tinder Select. Other Select members told me they've also noticed an increase in super likes.

Lost "Night Stalker" Scene from Spanish Moss Murders....

2016-10-27T10:41:00.001-04:00

Kolchak: The Night Stalker, a brilliant television series from the 1970s....

Either you get what this is or you don't.

Whichever category you fall into, I post this now as a lead-in to a story....Inside the Night Stalker, what really happened behind the scenes and why the great Darren McGavin wanted it canceled as quickly as possible....

The Spanish Moss Murders

Written by: Al Friedman and David Chase
Production # 41806 - October 21, 1974 (F.R.)

INT. INS OFFICE – DAY

As Vincenzo exits his office, carrying a huge bag of garbage and junk. Catches sight of Ron, who’s doing nothing, stares angrily.

VINCENZO

Why don’t you get off your Ivy League buckle and help some of the others?

UPDYKE

I volunteered but they say I just get in the way. They won’t take any of my suggestions.

(Vincenzo irritably looks around for something Updyke can do. Finally, he just sets the garbage bag down.)

VINCENZO

Then I suggest you empty this garbage.

(Ron unhappily rises, picks up the bag, exits with it. Vincenzo starts to re-enter his office, turns, hearing the sound of typing. Kolchak is busily at work on a story and at the same time taking bites of a piece of pound cake, dribbling crumbs all over his desk. Vincenzo crosses to him.)

VINCENZO

Will you knock off the work? Aren’t you aware the efficiency expert is coming?

(Kolchak gives him a look that expresses the absurdity of the statement. Vincenzo picks up on it, gestures around the office.)

VINCENZO

It’s just that Mr. Sunderland happens to feel that neatness and cleanliness are important to a well functioning organization. And so do I.

KOLCHAK

(only glancing up) Then wipe the mayonnaise off your tie.

(Vincenzo looks down, sees the offending blot, takes out his handkerchief and smears the stuff around.)

VINCENZO

You have a few minutes before you go to the airport. You could do something…

Straighten a file, clean out a cabinet. (happens to notice Kolchak’s watch; alarmed)

You have three-thirty? My watch stopped. I’m an hour late!

KOLCHAK

The efficiency expert comes none too soon.

VINCENZO

(looking around in panic; furiously winding watch stem)

His plane lands at four-forty five. Why aren’t you on your way to the airport?

KOLCHAK

(typing) Let him take a cab.

VINCENZO

He happens to feel that cabs are inefficient…a waste of company money. And so do I.

KOLCHAK

Get another rickshaw boy. I’m working.

VINCENZO

(nervously; looking around) Who? Miss Emily doesn’t drive. Updyke has accidents while he’s watching movies at the drive-in….

(Kolchak tries to ignore him, keeps pounding at the typewriter. Vincenzo eyes him anxiously, starts fussing, straightening papers.)

VINCENZO

Carl, there’ll be delays at the airport because of construction….

(More typing as Vincenzo fusses.)

VINCENZO

Rush hour traffic’ll start soon ---

KOLCHAK

(stands suddenly) Who can work in this squirrel cage anyway….

(Kolchak grabs his coat and hat, storms across the office. Vincenzo hastily clears the last crumbs, follows worriedly.)

VINCENZO

Take Mr. Sunderland to his hotel first….

(Under this, Updyke has re-entered and is gabbing with Emily Cowles.)

KOLCHAK

It’s Colonel Sunderland, not Mister….

VINCENZO

He’s not in the fried food business. He’s just retired Army….

(They move past Ron.)

UPDYKE

I’m hoping he can pull strings and get me transferred out of my reserve unit.

VINCENZO

(whirling) Don’t you dare ask him that!

EMILY

(dreamily) I was engaged to a West Point man…(puzzled) He disappeared right about the time my father lost the last Congressional election….

(Vincenzo waves this all away, chases after Kolchak.)

VINCENZO

Kolchak. Button your top button and straighten your tie….

(There’s no response from Kolchak who’s already bounding down the stairs. A worried Vincenzo moves back into the office.)

Ford White House Edited Rockefeller Commission Report, Deleting Section on CIA Murder Plots

2016-03-04T14:18:00.000-05:00

President Ford with his Chief of Staff Donald Rumsfeld (left)
and his deputy, Richard Cheney in 1975. (Courtesy Gerald R. Ford Library)

REVISED: To my great surprise the mass media hasn't picked this story up, which is troubling....Our former VP Dick Cheney was involved in this up to his eyebrows. Someone should seeks some answers....
The Gerald Ford White House "significantly altered" the final report produced by the "supposedly independent" 1975 Rockefeller Commission, created to investigate CIA domestic activities.

The report was heavily edited to cast suspicion away from the CIA; the effort was carried out over the objections of senior Commission staff members.

Based on newly released White House and Commission documents the National Security Archives posted, an entire section, 86-pages addressing CIA assassination plots was deleted.

The report was further edited by then-deputy White House Chief of Staff Richard Cheney, former Vice President of the United States under President George W. Bush.

The NSA has released the entire section on assassination attempts, Cheney’s handwritten marginal notes, staff memos warning of the fallout of deleting the controversial section, and White House strategies for presenting the edited report to the public.

"The leadership of the presidentially appointed commission deliberately curtailed the investigation and ceded its independence to White House political operatives," noted a statement on the release of the documents.

"This evidence has been lying ignored in government vaults for decades..."

The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was discovered to have plotted the murders of foreigners, including prominent leaders and heads of state, it was discovered in the 1970s.

The shockwaves this created along the corridors of power in Washington D.C. led to the creation of several investigations.

In 1975, the Rockefeller Commission and the Church Committee probed allegations of CIA involvement in assassinations.

President Gerald R. Ford, in a characteristic blunder (he was often filmed and photographed falling down), inadvertently revealed the CIA's involvement in plotting assassinations during a meeting with press editors!

Esquire hung Cheney on a peg for this one, noting:

There's no more valuable resource for an informed citizenry than the folks doing god's work at the National Security Archive at the George Washington University. Their most recent revelations concern the Rockefeller Commission, which was formed by the Ford Administration as a reaction to the New York Times stories in 1975 that broke the news of the CIA's misdeeds, up to and including covert assassinations. It seems that kindly old Gerry and his minions did all they could to ratfck the commission's report. And, lo and behold, you'll never guess who was leading the fcking of the rats. ...

Richard Cheney cares less about American democracy than he cares who he shoots in the face. And this has been true since he first crawled out of the primordial authoritarian soup. He would have been the perfect Hauptfuhrer*, the ideal Politburo conniver. He'd have risen high in the Stasi, and Pinochet would have had him over for Scotch and electrodes at least twice a week. And the great irony of this latest expose is that we can at least partly thank Oliver Stone for it.

Esquire also highlighted:

This evidence has been lying ignored in government vaults for decades. Much of the work of securing release of the records was done by the John F. Kennedy Assassinations Records Board in the 1990s, and the documents were located at the National Archives and Records Administration at College Park, Maryland; or at the Gerald R. Ford Library in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Additional mandatory declassification review requests filed by Archive fellow John Prados returned identical versions of documents, indicating the CIA is not willing to permit the public to see any more of the assassinations story than we show here. The documents in this set have yet to be incorporated into standard accounts of the events of this period.

* Methinks Esquire hath erred slightly.....

Hauptsturmführer was a Nazi Party paramilitary rank that was used in several Nazi organizations such as the SS, NSKK and the NSFK. The rank of Hauptsturmführer was a mid-grade company level officer and was the equivalent of a captain (Hauptmann) in the German Army and also the equivalent of captain in foreign armies.[1]

See more, including documents, here

All Hail the Virtuous Millennials!

2016-02-25T02:37:00.001-05:00

Millennials have fun....

Millennials didn’t grow up in the worst of times – things can always get worse, it’s simply a matter of perspective. But it’s fair to say that the majority of them came of age amid one of American history’s greatest time of challenge.

Still, it seems you wouldn’t know it based on how this generation thinks and acts. Millennials have shown time and time again, experts say, that they are ready, willing and more-than able to rise to the challenge.

Previous generations certainly had their own allotment of horrors – the wars (World War I and II, the Korean and Vietnam conflict), then things like the Kent State massacre, the mass murderers like Texas sniper Charles Whitman, serial killers like Ted Bundy, and mob wars in Philadelphia, New York and other cities, putting on newspaper front pages gruesome dead mobsters. (Think of Carmine Galante, Lilo, shot dead, a cigar stump stuck in his mouth; Philadelphia boss Angelo Bruno sitting in the front passenger's seat, head tilted back and mouth agape after a shotgun blast ended his life.) There were innumerable other disasters and horrors.

Then there’s my generation – the Gen-Xers. We were handsomely screwed, reaching maturity amid the AIDS epidemic (thank you, God, for that one). Not to mention the specter of Communism and total annihilation via nuclear weapons. On a lesser level, the Italian Mafia also was still kicking. They weren’t exactly a threat equal to the previous ones mentioned, but they certainly didn’t help. And in some cases, LCN, as the Feds call it, provided improper role models. John Gotti was seemingly everywhere – and remains a firm fixture of the American zeitgeist today.

