SO JEALOUS of this kiddo. Do enjoy this photo shoot of Kiddo Robocop tooling around Detroit. Maybe I don’t actually want to poison children on Halloween! (via)

Congratulations to Britain, which has stuffed itself to brim to become the tubbiest country in Europe and the fourth fattest worldwide. It trails only Australia, where childhood obesity is such a problem that schoolchildren are too fat to fit in their chairs, the United States (look around you) and the United Arab Emirates. So a very solid effort, but still some room for improvement. Maybe they should focus more on their drinking; plenty of empty calories there.

Great. Here during the current mass extinction event, the first of its kind to be caused by the activity of a single species (that would be human beings), a global conservation study released at this week’s UN Biodiversity Summit in Japan says that one-fifth of all animal and plant species on the are now endangered. Awesome animals, like the Siberian tiger, the largest of all the big cats; and the fossa, the top of Madagascar’s food chain, a creature so interesting, that zoologists don’t even know what family it belongs to (is it a type of cat, a mongoose, what?); and the sad and adorable and just recently discovered snub-nosed monkey of Myanmar, already so oppressed by its anatomy and environment that it has to sit with its head tucked between its knees whenever it rains — all on the brink of nevermore.

You know who seems to be thriving, though? (Besides bed bugs and Asian carp, I mean.) Mosquitoes! The most hateful, annoying, torturous plague of a life-form evolution ever came up with. And the most lethal! Mosquitoes are responsible, through the malarial parasite they carry, for one human death every forty seconds (mostly children, mostly in Africa). Mosquitoes have been responsible, in fact, for half of all human deaths since the stone age! Mosquitoes are doing so well, in fact, that a single strain, the Anopheles Gambiae of Africa, is mutating into two separate species. Each adapted to suit different environmental conditions, so more and more of the planet can be covered in their teeming swarms.

So that’s the future we have to look forward to: less species of everything else, more species of malarial mosquitoes.

It’s Bryan Ferry vs. Brian Eno in the battle of Roxy Music founders with new solo records out. I’ve listened to the new Ferry a couple of times, and it’s… fine. It’s exactly what you’d expect from a Bryan Ferry solo record. (I do love the way “You Can Dance” cribs its opening from Roxy’s “True to Life.”) Haven’t heard the Eno yet but, really, could it possibly be bad?

This is the laziest op-ed ever written by lawyers, on the subject of Sandra Day O’Connor’s support for Ballot Question 1 in Nevada, which would move that state to join the 25 others that pick judges by commission instead of by ballot. Entirely setting aside questions of how we should pick judges, the writers (David Rivkin Jr., who is the attorney representing the states suing the federal government over “Obamacare,” by the way, and Andrew Grossman, who seems to be of the Heritage Foundation!) actually believe something crazy! They say that because O’Connor recently was on the Ninth Circuit panel that upheld Arizona’s proof-of-identity-while-voting law but struck down Arizona’s proof-of-citizenship-while-voting law (a law that has improperly prevented naturalized citizens from voting, by the way), that now “critics of hers argue” (ooh, some critics somewhere argue, good one) “that Hispanics in Nevada — and others who agree with her Arizona ruling — might now vote yes on Ballot Question 1 simply because of the Justice’s endorsement.” Got that? It’s almost like they believe the court issued a pro-Hispanic ruling — not a pro-America ruling. An odd position to take, in light of the law’s consistent and consistently right history of removing obviously discriminatory obstacles to the right to vote. They apparently do not believe in the equal right to vote. So, look out, Nevada! Mexicans, and worse, Mexican sympathizers: now they all be takin’ orders from Sandy Day.

As a member of a class of French aristocrats that most Americans would mistake for characters in a faintly Francophobic Monty Python sketch, Christine de Védrines should be forgiven for making unusual choices. An anxious heiress to a centuries-old fortune, she, along with much of her immediate and extended family, entrusted their fortunes and fates to a charismatic gentleman with a penchant for conspiracy theories. The result? For Christine, routine, cultish beatings; for the others, brainwashing, isolation and bankruptcy. It’s an uncomfortably fascinating story; vivid and salacious to the point of doubt, and so incredibly specific that it can barely be considered cautionary.

Barely. Somewhere in or around Washington, D.C, a teenager, similarly anxious and also (allegedly!) destined for immense wealth, has been appealing for help with his millions on the Internet. He too is drawn to a charismatic leader with deeply sociopathic tendencies.

