Witches fly­ing broom­sticks in Swazi­l­and above 150 metres will be sub­ject to arrest and a hefty fine of R500 000, civil avi­ation author­it­ies said, accord­ing to a report.

Witches’ broom­sticks are con­sidered sim­ilar to any heavier-than-air trans­port­a­tion device that is air­borne, says The Star.

“A witch on a broom­stick should not fly above the [150-metre] limit,” Civil Avi­ation Author­ity mar­ket­ing and cor­por­ate affairs dir­ector Sabelo Dlamini said to the news­pa­per yesterday.

No pen­al­ties exist for witches fly­ing below 150 metres.

The report said it was hard to say how ser­i­ous he was, but witch­craft isn’t a jok­ing mat­ter in Swazi­l­and, where the people believe in it.

The stat­ute also for­bids toy heli­copters and children’s kites from ascend­ing too high into the country’s airspace.

Dlamini was asked by the Swazi press to explain the country’s avi­ation laws fol­low­ing the arrest of a private detect­ive, Hunter Shongwe, for oper­at­ing a toy heli­copter equipped with a video cam­era, of which he boas­ted using to gather sur­veil­lance inform­a­tion sim­ilar to the way a drone air­craft operates.

The detect­ive was charged with oper­at­ing an unre­gistered air­craft and for fail­ing to appear before his chief to be ques­tioned by tra­di­tional author­it­ies about his toy drone, the first of its kind in Swaziland.

Swazi brooms are short bundles of sticks tied together and do not have handles. Swazi witches are known to use them to fling potions about homesteads – but not for transport.

…prov­ing once again that whilst you can put the most aphotic and  dim into a suit, behind a desk and in con­trol of a apéri­tif or diges­tif, you shall still be sub­ject to the hid­den loin­cloth, Mora­baraba scratch­ings under Oxford-dressed foot and Umqom­bothi–induced black­outs dur­ing Colonial-Bitching hour, give or take a few hours before and after.

“This is your Crap­tain speak­ing. Thank you for fly­ing Heir Dick-tator. We’ll be attempt­ing to land shortly. We’d like to take this oppor­tun­ity to thank the Chief’s Avi­ation Author­ity for allow­ing us to do a cere­mo­nial loop around his deserved homestead on per­man­ently bor­rowed fuel from our Struggle Hero neighbours.”

Source: TimesLive

We think about far too much incon­sequen­tial crap in our daily lives.

I real­ised this when I over­heard two ladies recently, who volun­teer at a local insti­tu­tion, cas­u­ally con­vers­ing about one of their upcom­ing birthdays.

What set them apart is that the one was 94 years of age and the other was just two years her junior.

Struggle as you may, but both of them were still rather spritely for their advanced…maturity.

That said, the topic related to the younger one need­ing to take a flight soon, to meet some far-flung family.

She was quite con­cerned over the pos­sib­il­ity of excess­ive steps through­out the ter­minal and lead­ing up to the aircraft.

Fur­ther­more, there was a worry as to the avail­ab­il­ity of an oxy­gen tank onboard, just in case, you know…

We start off think­ing that exist­ing and walk­ing around is grand. Iron­ic­ally, we end up in the same boat. It’s those nig­gly few dec­ades in between where we get caught up in think­ing we need so much more in order to achieve what we always had…

We’re all guilty of it.

If you lived in days and weeks rather than months and years, how would you change your approach to life?

The big ques­tion though, is would you be able to appre­ci­ate your twi­light time more, hav­ing spent near a life­time learn­ing how not to handle your time and abil­it­ies better?

No teacher will ever bestow the gift of under­stand­ing life upon you quite like the les­sons given by well-lived char­ac­ters from the pen­ul­tim­ate chapters.

As if, ya per­verts.

Scope out Arlen’s ser­i­ously ques­tion­able gear­box work­shop promo’ video…

“Hey baby, how is your car run?”

It’s strangely catchy. In much the same vein, I can’t help but feel drawn to vis­it­ing his den of syn­cromesh inequity…

What say all of you?