As atrocious as some of these events were, they were mostly resolved. Yes, an argument can be raised that terrorism grew partly out of the way the world was casually recast following World War II. But the two wars themselves ended, treaties were signed, war crimes even prosecuted. Also finite: the Korean and Vietnam war. Even the great global menace once posed by Russia has dissipated. Russia and America are allies (I think… though this seems to change from day to day). AIDS, like diabetes, is a treatable condition, with proper medication. And we probably won’t be seeing another John Gotti in our lifetimes, anyway.

The Millennials came of age amid an entirely different and more challenging series of events. That’s because they were not so much events, as trends – visions of the future. Suicide bombers, for example; one person willing to die to take a group of soldiers with them or fly planes into buildings and kill massive numbers of people and cause irreparable financial and other damages.

Consider some of the key events this demographic absorbed via the news (which itself is now part of the problem, having grown from an evening television event into a 24/7 bombardment via the Internet and cable, streaming or satellite television):

The Oklahoma City bombing.
Columbine.
The space shuttle disaster (as well as the earlier one).
Hurricanes that wiped out an American city—and a failed bid to save suvivors.
Most campus shootings, mass murders, serial killers.
The September 11 tragedy.

While these events impacted several generations, including the Baby Boomers and Generation Xers, the Millennials were the most psychically vulnerable.

“No cohort of American youth has ever endured repeated mass catastrophes in the harsh, inescapable glare of a 24/7 media environment,” an influential and often-quoted USA Today report noted.

What differentiates the Millennial’s experience with crime and mass murder is the horror’s arbitrariness, which has fostered in many the mindset of: “Enjoy life while you can, because you never know what will happen tomorrow."

Shaped by trauma in their formative years, however, this generation is far from broken.

One would think they’d be fearful, less likely to travel – perhaps consuming the same psych meds as previous generations. Oh, the horror! And the depression and anxiety and whatever caused by economic gloom and the general residual doldrums of past events, including 9/11.

Yet that is far from true. As a generation, they are an optimistic group – optimistic in general, not according to a specific criterion. I am not making this stuff up, either. This is the general consensus of social scientists, psychologists and generational researchers. This is what they have been saying of Millennials over the years.

There’s an inexplicable piece to this puzzle however. The Millennials are simply much nicer and civil than was the case 25 years ago. Ironically, William Strauss and Neil Howe, authors of the 1991 book Generations, in which they coined the Millennial name for Americans born after 1981, predicted this generational phenomenon. These young uns, they said, would become “the nation’s next great Civic generation.”

Many reports point to the decline in violent crime over the past quarter-century as one of the more obvious examples of the better behavior of Millennials. The data says the most crime-prone age and gender cohort — 15-to-25-year-old males — are committing far fewer crimes than that cohort did in 1990 (In other words, my generation. Thanks a lot!) Over the past 20 years, Pew Research Center stats note that the gun murder rate fell 49 percent, forcible rape fell 33 percent, robbery by 48 percent, aggravated assault by 39 percent.

The Washington Examiner even asked rhetorically: Are today's Millennials a new Victorian generation? That article also noted that high school senior-class binge-drinking is lower than it ever was since 1976. The same goes for ninth graders engaging in sex. The percentage of seniors having sex with more than three people also has declined significantly. Furthermore (and probably more controversially than the paper realizes) it states that college date rape isn’t as widespread as some media segments have said. The story quotes Justice Department data that indicates the rate of rape on college campuses is 0.6 percent, not the 20 percent figure more-often bandied about in the media.

The “niceness” trend holds even when considering the ethnicities of Millennials, as well as key historical benchmarks. The Millenial demographic includes more Hispanic and blacks than previous generations. Statistically, due to income inequalities, the so-called minority groups tended to show “above-average crime rates.” Compounding the crime-rate issue is that these Millennials are much more likely to belong to single-parent households. Statistically speaking, this should mean we are experiencing the mother of all crime waves. Yet that is far from the case.

There is a near-infinite number of opinions and theories as to why the Millennials are the virtuous generation. Better policing, reforms related to education and welfare. Political rhetoric.

It may be nothing more complicated than the simple fact that people are quite capable of learning from their past – as well as the past.

We saw John Gotti and all the other infamous mob bosses of the 1980s and 1990s arrested, handcuffed like any common criminal – and then we watched as they went to prison for life. The same goes for all those thieving CEOs, senior executives and financial advisors, ranging from former financier Bernie Madoff to Enron chief Kenneth Lay to WorldCom’s Bernie Ebbers to Tyco CEO Dennis Kozlowski, we saw these while-collar professionals, the businessmen who should have been among the most admired, receive the same well-deserved treatment as the murderous mobsters. (Though I personally don’t think Kozlowski deserved what he got).

We recall or read or listen to music inspired by an earlier, more violent pop and music culture, when dreadful numbers of young people died or become heartless murderers as per the crack epidemic, as well as the heyday of the street gang. Even some of the most high-profile recording artists of their day went down in a hail of bullets.

Everyone alive has experienced these events, with the personal impact varying by degree. But the Millennial Generation seems to have shown more clearly than any other generation that when it’s their turn at bat, they just might do a better job.

Natasha Herzig Was Kidnapped, Forced into Prostitution

2016-02-23T14:39:00.000-05:00

Human trafficking survivor Natasha Herzig tells stories of being kidnapped and forced into working as a prostitute, being moved around the country to service high paying clients and posing for porn.

Herzig also talks of being made to call her family and tell them she was fine.

I think it's disgusting and shameful what people have said about Natasha. We Americans are very repressed about sex and, let's face it, hypocrites when it comes to pornography, a multibillion-dollar business.

If no one watches porn, how is it a billion-dollar business?

Natasha was a porn star after she spent years working as a high priced escort against her will.

It takes a seriously psychologically screwed up ignoramus to say what "Bud" says below (the following comments were taken from the above video's YouTube page):

Bud Fox 10 months ago
Her story has a lot of holes in it. Not buying everything she alleges.

Bud Fox 10 months ago
She still looks like a porn star.

Bud Fox 10 months ago
Someone this stupid was bound to become a hooker.

Bud Fox 10 months ago
It was not her trafficker it was someone she called "daddy". She loved the game. Spyder has the game on speed dial. Much respect for your game player that was tight execution of pimpin.

DD S 1 year ago
She's pornstar Tiffany Price and I refuse to believe she was forced into porn as well. She was on the reality show Gene Simmons Family Jewels two times. She was shown on national TV, she could have asked for some kind of help at that point, she didn't.

Slickis 4 months ago
+TJ P She was outed and needed to do damage control like DD S said. Now everyone's jumping on board with her fabricated story.

getoffmypage 4 months ago (edited)
In hindsight I changed my belief about this. Her tears are real, but I do not buy the abduction story either. The truth, according to me, is that she struggles living a normal life as an ex porn star because society sees her as a slut and a gold digger. In fact, many porn stars have problems building a normal life after their careers, because of that reason. They often do not want to have their real names published and try to erase all videos on the internet. How do you expect a man to genuinely love you if you sucked 500 cocks in your life? This woman had more penises in her mouth than snoop dogg had joints. Many girls in this industry have very deep issues and do it for the fame and attention. But after the career, they get to know the other side. And I think she is trying to justify her pornographic career by saying she was forced into it. Her tears are definitely real, but I do not think her story is real. Either way it does make sense

Natalie's story was recently presented on ID's House of Horrors: Kidnapped.

Natasha talks about the choices she made after her ordeal as well as how she uses her experiences to help others today.

For more, visit http://www.investigationdiscovery.com...

Subscribe to Investigation Discovery:
http://www.youtube.com/subscription_c...

Watch full episodes:
https://play.google.com/store/tv/show...

I am reading a fascinating book about sex trafficking, A Pound of Sugar, by L. M. Robinson it's fiction.

I am going to ask the writer to write a story about the topic for this blog.

click image to purchase

Her book's Amazon synopsis:

A spontaneous trip to London spirals deep inside the vast world of brutal sex trafficking for two female friends when they decide to spend their first evening in Soho's red light district with two intriguing strangers.

Time to Legalize Prostitution, Says The Daily Beast

2016-02-22T13:03:00.000-05:00

Why It’s Time to Legalize Prostitution - The Daily Beast:

Evidence shows that it would protect sex workers, reduce violence, cut down on sex trafficking, and more. There’s no good reason not to.

A prostitute has a 45 percent to 75 percent chance of experiencing workplace violence at some point, according to recent research indicates, and a 32 percent to 55 percent likelihood that she or he was victimized the past year. Worker safety, along with concerns about exploitation and objectification, are behind much of the continued support for keeping prostitution illegal.

But there’s a movement afoot to challenge conventional wisdom about prohibition. Or, rather, to incorporate what we already know about black markets into our thinking about sex workers and their rights.

As with the drug trade, much of the violence associated with sex work is exacerbated by its illegality. Violent people are more likely to prey on sex workers, confident that they won’t be reported to police. This leaves workers dependent on pimps and madams for protection, which often leads to more violence. And then there’s abuse from police. In Ireland, where prostitution is still criminalized, one study estimates that 30 percent of the abuse that sex workers report comes from police. Some estimate that police actually abuse American sex workers more often than clients do.

