Thursday, April 11, 2013
Fake Facebook Girlfriends: What's Not to Like?
Worse still, my girlfriend – my actual, real-life, flesh-and-blood girlfriend with whom I live – isn't a fan of my new fake girlfriend at all. Whenever my Facebook girlfriend posts anything, my real-life girlfriend narrows her eyes and reads it back to me in a withering voice. Yesterday, while I was looking up a recipe on my phone, she yelled, "Are you texting your new girlfriend? You are, aren't you?" and then fell silent for three-quarters of an hour. This whole situation was a mistake.
Why did I buy a fake Facebook girlfriend? Curiosity, mainly. Name me one red-blooded man who wouldn't want to validate his neediness by paying a stranger of undetermined gender to send him hollow, misspelt platitudes on the internet. You can't, can you?
But I also wanted a glimpse into the thriving, fascinating fake internet girlfriend industry. For a modest amount of money – certainly far less than it costs to start and maintain a human relationship – a growing number of websites now offer the services of pretend social media paramours. Maybe they'll flirt with you on Twitter. Maybe they'll change their relationship status on Facebook. Some fake girlfriends will even phone you at work, presumably so you can bark, "Not when I'm in the office, darling!" then hang up, roll your eyes at your colleagues, walk home and cry.
It's a weird setup. Many of the services claim that they exist to make other women jealous – your crush will see that you're in a new relationship, realise that she's wanted you for herself all along and pursue you relentlessly until you're hers. It sounds unlikely, but apparently it works.
My Facebook girlfriend came from Fiverr, an online marketplace where everything costs exactly five US dollars. Want someone to optimise your CV? Five dollars. Want someone to write your name on their cheek in lipstick and photograph it? Five dollars. Want a stranger to say a prayer to a god of your choice? Five dollars, you numbskull. For a friend's birthday last year, I took a Fiverr vendor up on his offer to dress as a wolf, dance around his basement and film himself singing a personalised, free-form version of Happy Birthday. The finished product looked like something a serial killer might record seconds before turning the gun on himself but, hey, it only cost five dollars. It was either that or an Amazon voucher.
Fiverr is teeming with fake girlfriends. But what sort did I want? Did I want to remain amicable with my pretend partner, or break up spectacularly (one ad was titled: "I will be your jealous PSYCHO girlfriend for a week")? Did I want a deliberately submissive Asian girlfriend, or someone touting themselves as a "crazy angry Russian"? Someone who would "post the sexiest comments you have ever seen", or someone who didn't care if they had to be my girlfriend or my boyfriend, just so long as they got their five dollars?
by Stuart Heritage, The Guardian | Read more:
Illustration: Lo Cole for the Guardian
Movie Studios Want Google to Take Down Their Own Takedown Requests
[ed. Sweet irony.]
There’s a dark side to Google’s transparency efforts, especially when it comes to publishing DMCA requests it receives from copyright holders.
With more than 100 million links to pirated files Google is steadily building the largest database of copyrighted material. This is rather ironic as it would only take one skilled coder to index the URLs from the DMCA notices in order to create one of the largest pirate search engines available.
Indeed, the DMCA notices are meant to make content harder to find on the Internet, but in the process they create a semi-organized index of links to infringing material.
by TorrentFreak | Read more:
The Rise of the New Global Elite
If you happened to be watching NBC on the first Sunday morning in August last summer, you would have seen something curious. There, on the set of Meet the Press, the host, David Gregory, was interviewing a guest who made a forceful case that the U.S. economy had become “very distorted.” In the wake of the recession, this guest explained, high-income individuals, large banks, and major corporations had experienced a “significant recovery”; the rest of the economy, by contrast—including small businesses and “a very significant amount of the labor force”—was stuck and still struggling. What we were seeing, he argued, was not a single economy at all, but rather “fundamentally two separate types of economy,” increasingly distinct and divergent.
This diagnosis, though alarming, was hardly unique: drawing attention to the divide between the wealthy and everyone else has long been standard fare on the left. (The idea of “two Americas” was a central theme of John Edwards’s 2004 and 2008 presidential runs.) What made the argument striking in this instance was that it was being offered by none other than the former five-term Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan: iconic libertarian, preeminent defender of the free market, and (at least until recently) the nation’s foremost devotee of Ayn Rand. When the high priest of capitalism himself is declaring the growth in economic inequality a national crisis, something has gone very, very wrong.