What you’re about to read, is the story of an amaz­ing penis.

You’ll read about how thin it is, but con­versely, how long it is too.

You’ll read how about it is screwed in and about how con­vo­luted the ori­fices are that it inhabits.

Ulti­mately, you will dis­cover what an explos­ive append­age it is and about how the part­ners it pairs handle an organ seem­ingly way out of pro­por­tion to the rest of the body car­ry­ing it.

Kinki­ness Bey­ond Kinky

By Carl Zim­mer | Decem­ber 22, 2009 7:55 pm

There comes a time in every sci­ence writer’s career when one must write about glass duck vagi­nas and explos­ive duck penises.

That time is now.

To err on the side of cau­tion, I am stuff­ing the rest of this post below the fold. My tale is rich with deep sci­entific sig­ni­fic­ance, resplen­dent with sur­pris­ing insights into how evol­u­tion works, far bey­ond the banal­it­ies of “sur­vival of the fit­test,” off in a realm of life where sexual selec­tion and sexual con­flict work like a pair sculptors drunk on absinthe, trans­form­ing bio­logy into forms unima­gin­able. But this story is also accom­pan­ied with video. High-definition, slow-motion duck sex video. And I would ima­gine that the sight of spiral-shaped pen­ises inflat­ing in less than a third of second might be con­sidered in some quar­ters to be not exactly safe for work. It’s cer­tainly not appro­pri­ate for ducklings.

So, if you’re ready, join me below the fold.

This story is actu­ally a sequel. Back in 2007, I wrote in the New York Times about the work of Patri­cia Bren­nan, a post-doctoral researcher at Yale, and her col­leagues on the weird­ness of duck gen­it­als. The full story is here. (Bren­nan also appeared in a Nature doc­u­ment­ary, start­ing at about minute 38:35.)

In brief, Bren­nan wanted to under­stand why some ducks have such extra­vag­ant pen­ises. Why are they cork-screw shaped? Why do they get so ridicu­lously long–some cases as long as the duck’s entire body? As Bren­nan dis­sec­ted duck pen­ises, she began to won­der what the female sexual ana­tomy looked like. If you have a car like this, she said, what kind of gar­age do you park it in?

Bren­nan dis­covered that female ducks have equally weird repro­duct­ive tracts (called ovi­ducts). In many spe­cies, they are orna­men­ted with lots of out­pock­ets. And like duck pen­ises, duck ovi­ducts are corkscrew-shaped. But while male duck pen­ises twist clock­wise, the female ovi­duct twists counterclockwise.

Bren­nan spec­u­lated that all this bizarre ana­tomy is the res­ult of a pecu­liar form of evol­u­tion known as sexual con­flict. A strategy that allows females to repro­duce the most off­spring may not be so good for males, and vice versa. For example, male fruit flies inject their mates with lots of chem­ic­als dur­ing sex, and those chem­ic­als make her less recept­ive to other males, thereby boost­ing his chances of fath­er­ing her eggs. But those chem­ic­als are harsh and will make female flies sick. Females, in turn, have evolved defenses against those chem­ic­als, blunt­ing their effects.

With many examples of sexual con­flict in nature, Bren­nan wondered if sexual con­flict between male and female ducks was giv­ing rise to their weird gen­it­als. Female ducks pair off with male part­ners for the breed­ing sea­son, but they also get har­rassed by other males, some­times being forced to have sex (and some­times dying from the attacks). A third of all duck mat­ings are forced.

And yet only 3 per­cent of the duck­lings that female ducks pro­duce come from such forced mat­ings. Bren­nan spec­u­lated that the female ducks can block forced cop­u­la­tions with their mis­matched spir­als. And they might also be con­trolling which drake got to fer­til­ize their eggs by sock­ing away the sperm of dif­fer­ent mates in dif­fer­ent pock­ets. And the extra­vag­ant pen­ises of males might be the res­ult of an evol­u­tion around those defenses.

