“Owners are dressing their domestic flocks in new fluorescent bibs, which have been specially designed to keep the creatures seen in the autumn evenings. The bibs are meant for the growing numbers of people who keep chickens as pets, especially in urban and suburban areas, to protect the birds from motorists. The bibs, costing £12 and available in pink or yellow, went on sale earlier this month.”
 — If you click through there is a picture of chickens literally crossing the road. Why? That’s the eternal question, isn’t it?

I Will Not Apologize For Just Randomly Tossing Out A Bunch Of Things That Nobody Wanted To Know About Me Or Cared About Anyway

So three things happened in recent succession, close enough together that it ensured I would not forget them and all thematically similar enough that my brain was somehow able to conflate them into A Story That Says Something About Who I Am Now: First, I was walking through the Greenmarket in Union Square when I saw a remarkably striking woman walking the other way, and when I say striking it is not any kind of exaggeration, she was just massively eye-catching, all tits and hair, and as we crossed paths and then went in opposite directions the first thought I had was, “Wow, I bet she is totally underestimated at work, I hope she uses it to her advantage.” The second incident also occurred in Union Square (look, the summer is just about over, I am buying whatever amount of little cucumbers I can still get before all they’re selling is potatoes and kale) and this time I walked past a young lady who was eating ice cream from a cup, and the look on her face as she brought the spoon to her mouth was one of such pure joy but also guilt that I spent the next few minutes in deep thought about the incredibly complex relationship women have with what they eat and how body image plays such a huge role in shame and pleasure to an obvious detrimental effect on even basic mental health. Finally, I was walking across 7th Avenue and I saw a gigantic billboard advertising the Jambone or Jawbox or whatever the hell it is, it’s like a set of speakers that plays your iPod and looks like a big Lego piece? You know what I mean. The slogan was “Starts with Jambox or Jawbone” or whatever the hell it is. (It says the name of the actual product, I am just not good at remembering.) Anyway, as you get closer to the ad you realize that it shows an attractive young woman in a state of extreme undress; in fact, she is so undressed that she is in a tub full of bubbled water, and her eyes look out in such a way as to suggest that someone, perhaps you, the viewer, is about to get to do sex to her, and my first thought upon that realization was that the woman in the ad appeared to be multiracial, and how amazing is it that we live in a time where something like that is going to be the norm rather than the exception? Now I am not sharing these anecdotes to suggest that I am somehow evolved in my thinking as a man or a sexist or whatever (please see “all tits and hair” above), but I am saying that these thoughts certainly would not have been the first, or even third, things I thought in these situations when I was a much younger man. So I guess I’m getting older, is what I’m saying. More mature. On the other hand, I still did notice these women, which is probably problematic somehow, I’ll admit to that. But I’m not going to apologize for it. I’m not going to apologize for being an old man who is probably problematic and rambles on about things to no end and even those things that I ramble on about are not particularly original or unique nor do they really call for any kind of apology, people have plenty of other things they are busy with right now to worry about, would be the title of my Thought Catalog essay if I ever wrote one, which I wouldn’t, but I think you see where I’m going with this. Thank you.

Azealia Banks seems like she would be really fun to hang out with but only, like, every couple of months, otherwise it would just be exhausting. She strikes me as the kind of friend who is always losing her keys and calling you at 2 in the morning because you’ve got the spare set. Those friends are fun, but in extremely limited doses. But of course I am just projecting based on what I know from a series of videos and Internet outbursts. She may be extremely responsible with her keys. I mean, for all I know, she may be the one all the friends call late at night because they know she’s home and has their spare set and will groggily meet them at the door and not say anything unkind and even gently remind them to return the keys the next time she sees them so they aren’t locked out again. You can’t ever tell with people, I guess. [Via]

“A friend recently brought to my attention a disturbing question from a psychiatrist working with a transplant team: Should she be checking the sobriety claims of liver transplant candidates by looking on their Twitter and other social media sites? That question merits discussion because it’s clear both doctors and patients are entering a new world of uncertain medical privacy due to Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and other outlets.”
 — Regardless of your concerns about medical privacy in an age of social media, I think we can all agree that if you are trying to get into a liver transplant program it is probably a bad idea to litter your Twitter feed with photos of yourself getting plastered. I mean, that is at least one of the bad ideas in this scenario.

If You Need To Get “Squirrel Testicles,” “Facebook” And “French Bank” Into The Same Sentence It Is Your Lucky Day

“A French bank has been slammed after posting an image on Facebook of a squirrel with its testicles trapped in a bird feed stand.” Sigh, yeah, there’s a photo, but I mean, really?

by Max Abelson

Recently I was driving upstate to visit my brother Tom on the farm he lives and works on with other disabled people. Because I was by myself for the drive and it’s good to have something fun to listen to I made myself a mix of Elliott Smith songs. Why not! Even though it’s sad that Elliott Smith died at age 34 ten years ago today, his music wasn’t all broken bottles in empty parking lots, stained floors, naked mattresses and irreversible damage.