Illegality also forces sex work outdoors. Craigslist and Backpage should be havens for workers to connect with and vet clients from the safety of their homes. Instead, cops monitor such sites to ensnare workers and their clients. Sex workers traded safety tips and rated clients on My Redbook until the FBI seized the site, destroying the data and forcing sex workers onto other sites, or the streets.

After Germany and New Zealand legalized sex work, violence against sex workers decreased, while workers’ quality of life improved. There, occupational health and safety laws protect sex workers. And the ability to screen clients and take credit card numbers has reduced violence. “It’s been just fantastic, really,” said Catherine Healey, national coordinator for the New Zealand Prostitutes’ Collective.

Some worry about legalized sex work leading to more widespread sexually transmitted infections. But in reality, after testing began post-legalization in Germany, researchers discovered no difference in sexually transmitted infection rates between sex workers and the general population.

In fact, the data are pretty clearly in favor of legalizing sex work to improve public health. The World Health Organization recommends that countries decriminalize sex work. According to a recent WHO report, “Violence against sex workers is associated with inconsistent condom use or lack of condom use, and with increased risk of STI and HIV infection. Violence also prevents sex workers from accessing HIV information and services.”

It’s not just the WHO. Editors of the top medical journal The Lancet wrote that there is “no alternative” to decriminalizing sex work in order to protect sex workers from HIV. In 1980, Rhode Island effectively legalized prostitution by accident when lawmakers deemed the state statute on prostitution to be overly broad. They accidentally removed the section defining the act itself as a crime while attempting to revise it, though lawmakers didn’t realize the error until 2003. Over the next six years new cases of gonorrhea among women statewide declined by 39 percent. Interestingly, reported rapes also declined by 31 percent.

As far as worker exploitation goes, working conditions in black markets are nearly always worse. In Germany, sex workers get to avail themselves of the same social-welfare infrastructure as all other German workers. Perhaps it makes sense that a country that has always taken workers’ rights seriously would choose that it should no longer exempt sex workers. There, they are represented by a union and are afforded full police protection when something goes wrong.

Another huge impetus behind the movement to legalize sex work is the current focus on ending the scourge of sex trafficking. People are waking up to the fact that laws against sex work actually help human traffickers. This is why the U.N. Human Rights Council published a report from the Global Alliance Against Traffic in Women which criticizes anti-trafficking measures which restrict sex workers.

According to the report, “The criminalization of clients has not reduced trafficking or sex work, but has increased sex workers’ vulnerability to violence, harmed HIV responses, and infringed on sex workers’ rights.”

Furthermore, it said, “Anti-trafficking discussions on demand have historically been stymied by anti-prostitution efforts to eradicate the sex work sector by criminalizing clients, despite protests from sex workers’ rights groups and growing evidence that such approaches do not work.”

Human rights powerhouse Amnesty International concurs: “Amnesty International is opposed to the criminalization or punishment of activities related to the buying or selling of consensual sex between adults.” Thus begins a recently leaked document calling for an end to prohibitions on sex work. Criminalization discourages sex workers from reporting suspected sex trafficking to police.

Working with instead of against sex workers will lead to more slaves being rescued. In Germany, it already is. While prohibitionists claim that legalizing prostitution has increased human trafficking in the country, the data don’t support them. In fact the opposite happened. Germany legalized sex work in 2001. Between 2001 and 2011, cases of sex-based human trafficking shrank by 10 percent.

Now most German sex workers, 74 percent, are foreign born. But these migrant workers are hardly child sex slaves. The mean age of a sex worker in Germany is 31. A massive study of the sex trade in New York revealed a similar pattern. Researchers found very few underage sex workers actually working. When they started talking to pimps they found many won’t work with underage sex workers, not because of fear of arrest or moral qualms, but because teen workers don’t make enough money.

The claim that legalizing prostitution increased human trafficking also defies common sense. Whether you think bargain basement blowjobs are a good thing or a bad thing, the fact remains that criminalization makes things more expensive. In Germany, you’ll still pay a lot for high-quality service. But the days of paying more than 15 Euros for sex from someone who clearly doesn’t want to be there are over. Time spoke to one tourist who described the country as “The Aldi for prostitutes.”

This matters for trafficking because it costs a lot to kidnap someone and hold her against her will. This new economic reality means it makes zero sense for traffickers to keep their slaves in Germany, where prices are low. It’s true that traffickers must bring their victims through the country. But they are rewarded with higher prices if they keep going until they get to one of the countries where prostitution is still illegal, like France.

One other big movement behind the push for legalization is, ironically, feminism. Specifically, a new kind of feminism that acknowledges and seeks to defend women’s agency from all encroachments.

Much of the energy behind keeping sex work relegated to the black market comes from the unlikely partnership between radical feminists and evangelical Christians, both of whom object to the way prostitution makes the economics of sex explicit. Both see sex work as a special kind of work. Both put sex in a special category, that is, to be done with only certain people, under certain circumstances, among which they do not include “customers” and “for money.”

Stuart Chambers in the Montreal Gazette makes an excellent case that people’s impulse to put sex for money in a different category than sex for dinner or sex for an orgasm is the same impulse that led doctors and scientists to pathologize masturbation and homosexuality. That is, some people see sex that makes them uncomfortable to think about as wrong for other people to have.

Sex-positive feminists, on the other hand, argue that prohibitionists take this idea of sex being “special” too far when they mandate, through law, that everyone put sex in a special category.

Ultimately it should be up to the individual woman, or man, to decide whether having sex with someone is in an entirely different category than making them a latte or giving them a massage. This new feminism recognizes that some people would really rather have their feet worshipped in a brothel than work in a factory to make rent. It recognizes that sex work is exploitative. Workers are exploiting the fact that they have something someone else wants. Clients are exploiting the fact that they have something the sex worker wants. But, then, all work is exploitative.

Casey Anthony Appears Publicly

2015-05-25T01:08:00.000-04:00

Most hated woman in America?

Casey Anthony -- the woman who was found "not guilty" of murdering her own daughter -- was seen in public earlier this month for the first time in in more than two years.

She apparently lives in a Florida suburb.

In pictures exclusive to Daily Mail Online, Anthony, 29, donned jogging garb and went for a run through West Palm Beach.

Apparently trying to appear incognito, Anthony's appearance came two days after she was seen at a 10k charity race in Lake Worth, Florida and almost four years since her acquittal for the murder of her two-year-old daughter, Caylee stunned the nation.

Last seen in public at her bankruptcy hearing in March 2013, Anthony has been in hiding and in fear of her life since a Florida jury found her not guilty of first degree murder.

Undercover Boss: ABM's Slipsager's Smarts Not so Blatant

2015-05-24T20:36:00.000-04:00

Henrik Slipsager, CEO of ABM;
potential reality-TV comedian.

ABM Industries Inc. (NYSE:ABM) reported for its fourth quarter ended Oct. 31, 2010, revenue of $901.4 million for fiscal year 2010 vs. the previous year's $868.0 million; net income was $21.8 million, a 45.2% increase from the previous year's fourth quarter. For the fiscal year revenue was $3.5 billion, flat compared to year-ago revenues. Net income was $64.1 million, an increase of 18.1% compared to fiscal year 2009.

"The company's fourth quarter results delivered a strong finish to the fiscal year," said Henrik Slipsager, president and chief executive officer, ABM Industries.

What a relief that must have been for shareholders; having watched Slipsager on CBS's Undercover Boss it's good to know he is a competent CEO, because he is not competent at much else.

Now you may ask, as I did, what is ABM?

ABM Industries, which operates through its subsidiaries (collectively "ABM"), is a leading provider of facility services. With fiscal 2010 revenues of approximately $3.5 billion and more than 95,000 employees, ABM provides janitorial, facility, engineering, parking and security services for thousands of commercial, industrial, government and retail clients across the United States and various international locations. ABM's business services include ABM Janitorial Services, ABM Facility Services, ABM Engineering Services, Ampco System Parking and ABM Security Services.

So, with all those different areas the company is in, we see that Slipsager has so many ways he can screw up -- and he doesn't disappoint! Whether driving a bus, washing windows or serving on the cleaning crew, a disguised (his hair was dyed and he wore a baseball cap) Henrik scored an F by his own underlings; he was even fired from the bus driver position after he broke all the rules and "cussed" over the PA system.

Undercover ABM CEO does nothing properly.

Henrik made for great TV. He was hilarious; I think if he left the business world, he'd have a great career making comedies. His deadpan demeanor gives him his own unique style, especially when he is being ripped apart for not slowing down while racing through a parking lot or scrubbing a toilet bowel hard enough. I thought this was one of the best episodes ever; he didn't even try for appearance's sake, as so many other CEOs do on the show.

(I don't mean any disrespect as to 9/11; as you'll read below, the company was strongly affected by the terrorist strikes at the World Trade Center, and the show was bittersweet in that so much of it, especially the second half, is devoted to 9/11. But I chose to focus on the funnier parts of the show. I just put together a post about the murder of an 18-year-old woman; I am getting too depressed to go down the path of tragedy again. I need to laugh -- we all do once in a while. So read this post and watch the videos with that in mind.)