On Reddit recently, he asked this:

“What would you do with one billion USD or even several hundred million? I need your help reddit!!”

Then, as if to excuse himself, “I’m 19.”

The anonymous heir’s story goes something like this: He’s a precocious teen who dropped out of college in a fit of entrepreneurship. He has never needed to worry about money, though his family’s only conspicuous Rich People habit is apparently constant travel. Soon, though, his life will change. He stands to inherit up to a billion dollars from his grandfather, an Indian infrastructure magnate.

His first order of business after grasping his looming reality? To consult with Reddit, the often fascinating, occasionally disappointing and aggressively nerdy nerve center of the internet. True to form, the users’ first responses were jokes:

• “Bring back Firefly….. “ (responses include “This guy is our only hope” and “Ctrl-F firefly, upvote.”)

• “Two chicks at the same time.”

• “So I need to send you my contact information so you can move it out of the country?” (Which elicited the worrying response from the heir, “why move it out?”)

When they’re not joking around, though, Reddit users have been known to lapse into state of extreme earnestness. A few posters offered surprisingly thorough screeds for and against the concept of charity, and one allegedly similarly endowed user even posted some first-hand advice:

Dude, first off, beware beware BEWARE. Be extremely wary. To put it bluntly, you come across as idealistic and naive. These are not objectively bad qualities to possess, but they absolutely can be if they result in you putting trust in people who do not deserve it. If you do end up possessing such an enormous amount of money, a certain number of people you meet will be looking to take advantage of you, and these people will almost certainly be much more adept than you in financial and legal matters. Please please please do both me and yourself a favor and watch out.

That so many of Reddit’s users took the original poster’s request seriously and responded with well-intentioned, if not always practical, suggestions is nearly as surprising as the poster’s decision to turn to Reddit in the first place. So we are all money managers now, I think?

I reached out to the original poster, who didn’t want to be identified and cut our correspondence short. (“I would like to remain anon,” he wrote, followed by silence. So: no confirming his story.) No matter — he left a trail of largely convincing and occasionally bizarre responses in his own thread. They paint a queasy portrait. But it’s a familiar portrait! Let’s call it “Young Money: A Study in Self Awareness.” (It’s a watercolor.)

On being a self-made man:

“I am currently, trying to build myself on my own. Doing good so far. I am a Young Entrepreneur, have received funding for a start up on my own through my current network. I originally thought that people would judge me by my age and not take me seriously but I was wrong, and I am glad.”

On travel:

“USA, Canada, Mexico, Brazil, Spain, France, Germany, UK, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, South Africa, Taiwan, China, Italy, India, Japan, Egypt, the Netherlands, Sweden, Australia, if I remember any more I’ll let you know.”

On philanthropy:

“Actually, I was thinking of putting some money to actually make an ad that if you click, you do in fact get the product it says you will get for free. But you will have to be lucky to get to the ad. I hate all of the internet ads that say, click here to get a free ipod, when I know I never will….”

On bootstraps:

“I was a Dishwasher for a year!”

On priorities:

“my parents believe in me. None of us care about money. Neither do I.”

On modesty:

“I have fun doing business. Hence, I dropped out of college, and on my own got a job as Head of Enterprise Business development and built a network on my own that includes the CIO of NASA, CTO of Lockheed Martin, various venture capitalists and other executives.”

On hopes:

“My ultimate goal is to help me people make their good ideas into a reality.”

On requests for startup cash:

“will reach back out to you.”

And finally, on trust:

“Wow!!! I met this guy at an airport from Nigeria. He asked me to do business with him and wanted money. And I looked his name up on google and scam is what pops up first!”

Oh dear.

He seems like a nice guy with pure intentions. He also seems (suspiciously?) like a composite character, created by someone who’s had more than a few brushes with young wealth: He’s assured, naive, and articulates his insecurities about personal success as matter-of-fact fits of heavily caveated boasting. But again, he seems like a well-meaning guy, and his postings suggest that he is less concerned about doing the COOLEST STUFF EVER than he is about determining what duties will come with his new wealth, and how to fulfill them.

We’ll probably never know if he follows Reddit’s best or worst advice, or if he just goes through with his own stated plans, or if, you know, he’s real. But he’s off to a bad start. He hasn’t acted on the only piece of indisputably good advice in the entire, thousand comment thread:

“To have already advertised yourself on the internet like this is opening yourself up to trouble. If I were you, the first thing I would do would be to delete this post.”