This widening gap between the rich and non-rich has been evident for years. In a 2005 report to investors, for instance, three analysts at Citigroup advised that “the World is dividing into two blocs—the Plutonomy and the rest”: In a plutonomy there is no such animal as “the U.S. consumer” or “the UK consumer”, or indeed the “Russian consumer”. There are rich consumers, few in number, but disproportionate in the gigantic slice of income and consumption they take. There are the rest, the “non-rich”, the multitudinous many, but only accounting for surprisingly small bites of the national pie.
Before the recession, it was relatively easy to ignore this concentration of wealth among an elite few. The wondrous inventions of the modern economy—Google, Amazon, the iPhone—broadly improved the lives of middle-class consumers, even as they made a tiny subset of entrepreneurs hugely wealthy. And the less-wondrous inventions—particularly the explosion of subprime credit—helped mask the rise of income inequality for many of those whose earnings were stagnant.
But the financial crisis and its long, dismal aftermath have changed all that. A multibillion-dollar bailout and Wall Street’s swift, subsequent reinstatement of gargantuan bonuses have inspired a narrative of parasitic bankers and other elites rigging the game for their own benefit. And this, in turn, has led to wider—and not unreasonable—fears that we are living in not merely a plutonomy, but a plutocracy, in which the rich display outsize political influence, narrowly self-interested motives, and a casual indifference to anyone outside their own rarefied economic bubble.
Through my work as a business journalist, I’ve spent the better part of the past decade shadowing the new super-rich: attending the same exclusive conferences in Europe; conducting interviews over cappuccinos on Martha’s Vineyard or in Silicon Valley meeting rooms; observing high-powered dinner parties in Manhattan. Some of what I’ve learned is entirely predictable: the rich are, as F. Scott Fitzgerald famously noted, different from you and me.
What is more relevant to our times, though, is that the rich of today are also different from the rich of yesterday. Our light-speed, globally connected economy has led to the rise of a new super-elite that consists, to a notable degree, of first- and second-generation wealth. Its members are hardworking, highly educated, jet-setting meritocrats who feel they are the deserving winners of a tough, worldwide economic competition—and many of them, as a result, have an ambivalent attitude toward those of us who didn’t succeed so spectacularly. Perhaps most noteworthy, they are becoming a transglobal community of peers who have more in common with one another than with their countrymen back home. Whether they maintain primary residences in New York or Hong Kong, Moscow or Mumbai, today’s super-rich are increasingly a nation unto themselves.
by Chrystia Freeman, The Atlantic | Read more:
Photo: Stephen Webster/Wonderful Machine
The Sailfish
Almost 15 years after my mother’s death, I was the sole passenger on a seaplane over the Indian Ocean when my father died. We landed in a lagoon where a rubber dinghy collected me and ferried me to a larger boat where I was to spend a week cruising the outer atolls of the Maldives, diving four times a day. Mobile phones did not reach to that part of the islands at the time, but the cruiser was equipped with a satellite phone. As I carried my luggage to my cabin, I was summoned to the bridge. On an echoing, static line my wife broke the news. Before I could ask for any details, the connection was broken and I was unable to speak to anyone in the outside world for another five days.
The shock was immense. But I was surrounded by people — ship’s officers, diving staff and a handful of other passengers — none of whom I had met before. There was no point in trying to return home, and I had no means of reaching any members of my family. I decided that there was no one aboard the boat in whom I could confide. It seemed rude to impose my grief on strangers who would inevitably feel awkward at the situation. My loss was a painful, private wound that could not be exposed.
Two hours later I was in my diving kit, sitting on the side of the boat ready to plunge. The dive leader explained that we were heading to a reef promontory that was swept by a strong current. We were to follow him, swimming as quickly as possible to the deepest part of the reef, about 36 metres down. The speed of descent was meant to keep the current from forcing us apart. I was last into the water, and I followed a stream of silver bubbles into the misty grey-blue depths. Halfway down I could already see the other divers clutching on to the reef to steady themselves. Surrounding them were dozens of grey reef sharks, the object of the dive. Keen though I was to join them, I paused, sensing a presence behind me. Swivelling in the water and looking back towards the pale surface of the sea, I stared into the eyes of an ocean giant: a sailfish.
