Last night had Harvard profs giving 10 minute speeches on “big ideas.” And this happened: “Harvard Kennedy School Lecturer Timothy P. McCarthy, who hinted that his days at Harvard might be numbered during his 10-minute presentation, discussed the future of protest-an area in which ‘teabaggers and terrorists and other terrible people might have gotten a head start.’” You betcha yer days are numbered, babe, when that Sarah Palin comes on over to Cambridge! Still, we’re on his team-he went on to trash Larry Summers, wondering why the guy who presided over Harvard’s endowment disaster is helping to fix the federal government’s own financial crisis. That is indeed the big mystery of our age!

James Crowley, who arrested Henry Louis Gates, Jr., last summer, gave Gates the handcuffs with which he was restrained. Gates in turn donated them to the National Museum of African American History and Culture at the Smithsonian. And now that painful chapter of our nation’s history has been closed.

A Field Guide to the Acronymical Kingdom, Part Two

by Willa Paskin

The Wtf, an invasive species originally native to the Idaho Rockies, can now be found from Patagonia to the tropics, the Sahara to the rain forest, nature preserves to toxic waste sites.

Despite being remarkably common, it is rarely seen. Its hunting technique, slapping the face and extremities of its prey with its powerful lower flippers, often renders said prey unconscious. The Wtf then uses its nimble, three-fingered paws to rifle the victim’s orifices, searching for bugs, grubs and other edible organic matter.

Experts believe the Wtf’s colorful wings are an adaptation that signals to predators that the Wtf is poisonous. (They are not, though they are generally regarded to be unpleasant tasting, except in France where they are often served with Ortolans.)

Similarly, experts have yet to come up with a satisfactory explanation for the existence of the Wtf’s head plumage. Despite its feather-like appearances, it is composed, like a rhino’s horn, of keratin and has the hardness of bone.

Previously: The Omg

Willa Paskin is features editor at Blackbook and a contributing writer at Double X. This is the beginning of her new life as a cartoonist.

“Just because you don’t swallow the worm at the bottom of a bottle of mescal doesn’t mean you have avoided the essential worminess of the potent Mexican liquor, according to scientists from the Biodiversity Institute of Ontario (BIO) at the University of Guelph. They have discovered that the liquid itself contains the DNA of the [mescal worm]… As part of a study to test their theory that DNA from a preserved specimen can leak into its preservative liquid, the BIO team tested a sample of liquid from a bottle of Monte Alban brand mescal. The liquor was found to contain [mescal worm family] DNA.” This is probably also true of the major works of Damien Hirst, so, you know, don’t drink those.

Doesn’t America seem particularly out of control this week? First-graders taken to mental institutions! Bank of America foreclosing on homes that don’t actually have mortgages! Dan Quayle’s son running for Congress in Arizona! Movies about love with a cast of thousands that are terrible! What is going on?

So what’s been happening with Silvio Berlusconi lately? Well, Guido Bertolaso, one of his most trusted aides, was forced to resign after it was revealed that he was “under investigation as part of a huge probe into corrupt contracts, sex parties and kickbacks surrounding the construction of a €327m (£287m) complex in Sardinia.” His ruling party is facing controversy over a decision that “forced through rules that mean the state broadcaster’s most popular talk shows will have to scrap their political content — or face a transfer from mid-evening to graveyard shifts” in advance of regional elections. And the premier himself is under fire for remarking, during a press conference with Albanian Prime Minister Sali Berisha on the subject of immigrants from that country to Italy, “We will only accept pretty girls from Albania.” So, basically, same old same old.

Harold Ford is now totally temporarily unemployed.

“Was getting a bit carried away with watching my progress on the gps tonight and was rudely interrupted when a flying fish hit me, er, in the bum! It was not a small one either, and rather startling to be hit without warning in the dark of the night. Perhaps it was a sign to slow down, stop and smell the roses. Or fish, or whatever.”

That’s 22-year-old Katie Spotz, writing yesterday on the blog she’s keeping while trying to become the youngest person in history to row alone across the Atlantic Ocean. Today is the 41st day of her trip.