John Herrman writes about tech for Gizmodo, SmartPlanet, PopMech and anywhere else that will have him. He spends slightly less time on Reddit than the above suggests.

by Mark Lotto

Bride of Frankenstein was the very, very best of the Universal horror movies, because its director, James Whale, was as perverse as any mad scientist and as gentle as his monster. After the bride’s black hair is stood up on end and shot through with white, and after she screamingly rejects the monster’s plaintive pleas for friendship, and after he detonates the laboratory with both of them inside it, I turned off the big-box TV — this was years ago, when I was an emptier person living in an empty apartment in an empty city — and I lay there feeling lonesome and ugly instead of skittish and jumpy. I’ve never seen it since, or wanted to.

But most Halloweens, I catch at least a few minutes of Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein.

Bud Abbott and Lou Costello were a comedy duo for 32 years, before their popularity was overtaken by Martin and Lewis and their fortunes were taken by I.R.S. auditors, before Lou died of a heart attack and Bud ended up doing their old routines onstage with a Lou-impersonator named Candy Candido. They made a whole bunch of movies that made a whole bunch of money, including this one, and they also spent years perfecting six or so minutes: “Who’s on First?”

“Who’s on First?” is the sort of reference you always chuckle knowingly at, and maybe you even remember seeing it, start to finish, that one time or another. Watch it again, though, or for the first time. Nowadays, our comedies of errors are timed out like “The Office” or “Parks and Recreation,” where any ill-considered remark, and the awkward pause after, dilates into an excruciating eternity. But in “Who’s On First?”, each further miscommunication compels Bud and Lou to go faster and grow more furious, like racecar drivers trading paint. It is beautiful.

Back to Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, which was made in 1948 and was maybe the most successful horror-comedy movie until Young Frankenstein or Ghostbusters. Tall, dandyish Bud and round, boiling-over Lou play Florida baggage clerks who deliver to MacDougal’s House of Horrors museum crates containing the actual Count Dracula (Béla Lugosi) and the actual Frankenstein’s monster (Glenn Strange), not the wax dummies listed on the packing slips. Dracula, for his part, is scheming to remove Lou’s brain and stick it into the monster’s body, a plan which everyone involved finds patently ridiculous. Explains Lou, while begging for his life: “I’ve had this brain for 30 years and it hasn’t worked yet. Ask me how much one and one is, Frankie. I don’t know.”

It’s funny to see Béla Lugosi again in this age of diamond-sparkling, designer-dressing vampires who, unlike the rest of us, want to go back and redo high school. Lugosi was 66 when he appeared in Abbott and Costello and is described as “tall, aristocratic,” with a “far-away look in his eye.” But he is exactly as gross and tiresome as you’d imagine a Romanian count would be after centuries of sucking blood and hypnotizing raven-haired maidens and turning back and forth into a screechy, animated bat. Glenn Strange, who played Frankenstein’s monster in this picture and three or four others, is the weak link, neither as scary nor as sad as Karloff, just big and dumb and weaponized, almost a forerunner to Michael Meyers or Jason, an unstoppable force in search an immovable babysitter. These actors, it’s important to note, don’t parody themselves, like they’re on SNL or “Scooby Doo.” They play their parts precisely as they did in many other Universal pictures, hammy as usual but no hammier, which makes them straight men of a sort, but not punch lines.

Then there’s Lon Chaney Jr. as Larry Talbot, “a man who is pure in heart and says his prayers by night” who becomes “a wolf when the wolfbane blooms and the autumn moon is bright.” In addition to having contracted lycanthropy like it’s a venereal disease, he is cursed to pursue his fellow abominations among the matte-painted moors and expressionist watchtowers and high-contrast lighting of the Universal backlots, always nipping at their heels, ending every flick in pyrrhic victory, beginning every sequel defeated and dispirited.

When Bud and Lou open the door Talbot insisted they lock him behind the night before, only to discover all the furniture’s been ripped to shreds and all the paintings knocked askew, they admonish the poor man: “Boy, what a bender he must have been on last night.” Which is basically right on: Lon Chaney Jr. has the same hangdog eyes and muttering, spastic mouth and careful way of explaining himself as a drunk trying to keep steady and clear just long enough to accomplish a single meaningful task. This is what would happen if Fred Exley fought monsters, in addition to the ones, you know, inside himself. Except then the full moon catches him like a spotlight and the gent’s hands turn hairy and his hair is suddenly perfect. Draw blood!

