We weren’t the only ones sim­ul­tan­eously grossed out by and fas­cin­ated with human DNA fact­ory Trent Arsenault—the pro­lific DIY sperm donor who hap­pens to be a pro­lific ama­teur porn star. He’s going to be on Ander­son Cooper’s day­time talk show tomor­row, where he’ll admit to being a 36-year-old vir­gin with more than a dozen kids.

In this pre­view clip, Arsenault, who’s been under fire from the FDA to shut down his one-man sperm bank, reit­er­ates that he’s a “donorsexual”—that is, all his sexual energy is devoted to donat­ing sperm (and pop­u­lat­ing his Xtube site with videos of him­self mas­turb­at­ing into a cup). “I don’t have other activ­ity out­side of that,” he said. “I will prob­ably be the 40 year-old vir­gin but I will have 15-plus kids.” Don’t you love science?

ABC is really milk­ing (ahem) this Trent Arsenault thing. Last week they pub­lished his spe­cial blue­berry “fer­til­ity smoothie” recipe in honor of a 20/20 appear­ance. Maybe next week they’ll give him a cook­ing show.

Here is the recipe:

Fer­til­ity Smoothie

Blue­ber­ries, organic (4.4 oz)
Banana, organic (1 medium-size, peeled)
Pine­apple, fresh (one-tenth of a pine­apple)
Cher­ries, frozen or fresh (5 medium-size)
Flax seed, organic, ground in cof­fee grinder (2 tbsp) or flax oil, organic (1 tsp)
Almond milk, organic (3/4 cup)
Cow milk, raw, organic, whole or skim (3/4 cup) or skim
Cocoa powder, raw, organic (1/2 tbsp)
Honey, raw, local, organic, and/or Manuka honey, organic (1/2 tsp total)
Lemon juice, organic (1 medium-size lemon, squeezed)
Vanilla bean powder, raw, organic (1/4 tsp)
Kiwi, peeled, organic (1 medium-size)
Cin­na­mon, raw, organic, ground (pinch)

Instruc­tions: Blend for about 20 seconds in a reg­u­lar blender. Fruits can be sub­sti­tuted when in sea­son or loc­ally avail­able , such as blue­ber­ries with rasp­ber­ries, straw­ber­ries, black­ber­ries, etc. Drink twice daily: once in the morn­ing, before exer­cise, and once in the even­ing. Eat one hour before donat­ing sperm to provide hydra­tion and fructose for sem­inal fluid.

A near-forty vir­ginal Ginger wanker, just what the doc­tor ordered for the sur­vival of the human race, eh?

Look Ma, hands!

Dis­claimer: the3rdrock.com is an equal hair col­our web­site. Mostly.

Watch a video inter­view on Gawker.com, here.

Source: mybroadband.co.za

We are breed­ing, weakly.

Dur­ing one of my fre­quent day­dream­ing epis­odes recently, it dawned upon me just how weak our spawn seem to be these days.

When you listen to young people talk about set­tling down and delving into the, sen­tence, that is repro­du­cing, you will very often hear the con­cern of ‘the cost’ involved.

They’re not wrong, but at the same time they’re also overly right.

I’m not talk­ing about tweens and teens, I’m talk­ing about babies. The beginnings.

Think of your ancest­ors. Some of them were born in a hovel some­where, some on the side of a road, per­haps on a boat or maybe even in a tree dur­ing a flood.

They lived before a con­sumer­ist time. They lived in a basic time.

Your ancest­ors amused them­selves with whatever lay around, who­ever was around and whatever their ima­gin­a­tion stirred up.

When a baby soiled him or her­self, [usu­ally just] water was used to cleanse and the status quo prior to splats­ville was resumed.

The air that sur­roun­ded was the air that was breathed.

When mother’s milk ran out, what was imme­di­ately avail­able was used.

Does that sound harsh to you?

Really?

Con­sider then that these babies are the ones who grew up to build the world you know today, cre­ate the his­tory that your kids are being taught (hope­fully) and on a lesser scale, are the ones respons­ible for your existence.

When you go to a pub­lic space today, just look, scar­ily, how much irrel­ev­ant non­sense young couples off­load from their hybrid family-friendly ‘people trans­porter’ SUV-esque ‘minivan’.

It may sur­prise and shock you to know that that baby will actu­ally sur­vive, per­fectly well, without, I’m sure, almost none of that.