Spotz, who is apparently physically fit, has previously bicycled 3,300 miles across the U.S. and was the first person to swim the full 352 miles of the Allegheny River through Pennsylvania and New York State. She has a super-tech high, 19-foot rowboat equipped with two solar panels that generate electricity for her VHF radio, GPS, navigation lights and a gizmo that sends Spotz’s coordinates to nearby ships and alerts her if those ships get dangerously close. She brought an iPod (a favorite song is Men at Work’s “Down Under”) and a laptop computer to track weather and blog, and uses a satellite phone to update her Twitter account.

This kind of thing always strikes me as cheating, kind of. Or at least violating the spirit of a solo rowing trip across an ocean, which should be more like The Old Man And The Sea. Or this:

But she’s doing it for a good cause: raising awareness of, and money for, the billion people around the world who don’t have access to clean drinking water. So more power to her.

And Spotz-who left off from Dakar, Senegal in December, and is aiming to complete the 2,500 mile trip to Cayenne, French Guiana late next month-has had some adventures. On January 31st, she was about to swim under her boat to check the hull for barnacles or slime build up. But then, as she writes,

I grabbed my snorkel, mask, and scrubber and took a quick look into the water. I started to dangle my toes in the water but something did not feel quite right. Another glimpse and … there it was. It was deep in the water but looked too big to be a fish yet too small to be a shark. Either way, it certainly did not look friendly with green spikes. So, I crawled my way back into the boat and decided to keep my mantra: “just keep rowing.”

(It turned out to be a tuna.)

Spotz desalinates ocean water to drink and eats 5000 calories a day from her food supply, which consists of:

300 Clif bars (lots of different flavors)
210 dehydrated lunches/dinners
98 dehydrated breakfast meals
90 Snickers bars
80 Bumble bars
70 trail mix bags (small)
50 Twix, Butterfinger, and Hersheys bars
42 dehydrated desserts (cheesecake or chocolate pudding)
40 salmon or tuna packs
18 bags dried mango (plain and spicy)
12 bags of beef or turkey jerky
7 bags of dried plantains
8 bags almonds
12 bags cashews
5 bags dried cherries
6 bags wasabi peas
8 hard bread packs with almond butter
12 bags of crackers
10 bags dried pears
10 bags of mission fig and calamyrna figs
8 bags of dried peas
7 boxes of biscotti
30 sunflower packs (small)
200 GU Energy gels
100 GU Blocks
7 bags dried blueberries
40 gummies bags
50 fruit leathers
6 bags of flattened banana
4 bags of mangosteen
12 packs of chocolate covered ginger
4 bags of tangy almonds
3 bags of whey protein
2 packs of Fig Newtons
6 bags of sesame crepes
2 chocolate cookies bags
Nuun electrolyte replacement tablets
1 sprouting kit with lots of seeds!

“Through imagination, stylization and invention, we become much more truthful. Take, for example, my 1992 film ‘Lessons of Darkness,’ which featured the fires in Kuwait after the Iraqi army set the entire country on fire. It begins with a quote from the French philosopher Blaise Pascal: ‘The collapse of the stellar universe will occur, like creation, in grandiose splendor.’ What a wonderful sentence! Of course, it is not Pascal — I invented it. Pascal couldn’t have said it better himself, let’s face it. To those with the mind of accountants, this looks like a fake. But ultimately it is not a fake because I elevate the audience onto a very high level before they have even seen the first image of the film, and you are stepping into this film with a different level of preparedness. In this respect, even though the quote is invented, it is not intended to deceive or mislead or defraud you. It’s exactly the contrary: to fill you with a certain awe and to prepare your soul for something that has never been seen in the history of humankind. So it is not a lie, it is an intensified form of truth.”
-You know what? Wherever Werner Herzog wants to take me, I am willing to follow.

“We’re talking about taking the penis of a man and putting it in the rectum of another man and wriggling it around in excrement. And you have to think, would I want that to be done to me?”
-New Hampshire State Representative Nancy Elliott? You’re doing it wrong.