For the show, his cover was that he was an immigrant from Holland competing with another, younger candidate for a job in the United States. (Yeah, right, like they wouldn't just hire the younger guy in a split second).

Slipsager's first job was at the Tampa airport, working as shuttle operator for ABM's Ampco System Parking division. Perhaps due to too little sleep -- his alarm clock roused him at 4:30am, a time "I don't usually wake up," he said, -- he was pooped, too slow helping people with their luggage but too fast while driving. The constant stream of criticism from Kenny, who is "training" him, reaches a crescendo when Slipsager "cusses" on the shuttles speaker for all the passengers to hear. Slipsager was promptly fired from his duties. (Watch the video for all the hilarious details).

Slipsager scrubs a toilet. Or tries to.

His fear of heights doesn't help his attempt to be a window washer; and he doesn't exactly excel at facilities maintenance, as the other video shows. (Ever see a real-live CEO scrub a toilet? Here's your chance!)

I liked this episode a lot, but I have to add that, overall, I think Undercover Boss has an obvious inherent unfairness to it. The lucky few employees who come into contact with the incognito CEO --and I believe they are carefully vetted somehow because they all seem to be the best of the best -- end up with perks that no one else in the company gets.

With Slipsager, for example, one employee gets an-all-expense-paid trip to Hawaii with his wife for their anniversary; another -- the bus driver, Kenny -- got entry to the company's management program, and Henrik said the company would pay his college expenses as well.

What about the rest of the employees?

I should add that ABM was seriously impacted by 9/11, as Undercover Boss showed. Two of the workers who participated with him in Undercover Boss were at Ground Zero on "the day." Talking to them about their experiences was the hardest part of Slipsager's doing the show, he said.

A total of 17 ABM employees died on 9/11; hundreds worked at the World Trade Center when the towers fell, but some were on different shifts.

In fact, one of the gifts he gave to an employee who shared a segment with him on the show was a reunion for all the surviving employees who were at the World Trade Center on 9/11. Larry, the employee, has been with ABM for 37 years (he was also the one Slipsager gave the all-expenses-paid vacation to).

Maria, another employee with whom Slipsager worked -- scrubbing the toilets being the highlight -- lost her 27-year-old nephew on 9/11. He was a foreman for ABM and was working on the 96th floor of one of the towers.

Pop Singer's Daddy's a Drug Lord

2014-07-27T19:22:00.001-04:00

Melissa Plancarte

Daddy's a Drug Lord: Now Where's My Record Deal? | Vocativ: "At first glance, it’s a typical photo of a woman getting ready to go out. She wears a skimpy dress and lots of makeup while striking a seductive pose. The only problem: She’s the daughter of a notorious drug lord, and her sexy dress happens to carry the insignia of her father’s criminal organization.

A major scandal hit the Mexican Internet in recent weeks after aspiring pop singer Melissa Plancarte posted the selfie on Instagram. Her father, Enrique Plancarte, is one of Mexico’s most wanted men and a leader of the Knights Templar drug cartel, which is currently embroiled in a low-intensity civil war with the army, federal police and citizen vigilante groups in the central Mexican state of Michoacán.

While the authorities say they are fighting the Knights Templar and searching frantically for its leadership, two of Enrique Plancarte’s children are working on musical careers, openly building on their father’s reputation as a drug lord. And apparently they have even received some help from the state authorities. The controversy is a major embarrassment to the federal government, which has vowed to arrest Melissa’s father and placed a bounty of almost $1 million on his head."

Listen to 3,400-Year-Old Sumerian Music

2014-07-15T19:39:00.002-04:00

Clay tablets from 3,400 years ago contain a cult hymn.

The “world’s oldest song,” a Sumerian hymn translated from a clay tablet, can be heard from a recording made in the 1950s, when the tablets were first discovered in the ancient Amorite city of Ugarit. (See YouTube video of the music on continuation page.)

According to Dr. Heather Lynn: Sumerian Music: Listen to the World's Oldest Song: "These clay tablets date to approximately 1400 BCE, making the songs the oldest found so far. They are Hurrian songs that include a 3,400 year-old cult hymn called Hurrian Hymn to Nikkal, or A Zaluzi to the Gods. The hymn is known to archaeologists as simply, h.6, and is of an unknown composer(s).

Nikkal, or Nikkal-wa-Ib, was a goddess of Ugarit/Canaan and later Phoenicia. Her Sumerian equivalent is the goddess Ningal, the mother of Inanna and Ereshkigal. Nikkal was the goddess of orchards, whose name derives from Akkadian/West Semitic "´Ilat ´Inbi" meaning "Goddess of Fruit.”

In the sixties, Anne Kilmer, a professor of Assyriology at the University of California, interpreted the musical notation using mathematic calculations. According to Professor Kilmer, the tablets found were primarily lists of numbers for mathematical operations, along with instructions for a singer accompanied by a nine-stringed sammûm, a type of lyre. Once Professor Kilmer was able to understand the mathematical function of the coefficient numbers, researchers were able to conclude that the tablets were, indeed, related to numbers and not just a coincidence. From there, they were able to translate the music. "

Cautionary Tales Shouldn't Be Forgotten

2014-06-30T20:04:00.003-04:00

How many a-holes do you meet in the course of, say, a single year of your life?

Of course the question arises, what do I mean by an a-hole?

I am a writer -- and like most writers I have dreams of one day writing a bestseller, selling a great script, etc., and so forth (and making a ton of money). So how about we use a writer asshole, a weaselly, self-important jerk who thinks he's the new Quentin Tarantino?

I know the reference is so old by now, the newest crops of writers are probably saying, can't he come up with someone better than that?

Which would mean you don't know who I am talking about, which further means I hit paydirt because that is the whole point of this exercise: a cautionary tale that should be remembered.

Troy Duffy, back before he ruined a beaut of a deal with Miramax.

The great thing about this one particular a-hole's story is that it was captured on film -- and it's called Overnight (go and rent, stream, steal or borrow asap if you haven't seen it). The entire crash and burn was filmed and the idiot in question signed away all rights to the film about his own downfall!

As Kurt Loder wrote in Overnight: The Ego Has Landed the film "preserves such a spectacle in the form of a documentary — which is to say that the world-class flame-out it depicts actually happened, to an actual jerk.

"His name is Troy Duffy, a would-be genius who moved from Boston to Los Angeles to pursue his twin dreams of selling a script he’d written for a movie he wanted to direct, called “The Boondock Saints,” and, at the same time, scoring a record deal for his band, the Brood, with which he played guitar."

If I sold a script, I'd tell the band "good luck" and become a screenwriter, but that's just me. It's hard enough for an artist to make it in one medium, never mind two. But hey, if you got tons of arrogance, you'll probably be foolish enough to try...

The movie begins in the spring of 1997. The 28-year-old Duffy is working as a bartender at a West Hollywood tavern called J. Sloan’s, but his script has been making the rounds, and Harvey Weinstein, the powerful co-founder of Miramax Pictures, has offered him a dream deal for a first-timer: $300,000 for the script; a $15-million budget to make the movie (on which he’ll also have final cut); and a soundtrack side-deal for the Brood with Maverick Records.

What young screenwriter would not love to be in Duffy' position? Only Duffy was such an asshole he made a freshman mistake. He couldn't hide the great extent of his a-holism, and ended up losing everything with his bad attitude and big mouth.

"In an amazing instance of spontaneous inflation, Duffy’s head immediately swells up to the size of a small planet, and he turns overnight into a raging egomaniac.

“Everybody knows this is the best f—in’ project in Hollywood,” he rants to his cronies, in between chain-smoking cigarettes, knocking back drinks and bad-mouthing anyone who comes to mind (Keanu Reeves: “a talentless fool”).

And it doesn’t help that Weinstein — the man who discovered Quentin Tarantino! — has publicly called Duffy “a unique, exciting new voice in American movies,” or that he’s been written up in USA Today and The Hollywood Reporter, and featured on the cover of MovieMaker magazine. With his own personal film crew in tow to document his rise into the heavens of cinematic legend, Duffy (who has unwisely signed away any control he might have had over the resulting footage) is launched on an ego trip from which he may never return. All of this before he’s shot a single foot of film.

Then Harvey Weinstein stops taking his calls, and by the fall of 1997, Miramax has put “The Boondock Saints” into turnaround, meaning the project is up for grabs by any other studio that might want it. None does. And with production continually being pushed back, Maverick Records eventually bails out of the soundtrack deal. (Duffy learns this when he tries to drop by the Maverick offices and is told he’s not allowed in the building.) By now, the trade media are starting to look at the bartender-cum-director in a different light (headline: “Back Behind the Bar”). But then an independent production company picks up “The Boondock Saints,” and Duffy finds his movie back in play, although on a much-reduced budget. He finally manages to assemble a cast that includes Willem Dafoe, Scottish comic Billy Connolly and porn star Ron Jeremy. Shooting begins in Duffy’s hometown of Boston.

In addition to this cinematic resuscitation, the Brood have been offered a recording deal by Lava Records. This prompts the other members of the band, who have essentially been starving ever since they moved out to L.A. at Duffy’s behest, to ask him to front them modest loans against the Lava advance money — not cash outright, just loans. Duffy swats them away. “I don’t believe you deserve a thing,” he tells them. (One of the bandmembers is his own brother.)