When that young couple goes home, baby will be put in a state-of-the-art cot, sur­roun­ded by nebulator-does-something air, a mil­lion ted­dies, half a dozen mobiles, baby-friendly paint on the walls, a stack of baby magazines, a frazzled set of par­ents and a pharmacy-worth of sup­plies in the everything-childproofed bathroom.

If you’ve ever wondered what went wrong to cause the world we live in today, if you’ve ever yearned for the ‘good old days’ and if you’ve ever told your folks that ‘now’ is a dif­fer­ent world’, per­haps you should be look­ing for the prob­lem at the source.

Just per­haps?

Inspir­a­tional words about one man whose words & actions inspired so many others.

A Sister’s Eulogy for Steve Jobs

By MONA SIMPSON

Pub­lished: Octo­ber 30, 2011

I grew up as an only child, with a single mother. Because we were poor and because I knew my father had emig­rated from Syria, I ima­gined he looked like Omar Sharif. I hoped he would be rich and kind and would come into our lives (and our not yet fur­nished apart­ment) and help us. Later, after I’d met my father, I tried to believe he’d changed his num­ber and left no for­ward­ing address because he was an ideal­istic revolu­tion­ary, plot­ting a new world for the Arab people.

Even as a fem­in­ist, my whole life I’d been wait­ing for a man to love, who could love me. For dec­ades, I’d thought that man would be my father. When I was 25, I met that man and he was my brother.

By then, I lived in New York, where I was try­ing to write my first novel. I had a job at a small magazine in an office the size of a closet, with three other aspir­ing writers. When one day a law­yer called me — me, the middle-class girl from Cali­for­nia who hassled the boss to buy us health insur­ance — and said his cli­ent was rich and fam­ous and was my long-lost brother, the young edit­ors went wild. This was 1985 and we worked at a cutting-edge lit­er­ary magazine, but I’d fallen into the plot of a Dick­ens novel and really, we all loved those best. The law­yer refused to tell me my brother’s name and my col­leagues star­ted a bet­ting pool. The lead­ing can­did­ate: John Tra­volta. I secretly hoped for a lit­er­ary des­cend­ant of Henry James — someone more tal­en­ted than I, someone bril­liant without even trying.

When I met Steve, he was a guy my age in jeans, Arab– or Jewish-looking and hand­somer than Omar Sharif.

We took a long walk — some­thing, it happened, that we both liked to do. I don’t remem­ber much of what we said that first day, only that he felt like someone I’d pick to be a friend. He explained that he worked in computers.

I didn’t know much about com­puters. I still worked on a manual Oliv­etti typewriter.

I told Steve I’d recently con­sidered my first pur­chase of a com­puter: some­thing called the Cromemco.

Steve told me it was a good thing I’d waited. He said he was mak­ing some­thing that was going to be insanely beautiful.

I want to tell you a few things I learned from Steve, dur­ing three dis­tinct peri­ods, over the 27 years I knew him. They’re not peri­ods of years, but of states of being. His full life. His ill­ness. His dying.

Steve worked at what he loved. He worked really hard. Every day.

That’s incred­ibly simple, but true.

He was the oppos­ite of absent-minded.

He was never embar­rassed about work­ing hard, even if the res­ults were fail­ures. If someone as smart as Steve wasn’t ashamed to admit try­ing, maybe I didn’t have to be.

When he got kicked out of Apple, things were pain­ful. He told me about a din­ner at which 500 Sil­icon Val­ley lead­ers met the then-sitting pres­id­ent. Steve hadn’t been invited.

He was hurt but he still went to work at Next. Every single day.

Nov­elty was not Steve’s highest value. Beauty was.

For an innov­ator, Steve was remark­ably loyal. If he loved a shirt, he’d order 10 or 100 of them. In the Palo Alto house, there are prob­ably enough black cot­ton tur­tle­necks for every­one in this church.

He didn’t favor trends or gim­micks. He liked people his own age.

His philo­sophy of aes­thet­ics reminds me of a quote that went some­thing like this: “Fash­ion is what seems beau­ti­ful now but looks ugly later; art can be ugly at first but it becomes beau­ti­ful later.”

Steve always aspired to make beau­ti­ful later.

He was will­ing to be misunderstood.

Unin­vited to the ball, he drove the third or fourth iter­a­tion of his same black sports car to Next, where he and his team were quietly invent­ing the plat­form on which Tim Berners-Lee would write the pro­gram for the World Wide Web.

Steve was like a girl in the amount of time he spent talk­ing about love. Love was his supreme vir­tue, his god of gods. He tracked and wor­ried about the romantic lives of the people work­ing with him.