Just kidding, of course it was. He’s the patron saint of heartbreak. Merle Haggard made misery sound manly, Stephen Merritt turned it into a charming underdog to root for, but Elliott Smith was the true bard of torment. He was joy’s eulogist.

He began recording his debut “Roman Candle” twenty years ago, in 1993, making an album so bleak that it’s saddest song isn’t even given a name. If it had one it would be “Home to Oblivion,” the phrase he repeats under soft shoulder-heaves of a pretty guitar. There are three other untitled songs on that album, along with ones named after childhood fireworks and cheap flavored wine.

One hundred years earlier Monet sat in front of the Rouen Cathedral in 1893 painting the same view of the gothic church over and over again, with the hour and weather and the seasons making each canvas different and moving. Elliott Smith made misery his Rouen, singing beautiful melodies about one thing with different light hitting it in new ways. He sketched sadness’ stench at 2:45 a.m., its smog on Easter afternoon, and its echo the morning after.

He is a man who watches his mother sing the Everly Brothers with her new boyfriend while she stares into space smoking. Even when he names his song Happiness and it has Jon Brion’s bubbly backup harmonies it opens with a dead body.

And then the giddy piano in Baby Britain, straight from Paul McCartney smiley songs about sheep dogs and uncles, marches into two versus about a bitter alcoholic. Sweet Adeline isn’t the 1903 flower-of-my-heart barbershop standard, but a dizzy little carnival of cuts and burns, kids on the floor, and winter air. The good news in a song about his biggest lie is that the lie is: “Everything that you do makes me want to die.” He doesn’t say what the truth might be.

But instead of maudlin or solipsistic the music is a swirl of melodies and harmony, sometimes played by cascades of orchestration and sometimes only the loneliest basement guitar. That’s the reason you can listen to twenty of them when you’re driving alone to go visit your older brother upstate on his farm, and why they’ve only gotten better in the ten years since Elliot Smith died.

He wrote sweet sad songs that shook you, and falling in love with somebody’s music when it moves you that way makes you feel slightly responsible for the singer. You hope his songs aren’t about train tracks, trick cards, and swollen cheeks any more than Monet’s paintings were about a building, but listening back sometimes you just don’t know. When I picked up my brother and we drove around he wasn’t crazy about my mix so we put on his favorite, Emmylou Harris.

Max Abelson writes about Wall Street for Bloomberg News and sometimes its magazine Businessweek.

“Highly radioactive water overflowed barriers into Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, its operating utility said on Monday, after it underestimated how much rain would fall at the plant and failed to pump it out quickly enough.”
 — That… can’t be good.

Ian Frazier’s fascinating piece about the out-of-control homeless epidemic in New York City — spoiler: things got particularly bad when Bloomberg replaced Section 8 housing subsidies with a new program called Advantage in 2007, which was then defunded in 2011 — has a terrific explanation of Bloomberg, our Mayor Smaug, in action:

Deputy Mayor Linda Gibbs, the Bloomberg administration official most significantly involved in its policies for the homeless, is a trim, gray-haired woman in her mid-fifties whose father was the mayor of Menands, a village north of Albany…. Her blue eyes often have an expression that can only be described as a twinkle. I’ve seen this look in other Bloomberg staffers’ eyes, and in photos of the Mayor himself. It reminds me of the twinkle in the eyes of the Santa Claus in the Coca-Cola ads from the nineteen-fifties (inappropriately, given the Mayor’s feelings about soft drinks).

I think the contagious Bloomberg twinkle comes partly from the Mayor’s role as a sort of Santa figure. He works for the city for a dollar a year, he gives away his money by the hundreds of millions, and he manifestly has the city’s happiness and well-being at heart. Every rich person should be like him. His deputies and staffers twinkle with the pleasure of participating in his general beneficence, as well they should. “You can’t make a man mad by giving him money” — this rule would seem to be absolute. And yet sometimes people in the city he has done so much for still get mad at Bloomberg and criticize him. At the wrong of this, the proper order of things is undone, and the Bloomberg twinkle turns to ice.

“Working on Bill & Ted was certainly an excellent adventure.”
 — Keanu Reeves

I am not going to pretend that many of you have either the time or the inclination to watch a five-and-a-half minute news story about the forces arrayed for and against a badger cull in Britain, but for those of you who do you are in for a fascinating five-plus minutes. There is something about the variety of human passion on display here that will make you look at our species with a mixture of pity and admiration. For the rest of you, here is a story about an alligator who kept triggering the automatic doors outside an Orlando Wal-Mart. Watch what you want, I won’t judge.