Problems crop up quickly. Lava chief Jason Flom doesn’t like what he’s hearing from the Brood’s initial sessions. But what does he know? In a meeting with the band, Duffy says that although Lava has put up a quarter-million dollars to make the album, “Look how Jewish they’re being about it.” In addition, it’s been discovered that there’s another band called the Brood — an all-girl group from Portland, Maine, that’s been putting out records since 1992 — and they have no interest in selling the rights to their name. This doesn’t sit well with Duffy (according to “Overnight” co-director Tony Montana, he castigated the rival Brood as “a bunch of talentless f—in’ dykes”). But in the end, his Brood is compelled to release its album under another moniker — the Boondock Saints, what else? It sells a total of 690 copies. Lava quickly drops the band, and the band quickly breaks up.

One of the sweetest sequences in the annals of payback is the one in which Duffy and his retinue travel to France in the spring of 1999 to screen the finished “Boondock Saints” for distributors at the Cannes Film Festival. Ensconced in semi-swank digs on his talent agency’s tab, Duffy swings wildly between his usual unfounded braggadocio (“I know I’m one of the best there is, and I’m gonna be the best”) and — when distribution deals fail to materialize — clueless incomprehension. (“Where’s the offer? What’s going on?”) The movie finally does get released — barely — in January of 2000. It plays for one week in five theaters, dies, and goes straight to video.

Wouldn’t it be annoying if “The Boondock Saints” turned out to be a good movie, unjustly ignored? I recently picked it up on DVD (10 bucks), and can report that it’s a film that almost certainly wouldn’t exist if Quentin Tarantino hadn’t made “Reservoir Dogs” and “Pulp Fiction” a decade ago. “Boondock” is a vigilante tale pitting two young Irish-American men against all manner of urban scum. In hapless thrall to Tarantino, director Duffy cooks up offbeat forms of torment (a fat mobster gets his butt set on fire) and makes sure that somebody says “f—” about every 20 seconds. Willem Dafoe, who appears not to have been given much in the way of direction, plays a gay FBI agent who listens to opera on his Discman while swanning around bloody crime scenes. There’s none of Tarantino’s jacked-up pop-cultural fizz to any of this, and none of his snappy way with dialogue. The movie opens with a beautiful color sequence shot in a Catholic church, but quickly begins to drift — you can feel the energy leaking out of it as it stumbles along. But if you stay with it … well, I don’t know what would happen if you stayed with it. I couldn’t.

As a PS to the story, The Boondock Saints grossed over $50 million in domestic video sales of which Duffy received nothing due to the structure of the contract he signed with the distribution company. He sued Franchise Pictures and other undisclosed companies for royalties of the first film and rights to the sequel.

After a lengthy lawsuit, Troy Duffy, his producers and the principal cast received an undisclosed amount of The Boondock Saints royalties as well as the sequel rights.

In 2009, Duffy filmed the sequel to The Boondock Saints, titled The Boondock Saints II: All Saints Day, which grossed $11 million at the box office (it had a limited release of 524 screens) and has grossed over $50 million in DVD sales (as of June 2012). The film had an $8 million budget.

Currently, Duffy has several projects in development, including films "Blood Spoon Council" and "The Good King." He is in the process of writing "Boondock Saints III." As of a year ago he was halfway through that script, and the same two actors will reprise their roles as the vigilante brothers of Boston.

Duffy did achieve a level of success. In interviews I've read, he also seems to have mellowed out a bit. That said, he's spent 15 years of his life on two not-good films fortunate enough to have engendered a cult following.

But how much sooner and farther would he have gone as an artist if he would've kept all the celebrity crap in perspective and had not been such a major class A a--hole from the get-go?

The Girl in the Blue Mustang

2012-11-17T00:19:00.000-05:00

MSNBC hides crime-scene photo in plain sight.

Just watched a repeat of The Girl in the Blue Mustang, on MSNBC's Dateline.

I am addicted to those shows: Dateline ID, 48 Hours, On the Case With Paula Zahn. It is amazing how popular this genre has become; you can find a murder docudrama on 24/7 these days thanks to all the channels available on cable. I am old enough to remember when 2, 4, 5, 7, 9, 11 and 13 were it – and 13 rarely.

The episode I watched on the girl in the blue mustang was a repeat of an April airing. It had to do with Michelle O’Keefe, an attractive freshman who played as an extra in music videos and I believe other things, her last being a shoot for a Kid Rock video.

O'Keefe was returning from Los Angeles from that shoot when she was murdered on Feb. 22, 2000. The shooting occurred in a car park, early evening. O’Keefe’s friend had dropped her off and left, believing her friend was right behind her, following her out of the lot. Turns out Michelle was only re-parking her car in a darker spot so she could change out of her provocative clothing used in the video; she had to go to class.
Someone came up and shot her four times. The car, slipped into neutral or drive, had rolled out of the spot and seemingly into another one. This created some confusion – the car moved twice after Michelle’s friend saw her get into it. If you ask me, her friend should have waited for her. Didn’t she know Michelle was going to be changing her clothes there alone in a dark park-and-ride? The friend is whisked out of the show, probably to spare her feelings, but I think it was odd that she wouldn’t hang around. She must have realized her friend hadn’t followed her out of the lot once she was on the highway and the car wasn’t behind her. I wouldn't have left a woman alone in that situation.

The guilty, Jennings, and the dead.

Anyway, it turns out that a security guard ultimately was found guilty of the crime 10 years later, though he denied his guilt even after the verdict, going as far as spurning the family’s offer of forgiveness right there in the court room. (His guilt was prophesied on the Montel Williams show when a psychic told the inquiring, desperate family that a "Lee" or "Leon" wearing a blue uniform had killed their daughter. The killer's middle name was "Lee" and he was wearing a blue uniform.The murder was only famous in the small Northern California town where the family (and killer) lived and the murder took place; the story didn't go national until years later.)

The prosecution’s story, which I believe completely, is that Raymond Lee Jennings, the guard in the car park at the time, shot her four times in the chest and face after realizing she wasn’t a prostitute. Remember how she was dressed – and that she was in the process of undressing to change her clothes. Maybe he propositioned her, she reacted violently, he got scared and shot her. (He said something to the police about her looking like a hooker during questioning.) He was in the army and no stranger to shooting a weapon. (He also lived near her, which I believe creates grounds for speculation for another theory: He knew who she was and tried to rape her ... Michelle's mother, on the show, admitted to seeing this guy at the local supermarket, and Michelle was quite attractive. Any red-blooded male would had to have noticed her, especially if she lived nearby). In any event, he was a married man with four kids; I guess he'd rather kill someone than let them perhaps publicly accuse him of being a pervert. I mean, who knows?

What drew attention to Jennings was that he simply knew too much about the details of the crime, things that only the killer would know. He said he was doing a Sherlock Holmes to help the police, and had no idea his "speculation" would slingshot back and hit him in the ass.

Two previous trials ended with deadlocked juries (in both cases, the majority was convinced of his guilt). Jennings, an Army National Guardsman and Iraq war veteran, was sentenced to 40 years to life in prison at the third and final trial after he was finally found guilty.

Detectives grew suspicious of Jennings for a lot of reasons, but I think what was key was that he told them the young woman was still alive when he found her – he said he even saw a pulse beating in her neck! He did not make a single effort to try to revive her because he feared contaminating the crime scene. Who but the murderer would've even thought like that?

There was no physical evidence linking Jennings to the crime. No murder weapon was ever found.

I did find, almost hidden in a quick montage during the part of the show when the murder took place, the above posted crime scene photo of Michelle. I feel compelled to run it, even though you really can’t see much, to show the horror that was done to the girl. I don’t know why Dateline didn’t show it better – they spent two hours discussing the story of her death, but hide a crime scene photo in plain sight. Well, they aired it, so I am going to show it.

POSTSCRIPT: I have been mulling some other things since I wrote this. I mentioned the psychic on Montel; that is not the only possible example of the supernatural imposing itself on this case. Michelle herself held a strong view that she didn't have long to live, and told her parents of her fear. When the license plates arrived in the mail for her brand spanking new blue Mustang, the tag ended with the numbers 187 -- which freaked her out because she knew that was police code for homicide. She also spoke of the car park, and that she felt safe there because the place had a "security guard." Her words remained stuck in the parents' mind for some reason during the investigation.

Also, chances are the killer would have escaped justice if not for Michelle's family's constant vigilance: checking up on the police, hiring a lawyer and PIs, and keeping the media focused on the case. The prosecutor only went ahead with the trial after a discussion with Michelle's father, who convinced him of Jennings guilt based on a PowerPoint presentation based on videos of Jennings discussing the case, knowing things only the killer could have known.

Dark Net Browser Tor Hosts More "Revenge Porn"

2012-11-15T22:02:00.000-05:00

T or provides a safe way for you to enter and navigate the “dark net." It is an anonymizing web browser that once hosted the Silk Road, a former online drug market, and now seems to be the key promulgator of so-called Revenge Porn.