As I repor­ted in 2007, Bren­nan dis­covered a pat­tern that sup­por­ted this hypo­thesis. Among 16 spe­cies of water fowl, spe­cies in which the males grew long phal­luses also had females with more turns in their ovi­duct and more side pock­ets. The ducks were escal­at­ing an arms race, gen­ital for genital.

But Bren­nan didn’t actu­ally know how duck pen­ises actu­ally moved through the labiryn­th­ine ovi­duct, and how the oviduct’s shape might affect the drake’s deliv­ery of sperm. So she traded cal­ipers and rulers for high-speed video.

Bren­nan and her col­leagues traveled to a Cali­for­nia duck farm, where work­ers are expert at col­lect­ing sperm from drakes. The first step in the col­lec­tion is to get a drake excited by put­ting a female duck in his cage. The drake climbs on top, and then the penis emerges. Before its emer­gence, a drake’s penis is usu­ally com­pletely hid­den from view, tucked inside his body like an inside-out sock. Drakes unfurl their pen­sises dif­fer­ently than male mam­mals. In mam­mals, the penis becomes erect as blood flows into the spongy tis­sue. Ducks pump lymph fluid instead. And as the fluid enters the penis, it does not simply become engorged. It flips rightside-out.

Here’s how it hap­pens, in slow motion. A Mus­covy drake everts his penis in about a third of a second, at speeds of 1.6 meters per second.

Of course, drakes don’t mate with the air. Hav­ing made this video, Bren­nan still needed a way to see how a duck penis actu­ally per­forms its appoin­ted task. Unable to film duck pen­ises in a real female ovi­duct, she built a fake ovi­duct out of sil­cone. She then man­aged to get a drake to mate with it. But the over­whelm­ing force of the explos­ive penis broke the fake oviduct.

So Bren­nan turned to glass. Her new fake ovi­ducts were strong enough to handle the drakes, and she star­ted film­ing. Here’s what she saw.

As Bren­nan had pre­dicted, the coun­ter­clock­wise turns of an ovi­duct slow down the expan­sion of the duck penis, com­pared to a straight tube or a clock­wise one. Bren­nan sus­pects that female ducks slow down males try­ing to force a mat­ing, but they can also let their partner’s penis move faster through the ovi­duct. They have been observed to relax and con­tract their muscles arond the oviduct.

Female ducks can’t stop an unwanted male from deliv­er­ing his sperm, but the obstacles in their ovi­ducts may give them con­trol over what hap­pens to that sperm. The female ducks may use their ovi­ducts to slow down the expana­tion of the penis, so that by the time the drake ejac­u­lates, the sperm are delivered in the lower reaches of the ovi­duct. A female ducks’s part­ner, with her cooper­a­tion, can deliver sperm fur­ther up the ovi­duct. With the wanted and unwanted sperm delivered to dif­fer­ent places in the ovi­duct, a female duck may be able to store the sperm in dif­fer­ent pock­ets. And then she can choose which drake will father her duck­ling. For all the explos­ive­ness male ducks may dis­play, it’s the female ducks that get the final say.

…

Ref­er­ence: Patri­cia L. R. Bren­nan et al, “Explos­ive ever­sion and func­tional mor­pho­logy of the duck penis sup­ports sexual con­flict in water­fowl gen­italia,” Pro­ceed­ings of the Royal Soci­ety of Lon­don, doi: 10.1098/rspb.2009.2139

[Update: 12/23–a couple mis­spellings fixed]

Source: Dis­cover Magazine

If you’ve come this far, I just know that you’re itch­ing to see one…

Ever­sion in air: from blogs.discovermagazine.com/loom from Carl Zim­mer on Vimeo.

You have such a dirty Mind, but that’s alright.

I’m sure most wild­life enthu­si­asts have seen at least one video of a gir­affe giv­ing birth, but I should think a far small por­tion of that group has seen an ele­phant birth, so here’s one for you, from Bali…

Nature is incred­ible, no doubt about it. Pro­cre­ation is essen­tial, no doubt about it. No penis-bearing creature should ever be sub­jec­ted to a video like this, abso­lutely no doubt about it. Crikey!