Whenever he saw a man he thought a woman might find dash­ing, he called out, “Hey are you single? Do you wanna come to din­ner with my sister?”

I remem­ber when he phoned the day he met Laurene. “There’s this beau­ti­ful woman and she’s really smart and she has this dog and I’m going to marry her.”

When Reed was born, he began gush­ing and never stopped. He was a phys­ical dad, with each of his chil­dren. He fret­ted over Lisa’s boy­friends and Erin’s travel and skirt lengths and Eve’s safety around the horses she adored.

None of us who atten­ded Reed’s gradu­ation party will ever for­get the scene of Reed and Steve slow dancing.

His abid­ing love for Laurene sus­tained him. He believed that love happened all the time, every­where. In that most import­ant way, Steve was never ironic, never cyn­ical, never pess­im­istic. I try to learn from that, still.

Steve had been suc­cess­ful at a young age, and he felt that had isol­ated him. Most of the choices he made from the time I knew him were designed to dis­solve the walls around him. A middle-class boy from Los Altos, he fell in love with a middle-class girl from New Jer­sey. It was import­ant to both of them to raise Lisa, Reed, Erin and Eve as groun­ded, nor­mal chil­dren. Their house didn’t intim­id­ate with art or pol­ish; in fact, for many of the first years I knew Steve and Lo together, din­ner was served on the grass, and some­times con­sisted of just one veget­able. Lots of that one veget­able. But one. Broc­coli. In sea­son. Simply pre­pared. With just the right, recently snipped, herb.

Even as a young mil­lion­aire, Steve always picked me up at the air­port. He’d be stand­ing there in his jeans.

When a fam­ily mem­ber called him at work, his sec­ret­ary Linetta answered, “Your dad’s in a meet­ing. Would you like me to inter­rupt him?”

When Reed insisted on dress­ing up as a witch every Hal­loween, Steve, Laurene, Erin and Eve all went wiccan.

They once embarked on a kit­chen remodel; it took years. They cooked on a hot­plate in the gar­age. The Pixar build­ing, under con­struc­tion dur­ing the same period, fin­ished in half the time. And that was it for the Palo Alto house. The bath­rooms stayed old. But — and this was a cru­cial dis­tinc­tion — it had been a great house to start with; Steve saw to that.

This is not to say that he didn’t enjoy his suc­cess: he enjoyed his suc­cess a lot, just minus a few zeros. He told me how much he loved going to the Palo Alto bike store and glee­fully real­iz­ing he could afford to buy the best bike there.

And he did.

Steve was humble. Steve liked to keep learning.

Once, he told me if he’d grown up dif­fer­ently, he might have become a math­em­atician. He spoke rev­er­ently about col­leges and loved walk­ing around the Stan­ford cam­pus. In the last year of his life, he stud­ied a book of paint­ings by Mark Rothko, an artist he hadn’t known about before, think­ing of what could inspire people on the walls of a future Apple campus.

Steve cul­tiv­ated whimsy. What other C.E.O. knows the his­tory of Eng­lish and Chinese tea roses and has a favor­ite David Aus­tin rose?

He had sur­prises tucked in all his pock­ets. I’ll ven­ture that Laurene will dis­cover treats — songs he loved, a poem he cut out and put in a drawer — even after 20 years of an excep­tion­ally close mar­riage. I spoke to him every other day or so, but when I opened The New York Times and saw a fea­ture on the company’s pat­ents, I was still sur­prised and delighted to see a sketch for a per­fect staircase.

With his four chil­dren, with his wife, with all of us, Steve had a lot of fun.

He treas­ured happiness.

Then, Steve became ill and we watched his life com­press into a smal­ler circle. Once, he’d loved walk­ing through Paris. He’d dis­covered a small hand­made soba shop in Kyoto. He down­hill skied grace­fully. He cross-country skied clum­sily. No more.

Even­tu­ally, even ordin­ary pleas­ures, like a good peach, no longer appealed to him.

Yet, what amazed me, and what I learned from his ill­ness, was how much was still left after so much had been taken away.

I remem­ber my brother learn­ing to walk again, with a chair. After his liver trans­plant, once a day he would get up on legs that seemed too thin to bear him, arms pitched to the chair back. He’d push that chair down the Mem­phis hos­pital cor­ridor towards the nurs­ing sta­tion and then he’d sit down on the chair, rest, turn around and walk back again. He coun­ted his steps and, each day, pressed a little farther.

Laurene got down on her knees and looked into his eyes.

“You can do this, Steve,” she said. His eyes widened. His lips pressed into each other.

