Oh, right, the mascots for the London Olympic Games. These are them! Meet Wenlock and Mandeville. Historical context:

Wenlock is named after Much Wenlock, a village in Shropshire which held an event in the 19th century which inspired the modern Games. Mandeville is named after the hospital at which the Paralympic Games were founded. Though both sound like Tolkein characters, the names are quite good and are the only thing that makes the mascots distinctly British.

Additional context: Many British people only have one eye, due to all the knifing and glassing. Plus, these strange, amorphous things do indeed capture the spirit of the age. They’re adorable, harmless, and hope to be in your face for the next few years. Give one a pink tie and one a blue tie and you could call them Cameron and Clegg.

by Sean McNally

Many patients will find after a course of treatment that they are ready to stop taking Zoloft® (sertraline HCl), or that Zoloft may be contraindicated for a new medication. What follows is a list of common side effects of Zoloft withdrawal in their usual order of appearance over time, to allow doctors and their patients to be aware of the implications.

1. Disconsolate or self-disparaging thoughts; feelings of hopelessness

2. Stomach cramping; nausea

3. Insomnia; body fatigue; lightheadedness

4. Migraine headaches

5. Extra sensory perception; sharpening of memory

6. Fugue reactions accompanied by compulsion to return to Witch Mountain

7. Glorgmagog; hot triangle; Kenneth????; green triangle; HOT SQUARE; flower triangle.

8.

Related: The 32 Possible Side Effects of Using CHANTIX, a Non-Nicotine Prescription Medicine Specifically Developed to Help Adults 18 and Over Quit Smoking, In Order

Sean McNally leads a blameless life and is innocent of all wrongdoing.

by Brad Nelson

Harvey Milk, an Athens, Ga. doom metal band, release their seventh album, A Small Turn of Human Kindness, this week. The doom metal palette is generally somewhat monochromatic-it is usually two-to-five people approximating Black Sabbath and Blue Cheer in slow motion. These bands make the noise of the ancients if the ancients were truckers with bags of glue. And hey, maybe they were?

Where Harvey Milk differ is in white space. They litter silence the length of canyons in their thick and severe music. The lulls arrive like sudden dips in the heart monitor. It would seem a reprieve from the actual songs, which are overrun with tones that resound in the body like trauma.

Instead, it is completely horrifying. It is the moment when you realize the monster is entirely real because it can breathe.

Harvey Milk are often mentioned in tandem with the Melvins, their colleagues in doom. Former Melvins bassist Joe Preston has, on separate occasions, recorded the band and performed with them. They are also like the Melvins in that their form of abuse is as much a source of laughter as it is the source of our shaking. Which is awfully considerate of them. We all need to take refuge in comedy.

The new record swells, distends, mimics the slow rending of earth. It is desolate and spare. In this way, it deliberately recalls their second record, Courtesy and Good Will Toward Men. I refuse to discuss Courtesy and Good Will Toward Men. It knows what I look like when I am naked.

It also refers to their 2006 release, Special Wishes, in which their typical drawn gait met the stylistic turn of 1997’s The Pleaser, which is an AC/DC record about hemorrhaging. The moments where twin guitar lines and escalating melody invade Kindness-that is Special Wishes making itself known, twisting its ludicrous body so that we may retrieve some pleasure from the otherwise bleak cavity.

I will now discuss Courtesy and Good Will Toward Men. I first heard it in 2006. Thinking of it now, I feel the old fear stirring. It unfolds slow, as trees drawn upward by the sky. It is as influenced by modern classical as it is by noise and death.

Their first record, My Love is Higher Than Your Assessment of What My Love Could Be, quotes Gustav Holst’s “Jupiter” amid the tumult of “The Anvil Will Fall”….

….but this is in the service of high comedy. Courtesy wants for more. Courtesy wants to carve the whole face of Jesus out of bonemeal. Harvey Milk resolve to cover Leonard Cohen when it is necessary.

They also subvert their own engagement thereof. In an interview with Self-Titled, Harvey Milk detail the conceptual heft of Kindness:

This was made for all the people that think Courtesy is our best album. We came up with the most pretentious music we possibly could, and since that wasn’t enough, we wrote ridiculous words about total bullshit and named the songs in the most annoying fashion we could imagine. But we thought we could keep pushing the envelope; we named the album the same thing as a song on another album of ours (My Love Is Higher…) and then designed an album cover that truly shows you how much we care-it’s a picture of some trees. We have reached the point of complete and total creative bankruptcy, but at least we made it shorter than the last record, so you can get through listening to it and return it to the store for a refund faster.

Whether the band’s active malice toward their every release (sans Special Wishes) is feigned or real, they regard their work with no self-seriousness, which makes my attitude, how I receive them like compound fractures, ridiculous. I am impacted by jokes and filler.

Whatever. Jokes and filler can be transformed through overzealous perspective. Whatever the technical detail of their assembly, Courtesy and Kindness bears an enormous center of gravity.

If you would like to hear it, A Small Turn of Human Kindness is streaming at NPR, where I understand they are producing the new fantastic naive children of oblivion who will know the plight of Mexican crops but will not be able to look each other in the eye.

Harvey Milk will laugh at Brad Nelson and then devour him.