This should be shown in all school guid­ance classes. We’d stem the tide of teen­age births within months.

Happy din-dins everyone!

It’s been a while since I last fea­tured an artist on here, so here’s one with a dif­fer­ence, to get things going again…

Tak­ing inspir­a­tion from the mod­ern fossil-fueled, happy-disposable soci­ety that we cre­ated, live in and seem­ingly thrive upon, Brad­ley Hart’s latest works involve the much-loved and ever-present bubble-wrap that per­vades our lives, sup­port­ing our shipped items, help­ing us to while away a few moments or just filling the dump­sters of many a business.

Care­ful injec­tion of cal­cu­lated acrylic paint mix­tures into the bubbles, fol­lowed by surgical-like removal of the over­runs even­tu­ally shows up a pixelated illus­tra­tion with a difference.

A com­pleted bubble-wrap painting

The paint has been injec­ted, but the over­run has yet to be removed

A close-up of bubble-wrap art

Jes­sica Simpson is a bit like that hot spe­cial needs kid that always hung out under the bleachers…but let’s be hon­est here, she prob­ably spent most of that time much like an alky’s hip flask, bot­toms up, because…

Out of everything that can be over­looked, done in error or con­duc­ted poorly in a film, zoetic corpses annoy me the most.

For the love of some­thing dead, stop @$*&ing breath­ing! Hold it in, change the cam­era angle, change the light­ing or CGI that SOB.

Unfor­tu­nately, it’s become a bad habit of mine that I now act­ively watch for it.

And now, so shall you.

Not Dead!

I’ve been known, on occa­sion, to bitch about my old cars; about their issues, their costs, their faults and their quirks.

You might think I’m a lone nut­ter in this regard, but the chap quoted below could prob­ably tell you much the same, marque aside.

Here then, is Budleigh Salterton’s account of his inex­plic­able love for his BMW…

I’m in the rel­at­ively for­tu­nate pos­i­tion of not hav­ing to have fuel eco­nomy or silly things like that influ­ence my choice of trans­port. As such, I drive some­thing with char­ac­ter, some­thing with soul, some­thing with char­ac­ter and pat­ina. I drive a 19-year old car.

Budleigh Salterton’s beloved BMW

19 in car years is about 64 in human years. When I start my 19-year old car in the morn­ing it leaps into life. Then, ini­tial urgency quietened some­what by the rheum­at­ism of its advanced years, it idles at 400 rpm, some­times 300rpm if it’s excep­tion­ally grumpy. Occa­sion­ally a plume of white smoke erupts from the twin tailpipes. “They all do that, sir”, the mech­anic says. So I ignore that. There’s oil sweat­ing from some­where. That will have to wait. It could use a lick of paint. I’ll get to that, I tell myself.

This morn­ing, I pulled out of my charm­ingly kitsch villa, caus­ing the coffin-dodgers to spur on their equally decrepit basset-hounds, lest the grim rap­ture be approach­ing. As I pulled onto the street, delib­er­at­ing whether my com­mute should be atten­ded by the sooth­ing sounds of “Fine Music FM” or the fine melod­ies of that renowned word­smith 2 Chainz, I pulled down my sun­visor, and some­thing happened. It made a sound. A bad sound. The sound of break­ing plastic. And with that, my sun-visor became a sun-flap, refus­ing to return to its fol­ded pos­i­tion. I cursed. I swore. I raged. I wept.

I drove to work, and I thought that maybe, per­haps, maybe, a 19 year old car that aver­ages 17l per hun­dred, costs R1200 to fill up, isn’t fright­fully fast and makes one look like a down-on-his luck drug mer­chant is not the best thing to be using as a daily driver. All around me in traffic, GTIs and Megane Sports and other mem­bers of the hot-hatchery sit using far less fuel, killing far fewer trees. Their sun­visors work.

