Here is everything you need to know about what the new full-body scanners are going to show when you pass through airport security from here on out. Bascially, yes, amused TSA employees will indeed be able to see your dangly bits or pillowy parts. Step back a second, though, and pretend that you’re someone from the distant past-say, 1998 or so-who is watching this video as a glimpse into the future. Would any of it even make sense?

“An appraisal on Dec. 31 about David Levine, the caricaturist for The New York Review of Books who died on Dec. 29, may have left the incorrect impression that the Russian writer Aleksandr Pushkin, the subject of one of Mr. Levine’s drawings, was homosexual. The description of Pushkin as “a gay man” was a reference to his demeanor, not his sexual orientation.”

“Question: Is there an afterlife? -Matt.”

Answer: If you ever need to make your own Grand Canyon, start with a river and lift up the earth. As the ground rises the river will carry some of it away. Wait seven million years, at which point tourists will come. Some will see eons of erosion at work; others will believe that, a mere 4,500 years back, God dragged His fingernail across the desert. Like the group of evangelical-Christian creationists that rafted through in 2005. ‘One of the things it says to me,’ a rafter was quoted as saying, ‘is I’m small and God and the world He created is huge. This is a man-dwarfing place.’

I am going to have what I like to call a “re-set day.” (I hyphenate that word to distinguish the concept from that in the Kurt Andersen book. Heh.) This means that today is going to be about noticing and enjoying awesome things! There has been way too much conflict up in my dancery this 2010 and it’s time to start over. Won’t you join me? If you see or do something hilarious, cool, enjoyable or even just mildly pleasant, give a shout. (Don’t worry, I’m sure Mr. Balk will handle the outrage beat on my behalf.)

OMG, Sade!

So Colonel Percy Fawcett has been vindicated. The British explorer, who David Grann wrote about in the wonderful book The Lost City of Z, was last seen in 1925, trudging off into the jungles of the Amazon basin, searching for evidence to support his belief that a vast civilization had once populated the area-the fabled city of gold, perhaps, El Dorado. In the years since, the prevailing opinion has been that he was following a pipe dream, that the harsh physical conditions of the basin have always precluded mass inhabitation. Now, as Grann reports today, at The New Yorker:

In cleared-away areas of the upper Amazon basin, researchers, using satellite imagery, have recently pinpointed a vast network of monumental earthworks, including geometrically aligned roads and structures, constructed by a hitherto unknown civilization. According to a new report published in the journal Antiquity, the archeologist Martii Pärssinen and other scientists have documented more than two hundred and ten geometric structures, some of which may date as far back as the third century A.D. They are spread out over an area that spans more than two hundred and fifty kilometers, reaching all the way from northern Bolivia to the state of Amazonia in Brazil.

The structures that have been discovered thus far represent only ten percent of the whole, according to the archeologists, who attribute the disappearance of the civilization to disease spread by the arrival of European conquistadors in 16th century.

“What is striking about the structures is that their monumentality and sophisticated design are best seen from an aerial view,” says Grann, “where they look like an elaborate geometry equation diagrammed in the earth.”

Or, you know, maybe they’re just alien landing pads.

Former Rep. Susan Molinari (R-Staten Island) is considering a challenge to Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand. In related news, I am considering growing an extra penis that dispenses extremely tasty, yet calorie-free, girlie cocktails. I am estimating that the success of both aspirations will be pretty similar.

