Off Beat
For years, he was the booze-soaked bard of the barstool, the keeper of ‘a bad liver and a broken heart’. But Tom Waits was saved by his wife, hasn’t had a drink for more than a decade and, at 56, is making the music of his life. Interview by Sean O’Hagan
Orphans is a big, sprawling map of disintegration, a triple album containing 54 songs, 30 of which are brand new, while the rest have been gathered up from various one-off projects, film soundtracks and stage plays. His wife, Kathleen, once said there were two types of Tom Waits songs, ‘the grim reapers and the grand weepers’, but Orphans suggest there are at least three. ‘Brawlers’ is made up of blues stomps and raw rockers; ‘Bawlers’ is full of those beautiful, broken-down ballads of his that always sound oddly familiar, and ‘Bastards’ is a series of fits and starts, noisy outbursts that range from the cantankerous to the unhinged.
And now for my last trick
His death-defying stunts made him an international man of mystery. But did Harry Houdini lead a life of even greater intrigue — as a secret agent?
Secrecy was such a fixture of Harry Houdini’s life, it should have been his middle name. We remember him now as the greatest escape artist who ever lived – a tough, squat Hungarian-born Jewish American who freed himself from everything from handcuffs, chains and straitjackets to coffins, iron maidens and torture racks – but he was basically an illusionist; a conjuror. While millions may have swallowed the myth that he achieved his escapes using nothing but brute strength, extreme plasticity and superhuman self-belief, in fact there was often something up his sleeve, so to speak – something he knew about and the audience didn’t. His equipment would be customised, rigged, interfered with. The myriad containers that imprisoned him would come apart in ingenious ways. To accomplish his famous escape from a big milk can full of water, for instance, he could simply remove the top section, whose ring of false rivets gave a convincing illusion of indestructibility. Even when he leapt shackled into the Mississippi, the Seine or Aberdeen harbour, there was something he wasn’t letting on about the ties that bound him, whether it be dodgy cuffs or concealed lock-picks.
10 dirtiest jobs in science
Sometimes a job calls for a little dirty work, but when your job is in science, the dirty part can become increasingly literal.
Hot-zone Superintendent
What they do: Perform maintenance work for bio-safety labs that study lethal airborne pathogens, for which there is no known cure. Their work enables scientists to study the nature of disease-causing organisms, such as anthrax.
Dysentery Stool Sample Analyzer
What they do: Study stool samples from diseased humans who have experienced diarrhea from a disease-causing microbe. The analysis allows these scientists to develop intestinal diagnostics to ease those suffering from the disease.
Rare Look at a Great White Shows Shark’s Fragility
Rare Look at a Great White Shows Shark’s Fragility
Trenton Wheeler is just 5 years old, but he is already a “stalker” of great white sharks, in the words of his father, Kevin. And at this point there is just one place in the world for Trenton to pursue his obsession: the Monterey Bay Aquarium. For half a century, aquariums around the world have tried unsuccessfully to maintain a captive great white, the shark immortalized in the 1975 movie “Jaws” and its sequels, for more than a couple of weeks. Two years ago, scientists at Monterey managed to pull off this feat for the first time, keeping a female great white in their million-gallon tank for six months. Since September they have been at it again, introducing a year-old male to thousands of tourists who have flocked to view it.
For half a century, aquariums around the world have tried unsuccessfully to maintain a captive great white, the shark immortalized in the 1975 movie “Jaws” and its sequels, for more than a couple of weeks. Two years ago, scientists at Monterey managed to pull off this feat for the first time, keeping a female great white in their million-gallon tank for six months. Since September they have been at it again, introducing a year-old male to thousands of tourists who have flocked to view it.
Playing tag now a no-no at some US schools
Playing tag now a no-no at some US schools
Two Massachusetts primary schools this week joined a growing list of US schools that have banned the age-old game of tag for fear that children may get hurt and their parents will sue.
Officials at McCarthy Elementary School in Framingham in the northeastern state, told local media that children have been ordered to invent a new no-contact version of the game for safety reasons.
“If the hands come out to touch, then the supervisors ask them to stop,” McCarthy principal Joan Vodoklys was quoted as saying in the Boston Herald on Friday. “What we require is that children do not touch each other.”
Sonic Passion: A case study on robophiliacs
Sonic Passion: A case study on robophiliacs
We all know the world wide web is not always a pretty place. Sure, there are plenty of normal web sites for people to visit — web sites that allow us to book vacations or shop from the comfort of our homes, web sites that provide us with great free entertainment, web sites that allow us to get our news for free, and web sites that allow us to interact and connect with others across the globe, for example, but beneath the web’s bright and shiny exterior lies a seamy underbelly full of insane conspiracy theories, sexual depravity, disturbing pictures, and just about anything else you don’t want to see. The bright side of this underbelly is that it is an endless source for humor and entertainment in the form of mockery and satire.
One such hilarious web site is Sonic Passion, a forum for people who are into something called “robophilia”. Just what is robophilia, you ask? The preferred definition seems to be a sexual attraction or love for an artificially intelligent, human-like robot. So if you were attracted to Data from Star Trek (if he were to exist in real life), for example, that would be robophilia. The Sonic Passion forum members have misconstrued this word to mean a sexual attraction to, believe it or not, video game characters. And we’re not talking Lara Croft or Kasumi or Yuna. These people are primarily attracted to characters from the Sonic The Hedgehog series of games. Yeah, you read right.
Plan to ship water
A fleet of supertankers shipping in hundreds of millions of litres of water every week could be the solution to the drought threatening Australia’s cities.
Ambitious plans are being developed to ship desperately needed water to Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne from Tasmania, New Zealand or Papua New Guinea.
Proponents say it would cost a fraction of new dams, desalination plants or the pipeline between north Queensland and Brisbane being considered by the Beattie Government.