What is revenge porn? It is exactly what it sounds like. Revenge porn is usually recourse taken by a spurned lover, usually the man. To avenge his "broke heart," he uploads any sexually explicit images or videos of the woman in question. The smut usually includes the target's personal information, including the pictured individual's full name, links to Facebook and social media profiles and even, on occasion, home addresses. The resulting damage to a person's reputation, future relationships, and career can be quite severe, sometimes leading to additional real-world abuse of the victims.

Occasionally victims are known to have committed suicide. [Read the above story from the Economist, as well as this CNN article and this story from Slate.com.]

Unfortunately, few legal remedies are available. However, some states within the United States are making new laws, which are pending, though many critics describe these efforts as largely ineffective.

The founder of Pink Meth, a Tor Hidden Service that "allows you to post anyone's nudes and info," who calls himself “Olaudah Equiano,” says he’s not concerned about a lawsuit against Tor because its "creators cannot physically shut down a site that operates on its network."

“Domain registrars unfortunately choose to suspend any and all of our domains after they get contacted by a threatening attorney like Jason Van Dyke,” Equiano says. “Project like Pink Meth is simply much more suited as a hidden service as opposed to a regular website.”

With a normal domain registrar, lawyers can sue to obtain the records of someone who runs a particular website. But Tor doesn’t have or maintain those records. Tor operates by turning computers into anonymous “exit relay nodes”—so the operators of sites never fear the risk of exposure.

“This is idiotic to sue Tor as complicit in this,” one commenter notes on a popular Tor forum on Reddit. “That is like suing the Postal Service for a legally delivered firearm that was used in the commission of a crime, or blaming a cab driver for a fare who subsequent commits murder. This is an age old case of trying to kill the messenger for the contents of the message.”

Still, as more illicit sites migrate to Tor, there has been mounting legal pressure on Tor’s architects—and its users.

ARE YOU A VICTIM OF REVENGE PORN?

WE WANT TO TALK TO YOU!

EMAIL US AT EDDIE2843@GMAIL.COM OR LEAVE A COMMENT BELOW...

Casey Anthony Vlog: YouTube

2012-11-08T00:57:00.000-05:00

Courtesy of YouTube:

This is "the video" of Casey Anthony, talking shit. If she can formulate a complete thought in that empty head of hers, she certainly doesn't know how to verbally express it, that's for certain.

I prefer the jailhouse videos when she's crying to mommy and daddy like a little bitch.

And drop dead, Jose -- and the "back up defense attorney with the big middle finger," pal, I hope she's recording this thing -- as well as living -- in your fucking house.

The Most Interesting Ad in the World?

2012-07-08T11:36:00.000-04:00

The Most Interesting Man in the World is an advertising campaign for Dos Equis beer, produced by the marketing firm Euro RSCG for Cuauhtémoc Moctezuma Brewery, according to Wikipedia.

The ads feature Jonathan Goldsmith as "the world's most interesting man" and are narrated by Frontline's Will Lyman. Goldsmith has stated that his friend, actor Fernando Lamas -- an Argentine-born actor and director, and the father of actor Lorenzo Lamas -- was an inspiration for the character.

The advertisements first began appearing in the United States in 2006. They beat the crap out of the Energizer Bunny, I have to say.

I have enjoyed these commercials a lot, and I will actually stop fast-forwarding through them, as is my usual tendency when the commercials pop up. Ever since I watched the first one--I will say that although Dos Equis isn't my preferred brand, I will ask the bartender for one from time to time. when I drink beer, I will go for a Dos Equis, if the bar I am in serves it bottled.

"The most interesting thing about the man who plays the Most Interesting Man in the World, in those TV ads for Dos Equis beer, is that he is interesting, too, perhaps even superlatively so," writes the New Yorker.

At museums, he’s allowed to touch the art. . . . His blood smells like cologne. . . . Sharks have a week dedicated to him. . . . He once had an awkward moment, just to see how it feels. . . . The police often question him, just because they find him interesting. . . . [As for memory foam mattresses].There are some things mattresses shouldn't remember...

"These lines are recited gravely by the narrator of “Frontline” over faux-grainy clips of our Man cliff-diving in Acapulco, or splashing down in a space capsule, or lying in a hospital bed stitching up a wound on his own shoulder while surgeons and nurses stand around idly, chuckling at his jokes," the New Yorker writes.

"Goldsmith is not this man. Still, he has more in common with him than you do. A montage of highlights from the real life of Jonathan Goldsmith might include (had there been cameras present) footage of him rescuing a stranded climber on Mt. Whitney, saving a drowning girl in Malibu, sailing the high seas with his friend Fernando Lamas (the inspiration for his Interesting persona and, according to Goldsmith, “the greatest swordsman who ever lived in Hollywood”), and starting a successful network marketing business (“I was a hustler, a very good hustler”), which, for a while, anyway, enabled him to flee Hollywood for an estate in the Sierras. Among the outtakes might be glimpses of his stint as a waterless-car-wash entrepreneur. “I love the old philosophers,” he said. “I have a large library. I am not a die-hard sports fan. I love to cut wood.”

Read more: Dos Equis’ Most Interesting Man in the World : The New Yorker

Also:

Dos Equis website
The Most Interesting Man In the World The original site with comments by the campaign copywriters as well as all the actual videos used in the campaign
"Articles of fandom"
Dos Equis videos
SportsCenter parody with The World's Most Interesting Analyst
(YouTube video)

Death Did Not Diminish Her Beauty

2012-06-13T01:08:00.000-04:00

Stare at this picture closely, starting with the serene, composed features of the woman.

Notice she is grasping still her necklace; her feet casually crossed at the ankles. Then see

the ruined car atop which she landed after leaping from the Empire State Building....

The May 1947 edition of LIFE magazine did not include the above photo on its cover; rather, it was inside, filling an entire page. The photograph was taken serendipitously by a student photographer across the street when the woman landed atop a car, punching deep into it with her body, after leaping to her death from the Empire State Building.

Robert Wiles' photograph is considered to be among the most famous portraits of suicide ever made. Wiles "graphically and unforgettably captures the destruction—both literal and figurative—that attends virtually all suicides," as recently noted on LIFE.com, which reran the famous photo.

Evelyn McHale was 23 when she died. Little is known of her life -- or even of her final hours. Over the decades many have sought to fill in some of these gaps. Some "people have put enormous effort into uncovering as much about the troubled, attractive California native as they possibly could," Life noted.

One blog, Codex 99 features some interesting details.

As Life noted: "In Wiles’ photo, Evelyn looks for all the world as if she’s resting, or napping, rather than lying dead amid shattered glass and twisted steel. Everything about her pose—her gloved hand clutching her necklace; her gently crossed ankles; her right hand with its gracefully curved fingers—suggests that she is momentarily quiet, perhaps thinking of her plans for later in the day, or daydreaming of her beau."

The Codex 99 post provides insight into her final hours, and maybe her final thoughts:

Evelyn, still clutching a pearl necklace, looks disarmingly placid and composed – as if simply asleep. Around her, however, the broken glass and crumpled sheet metal of a car roof show the brutally destructive evidence of her 1050 ft jump. Some 60 years later the photo remains as haunting and affecting as when it was first published.

Evelyn Francis McHale was born 20 Sept 1923 in Berkeley, California. She was the sixth child (of seven) of Vincent and Helen McHale.

Around 1930 Vincent accepted a position of Federal Land Bank Examiner and the family moved to Washington, D.C. Shortly thereafter Helen left the family for unknown (although apparently material) reasons. They were divorced and Vincent took custody of the children. Later he moved the family to Tuckahoe, New York were Evelyn attended high school.

After high school Evelyn joined the Women’s Army Corps and was stationed in Jefferson, Missouri. After her service it was reported that she burned her uniform.

Evelyn then moved to Baldwin, New York to live with her brother and sister-in-law and took a job as a bookkeeper with an engraving company.2 It was here that she became engaged to Barry Rhodes, an ex-GI studying at Lafayette College in Easton Pa. They had intended to be married at Barry’s brothers house in Troy, NY in June 1947.

On 30 Apr she visited her fiance in Easton presumably to celebrate his 24th birthday and boarded a train back to NYC at 7 a.m., 1 May 1947. Barry stated to reporters that “When I kissed her goodbye she was happy and as normal as any girl about to be married.”

Of course we’ll never know what went through Evelyn’s mind on 66 mi train ride home. But after she arrived in New York she went to the Governor Clinton Hotel where she wrote a suicide note and shortly before 10:30 a.m. bought a ticket to the 86th floor observation deck of the Empire State Building.

Around 10:40 am Patrolman John Morrissey, directing traffic at Thirty-fourth Street and Fifth Avenue, noticed a white scarf floating down from the upper floors of the building. Moments later he heard a crash and saw a crowd converge on 34th street. Evelyn had jumped, cleared the setbacks, and landed on the roof of a United Nations Assembly Cadillac limousine parked on 34th street, some 200 ft west of Fifth Ave.

Across the street, Robert C. Wiles, a student photographer, also noticed the commotion and rushed to the scene where he took several photos, including this one, some four minutes after her death. Later, on the observation deck, Detective Frank Murray found her tan (or maybe gray, reports differ) cloth coat neatly folded over the observation deck wall, a brown make-up kit filled with family pictures and a black pocketbook with the note which read:

“I don’t want anyone in or out of my family to see any part of me. Could you destroy my body by cremation? I beg of you and my family – don’t have any service for me or remembrance for me. ~~My fiance asked me to marry him in June. I don’t think I would make a good wife for anybody. He is much better off without me.~~ Tell my father, I have too many of my mother’s tendencies.” [Note: Evelyn herself made the cross out; many newspapers that later ran the story didn't include the crossed-out details.]