Sailfishes are about the size of a man. They have a long, sword-shaped bill, just like marlin. I abandoned my descent and finned towards the lurking presence. For a few moments the giant fish hung there, suspended like a mounted trophy. Then it raised and lowered its sail, blue skin traversed by flashing shadows in the bright-lit surface waters. It was the kind of encounter that is so immediate and thrilling that time and action seem compressed. For no more than five or six seconds we watched one another, then the sailfish shimmered, sideways, downwards, blending again into the darker water beyond my vision. None of the other divers saw my encounter, though the dive leader did, and we talked about it privately that night. I wanted his affirmation that I and the sailfish had really been just metres apart. I did not, could not, tell him about my father.
I have had hundreds of special underwater experiences, but I have never again seen a sailfish underwater. I know from other dive masters that such encounters are rare. I cannot shake the idea that, for many people on earth, this would have been a clear example of shape-shifting: my father’s only opportunity to say goodbye. My father was not a spiritual man. Indeed, he revelled in denying the existence of God — partly, I think, in order to infuriate my mother who, frankly, believed in everything. At university, I studied, at different times, classical civilisation, literature and anthropology. Did my experience merely spring from a recalled shamanistic tradition? Or was it an evocation of deeply buried lectures on Tolkien’s Sauron, or a childhood memory of a tale of Zeus and Io, Athena and Arachne? The intensity of my meeting with the sailfish was doubtless increased by my reeling mind.
And yet, how strange, in the hours and days following the loss of both of my parents, that I was able to be underwater, the place where I am happiest. I felt blessed by that. My mother had died without ever seeing me discover this pleasure. When I was a young adult, she worried constantly that I was frequently unhappy. I hope she would have been pleased that I had discovered something that gripped me with such deep joy. Dad lived long enough to witness some of my underwater life. And yet his habit was to deny spirituality, to deny faith, to deny any sentimentality. When I met the sailfish in the hours following his death, it bothered me that he, of all people, might have been proved wrong in his view of the universe. But if reincarnation, perhaps momentary, as a sailfish was his route to wishing me farewell, I hope it came with a sense of acceptance: that all shall be well. I take my dead parents with me still, every time I dive.
Immersion gives birth to these thoughts, tilling and ploughing my subconscious and bringing a sense of renewal. I have occasionally met other divers who say that being underwater allows them to reach new realms of spiritual, intellectual and emotional freedom. But they share that knowledge cautiously. By contrast, I have met lots of people who proclaim a special connection with certain marine creatures. I know divers who believe that they can connect with great white sharks, manta rays, even octopuses. I once spent a week with a group of middle-aged women in the Bahamas. They believed in the power of crystals, and were convinced that they could make a connection with wild dolphins. Dolphins seem to suffer that indignity more than most. There was even a woman who engineered an informal marriage ceremony with a captive one.
by Tim Ecott, Aeon | Read more:
Photo by Alastair Pollock Photography
Wednesday, April 10, 2013
PETA Kills Puppies
Warning: Some of the following graphic photos may distress the reader.
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) is an organization that publicly claims to represent the best interest of animals -- indeed their "ethical treatment." Yet approximately 2,000 animals pass through PETA's front door every year and very few make it out alive. The vast majority -- 96 percent in 2011 -- exit the facility out the back door after they have been killed, when Pet Cremation Services of Tidewater stops by on their regular visits to pick up their remains. Between these visits, the bodies are stored in the giant walk-in freezer PETA installed for this very purpose. It is a freezer that cost $9,370 and, like the company which incinerates the bodies of PETA's victims, was paid for with the donations of animal lovers who could never have imagined that the money they donated to help animals would be used to end their lives instead. In fact, in the last 11 years, PETA has killed 29,426 dogs, cats, rabbits, and other domestic animals. (...)
Acording to inspection reports by the Virginia Department of Agriculture, the PETA facility "does not contain sufficient animal enclosures to routinely house the number of animals annually reported as taken into custody... The shelter is not accessible to the public, promoted, or engaged in efforts to facilitate the adoption of animals taken into custody."