My work col­leagues mut­ter about it not being a fit­ting vehicle for a chap in my pos­i­tion. My boss has star­ted to whis­per tact­fully about Sci­roc­cos and F30 BMWs. He may have a point. This 19-year old car has all the com­fort and con­veni­ence fea­tures a GTI has, but it has them in exactly the way you expect a car that was designed in the eighties to have them. The cli­mate con­trol can do fri­gid (after it girds itself up) and it can do a pretty good impres­sion of an incin­er­ator, but if you ask it to give you 23 degrees it responds as if you were telling Oliver Reed to recite from The Tem­pest — uncer­tainly, pon­der­ously, and then with rather too much force.

The win­dows open and close with all the urgency of the pope respond­ing to child abuse alleg­a­tions. Occa­sion­ally, the back ones make noises that frighten the occu­pants. You can only really put two of said occu­pants in the back any­way, unless the middle chap wants to sit a la Sharon Stone, or van­dal­ize the leather con­sole with their shoes. There are two ash­trays in the back, one for each door, and a cigar­ette lighter, but no cuphold­ers. There are no cuphold­ers in the front either, but there’s a massive ash­tray. Pre­sum­ably four powerfully-built Broeder­bond types could sit in com­fort and puff away like an epis­ode of Mad Men, but nobody ever drank any­thing in the eighties.

The gear­box is from ZF’s Spe­cial Needs col­lec­tion. This state of the 90s-art three mode slusher has a Sports mode, which I select imme­di­ately I start it. Without it, the default is Eco­nomy, and the thing doesn’t trouble itself to ever pull off in first, and responds as indif­fer­ently as Jacob Zuma to demands for pro­gress, unless you bury your foot in the throttle, at which point it sum­mons up a Wag­n­erian down­shift or two, and blasts forth with a bel­low, scar­ing any creatures unfor­tu­nate enough to be in its path. Because the damned thing doesn’t have trac­tion con­trol, it nearly killed me when I was pulling out of a gar­age the other night. It was rain­ing just enough to make the exit slip­way greasy, and as I accel­er­ated gingerly onto the high­way the rear end stepped out and I very briefly found myself observing the lane I had just exited through the side win­dow. Only quick applic­a­tion of counter-steer kept me from slid­ing grace­fully onto the grass embankment.

Ah, the steer­ing. It has Ser­vo­tronic. This sounds very fancy. It’s not, really. The steer­ing and brakes (of which more later) are accur­ate, but give very odd feed­back. Or rather, the steer­ing gives odd feed­back, like per­form­ing sur­gery in woolen gloves. The brakes give no feed­back at all, because they use some strange hydraulic sys­tem from the dark abysm of time, which must be sated peri­od­ic­ally with a liquid called Pentosin, which is clearly triple-distilled Unicorn’s blood, given what BMW charges for it.

All in all, it’s an odd thing to con­tend with on a day-to-day basis. And then there are those moments where it all comes together and you catch a reflec­tion of your­self in a Kloof Street win­dow while the V8 rever­ber­ates off the sur­round­ing build­ings, and you feel like you’re in a Jensen Inter­ceptor or some such beast rather than a 4-door saloon. And then you get to your des­tin­a­tion and it tells you that the oil is low, a fact the car feels isn’t worth troub­ling you with, until you arrive at your destination.

So I want some­thing more prac­tical, more mod­ern, less pre­his­toric. Why then, am I look­ing at E39 M5s?

In my youth, I elec­ted to drive a vin­tage car, at a time where seem­ingly all other people in my age group wanted the latest hatches, lux­ury hand-me-downs from their folks or, for the kids with rich mom­mies & dad­dies, some­thing new, flashy and prob­ably far in excess of their abil­it­ies and deserving.

Most got a used Volk­sie Mk 1 Golf, or Rab­bit for you lot over­seas. Some got Toyota appli­ances. A few arrived in assor­ted oddballs from the annals of motor­ing his­tory. We had trans­port, and we liked it.