LIFE magazine captioned the picture with: “At the bottom of Empire State Building the body of Evelyn McHale reposes calmly in grotesque bier her falling body punched into the top of a car.”

A single paragraph accompanied the image:

On May Day, just after leaving her fiancé, 23-year-old Evelyn McHale wrote a note. ... She went to the observation platform of the Empire State Building. Through the mist she gazed at the street, 86 floors below. Then she jumped. In her desperate determination she leaped clear of the setbacks and hit a United Nations limousine parked at the curb. Across the street photography student Robert Wiles heard an explosive crash. Just four minutes after Evelyn McHale’s death Wiles got this picture of death’s violence and its composure.

Note:

Since the Empire State Building was constructed in 1931 some 36 people have jumped from the building, including 17 from the 86th floor observation deck.

Evelyn was the 12th suicide from the building and the sixth to clear all of the setbacks. She was one of five people in a three week period to attempt suicide from the observation deck. In response a 10-ft wire mesh fence was installed and guards were trained to spot potential jumpers. After the barrier was installed people just jumped from other parts of the building, usually from office windows. The most recent suicide, however, was a 23-yo Yale student who managed to scale the observation deck fence on 30 May 2010.

North Korean leader Kim Jong-il dead: Reuters

2011-12-19T00:04:00.000-05:00

(Reuters) - North Korean leader Kim Jong-il died of a heart attack while on a train trip, state media reported Monday, sparking immediate concern over who is in control of the reclusive state and its nuclear program.

A tearful television announcer dressed in black said the 69-year old had died Saturday of physical and mental over-work on his way to give "field guidance."

He had suffered a stroke in 2008, but appeared to have recovered. North Korea's official KCNA news agency said he died at 8:30 a.m. Saturday (6:30 p.m. EST on Friday) after "an advanced acute myocardial infarction, complicated with a serious heart shock."

South Korea, still technically at war with the North, placed its troops and all government workers on emergency alert, Yonhap news agency reported. But Seoul's Defense Ministry said there were no signs of any unusual North Korean troop movements.

"Up until tonight, if anybody had asked you what would be the most likely scenario under which the North Korean regime could collapse, the answer would be the sudden death of Kim Jong-il," said Victor Cha, a Korea expert with the Center for Strategic and International Studies think-tank in Washington.

"And so I think right now we're in that scenario and we don't know how it's going to turn out."

The White House said President Barack Obama had been notified of the reports of Kim's death and it was closely monitoring and in touch with South Korea and Japan.

The United States was committed to stability on the Korean peninsula as well as to its allies, the White House press secretary said.

Japan's Foreign Minister Jun Azumi said his country had to be prepared for the unexpected on the security front.

Hitch: A personal memory from my 'Penthouse' years

2011-12-17T00:25:00.007-05:00

Controversial journalist Christopher Hitchens has finally succumbed to cancer

of the esophagus. I will miss his work, but I still have more than half his

memoir to relish. And I have the memory of my one phone call to him.

Early in my editorial career, I was a managing editor working for a subsidiary of Penthouse magazine; I worked on three pubs, actually: Penthouse Letters and Penthouse Forum (I was a senior editor on both mastheads), and Penthouse Hot Talk (of which I was the managing editor).

We never had to trouble ourselves with the "dirty" stuff -- we simply ran the photographs that Penthouse, for whatever reason, had rejected. If you've ever seen Hot Talk (henceforth to be referred to as HT), you'd never imagine they were "rejects." Bob Guccione made the final selections, so I suppose that women who didn't conform with his opinion of beauty were thrown in the "recycle" pile.

General Media, the parent company of Penthouse and the special publications group of which I was part, owned and operated an eclectic batch of pubs, some of which were quite profitable, at least for a time, such as Omni. GM also owned a large portfolio of several automotive magazine titles.

A year or two before the millennium, things started going seriously wrong for GM, as several troubling trends began converging on Guccione's empire. Wildly unsuccessful investments that Guccione had made years earlier -- including what was to be the Penthouse Boardwalk Hotel and Casino, which in the late 1970s, due to financial and legal difficulties, was never completed and a casino license never issued (the company lost some $160 million -- where was Nucky when they needed him?), and there was also a (never-built) nuclear fusion power plant, yes, a (never-built) nuclear fusion power plant. These "investments" were a key part of the financial woes which were mounting and wreaking havoc on the company's books.

[Please bear with me; I will get to Hitch. As Quentin Tarantino wrote, and said, "It's not reaching the destination, it's the ride that counts," or something like that.]

Also fueling the company's problems was the erosion of Penthouse's readership base due to intense competition from other pubs, plus a new animal that had began pawing at the door -- the Internet. On top of that, some of GM's once-steady revenue generators, such as Omni and Longevity, were losing their juice with readers, probably due to cutbacks, and sales were seriously falling. Ad revenue is usually not far behind, and wasn't.

In mid-2003, GM threw in the towel and filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. In October 2003, Penthouse magazine was put up for sale as part of a deal with its creditors. On Nov. 13, 2004, Guccione resigned as Chairman and CEO of Penthouse International, the parent of General Media, at the request of, yes, I am not kidding, the U.K. Royal Family -- though why the Q of E would care about what an aging, broke American smut peddler did in Manhattan defies all logic, in my humble opinion. (Guccione was an American of Sicilian descent, although the magazine was founded in 1965 in the United Kingdom.Also worth noting: At the height of his success, Guccione was one of the richest men in the United States, listed in the Forbes 400 ranking of wealthiest people. An April 2002 New York Times article reported Guccione as saying that Penthouse grossed from $3.5 billion to $4 billion over the 30-year life of the company, with net income of almost half a billion dollars.)

Guccione did have friends, we should remember. When it began to look exceedingly possible that he might lose his magnificent Manhattan digs -- which New York magazine described as "one of the biggest private houses in Manhattan, with 30 rooms" and a mere $5 million a year to maintain it -- some hedge fund managers and other financiers rushed to Guccione's aid to try to save it, but ultimately, it was gone, reportedly sold for $49 million -- $10 million below asking price -- to Wall Street financier Philip Falcone, founder of Harbinger Capital and LightSquared.

With his home went most of his famous art collection, as well as his personal fortune.The worst blow of all had already hit Guccione, no stranger to grief. In 1997 his wife/long-time companion Kathy Keeton, 58, a native of South Africa, reportedly died of complications from surgery to remedy an obstruction in her digestive tract.

FriendFinder Network now owns Penthouse. Guccione died of cancer on Oct. 20, 2010, two months before his 80th birthday, at Plano Specialty Hospital in Texas. He had had lung cancer for some time, according to his second wife, April Dawn Warren Guccione, who was reportedly at his side when he died. There is much speculation that April was handpicked for Guccione -- by Kathy Keeton before she died.

Back before these woes, in the heady, early 1990s when I was managing Hot Talk, we put together a formula, the "we" being me and the VP/Editorial Director in charge of this group.

With the recycled pics, we also ran plenty of content written by our readers in the form of the Penthouse letter, as it is classically known. Penthouse Letters also was filled with recycled pics and letters, as was the digest-size Forum, which was once available in supermarkets across the land, until one brilliant marketer/editor put the word "penis" on the cover -- and overnight every single one of those supermarkets dropped the mag. The man responsible for this was also involved with the television quiz show scandals of the 1950s. Imagine how much revenue just ceased at once from flowing into the company's coffers.

Anyway HT also had the pics and letters, but we also wanted to be more Penthouse-like; we had to be careful not to compete with the flagship pub, Penthouse itself, so we basically differentiated HT by filling it with reprints of articles and a lot of original fiction (from some pretty well-known writers, I might add, such as John Shirley, Robert Silverberg and, almost, Harlan Ellison; I actually knew Harlan through my grandfather. We paid him a few thousand to run one of his pieces, but he hadn't known how "dirty" we were. The VP must've soft pedaled that part to the famous writer of science fiction. So, I gave him a break and buried the story -- which means he got paid thousands to write something that never ran. No one on the pub ever even noticed. And from Harlan, I didn't even get a "thanks."

So at the time, in search of content, I was reading every newspaper and magazine I could get my hands on in search of interesting articles to reprint. I also hired writers to belt out sexy fiction, and we'd run all that copy alongside lots of booty pics and readers' letters (and, yes, readers really do write the letters -- whether the events portrayed in them are fact or fiction I of course am not in a position to say).

The VP was an older man, a veteran of Playboy, which didn't hurt when Guccione hired him for the special pubs group, supposedly at a cocktail party. This was the first real boss I ever had, probably the most powerful corporate honcho I ever worked closely with. He was a drunk and a pill popper, which I wouldn't have minded so much save for the fact that he was a nasty drunk and pill popper. His nose was too big for his leathery face, and busted blood vessels made it as colorful as a road map. Despite this, he and I got along pretty well in the two years before he fired me.

