A giant dominatrix teddy bear wearing a leather mask and brandishing hand-cuffs has been banned from sober Zurich’s street display of man-sized model bears, the project’s artistic director said on Tuesday.

“This bear is perverse, dominatrix and hardcore. We had to ban it because of the children,” Beat Seeberger-Quin, the project’s art director, told Reuters.

The offending bear stands atop a pedestal bearing the words “first class service…”

(Found by Nef, thanks)

Five loaves, two fish and a goblet of red wine could be on the menu for Americans if a new diet takes off.

Don Colbert, a Florida doctor, believes asking yourself “What would Jesus eat?” is the best way to stay fit, slim and trim. “If you truly want to follow Jesus in every area of your life you cannot ignore your eating habits…”

Eric Eve, a tutor in theology and a New Testament scholar at Oxford University, said: “The staple diet of a Mediterranean peasant in Jesus’ day would have been bread. Many of them probably went hungry much of the time, or achieved only bare subsistence. I can’t imagine many modern Americans taking enthusiastically to all the features of a “biblical” diet. For example Leviticus 11.22 says ‘Of them you may eat: the locust according to its kind, the bald locust according to its kind, the cricket according to its kind, and the grasshopper according to its kind…’”

Patton Oswalt, on a gig in Youngstown, Ohio:

Weird reactionary moment: A young comedian dropped in to do a guest set on the late show. At one point, he made a clumsy joke about Third World kids making his clothes for seven cents an hour, and how evil that was, and a lady in the front row piped up: “Someone had to make ‘em, asshole!”

Found here, by Fraction:

A 60ft high picture of a murdered prostitute has been projected onto a derelict block of flats in Glasgow.

Detectives hope it will help to turn up clues about the death of Emma Caldwell, whose body was found in woods in South Lanarkshire on 8 May.

The image was displayed for four hours on the multi-storey flats in Cumberland Street, Hutchesontown on Monday night.

Police said the site had been chosen as it was visible across areas frequented by Emma and other prostitutes…

The Magazine Publishers of America recently had twenty or so of its members create magazine covers from the 22nd century.

Judging by the old diepunyhumans.com readership, there’s a bunch of photoshop ninja reading this who could do a hell of a lot better, with a more interesting range of magazines and a sharper sense of the future. warrene @ aol.com if anyone comes up with anything interesting. I’ll run a link to your website with it.

It occurs to me that an awful lot of trouble in Gotham City could have been averted a long time ago if Batman had just ripped the Joker’s nipples off.

I mean, treatment doesn’t work, does it? They stick the Joker in the nuthatch, he comes out again and does the same things.

A man with the nipples ripped off him does not make the same mistakes twice.

Criminals are a superstitious, cowardly lot, and need the nipples ripped off them.

I mean, who’s going to argue?

“Batman, I’ve heard disturbing reports that you ripped the Joker’s nipples off.”

“Choke on my fuck, Commissioner Gordon.”

“…okay.”

I mean, crime in Gotham City doesn’t exactly seem to be affected by a man dressed as a bat flapping around the place. But no-one disobeys a man wearing a necklace of human nipples.

“I’m Batman” isn’t cutting it in the striking-fear-into-their-hearts stakes. But “I’m Batman — and I’m here for your nipples” is an entirely different proposition.

Criminals would see the error of their ways after a man in a black leather pervert suit had their nipples off with the edge of a Batarang, you mark my words. Or a Bat-Denipplizer.

I’m off to ring DC Comics.

(Written 2002, just realised it hadn’t been moved over here yet.)

Pressure is mounting on the US federal government to modify a law which allows convicted sex offenders to receive the impotence drug Viagra for free.

Nearly 200 convicts obtained the drug between January and March 2000 from state-funded Medicaid, the New York State Comptroller Alan Hevesi revealed.

They were all Level 3 convicts. These are likely to have committed crimes such as rape and child abuse and are seen as at a high risk of reoffending…some of the recipients of the erectile dysfunction drug had been convicted for sex offences on children as young as two years-old…

Ionatron say they’re working on a real-life ray gun which uses femtosecond lasers – light pulses that last less than a ten-trillionth of a second – to carve conductive channels of ionized oxygen in the air. Through these channels, Ionatron’s blaster supposedly sends man-made lighting bolts, frying anyone unfortunate enough to step into their path, up to 800 meters away.

(Read the article, and it turns out it’s probably bullshit. But I’m stealing that term and description, oh yes)

The original 1922 film NOSFERATU has been digitised and placed online as a permanent fixture of the Internet Archive. Available as a stream or a download in various resolutions for various speeds. All free.

All details here.

Aeroplanes will be too afraid to crash, yoghurts will wish you good morning before being eaten and human consciousness will be stored on supercomputers, promising immortality for all – though it will help to be rich.

These fantastic claims are not made by a science fiction writer or a crystal ball-gazing lunatic. They are the deadly earnest predictions of Ian Pearson, head of the futurology unit at British Telecom.

‘If you draw the timelines, realistically by 2050 we would expect to be able to download your mind into a machine, so when you die it’s not a major career problem,’ Pearson told The Observer. ‘If you’re rich enough then by 2050 it’s feasible. If you’re poor you’ll probably have to wait until 2075 or 2080 when it’s routine. We are very serious about it. That’s how fast this technology is moving: 45 years is a hell of a long time in IT.’

He believes that today’s youngsters may never have to die, and points to the rapid advances in computing power demonstrated last week, when Sony released the first details of its PlayStation 3. It is 35 times more powerful than previous games consoles. ‘The new PlayStation is 1 per cent as powerful as a human brain,’ he said. ‘It is into supercomputer status compared to 10 years ago. PlayStation 5 will probably be as powerful as the human brain…’

Naisho no Tsubomi (Tsubomi’s Secrets) is the critically acclaimed manga getting the littlest schoolgirls swooning, but is also innocent enough to make their parents and teachers happy, too.
“We’ve got another print run of 20,000 copies for late May. It’s hardly rare for a comic to sell 30,000 copies, but it is almost unheard of for a series of works directed at elementary school children to do so well,” a spokesman for Shogakkan, the publisher of the manga, tells…

Parents and teachers have praised the comic’s realistic depiction of life for children entering puberty. But the book, drawn by veteran manga artist Yu Yabuuchi, is not attracting simply elementary school children and their minders.

“We sold out the 30 copies we ordered on the same day we shipped them in,” says an employee of K-Books in Akihabara, the spiritual home of Japan’s hordes of manga-loving otaku. “Take a look and you’ll see our customers are nearly all men. Just about everybody who bought the book here was a man in his 30s.”

Naisho no Tsubomi, it seems, has hit a nerve with the moe-kei type of otaku, the name given to geeks with a fascination for little girls…

The Chinese government has banned restaurants from serving food on the bodies of naked women.

The Beijing Times newspaper said the new ban was introduced because serving food on women “insults people’s moral quality”.

Sunset over Pudong:

kt:

My friend Xeni’s covering E3, and is dropping photos from her and colleagues into her Flickrstream:

A 25-year-old woman was charged with trying to hire a man to kill her ex-husband, and police say she used one of his credit cards to pay for the would-be hit man’s flight from Australia…