Me? I was lov­ing my vin­tage ride, because even then, I’d learnt that there was more to motor­ing than trans­port­a­tion and that whilst most of the junkers being piloted by us rov­ing acci­dent­ari­ans amoun­ted to noth­ing more than A-Z mobiles, some of it was worthy of the descrip­tion driv­ing. Some gave you more than a des­tin­a­tion, some gave you a thrill, a feel­ing and per­haps even a glim­mer of a soul, bar the odd break­down or three.

Many years on, I am still driv­ing my vin­tage vehicle, but I have quite a few more with my name on them too now, because they excite me, are fun to use & work on and because they look, well, awesome.

I drive slow cars and I drive fast cars, old cars and new cars, road cars and off-road cars, in the ways that they were designed to be driven, and some­times not.

I enjoy high speeds, use the newer tech­no­logy and am amazed at what cars come equipped with these days, but I don’t like it. I find it…boring.

Short of an air-con’ sys­tem for a few days a year, the abil­ity to very blindly blur past speed limit signs and, well, actu­ally I can’t think of any­thing else that makes me want a new car.

Would you like some reas­ons as to why? Maybe just a few?

I can’t work on the car, let alone see the engine.

I can’t con­duct an orches­trated feast of actions when it comes to chan­ging gear manu­ally, in most higher-end vehicles these days.

I can’t tinker, eas­ily modify (improve?) or inspect my car. Hell, I can’t even fig­ure out how most of the pieces are put together these days!

I can’t see my car being around in twenty, or per­haps even ten years time!

I dread the day some­thing goes wrong with it, and I know it will, because it’s designed to, because I’m pretty cer­tain I couldn’t afford the bill for the repair!

It looks…like everything else. Unless you’re in that 1%, your car will def­in­itely look like some­thing else at some stage.

It may handle, brake and accel­er­ate like a champ, but it’s clinical…expected…knowingly designed for the cush­ioned generation.

Look somewhere…what do you see? Plastic.

I don’t want to push a but­ton, toggle a switch or speak a com­mand for everything. I don’t want to turn to page 748 in the owner’s manual, or there­abouts, to find out what the red light on my dash is. I hate not hav­ing a gear­lever, hav­ing some­where to plug what should be back in the office, into my dash. Speak­ing of which, what was wrong with rotary dials on the dash? If I need elec­tric con­trols in order to move my arse in any which dir­ec­tion, I’m too fat and manual labour would prob­ably be best for me. Blanks on my con­sole remind me that I’m prob­ably too poor or that you don’t deem my nation good enough to war­rant put­ting the same thing there that some farmer in Chechnya prob­ably has. My car has how many airbags in it? No won­der it weighs 4 tonnes. TURN OFF THAT FUCKING ANNOYING DOOR AND/OR SEATBELT BONG! If the door’s open and my seatbelt’s off, it’s because I’m fight­ing off a knife-wielding hitch­hiker or I’m try­ing to com­mit sui­cide. My choice; leave me to it. Chrome bump­ers were epic; your mal­le­able plastic & foam ones are not. And so on and so forth.

I want a car, not a bludy bloated dis­pos­able gad­get show that I pick up in the same aisle as my toaster and kettle.

Per­son­ally, I place a lot of blame on the con­sole gen­er­a­tion. The kids of yes­ter­day, who wasted their days upgrad­ing and racing on the TV are now demand­ing cars with auto­matic this and self-adjusting thats, cars that change gears in X num­bers of seconds, accel­er­ate from Y to Z in 3,75849 seconds and cars which integ­rate their iSods with their USB­Tooth thin­gyma­jigs and whatchamacallits.

As proof that video games are to blame, at least in part, here’s a video of the new Renault RS 200 EDC.

It ‘fea­tures’ a video dis­play, not unlike that seen in cer­tain games of yore, that lets you…lets you…sorry, I’m chok­ing up here…select which type of car sound you would like to hear, through the speak­ers, whilst you are driving.

It’s all just…wrong.