Check it out on the left sidebar!!

….okay, that was a dick move. But how else did you expect us to go out?

It’s been real, y’all. Les Auteurs FrinkTank will resurface in other places and other forms in the future. Or maybe even back here. But when/wherever it happens, you’ll surely recognize the signs.

Yes, yes. We haven’t posted since homo erectus scrawled a cave painting. Sorry. We’re like that big booger-lookin’ thing that the Mogwai turns into if you feed it after midnight.

However, we couldn’t see this and not take a shot at our favorite genus of punching bag.

Hm, looks like the Lower East Side’ll get the hardest bitchslap from global warming. Tragedy or blessing? HEY-OH!

ARO’s City of the Future | Flickr

Alert Reader “minouette” alerted us to the following tidbit from The Independent:

In December 2006, Wisconsin hunter Rick Lisko ran over and killed a seven-legged hermaphroditic deer. “It’s a pretty weird deer,” he said before eating it, later adding: “It was tasty.”

The Portage Daily Register has the full story:

Warden Doug Bilgo of the state Department of Natural Resources came to Lisko’s property near Mud Lake in the town of Osceola to tag the deer.
“I have never seen anything like that in all the years that I’ve been working as a game warden and being a hunter myself,” Bilgo said. “It wasn’t anything grotesque or ugly or anything. It was just unusual that it would have those little appendages growing out like that.”

And here, courtesy of our art department (who always follow our exacting standards for good design) is an artist’s rendering:

You’d think the natives of Easter Island would be grateful that their home was made famous by a giant viking of a white man named for the Norse god of thunder, but Nooooo… now they’re “fatigued” by all the attention they’ve been getting from “archaeologists, anthropologists, ethnographers, musicologists, botanists, biologists and art historians.”

Apparently they’d rather, you know, make a living or plant their crops than put up with another yammering, dreadlocked graduate student bent on wresting a PhD thesis from the mud people’s non-western tonal scale:

“What did Heyerdahl really leave behind for us? You have to share the benefits and not just leave me a chocolate bar. Those days are over.”

Many on Easter Island Prefer to Leave Stones Unturned | New York Times

What is up with the skanktastic science news this week? First we hear about Toxoplasma gondii, the friendly cyst-borne parasite that “turns women into sex kittens.” (Screw fluoride: who’s the civic genius to start putting this in the water supply?) Then there’s the discovery a set of genes that directly tracks the likelihood of your old lady to fuck around on you. (Interestingly, the correlation doesn’t tell anything about the man’s likelihood of cheating. Perfect for organizing your next honor killing!)

It takes three to be a trend, so I’m just waiting for the next vaguely-misogynistic EurekAlert news release to hit the interblogs. This one comes close, buried in a piece about new Lite-Brite machines for your Brainhole:

In a recent experiment, scientists tried to figure out what you might call the “Grey’s Anatomy” effect. When characters on the show get lonely, they act out — drinking too much at the local bar, baking up a storm in the kitchen, having sex with a guy who ends up with a permanent erection.

W. Keith Campbell, a psychology professor at the University of Georgia, and his colleagues recruited 30 female students who underwent what they thought were ordinary personality tests while being monitored by an MEG scanner.

Half the women were told that their test results suggested they would have trouble maintaining relationships and “end up alone in later life.” The other women, a control group, got only neutral feedback to their answers, with no indications their lives were destined to go to pot.

Afterwards, all the subjects worked on a long series of math problems. Those who were told they’d grow old alone scored worse than the other women, and “showed less activation in parts of the brain associated with self-control,” Campbell said,

The ten-car pileup of Negative Chick Stereotypes going on here (”like, ohmiGOD! I totally can’t do long division because I’ll never have Dr. McDreamy’s baby!”) almost puts it over the top, but since the article pussyfoots around the research’s implied slut-factor, I can’t deem it worthy. “Showed less activation”? Dude, speak in English. In fact, aim for New York Post english. Like this:

Barren-Womb Fear Makes Broads Beg For It, Sez Study
So-called “Grey’s Anatomy” effect lowers IQs, hikes skirts

Now THAT’LL get you Dugg, baby!

Parasite ‘turns women into sex kittens’ | The Age
Don’t Pair Up With Matching Genes | New Scientist
MEG Scanners are Mega Powerful | Wired News

I was furiously downloading the photographic gorgeosity from Michael Poliza’s Flickr page, when I found this awesome photo called, um, “hard work.” Think Nat Geo crossed with Boogie Nights outtakes. SFW, but only b/c it’s Science.

Oh, and he’s got a bit of snuff too. Elton John, eat your bloody baby elephant trunk out.

You may have missed this, since it was announced on Jesus’s birthday, but apparently the Healthy Penis campaign–an effort to alert gays that getting syphilis is no mere tragic anachronism–was a resounding success.

That’s great and all, but mostly I’m just glad someone finally dug up an excuse to send a cock & syphilis sore marching down a public sidewalk…

And there’s even an animated version! And anatomically life-size squeezable penile stress relievers! (Not warranted for off-label use…)

Can YOU tell the difference? Click to find out!

Oh geez, Seed Magazine EIC and Peter Principle posterboy Adam Bly is talking again, and we, like untold dozens of others, are listening—mostly to see if he actually says anything relevant, or just repeats his little catchphrase “science is culture” over and over again like a less-dapper Rain Man with echolalia.

Bly’s latest editor’s letter was featured on Gawker yesterday, mainly because it’s a masterclass of sheer asswipery (Gawker, for their part, used the words “pomposity” and “pretentious”). It’s the kind of onanistic drivel that only comes from a person with absolutely no friends or respect who’s desperately trying to convince the world that he is in fact liked and respected. If Bly didn’t make a career of screwing freelancers, alienating staffers, and being an all-around mendacious twat, he’d be the ideal object for your pity. Unfortunately this strange piece of bullshit can no longer be accessed on Seed’s homepage [Ed. Note - it’s back up] as Bly, in true chickenshit fashion, pulled it as soon as Gawker called him out. It’s telling when an editor in chief is ashamed of his own introduction to his own magazine, don’t you think?

Luckily the first graph remains:

My role as editor of this magazine offers me few pleasures greater than sharing a meal with a fascinating scientist. It starts with the ideas on the table, certainly, but for me it’s also the distinct cadence, the fluttering of the hands, the brush of the forehead, the coy grin that lets you know you’re being let in on one of nature’s secrets. Inspired by a friend here in New York who regularly hosts great thinkers in his home, I’ve even installed (with considerable effort) an oversize blackboard in my dining room for those occasions when you just need to see it in chalk.

The fluttering of the hands, the brush of the forehead, the coy grin…if this is what constitutes heady repartee in Bly’s mind, it’s no wonder Seed has all the substance of a Tiger Beat double issue. But either way, with verbal cues like that, we’d advise any visitors (yeah right) to this guy’s black-boarded seraglio to keep an eye out for hidden Web cams and to think before gulping down a second glass of that too-enthusiastically proffered Yellow Tail. I mean, his associates don’t toss around endearments like “oily worm,” “Ken-doll crotch,” and “Pee-Wee Herman’s eunuch doppelganger” in honor of his competence and sparkling personality.

Gawker - Adam Bly’s ‘Seed’: Pretentious or Preternaturally Potent?