What’s Next, A Mountain-Climbing Infant?

Is 13 too young of an age to climb Mt. Everest, and also scale the highest mountains on the world’s other six continents (yes, that includes Antarctica)? Well, Jordan Romero (the grinning moppet at left) doesn’t care if you think the answer might be yes; along with his dad, the kid has spent the last three years scaling the Seven Summits while toting around a curiously non-denominational grab bag of good-luck totems that include a cross, a rabbit’s foot, and a pair of kangaroo testicles. He climbed the Alaskan mountain Denali at age 11, and he’s on target to reach the peak of Everest as early as Sunday. Fewer than 200 people have accomplished this feat, and should Romero do it, he’ll beat the “youngest person ever” record by some four years. It may not surprise you that some tongues are wagging over this!

Erik Weihenmayer, who in 2001 became the only blind person to summit Everest and has climbed the Seven Summits, is among those who have pondered the wisdom of allowing a 13-year-old to attempt such an arduous and dangerous feat.

“My gut reaction was that 13 seems young to have the emotional maturity to decide to be there himself,” Weihenmayer said. “When I went up the mountain, I had people like one of my heroes, Ed Viesturs, saying I was going to slow my team down and kill them and myself, so I won’t be a dream crusher.”

Wow, the old “well, I don’t think you can do it, but I won’t tell you in order to make you believe in yourself” trick? That’s a hell of a lot more underminery than the dumb “peaking early” jokes that I was trying to make, that’s for sure.

Meet the topi antelope, a denizen of sub-Saharan Africa. Topi of both genders are known to “warn” predators away from attacking them by delivering a loud snort, but apparently the male of the species has figured out that there is a benefit to the occasional snort even when no predator is present. The benefit? More hot bovid lovin’!

Each mature female is usually only sexually receptive for one day every year some time during the month-and-a-half-long mating season. On the day of ovulation, on average these females visit 10 male territories and have sex 11 times.

The researchers found that when a female who is in heat gets ready to leave a male’s territory, the male often makes a false alarm call while looking intently where the female is headed at an imaginary predator in the distance. Rather than risking any danger ahead, the female typically lingers a while longer, giving the male more chances at sex.

Behavioral ecologist Jakob Bro-Jørgensen, who observed the behavior, theorizes that female topi put up with the blatant falsehood because “failing to react to a true alarm could easily mean death in a place like the Masai Mara, where it’s literally crawling with large predators,” which is just another way of saying that in the Animal Kingdom it is better to be fucked than be eaten.

Parents in the third-largest school district in Colorado are being asked to lay out 50 cents per ride if they want their children to take the bus to and from their learning institutions. The program, which starts next year, will raise about $2 million for the cash-strapped Douglas County School District — which is looking to reduce its annual operating costs by some $31 million after cutting $80 million from its budget over the past four years.

Serious business: it’s the Vanity Fair Men’s Best Dressed List voting time! Will it be Viscount Linley, known to you as David Albert Charles Armstrong-Jones, the 1st Viscount of Snowdon, not to be confused with craggy-hot Antony Armstrong-Jones, 1st Earl of Snowdon? Or Ogden Phipps II, known to you as horse-loving Ogden Mills “Dinny” Phipps? The odious Cody Franchetti? Or some other descendant of the hideous elitist blood-stained riders of the working class? We’re voting Daniel Craig and also equity fund manager Ivan de la Fressange, solely because his name sounds like some fun lesbian act.

Fans of local news will want to savor this one, because reporter David Begnaud is a master of the form. Pay specific attention to the way he acts out suspected airport peeper Adolph Vizcarra’s airport peepery. Note the intonation he uses to make the word “peeper” pop. Enjoy the completely extraneous inclusion of an attractive woman who adds nothing to the story. And marvel at the way the piece is bookended by Vizcarra fleeing from the Begnaud and his crew. Honestly, they’ll be teaching this one in journalism school twenty years from now if there are still journalism schools then, which there almost certainly will not be.

“The study is a sobering reminder that human-caused climate change is very real, and by many measures actually proceeding faster than the models have projected.”
Climate scientist Michael Mann discusses new evidence showing a significant rise in the temperature of the ocean since 1993, which is a more reliable indicator of global warming than terrestrial temperatures. But, really, how many quotes have you seen just like this one? Thank God we’re taking measures against climate change before we run out of time.

20. Depeche Mode, Violator
19. Bell Biv DeVoe, Poison
18. Fugazi, Repeater
17. Sinéad O’Connor, I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got
16. Deee-Lite, World Clique
15. LL Cool J, Mama Said Knock You Out
14. Concrete Blonde, Bloodletting
13. Sonic Youth, Goo
12. Madonna, The Immaculate Collection
11. Jane’s Addiction, Ritual de lo Habitual
10. Public Enemy, Fear Of A Black Planet
9. INXS, X
8. Alice In Chains, Facelift
7. The Black Crowes, Shake Your Money Maker
6. Danzig, Danzig II: Lucifuge
5. The La’s
4. George Michael, Listen Without Prejudice Vol. 1
3. Megadeth, Rust In Peace
2. Mother Love Bone, Apple
1. Jellyfish, Bellybutton