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Designer Lauren McCarthy invented the Happiness Hat. It stabs you in the head if you stop smiling.
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OBJECTIFYING SCIENCE
As outlandish as these “love affairs” might sound, psychologists have studied them at length and have come up with a few theories on why these people become so attached to their objects.
• They’re fetishists. Fetishism, a well-documented psychological phenomenon, involves being turned on sexually by objects or body parts—say, leather clothing, or feet. But OS people maintain that their relationships are more focused on love than on sex.
• Some research suggests that there may be a link between OS and a form of autism called Asperger’s syndrome, which results in the sufferer having difficulty interacting with other people. But many in the OS community are very social and don’t fit the typical Asperger’s profile.
• Many OS people suffered from a past severe emotional and/or physical trauma and are unable to form a loving bond with another human out of fear. Put simply, they may prefer to be in a relationship where the other partner can’t abuse or leave them.
• Some theorize that OS may be just another form of sexual orientation, albeit a very rare one. Just like hetero- and homosexuality, objectum-sexuality often manifests at the onset of puberty.
Erika La Tour Eiffel can’t really explain it. She calls the feelings she has for objects “innate.” As her Web site says, “We are not looking for a cure, but more comprehension into our make-up as an emerging part of society.”
* * *
The children’s song “La Cucaracha” is about a cockroach who ruins his life by smoking marijuana.
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NEWSPAPER
CORREKSHUNS
Every once in a while, a newspaper makes a mistake. What are we saying? They make mistakes all the time. Luckily, most papers have a policy of issuing a correction. And some, like these from the very recent past, are hilerious.
Anchorage Daily News:
“There was an error in the Dear Abby column that was published on Monday. In the fifth paragraph, the second sentence stated that Charlie’s hiccups were cured temporarily through the use of carbon monoxide. It should have read carbon dioxide.”
The Guardian (U.K.): “In our entry on Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegon Days, we referred to A Prairie Ho Companion; we meant A Prairie Home Companion.”
The Sun (U.K.): “In my column on August 22, I suggested that Sharon Osbourne was an unemployed, drug-addled, unfit mum with a litter of feral kids. This was not intended to be taken literally. I fully accept she is none of these things and sincerely apologise to Sharon and her family for my unacceptable comments. Sorry, Sharon…”
The Amherst Citizen (Nova Scotia): “A Nov. 9 story about Nova Scotia’s black minority was accompanied by an inaccurate photograph caption. The photo, said to depict rundown houses around Dartmouth, was actually of a pig farm. The Citizen apologizes for the error.”
The Sentinel-Review (Woodstock, Ontario): “In an article in Monday’s newspaper, there may have been a misperception about why a Woodstock man is going to Afghanistan on a voluntary mission. Kevin DeClark is going to Afghanistan to gain life experience to become a police officer when he returns, not to ‘shoot guns and blow things up.’ The Sentinel-Review apologizes for any embarrassment this may have caused.”
Denver Daily News: “We would like to offer a sincere apology for a typo in Wednesday’s Town Talk regarding New Jersey’s proposal to ban smoking in automobiles. It was not the author’s intention to call New Jersey ‘Jew Jersey.’”
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In 2005 a 28-year-old South Korean man died from exhaustion after playing StarCraft, an online video game, for 50 hours straight.
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The Sunday Paper (Atlanta, Georgia): “An earlier version of this story incorrectly described Buffington’s special support hose as ‘mercury-lined.’ The hose are mercury-gauged, meaning that barometric mercury is used to measure the compression of the hose. They are not mercury-lined, which would, of course, make them poisonous.”
Us Weekly: “In our feature ‘Why She Left Him,’ the woman identified in the photograph as former adult-film star Ginger Lynn Allen is neither Ms. Allen nor an adult-film actress. Us regrets the error.”
The Sun (U.K.): “In an article published on The Sun’s website on January 27 under the headline ‘Gollum joker killed in live rail horror,’ we incorrectly stated that Julian Brooker, 23, of Brighton, was blown 15 feet into the air after accidentally touching a live railway line. His parents have asked us to make clear that he was not turned into a fireball, was not obsessed with the number 23, and didn’t go drinking on that date every month. Julian’s mother did not say, during or after the inquest, that her son often got on all fours creeping around their house, pretending to be Gollum from the J.R.R. Tolkien novels. We apologise for the distress this has caused Julian’s family and friends.”
Portland (Maine) Press Herald: “A story on Wednesday about foraging for edible mushrooms contained a photo of amanita muscaria, which is a poisonous and hallucinogenic mushroom. It was a copyeditor’s error.”
The Guardian: “We misspelled the word ‘misspelled’ twice, as ‘mispelled,’ in the Corrections and clarifications column on September 26, page 30.”