Routine inspections often found "no animals to be housed in the facility" or, at best "few animals in custody," despite thousands of them impounded by PETA annually. Since they take in thousands per year, where were they? "90% [of the animals] were euthanized within the first 24 hours of custody," according to the Virginia Department of Agriculture inspector. How can people adopt animals from PETA when they kill the animals they acquire within minutes without ever making them available for adoption? How can people adopt animals when they have no adoption hours, do no adoption promotion, and do not show animals for adoption, choosing to kill them without doing so? In fact, when asked by a reporter what efforts they make to find animals homes, PETA had no comment.
by Nathan J. Winograd, Huffington Post | Read more:
Image: Virginia Department of Agriculture
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) is an organization that publicly claims to represent the best interest of animals -- indeed their "ethical treatment." Yet approximately 2,000 animals pass through PETA's front door every year and very few make it out alive. The vast majority -- 96 percent in 2011 -- exit the facility out the back door after they have been killed, when Pet Cremation Services of Tidewater stops by on their regular visits to pick up their remains. Between these visits, the bodies are stored in the giant walk-in freezer PETA installed for this very purpose. It is a freezer that cost $9,370 and, like the company which incinerates the bodies of PETA's victims, was paid for with the donations of animal lovers who could never have imagined that the money they donated to help animals would be used to end their lives instead. In fact, in the last 11 years, PETA has killed 29,426 dogs, cats, rabbits, and other domestic animals. (...)
Acording to inspection reports by the Virginia Department of Agriculture, the PETA facility "does not contain sufficient animal enclosures to routinely house the number of animals annually reported as taken into custody... The shelter is not accessible to the public, promoted, or engaged in efforts to facilitate the adoption of animals taken into custody."
Routine inspections often found "no animals to be housed in the facility" or, at best "few animals in custody," despite thousands of them impounded by PETA annually. Since they take in thousands per year, where were they? "90% [of the animals] were euthanized within the first 24 hours of custody," according to the Virginia Department of Agriculture inspector. How can people adopt animals from PETA when they kill the animals they acquire within minutes without ever making them available for adoption? How can people adopt animals when they have no adoption hours, do no adoption promotion, and do not show animals for adoption, choosing to kill them without doing so? In fact, when asked by a reporter what efforts they make to find animals homes, PETA had no comment.
by Nathan J. Winograd, Huffington Post | Read more:
Image: Virginia Department of Agriculture
Robert Rauschenberg, Engagement, solvent transfer on Arches paper with gouache, watercolor, wash and pencil, 57.47 x 75.88 cm, 1968.
via:
Soaking Up the Sake: Izakayas
Easy: izakayas. These informal Japanese restaurants have been opening at a rapid pace around the country, but most Americans haven’t figured them out yet. Where’s the sushi bar? What’s with the tiny portions? Is this Asian fusion tapas or what?
That’s the izakaya: easy to love, but hard to nail down. It’s friendlier than a French bar à vins, has more food choices than a Spanish tapeo, and takes itself less seriously than a British gastro pub.
But it makes the same point: drinking is primary; food is secondary; and if you’re doing it right, there will be hangovers.
“Hangover prevention is a big topic of conversation at izakaya meals,” said Yukari Sakamoto, a Japanese-American sommelier and writer who lives in Tokyo. (She swears by a morning-after remedy called Ukon no Chikara.) “That is, when you’re not talking about what to eat next.”
From the words for sake (rice wine) and stay, traditional izakayas are places anyone can linger for the price of a drink. The word is usually translated as tavern or pub — not very helpfully, since those words suggest a menu more T.G.I. Friday’s than Nobu. An izakaya isn’t a destination for great ramen, or perfect tempura, or impeccable sushi — although the menu, confusingly, will list all those dishes and more. Izakaya food, like most bar food, is salty and spicy, crunchy and savory, and engineered to be especially delicious with beer or wine.
But our phrase “bar food” can’t cover the dizzying spread of house-made tofu and pickles, grilled seafood, deep-fried bites like octopus balls and chicken wings, home-style meat stews, fried rice, noodle bowls and local seasonal produce that characterize even modest izakayas in Japan.
At their best, izakaya meals can also be models of Japanese culinary poise and delicacy. “It’s supposed to be a kind of casual place to eat and drink,” said Eric Bromberg, the chef and restaurateur who opened Blue Ribbon Izakaya and Sushi on the Lower East Side last year. “But since it’s Japan, everything comes out beautiful and elegant anyway.” (...)
