Weak end for the weekend…

Posted by: prolixous on: June 13, 2015

• In: Current Events | Open Thread | Weekend Light Fare
• 35 Comments

Happy weekend Widdershinners – hoping your week was a good one.  In order to assure you have an appropriately weak end to your week, I’ve collected a few stories for your enjoyment from the News of Weird.  Let’s begin by explaining why this post is adorned with the art work of Mark Rothko. 

Mr. Rothko is an abstract impressionist who has been quite successful according to the New York Times.  Mr. Rothko will never be accused of being complicated in his painting.  In fact, some critics have compared Rothko’s art to the “squiggles of playful toddlers,” but eye of the beholder and all that art appreciation stuff.  Sotheby’s auction house announced last month that Rothko’s “Untitled, (Blue and Yellow)” sold for $46.5 million.  As you can tell that is $15.5 million per rectangle.  The Sotheby’s catalog described the painting as one that shows “how truly miraculous a painting can be.”  Funny, I thought I knew the definition of “miraculous”.

Speaking of art appreciation…

The students of the University of California, San Diego’s Visual Arts 104A class were seen as truly appreciating art since they were “truly being seen” during art appreciation.  For the final exam students were to make a presentation while nude, but not to worry, the room was darkened and the professor was also nude.  The professor had been conducting his final exams in the “all together” for eleven years and no student had ever complained.  I can only imagine what Visual Arts classes 101 through 103 entailed – pun sorta intended.

Now, here’s a complaint…

According to the London Independent, British forensic scientist Dr. Brooke Magnanti recently filed a lawsuit accusing her ex-boyfriend of libeling her.  Dr. Magnanti has written two best-selling books and even inspired a teevee series based on her life.  Part of Magnanti’s marketability cachet was that she claimed to have paid for her education through prostitution.  Her ex-boyfriend had the chauvinistic temerity to say Dr. Magnanti was NOT a prostitute, ergo the libel suit.  After the breakup, the ex-boyfriend should have stuck with whispering the sweet-nothing of, “What a whore!”

Speaking of horizontal activities…

According to the Daily Telegraph, Mike Holpin, 56, told reporters he was just “doing what God wants.”  Mr. Holpin, unemployed since he lost his promising career as a carny, claims to have fathered at least 40 children.  Those children are now aged from 3 to 37 and the product of Holpin’s carny barking with some twenty different women.  Mr. Holpin explained, “In the Bible, God says go forth and multiply.  I will never stop.  I’m as fertile as sin.”  If anyone from TLC is out there reading TW today, I nominate Mr. Holpin and his extended brood for the time slot formerly occupied by the gold Duggars.

Speaking of religiosity…

The Associated Press reported about the activities of an energetic Catholic Monsignor named Kevin Wallin.  The Monsignor is a young-at-heart 63 years old, but Wallin will be at least 68 when he is again free to roam the environs of Bridgeport, Connecticut.  You see the good Monsignor was sentenced to prison for running a meth distribution ring.  In addition, to cover the lucrative profits from his grassroots pharmaceutical marketing the industrious Wallin also operated a sex shop.  You know what they say about idle hands.  In any event, Wallin had faced a ten-year sentence, but because of his history of charity work and 80 letters of support from high-ranking clergy, he will only be sidelined for five years during which he will undoubtedly be a virtuous paragon of prison wisdom.

Speaking of needed counseling…

In March, following the departure of Zayn Malik from the British band One Direction, an executive with the Peninsula employment law firm in Manchester, England, told London’s Daily Telegraph that he had received “hundreds” of calls from employers seeking advice about workers who were requesting “compassionate” leave because Malik’s resignation had left them distraught.  I was distraught when I had no idea who Zayn Malik was and even more distraught when I learned there was a band called One Direction.

Crying at the office…

I would have said, “Crying all the way to the bank,” but these people are already at banks for the most part.  Lightly regulated hedge funds failed last year, for the sixth straight year, to out earn ordinary stock index funds.  Following the advice of their high priestess Ayn Rand, you would think such poor performance would be punished by the “invisible hand of the market,” but no.  The top 25 hedge fund managers collectively earned $11.62 billion (not million – billion with a “B”) in fees and salaries for an average of over $464 million each.  Making sure this is understood:  Twenty-five people split $11.62 billion in fees and salaries.  Twenty-five people!  Eleven point Sixty-two billion!  But, six years of failure does take its toll on a person so perhaps they can find solace in their subsistence wages.

They do it for love of the gaming…

A 21-year-old man in Hefei, China, collapsed last month after 14 straight days of Internet gaming, yet when paramedics revived him, the man begged them to leave and put him back in front of the screen.  Then, two weeks later in Nanchang, China, a 24-year-old female gamer took only a minutes-long break at an Internet cafe at 4 a.m., to head to a rest room and give birth — returning with her blood-covered baby in her arms to resume her place at the mouse pad.  Now that is the type of initiative Ayn Rand was talking about.

Just something you need to know…

From the New York Times:  Almost half of the DNA collected from a broad swath of the New York City subway system matched no known organism, and less than 1 percent was human. Weill Cornell Medical College researchers announced in February that they had collected the DNA by swabbing passenger car and station surfaces, finding abundant matches to beetles and flies (and even traces of inactive anthrax and bubonic plague), but that since so few organisms have been fully DNA-“sequenced,” there was no cause for alarm. The lead researcher fondly compared the bacteria-teeming subway to a “rain forest,” deserving “awe and wonder” that “there are all these species” that so far cause humans relatively little harm.  In related news, the lead researcher was voted “Mr. Optimism” by his coworkers.

And finally, for some political news…

Holly Solomon, 31, of Phoenix, pleaded guilty in April to aggravated assault and sentenced to three and a half years in prison.  It seems Ms. Solomon was attempting to press her then-husband’s clothes with him in them.  She wasn’t using an iron, but was taking the novel approach of using her Jeep.  It seems as though Ms. Solomon ran down her spouse because she was angry that he had neglected to vote for Mitt Romney as he promised to do.  Romney won Arizona quite handily even without her hubby’s vote, but voting is a responsibility Ms. Solomon takes quite seriously.

 

That should about do it for now my Widdershin friends.  Enjoy the weekend and feel free to allow the conversation to roam in any direction you may wish.

 

 

 

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Tags: Hedge Fund Managers, Holly Solomon, Kevin Wallin, Mike Holpin, Mitt Romney, NYC subway, Rothko, Zahn Malik