He was a wealthy man, as well, not only due to his compensation but from the fortune his wife's family had passed down to them. Yep, this drunk married a wealthy lady, who was also a successful writer of romance novels. But despite the affluence, this VP was a hardcore liberal, and read The Nation every week (I was a lefty at the time as well, and I read The Nation after he finished with the week's copy).

Hitchens was a regular contributor back then; this was years before his "conversion" into a rightwinger. I read one of Hitchens's articles -- it was about Mother Theresa, of all people! Hitchens found she came up short; that something was amiss with this woman, who had been proposed for sainthood. The article was only the first volley from Hitch's cannon over the Mother's bow. He followed her the rest of his life.

"[Mother Theresa] was a fanatic, a fundamentalist, and a fraud, and a church that officially protects those who violate the innocent has given us another clear sign of where it truly stands on moral and ethical questions," he would write for Slate.com in 2003.

We wanted to run it -- it was controversial, buried in the little-read Nation, and I had written a great cover line that even put a smile on the VP's face (the cover line has faded from my memory, alas). But would Hitch sell us the rights to reprint it?

Hitchens lived in DC at the time. I dialed information and soon his slight British voice was vibrating in my ear. A short, punchy, honest discussion followed. I broke the ice by bringing up a symposium I had attended about the recently released film JFK at which Hitch had spoken, along with Oliver Stone and Norman Mailer. Eventually I went on to the article on Mother Teresa, expressing my desire to print it.

Now, back in those days, working for Hot Talk, there was always what I called the moment of truth, when I would have to confess the name of the pub I was calling from, as well as describe its contents, at which time I expected most writers to hang up. Many did. But for some reason, I didn't think Hitch would. The VP agreed; we had both believed that Hitch was more than a reporter, he was an advocate -- and wanted his words spread far and wide to influence as many readers as possible.

Turns out me and the VP had called it right. Hitch didn't hang up. Trying to feel him out, I bluntly asked how much he wanted to be paid to let us print it. He said, and I remember this quite clearly, words to the effect of "Ed, I won't haggle with you over price -- I trust you enough to pay me what you consider fair." And our conversation was over.

He signed the contracts we mailed him, and he returned them. We sent his check. (No email back then; no Internet, either, and while we had started using computers -- which served merely as word processors, we saved and transported stories on floppy disks -- we all still had typewriters, one in every office.) We ran the article.

And that was my brush with Hitch.

I have been reading him ever since, and am now reading the memoir he finished before he died, having written it while the cancer slowly, uselessly started the process of removing him from our world forever. I will miss him, but unlike most, I have a small, revealing memory of him, one that puts a smile on my face, though he probably forgot about me a cool minute after the check cleared, if not after the phone call had ended.

One of the final homes for his unique brand of journalism was The Huffington Post, which is running an interesting story and video about him on the site now.

"Less than two years after being diagnosed with esophageal cancer, the fiery polemicist and public intellectual Christopher Hitchens died last night, at 62," reports the huffingtonpost.com

.
"His dominance in the age of the internet leaves us with a seemingly inexhaustible supply of in memoriams -- there's Hitchens on "Politically Incorrect," calling Mos Def "Mr. Definitely" as they spar over the ethics of nuclear armament, Hitchens"improving" Joe Scarborough as a host, Hitchens as a natural on "The Daily Show" and a regular on Fox, a Hitch-centric talk beamed to his bedside at the first sign the end could be near, led by Stephen Fry, Sean Pean, Salman Rushdie, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Buckley, Martin Amis, and the rest of the elite crowd he included among his closest friends, Hitchens drinking while discussing Youtube, Hitchens smoking while discrediting Mother Teresa [See? You thought I was lying about it, I bet!], Hitchens sick and Hitchens well. There is also of course the work Hitchens called "most important" in his life, to the point of nursing cancer-forming habits to support it -- his brilliant, iconoclastic writing, for Vanity Fair, Slate, and even the Huffington Post.

"It's a bountiful harvest to sort through, even excepting his two dozen books, and we recommend the publisher's trailer below for Hitchens' 2010 memoir "Hitch 22" as a useful grounding point -- a compilation of 22 Hitchens moments that, like all of Hitchens' so-called "moments", represent his life's work and philosophy in miniature. What's remarkable about the long-ranging montage is the consistency of spirit on display since Hitchens' time as a precocious newcomer with less girth and more hair. It appears his devotion to his own high standards did indeed last, as he predicted it would then, "til' he dropped."

WATCH VIDEO: Christopher Hitchens: Remembering Him

NYC -- How It Evolved from Most Dangerous City to Safest: Salon.com

2011-11-20T21:33:00.001-05:00

No one would argue that New York City is simply not the same city it was back during the 1970s to 1980s, and the results are good, crime wise, although there is something a bit boring and antiseptic about the city today.

In a Salon.com book review there is a theory put forth explaining how this change happened -- and the book will surprise you. The New York of the film "Death Wish" is today a city out of Disneyland, if you ask me.

"In the 1970s, ’80s and early ’90s, New York was viewed as one of the world’s most dangerous metropolises — a cesspool of violence and danger depicted in gritty films like 'The Warriors' and 'Escape From New York.' Friends who lived here during that time talk of being terrified to use the subway, of being mugged outside their apartments, and an overwhelming tide of junkies. Thirty-one one of every 100,000 New Yorkers were murdered each year, and 3,668 were victims of larceny," the story says.

"Today, in an astonishing twist, New York is one of the safest cities in the country. Its current homicide rate is 18 percent of its 1990 total — its auto theft rate is 6 percent. The drop exceeded the wildest dreams of crime experts of the 1990s, and it’s a testament to this transformation that New Yorkers now seem more likely to complain about the city’s dullness than about its criminality."

How did this happen? According to a new book by a Berkeley law professor, the reasons for this evolution, despite the popularly held view, is not Giuliani’s “zero tolerance” bluster,Salon.com reports.

"In his fascinating new book, “The City that Became Safe,” Franklin Zimring, a professor of law and chairman of the Criminal Justice Research Program at the University of California at Berkeley [reports that] it was a combination of strategic policing and harm reduction by the New York Police Department. Police targeted open-air drug markets, and went after guns, while leaving drug users largely alone. The implications of the strategy could make us revise not only the way we think about crime, but the way we think about our prison system and even human nature."

Read full story: What really cleaned up New York - Salon.com

Kershaw on the Last Days of the Third Reich

2011-11-19T02:43:00.001-05:00

The German city of Hanover was
bombed to utter ruin in 1943.

During 1944, many other cities in
the Third Reich met the same, or
worse, fate.

In a SPIEGEL interview, the best-selling British historian Ian Kershaw talks about the last days of the Third Reich, why the Germans persevered when it was clear that all was lost and the devastating consequences of the failed July 20, 1944, attempt to assassinate Hitler.

SPIEGEL: Professor Kershaw, you have spent the last three years studying the collapse of Nazi Germany. In the end, are we left to shake our heads in amazement at the absurdity of the final phase, or do you, as a historian, also feel something akin to admiration for the perseverance of the Germans?

Kershaw: The head-shaking predominates, at any rate. I'm convinced that we English would have given up much earlier. It's certainly unusual for a country to continue fighting to the point of complete self-destruction. It's the sort of thing we usually see in civil wars, but not in conflicts in which hostile nations are at war with one another.

"We English would have given up

much earlier. It's certainly unusual

for a country to continue fighting

to the point of complete self-

destruction."

SPIEGEL: The question of why the Germans persevered for so long is the starting point of your new book. What would have been the obvious thing to do?

Kershaw: In any armed conflict, there is eventually a point at which one side realizes that it's over. If the people in power don't give up but instead continue to plunge the country into ruin, there is either a revolution from below, as was the case in Germany and Russia near the end of World War I, or there is a coup by the elites, who attempt to save what can still be saved. An example of that is the overthrow of Benito Mussolini in Italy in July 1943.

SPIEGEL: What is the latest point at which the Germans should have recognized that they could no longer win the war?

Kershaw: I would say in the summer of 1944, after the successful landing of the Allies in Normandy and the Russians' enormous territorial gains in the east. At that point, the war was objectively lost, even if the German public didn't see it that way. But starting in December 1944, after the failed Ardennes Offensive (ed's note: also known as the Battle of the Bulge), it was also clear to the power elite in the German Reich that there was nothing left to be gained militarily. At that point, it would have made sense to enter into capitulation negotiations.

Read full story: Ian Kershaw on the Last Days of the Third Reich: 'Hitler's Influence Was Fatal' - SPIEGEL ONLINE - News - International

Casey Anthony 'Assassination Attempt' Fake: Baez

2011-11-19T01:12:00.000-05:00

"You may want to consider donning a pair of quality hip waders before delving into the latest Casey Anthony article in the National Enquirer, according to her lawyer," reports The Huffington Post.

"None of it is true," Anthony attorney Jose Baez told the website.

The article in question, "Casey Anthony Survives Assassination Attempt," appears in the tabloid's latest issue. The Enquirer reports that someone found 25-year-old Anthony's secret hideout in Florida and placed on her door a threatening note that read, "I know where you are, I'm coming to put a bullet through your brain."

See related post here.