Iowa State Daily: “In Friday’s issue, the article ‘Decorate your dorm on the cheap’ inaccurately described furniture purchased at Goodwill and Salvation Army stores as being ‘complete with that old-urine smell.’ The Daily retracts its false statement and deeply regrets the error.”
MOONSTRUCK
Is our moon to blame for this crazy world?
LUNAR-TICS
The idea of someone being “moonstruck”—driven insane by the influence of the moon—dates back to the ancient Greeks and Romans. In fact, the word “lunatic” derives from Luna, the Roman goddess of the moon. The Greek physician Hippocrates (460–370 B.C.) observed the moon’s effect on the tides, and concluded that the moon must exert some influence over the brain’s “moistness” and cause madness. This belief persisted through the Middle Ages: People refused to sleep where moonbeams might strike them, and werewolves were said to wreak havoc during the full moon.
STATISTICAL ANOMALIES
To this day, it is a common belief that weird things happen when the moon is full, a phenomenon sometimes called “the Transylvanian effect.” Police officers and emergency room workers attest that crime, accidents, and suicides all increase on full moons. Nevertheless, rigorous statistical analysis has shown that there is little correlation between human behavior and the phases of the moon. More than 35 major studies have been conducted on lunar cycle influence. The findings: There are no significant increases in ER visits, births, or crime.
OVER THE MOON
Still, it will probably take more than statistics to convince people that the moon doesn’t effect us in some way. As Hippocrates noted, the moon’s gravitational force affects the tides, and the human body is composed largely of water. And there is evidence of lunar influence in the length of menstrual cycles and the circadian rhythms that govern sleep.
But Michael Shermer, editor of Skeptic magazine, has this simple explanation for why we think full moons cause weirdness. “We don’t remember the unusual things that happen on all the other times, because we’re not looking for them.” Or perhaps a brightly lit night is simply conducive to mischief.
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Almost 90% of Americans label themselves as shy. Who says? The California Shyness Clinic.
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THE CHEMTRAILS
CONSPIRACY
What’s crazier? That some people actually believe the United States government is purposely spraying caustic chemicals into the air? Or that those people have evidence to back up their claims?
THE UNFRIENDLY SKIES
In May 2000, an anonymous letter started making the rounds on the Internet. Here’s an excerpt:
I work for
an airline in upper management levels. I will not say which airline. I wish I could document everything, but to do so would result in possible physical harm to me. Airline companies in America have been participating in something called “Project Cloverleaf” for a few years now. They told us that the government was going to pay our airline, along with others, to release special chemicals from commercial aircraft. When asked what the chemicals were, they told us that information was given on a need-to-know basis and we weren’t cleared for it. They told us the chemicals were harmless, but the program was of such importance that it needed to be done at any cost. The public doesn’t need to know what’s going on, but that this program is in their best interests.
The writer went on to say that Project Cloverleaf made use of a “Powder Contrail Generation Apparatus,” which was attached to the planes.
By the time the letter appeared, discussion of “chemtrails” had already become a fixture on late night talk radio shows, in alternative magazines, and online. Dozens of conspiracy Web sites reported (and still report) that, far from being harmless, chemtrails are something to be very afraid of. But what are they?
LINE UP
If you look up when a jet plane passes overhead, you’ll often see a white plume that looks like a chalk mark in the sky. That’s called a contrail, short for “condensation trail.” A contrail forms when water vapor around the exhaust from a jet plane flying above 30,000 feet freezes. Sometimes, though, planes leave behind trails that are thicker, longer, and longer-lasting. These, according to conspiracy theorists, are “chemical trails,” or chemtrails. Here’s how they say you can tell the difference:
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An Ad Age magazine study says America is so diverse now that “average Americans” don’t exist.
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3 Contrails are visible about one wingspan’s distance behind a jet plane. Chemtrails are directly behind a plane, with no gap between the plane and the trail.
3 Contrails form straight lines. Chemtrails crisscross the sky in zigzag patterns that often form a large grid.
3 Contrails last for moments and then dissipate. Chemtrails last for hours and leave behind a hazy stain in the sky.
Contrails are basically just water vapor—an incidental byproduct of regular aircraft. But chemtrails, say the conspiracies, contain a mixture of pesticides and heavy metals, such as barium and aluminum. They’re dispensed by either passenger jets or unmarked planes that fly repeatedly over the same area, at lower-than-normal altitudes. Once in the sky, chemtrails are supposedly heated by super-powerful radar or microwaves, creating chemical fibers known as “angel hair” that fall to the ground in a toxic mist.
COUGH, COUGH
So why are these dastardly doses of death being dumped on us? There are several theories.
Population control: It’s a part of the Illuminati’s “New World Order Depopulation Agenda,” the aim of which is to kill off masses of undesirable people, or at least render them sterile so they can’t multiply. (This is occurring in North America and Western Europe—but not China because that nation, according to the theory, “is being groomed by the NWO to replace the United States as the leading nation of the world, both economically and militarily.”