In other words, the Wolf Man is too afflicted, too self-defeating, to be of much help, and mostly he’s more trouble. Which Abbott and Costello definitely do not need. Though the duo went on, in later films, to …Meet the Killer, Boris Karloff, …Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and …the Mummy, bumbling was more their bailiwick, not grit or guts or attacking anyone other than one another.

Sure, yes, do I kind of wish it was the Marx Brothers in this mess? I can almost see it: a Halloween costume party at Margaret Dumont’s country house, where the villains mix freely among the costumed guests. The Count has his vorticular eyes on Zeppo’s love interest. The Wolf Man pads over to the bar and orders a piña colada. Frankenstein’s monster even gets caught up in a dance number or two. But in the end it would be no contest: Groucho and Harpo and Chico are like bad, wild weather and you just pray that by the time they blow back out to sea, your house is still standing. They’d fuck up the monsters’ plans along with everyone else’s night and never even notice.

But Abbott and Lou Costello are more human and more accessible, and that was their genius. Bud spends most of the movie refusing to believe that he’s in a monster movie. And Lou is so out-of-his-gourd terrified that he repeatedly loses the ability to speak English, or form words at all. They act, in other words, like each of us would in exactly the same situation. Lou and Bud don’t arm themselves with stakes and garlic and silver bullets, and they don’t act bravely, like Grace Kelly snooping around the murderer’s one-bedroom in Rear Window, or maddeningly, like Jamie Lee Curtis running back up the stairs in Halloween. They don’t even make that many jokes. They remain in disbelief as long as they can rationally manage, and then they run for their damn lives.

And when they’ve finally escaped the haunted island, only to discover they’re sharing their rowboat with a cigarette suspended in mid-air like a firefly — i.e., the Invisible Man (Vincent Price’s voice, in a cameo) — Bud and Lou do the only sane thing. They jump right in the river.

Mark Lotto is an editor at the New York Times.

Here’s Nick Dentons’s memo on today’s top Gawker story, an anonymous first-person account of a date with politician Christine O’Donnell, celebrating its “brilliant packaging” and other fine qualities. His advice for journalists: “it’s better to get out of the way of the pictures.”

From: Nick Denton
Date: October 28, 2010 3:52:52 PM EDT
To: [EDITORIAL]
Subject: Getting out of the way of the story

http://beta.gawker.com/#5674353/i-had-a-one+night-stand-with-christine-odonnell

This Gawker scoop is an example of brilliant packaging. The composite image that shows up on the front is good; the pull quotes; etc.

But, best of all: the story was written in the first person. The journalist is a ghost-writer. The account is much more compelling as a result. As is the headline.

And this points to a general rule on the web. Writers are successful to the extent that they can sublimate their egotism and get out of the way of the story.

Sometimes a video or photo is undermined — not enhanced — by the length of the companion text.

That atmospheric video of the Iceland volcano works because it takes the viewer there; it and the track create a mood. A TV reporter friend of mine, when I told him how successful these clips were, moaned to me: but what do I do? He wants to be the guy at the rim of the volcano, saying: “This is Matt Wells, reporting from Iceland.”

But it’s better to get out of the way of the pictures.

Unless the story happened to you, or the piece revolves around your opinion, in which case get in the way as much as you can!

This is the ridiculously long story of how I exchanged regular deodorant-antiperspirants (Secret, Dove, Degree, etc. — the ones that make you smell nice) for natural deodorants (Tom’s, Jason’s, the crystals, etc. — the ones that make you disgusted with yourself, your body, your clothes, and the haze of putrescence that surrounds you at all times). Here we go. READ MORE

“The notion of ‘fitting’ inside a urinal may not appeal to everyone. But that’s a pretty fair description of the experience. These big boys are so spacious and tall, and with shoulders that extend almost behind you and certainly far enough that no one can look over and make unfair judgments, that one might go so far as to describe the experience of relieving yourself as enveloping, even nurturing. And perhaps most important of all — certainly for the quality of life of subsequent bar patrons — the margin of error is huge. You basically can’t miss.”
 — This is a rather enjoyable celebration of the urinals at Old Town Bar, which is indeed a terrific place to piss. The fixtures turn 100 years old next week.

Photo by larryfishkorn, from Flickr.