He tried. He always, always tried, and always with love at the core of that effort. He was an intensely emo­tional man.

I real­ized dur­ing that ter­ri­fy­ing time that Steve was not endur­ing the pain for him­self. He set des­tin­a­tions: his son Reed’s gradu­ation from high school, his daugh­ter Erin’s trip to Kyoto, the launch­ing of a boat he was build­ing on which he planned to take his fam­ily around the world and where he hoped he and Laurene would someday retire.

Even ill, his taste, his dis­crim­in­a­tion and his judg­ment held. He went through 67 nurses before find­ing kindred spir­its and then he com­pletely trus­ted the three who stayed with him to the end. Tracy. Arturo. Elham.

One time when Steve had con­trac­ted a ten­a­cious pneu­mo­nia his doc­tor for­bid everything — even ice. We were in a stand­ard I.C.U. unit. Steve, who gen­er­ally dis­liked cut­ting in line or drop­ping his own name, con­fessed that this once, he’d like to be treated a little specially.

I told him: Steve, this is spe­cial treatment.

He leaned over to me, and said: “I want it to be a little more special.”

Intub­ated, when he couldn’t talk, he asked for a note­pad. He sketched devices to hold an iPad in a hos­pital bed. He designed new fluid mon­it­ors and x-ray equip­ment. He redrew that not-quite-special-enough hos­pital unit. And every time his wife walked into the room, I watched his smile remake itself on his face.

For the really big, big things, you have to trust me, he wrote on his sketch­pad. He looked up. You have to.

By that, he meant that we should dis­obey the doc­tors and give him a piece of ice.

None of us knows for cer­tain how long we’ll be here. On Steve’s bet­ter days, even in the last year, he embarked upon pro­jects and eli­cited prom­ises from his friends at Apple to fin­ish them. Some boat build­ers in the Neth­er­lands have a gor­geous stain­less steel hull ready to be covered with the fin­ish­ing wood. His three daugh­ters remain unmar­ried, his two young­est still girls, and he’d wanted to walk them down the aisle as he’d walked me the day of my wedding.

We all — in the end — die in medias res. In the middle of a story. Of many stories.

I sup­pose it’s not quite accur­ate to call the death of someone who lived with can­cer for years unex­pec­ted, but Steve’s death was unex­pec­ted for us.

What I learned from my brother’s death was that char­ac­ter is essen­tial: What he was, was how he died.

Tues­day morn­ing, he called me to ask me to hurry up to Palo Alto. His tone was affec­tion­ate, dear, lov­ing, but like someone whose lug­gage was already strapped onto the vehicle, who was already on the begin­ning of his jour­ney, even as he was sorry, truly deeply sorry, to be leav­ing us.

He star­ted his farewell and I stopped him. I said, “Wait. I’m com­ing. I’m in a taxi to the air­port. I’ll be there.”

“I’m telling you now because I’m afraid you won’t make it on time, honey.”

When I arrived, he and his Laurene were jok­ing together like part­ners who’d lived and worked together every day of their lives. He looked into his children’s eyes as if he couldn’t unlock his gaze.

Until about 2 in the after­noon, his wife could rouse him, to talk to his friends from Apple.

Then, after awhile, it was clear that he would no longer wake to us.

His breath­ing changed. It became severe, delib­er­ate, pur­pose­ful. I could feel him count­ing his steps again, push­ing farther than before.

This is what I learned: he was work­ing at this, too. Death didn’t hap­pen to Steve, he achieved it.

He told me, when he was say­ing good­bye and telling me he was sorry, so sorry we wouldn’t be able to be old together as we’d always planned, that he was going to a bet­ter place.

Dr. Fisc­her gave him a 50/50 chance of mak­ing it through the night.

He made it through the night, Laurene next to him on the bed some­times jerked up when there was a longer pause between his breaths. She and I looked at each other, then he would heave a deep breath and begin again.

This had to be done. Even now, he had a stern, still hand­some pro­file, the pro­file of an abso­lut­ist, a romantic. His breath indic­ated an ardu­ous jour­ney, some steep path, altitude.

He seemed to be climbing.

But with that will, that work ethic, that strength, there was also sweet Steve’s capa­city for won­der­ment, the artist’s belief in the ideal, the still more beau­ti­ful later.

Steve’s final words, hours earlier, were mono­syl­lables, repeated three times.

Before embark­ing, he’d looked at his sis­ter Patty, then for a long time at his chil­dren, then at his life’s part­ner, Laurene, and then over their shoulders past them.