56. Biggie
55. Hope You Niggas Sleep
54. Playa Hater
53. Another
52. Last Day
51. Can I Get Witcha
50. Nasty Boy
49. B.I.G (Interlude)
48. Niggas
47. Dreams
46. Let Me Get Down
45. Miss U
44. If I Should Die Before I Wake
43. Would You Die for Me?
42. Long Kiss Goodnight
41. Rap Phenomenon
40. Somebody’s Gotta Die
39. Dangerous MCs
38. Niggas Bleed
37. Me & My Bitch
36. You’re Nobody (Til Somebody Kills You)
35. Come On
34. What’s Beef?
33. Respect
32. Things Done Changed
31. Kick in the Door
30. The World Is Filled…
29. Ready to Die
28. My Downfall
27. Friend of Mine
26. Fuck You Tonight
25. Everyday Struggle
24. One More Chance
23. I Love the Dough
22. Big Booty Hoes
21. Going Back to Cali
20. The What
19. I Love the Dough
18. Suicidal Thoughts
17. Notorious B.I.G.
16. Dead Wrong
15. Sky’s the Limit
14. Ten Crack Commandments
13. Player’s Anthem
12. One More Chance (Remix)
11. Hypnotize
10. Get Money
9. Warning
8. I Got a Story to Tell
7. Who Shot Ya?
6. Mo Money Mo Problems
5. Machine Gun Funk
4. Big Poppa
3. Gimme the Loot
2. Unbelievable
1. Juicy

Cord Jefferson is a writer-editor living in Brooklyn. His work has appeared in National Geographic, GOOD, The Root and on MTV.

by Mark Bibbins, Editor

Back for the New Year! Four poems by Star Black, starting with Ode to Radnitzky.

Ode to Radnitzky

I can’t be a celebrity
because I punctuate, I dig
up arrowheads for exclamation
points, then make the mistake

of believing repetition can
be renewed, as if sculpture were
a wiry mobile of coat hangers Man
Ray didn’t do ninety years ago

when he was in art school.
Pass the gravel and make it cool.
I like mine grey. The road is too
possible. It’s in the way. I’m

Thumbelina on a pterosaur,
valleys a groan of tangled trees.
This ride was done in the movies,
movies Man Ray’s already seen.

Cratered

I know you’ve been inducted
onto the carousel, its skeins of pigtails,
its melon-colored steeds, its cancan music
that swirls as a Ferris wheel in a flask,

but have you hidden any details,
any sullen elsewheres blocking the path,
have you been casual and coy rather
than wrathful, in need of a bath?

I have, but fallen pennies own
their wishes so I thought I’d ask, now
that winter is no longer a spa or a tricycle
dropped from the sky. Are you,

like me, unable to cry? Do your
divinations need companions? I would,
but cannot, take your hand. We’ll just stare
at bandoleers together, their giant pockets.

Nuance

Less faraway than gay, something
encloses me, some somber sexuality
evangelic in origin, not exactly an orgy,
but more a circulation, coupled

by vampire abstinence, hesitation,
inswirled intimacy that never happens.
Do you think I need surgery? Or will
beet juice do? I am evolving. My

neck is teething, touched. My breath
has had enough breath, yet isn’t ceasing.
I’m in a spell-in-the-stairwell sort of feeling,
wan, urgent, spiral, and you aren’t

moving, just touching, and the drapes
are velvet, fuzzed maroon, and the room
is expiring like a tired roach, a roach
that’s seen everything evident.

The Bungler’s Crew

Only the military grinds you down
or grinds you into the ground, either way.
Its kids are bratty, they like to say, whereas
I, I am a boat of teeth, a few minutes

of comedy in a solarium at midnight
with an audience of one: a jade plant. I
seek lesser concepts: a lake dematerializing
into snap turtles with diesel propellers

ten feet away. I camouflage the inevitable.
The sky’s a drop-shot. At last. An osprey makes
an overpass. I don’t exist. I swim within rims
of crumpled fish-bait trash, a prey, a soup,

an exoskeleton. I’m left behind when
work needs to be done, work no one wants
to do unless they believe in you, my country.
Thinking never was your top priority.

Star Black is the author of five books of poems, most recently Ghostwood (Melville House). She has taught at The New School and Stony Brook University, and lectured at the Bennington Writing Seminars. An Artist’s Project exhibit of her collages shown in hand-made books will be on view at The Center for Book Arts from January 20 through April 3, 2010. She works as a photographer in New York City.

You may contact the editors at poems@theawl.com.

Unsurprising endorsement of the day: “Full body scanning machines proposed in major airports may involve an image received by screeners of travelers in their ‘altogether,’ but all together, scanning makes sense. So endorses the American Association for Nude Recreation (www.AANR.com), the oldest and largest group representing nudists in the US and Canada.”