In Japan, where the custom goes back at least to the 19th century, izakayas — marked by glowing red lanterns and long sake lists — are where co-workers go to celebrate a promotion, where young people meet to fill up before clubbing or karaoke, where families gather for an inexpensive weekend treat. There are upscale and hole-in-the-wall izakayas, kawaii izakayas where the waitresses are dressed as little girls, and chains of kechi yasui (“for misers”) izakayas where the drinks or food come free. Among young people, sake consumption has been steadily declining in Japan as stronger drinks become popular, and chain izakayas are among the efforts by the sake industry to bring them back.
“In Japanese life, there is a lot of drinking, but it is always combined with eating,” said Ms. Sakamoto, who was raised in Minnesota and attended culinary school in New York City, and was a sommelier at the Park Hyatt in Tokyo. “Which is why we have more izakayas than bars.” (...)
Although the menu may look huge and rambling, there is a logical sequence to an izakaya meal.
“To a Japanese eye, an izakaya menu looks like a bento box,” Ms. Sakamoto said. “And you just know how to eat it: something raw, something pickled, something fried, something simmered.”
by Julia Moskin, NY Times | Read more:
How a Leafy Folk Remedy Stopped Bedbugs in Their Tracks
Generations of Eastern European housewives doing battle against bedbugs spread bean leaves around the floor of an infested room at night. In the morning, the leaves would be covered with bedbugs that had somehow been trapped there. The leaves, and the pests, were collected and burned — by the pound, in extreme infestations.
Now a group of American scientists is studying this bedbug-leaf interaction, with an eye to replicating nature’s Roach Motel.
A study to be published Wednesday in The Journal of the Royal Society Interface details the scientists’ quest, including their discovery of how the bugs get hooked on the leaves, how the scientists have tried to recreate these hooks synthetically and how their artificial hooks have proved to be less successful than the biological ones.
At first glance, the whole notion seems far-fetched, said Catherine Loudon, a biologist at the University of California, Irvine, who specializes in bedbug locomotion.
“If someone had suggested to me that impaling insects with little tiny hooks would be a valid form of pest control, I wouldn’t have given it credence,” she said in an interview. “You can think of lots of reasons why it wouldn’t work. That’s why it’s so amazing.”
“The areas where they appear to be pierceable,” Dr. Loudon said, “are not the legs themselves. It’s where they bend, where it’s thin. That’s where they get pierced.”
This folk remedy from the Balkans was never entirely forgotten. A German entomologist wrote about it in 1927, a scientist at the United States Department of Agriculture mentioned it in a paper in 1943, and it can be found in Web searches about bedbugs and bean plants.
But the commercial availability of pesticides like DDT in the 1940s temporarily halted the legions of biting bugs. As their pesticide-resistant descendants began to multiply from Manhattan to Moscow, though, changing everything from leases to liability laws, the hunt for a solution was on.
by Felicity Barringer, NY Times | Read more:
Photo: Megan W. Szyndler and Catherine Loudon/University of California, Irvine
Tuesday, April 9, 2013
Masters 2013: Hole-by-Hole Guide to Augusta
Past and present Masters stars reveal how they would tackle each hole from tee to green at Augusta National as the world's best players gear up for the first golf major of 2013.
by Paddy Allen and Ewan Murray, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: PGAgolfArt.com
Paying For Your Ex-
[ed. Click HERE for larger graphic.]
What is probably the most exclusive club in the world has a similarly exclusive price tag. The bill included $450,000 on Bill Clinton’s Harlem office and $85,000 on George W Bush’s telephone bill, said the report by the non-partisan Congressional Research Service.
The cost of funding the former presidents will raise eyebrows, given that the hefty speaking fees they can command after leaving office and the well endowed presidential centres and foundations that facilitate many of their post-presidential activities.
The figures don't include security provided by the Secret Service, costs which are on a separate, undisclosed budget.
The cost of funding the former presidents will raise eyebrows, given that the hefty speaking fees they can command after leaving office and the well endowed presidential centres and foundations that facilitate many of their post-presidential activities.
The figures don't include security provided by the Secret Service, costs which are on a separate, undisclosed budget.
by Mark Oliver and Conrad Quilty-Harper, The Telegraph | Read more:
h/t TYWKIWDBI
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