Steve’s final words were:

OH WOW. OH WOW. OH WOW.

 

I’ve been on a gene­a­lo­gical search for, what I reckon must be over six years now, inform­a­tion on my paternal grandfather.

My search has spanned the globe, via phone calls, the Inter­net, let­ters, flights and via all man­ner of friendly & help­ful folk, both offi­cial and unofficial.

I’ve had reli­gious organ­isa­tions help­ing me, the inter­na­tional Red Cross, mul­tiple national archives and records agen­cies assist­ing me.

I’ve tracked down towns through old pho­to­graphs, fol­low the faintest rumours from Africa to Europe and invest­ig­ated hunches, no mat­ter how small or obscure.

The trail’s altern­ated between hope­ful & warm to point­less & lifeless.

In six years I’ve learnt very little, and got­ten almost nowhere with my goal of obtain­ing my EU pass­port, but I have learnt one thing…

It really helps if you have an oddball surname!

As frus­trat­ing as it’s been for me, I can only ima­gine what gene­a­lo­gical enthu­si­asts go through when hunt­ing for someone with a name such as John Smith.

Enter name to search for: John Smith

Computing: [ ////////// ]

Output: "Mate, you're F*cked!"

Amer­ican solider, Ser­geant Scott Moore, engaged his Kevlar-cladded balls and pos­ted a video on You­Tube ask­ing act­ress Mila Kunis to the upcom­ing Mar­ine Corps Ball.

The high­light of the Amer­ican mil­it­ary social cal­en­dar, the ball marks the found­ing of the Mar­ines in 1775.

A day later, on an unre­lated TV inter­view, Mila was sur­prised when the inter­viewer asked her about the video. A brief explan­a­tion later, and with some egging on from co-interview Justin Tim­ber­lake, Mila accep­ted!

Although her PR agent has yet to con­firm the arrange­ments, it is believed that she will in fact attend as promised.

With the bulk of the Mar­ines assumedly excited, and a grow­ing video archive to prove her words, let’s hope she keeps her promise.

War aside, I would ima­gine Ser­geant Moore is more than a little nervous.

I can just ima­gine the flood of sim­ilar videos that will no doubt soon flood You­Tube ask­ing for Dates with the world’s most fam­ous lovelies.

On that note, Kristin/Shakira, I’m free this weekend…

Last night I read over the pending nup­tials for a relative’s upcom­ing wedding…

As you might expect, it was a rather dull read of a few pages.

Some con­clu­sions were reached post per­usal though — the primary one being that such a con­tract is writ­ten with very little foresight.

How, you may ask, can nup­tials — a doc­u­ment cre­ated for the future — dis­reg­ard it so drastically?

Think about it…

When are you going to make use of your nup­tials? When you are furi­ous! Enraged! Blurred and liv­ing in the moment!

When you are roy­ally hacked off, the last thing you want to deal with is a lit­er­ary conun­drum com­prised of Latin, ‘here­in­after’ and Act xx of 19xx.

I pro­pose (see­ing as we’re talk­ing about mar­riage) that we sim­plify the entire con­tract, word it accord­ing to expec­ted emo­tional cli­mates and take into account pren­up­tial interests.

E.g.

John likes his cactii col­lec­tion. He has a pen­chant for Bull­dogs and enjoys his weekly golf games.

Janes takes pleas­ure in fusion–style cook­ing, adores her cats and will drive her belated father’s MGB to the grave.

The con­tract…

John, here­in­after referred to as The Arse­hole, gets his cactii (to be applied rectally as per the appen­ded instruc­tions), can have his drool­ing, snort­ing and overly vocal Bull­dog (tat­tooed with “Jane” across his head) and is also entitled to full use of his golf clubs. Please note that since our mar­riage con­tract stip­u­lated ante-nuptial, half of his golf clubs belong to me, so he only has the use of of the bot­tom quarter and the handles — the middle sec­tion of each club is to be sawn off and handed to the nearest char­ity on my behalf.

Jane, here­in­after referred as The Bitch, is entitled all of the foul-smelling spices resid­ing in the kit­chen. Final set­tle­ment will include reper­a­tions for the war waged upon my intest­ines in accord­ance with res­ults pro­duced by the local health depart­ment. Her cats — minus the ones fed to my Bull­dog — are wel­come to leave with her. Her MGB should be towed from my gar­age at the first oppor­tun­ity. Repay­ment for the oil dam­age to my floor will be sought at a later date. The replace­ment brakes part shall remain mine…I might want an MGB one day.

_______________
John

_______________
Jane