Urban unrest: Some conspiracy theorists claim that spraying chemtrails over low-income inner-city neighborhoods has resulted in increased outbreaks of violence and crime, causing unrest in the cities, which will eventually lead to chaos. (No word on what kind of outcome that chaos is supposed to lead to.)
Weapons testing: The military is using chemtrails to test out various forms of biological warfare…and U.S. citizens are the guinea pigs.
Weather control: Imagine one country threatening another country with, “Surrender—or you won’t see any rain for 20 years!” Chemtrails may be the means to achieve this.
Environmental aid: Another theory is far less grim. Chemtrails were designed to stop global warming by increasing what’s called “global dimming.” Believers point to physicist Dr. Edward Teller, known as the “Father of the Hydrogen Bomb” and also the father of the “Star Wars” missile defense program. In 1997 Teller wrote in the Wall Street Journal that the same chemicals used in topical sunscreen could be used to block the harmful atmospheric rays that cause global warming and that passenger jets are perfectly suited to disperse them into the atmosphere. Interestingly, chemtrails started appearing in much greater numbers shortly after Teller’s article was published.
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Nearly half of all psychiatrists have been attacked by one of their patients.
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HAARP ATTACK
At the heart of the chemtrails controversy is the U.S. Air Force project HAARP (High Frequency Active Aural Research Project) in Alaska. According to its Web site, HAARP is an unclassified research project that studies the ionosphere and radio science. Conspiracy theorists, however, say this is a ruse. They claim the classified mission of HAARP is to establish a massive radar grid that combines electromagnetic waves with chemtrails in order to spread the chemicals across the world’s atmosphere, giving the American military-industrial complex control over everything from the weather, to enhanced surveillance, to mind control.
To back up their claims, they exhibit a 1996 research study published by the USAF called “Weather as a Force Multiplier: Owning the Weather in 2025.” The unclassified report was produced by students, faculty, and scientists from academic branches of the Air Force. They were challenged to imagine a set of fictional scenarios set 30 years in the future and what possible responses the military might have. These scenarios describe using weather modification to achieve “battlespace dominance” by enhancing precipitation (making rain), inducing drought, generating cloud cover, and disrupting satellite communications and radar.
THE RAINMAKERS
Government control of the weather is not a new concept. During World War II, attempts were made to combine chemical agents with cloud seeding, and during the Vietnam War covert cloud-seeding operations tried to make enough rain to muddy jungle trails and hinder the movements of enemy soldiers. These operations were exposed in the late 1960s, and by the early 1970s the U.S. Senate called for an international treaty against weather manipulation. They got one: the United Nations Convention on the Prohibition of Any Hostile Use of Environmental Modification Technique, which was ratified by the U.S. and 30 other nations, and entered into effect in 1978.
* * *
A cornflake shaped like the state of Illinois recently sold on eBay. Price: $1,350.
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DEATH RAY 2000!
But just because something is illegal, does that mean the government won’t do it? Carolyn Williams Palit, a Texas woman in her 50s, believes that not only is the government continuing to spread chemicals in the atmosphere, but that they’re actually weapons:
It involves the combination of chemtrails for creating an atmosphere that will support electromagnetic waves, ground-based electromagnetic field oscillators called “gyrotrons,” and ionospheric heaters. They spray barium powders and let it photoionize from the ultraviolet light of the sun. Then they make an aluminum-plasma generated by “zapping” the metal cations that are in the spray with either electromagnetics from HAARP, the gyrotron system on the ground [the Ground Wave Emergency Network], or space-based lasers. The barium makes the aluminum-plasma more particulate dense. This means they can make a denser plasma than they normally could from just ionizing the atmosphere or the air. More density [more particles] means that these particles are colliding into each other and will become more charged. What they are ultimately trying to do up there is create charged-particle, plasma beam weapons.
Palit believes we are victims of “state-sponsored torture” and that Congress is knowingly using American tax dollars to fund it.
THE OFFICIAL RESPONSE
In response to Palit, her many followers, and all the other conspiracy theorists, NASA, the USAF, the EPA, and the NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) ha
ve all released rebuttals, explaining that chemtrails are nothing more than really big contrails, caused by various atmospheric, weather, and air traffic conditions.
* * *
The United States produces 42% of the world’s e-mail spam, followed by South Korea at 15%.
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In their “Aircraft Contrails Factsheet,” the agencies explained the difference between short-lived contrails and persistent contrails—the ones most likely to be mistaken for chemtrails. The photographs in the pamphlet show the crisscrossing patterns and grids that chemtrail believers so often point to as proof that the lines are not contrails. In 2005 the USAF released their own “Contrails Facts,” a long, exhaustive document that goes into infinite detail about contrails, and debunks chemtrails, calling them a “hoax.”
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