Snark Week: A Silent, Adorable Killer

By: | July 6, 2015

platypus underwaterI have noticed a disturbing trend on the internets recently. A series of videos, pictures, and posts have portrayed the duck-billed platypus as an adorable, lovable creature. As if it is some cute little bundle of playful, ticklish fun. They’ve even been given a cute little web nickname of “puggle.” In fact, I might go so far as to say the platypus is on the verge of becoming the web’s new hedgehog. This needs to stop and it needs to stop now.

The duck-billed platypus – often called “nature’s mistake” or “holy crap, what is that freaky thing” by scientists – is not a toy, not a pet, and not even remotely safe. You see, platypuses (or “platypi,” as they are called by people who also use the word “octopi”) have a deadly secret. Continue reading →

Welcome to Snark Week

By: | July 6, 2015

Snark week 4

Welcome to the third annual Snark Week! Every year, the Discovery Channel spends a week reminding us how frightening sharks around the world can be. It’s a week of half-truths, embellishment, and occasional outright fabrication. But man, it’s good TV.

But what about all the animals that aren’t sharks? Don’t they want to kill us too? In fact, yes, they do. Pretty much all of them. And thanks to the hard working journalists at LWON, you will learn about five such frightening creatures this week. Are they genuinely dangerous? Sure, why not? Are they interesting? Absolutely. Are they terrifying? Well, they are now.

And just like its namesake, it’s less important that the creatures you learn about are truly dangerous as much as that you feel they are dangerous. Because who needs facts when you have good old fashioned intuition? So sit back, kick up your feet and enjoy Snark Week. Because nothing is as much fun as being frightened by the world around you.

Just when you thought it was safe to say “Awww, how cute…”

The Last Word

By: | July 4, 2015

23__Provo_3DouchesJune 29-July 3

This week Craig waxes poetic and scientific on how wanderlust may (or may not) be etched in our genes.

Cameron plays with fire in her dreams but can’t light one in real life.

Guest poster Naomi Schon and regular LWONer Sally tease out (squeeze out?) the flaws in the breastfeeding-makes-you-skinny promise. (Spoiler: It doesn’t.)

Photographer Steve Smith, who grew up in the Mormon church, shares photos from his new book Waiting out the Latter Days, which he says investigates “the world that did not meet its armageddon.”

And Jessa takes us up a river with a paddle—drawing and cross-drawing masterfully on whitewater but always returning to dip silently into her beloved river of glass.

 

(Photo by Steve Smith)

Dip, Dip and Swing

By: | July 3, 2015

shutterstock_21842599Another Canada Day has passed, eclipsed in my part of the country by the festivities of Aboriginal Day, which falls just a week beforehand. Bizarrely, it was the Google Doodle this year that most roused my patriotic spirit on July first. In the image, a woman kneels up in the bow of a canoe — possibly scouting some rapids ahead – while a man steers in the stern.

It’s quite a beautiful scene. Trouble is, neither of them seems to know how to hold a paddle. Their top hands are wrapped around the shaft instead of clasping the grip, and the paddles themselves are outlandishly outsized, in an otherwise realistic painting. That might be a minor quibble, but it doesn’t sit right with me. Nothing says Canada to me like paddling, but much more than that, nothing marks a Canadian more than paddling expertise. There is a certain kind of competence you can only display in a canoe. Continue reading →

Guest Post: Waiting Out the Latter Days

By: | July 2, 2015

Steven Smith — a photographer who grew up in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, the Mormon church, and whom I’ve known a long time — sent me a book he’s just published.  It’s called Waiting Out the Latter Days.  It’s almost entirely photographs which I love but am incapable of reading, so I asked him to explain it a little.  His full answer is in the following post but his first answer was:

“I have been thinking about how to talk about this book but it is so personal, I get self-conscious. The book has a catchy, almost clichéd, title but I mean the phrase in every sense possible. The Mormons viewed the nuclear apocalypse as the Bible’s promise of the end of days. That was when Jesus was going to come back and take every one to heaven. I did this book because I was so curious to investigate the world that did not meet its armageddon.”

– Ann

03_Lehi_ShadeParadeBoyFourth grade was the last time we practiced diving under our desks and turning our faces away from the windows. In middle school, we were sent down into the basement from time to time for what our teachers told us were earthquake preparedness drills. We knew the drills were for atomic bombs. The looming nuclear attacks were all part of God’s plan. Our job was to remain faithful and wait.

While waiting, we saw the TV programs on Nuclear Armageddon and When the Russians Invade that aired right before Saturday morning cartoons. Then in Sunday school, we found out how Satan and the Communists were conspiring together against us. The Cold War was escalating, the Russians were going to attack soon, and we had better stop touching ourselves. I didn’t really have any hopes or dreams then. I just wanted to live long enough to get married and have sex before God called us Home. Continue reading →

The myth of the breastfeeding diet

By: | July 1, 2015

shutterstock_162325934Breastfeeding is often sold to new mothers as a bulletproof way to lose the baby weight. The promise is the same whether you’re getting advice from lactation experts, mummy blogs, Unicef, midwives, or official medical sites such as the NHS in the UK and the National Institutes of Medicine in the US: feed your baby the natural way, and you’ll burn about 500 calories every day.

The prospect of effortlessly melting away the baby weight will be attractive to someone who is probably still too sore and exhausted from labour to even consider going for a run. It’s also an awfully nice carrot to dangle in front of a person who is on the fence about breastfeeding. But 500 calories is a very specific number. So where did it come from? And is there any truth in it? Continue reading →

Fired Up

By: | June 30, 2015

3368841720_f6ddbcfe97_zI quit glassblowing because it pissed me off too much. It’s been ten years since I’ve done it, so I don’t remember much about how to make a goblet or a vase or a Christmas ornament. What I do remember is the bright eye of the furnace, the relentless heat, and the crazy dreams that I had after late-night sessions in the shop. My nights were filled with color, with people transforming into animals or into each other, with rainbow storms and trippy blobs that looked like moving Rorschach tests.

In the dreams I was often angry. In the glass shop I was often angry, too, because I found it so frustrating and I was so terribly, terribly bad at blowing glass, at shaping it on the bench, at doing much of anything at all besides staring into the fire and, later, having the circle of it burned into my dreams.

Continue reading →

The Urge to Go

By: | June 29, 2015

shutterstock_261653681I couldn’t have been any more than 7 or 8 years old when I told my mom I was running away. Her response was, “Take me with you.”

I grew up with her, just the two of us. She was a wanderer, not happy unless she was going somewhere. Her restlessness had us moving once every year or two or three. Everything was an adventure, every weekend a journey. Out of Denver, she’d take me up into the Rockies to camp in a tent along cold, tumbling streams. We ate out of foil packets and climbed mountains until we could see everything, a continent disappearing over the edge of the earth all around us.

To live is to move. Any species will tell you that. Genes require frequent stirring and new niches must found. Tendencies toward novelty seeking and risk taking have a chromosomal expression. Some of us are just more struck than others. Continue reading →