Nach Uh-Oh

A salmonella strain found in fresh jalapenos has made 1,251 people sick, 229 of whom had to be hospitalized.

Agricola Zaragosa, a Texan agricultural distribution facility, has been implicated in the contaminated peppers; however, the peppers originated in Mexico, and now public health officials on both sides of the border are engaged in Richards/Sheen-y yes-you-did no-I-didn't silliness.

Salmonella-induced illness—which includes diarrhea, fever, and cramps—likely occurring from pepper snacking has been identified in 43 states. According to the Food and Drug Administration, which tracked down the source of the infection, and is consequently so proud of itself that it's taken a shine to the third person:

"FDA is also asking consumers to avoid eating raw jalapeno peppers or foods made from raw jalapeno peppers until further notice in order to prevent additional cases of illness. ... FDA is continuing to advise that people in high risk populations, such as elderly persons, infants and people with impaired immune systems, avoid eating raw serrano peppers or food made from raw serrano peppers until further notice."

Serrano? Apparently the dumb 'nillas have added peppers to the list of things they can't tell apart.

Pickled jalapenos are fine, by the way. Just not the La Morena brand—whether or not Amazon wants to call them "gourmet food"—as they are profoundly fucking foul.

{from Reuters UK, in what Lunar Weight suspects must be some British culinary response to the Zimmerman telegram}

Schooled Like a Fish (Bite Us)

We got the start date for Shark Week dead wrong.

From our friendly neighborhood Discovery Channel press being, possibly in an attempt to smother Lunar Weight with kindness and turn us into corporate shills (hey buddy, it'll work, trust us; the secret is schwag. We'd like a Les Stroud action figure with kung-fu grip and Real Dehydration-Induced Hallucinations™):

"I noticed you accidentally put June 27th as the start [for Shark Week] date though... it's actually July 27th (at 9PM with a Mythbusters special) which is what I'm sure you meant. Unfortunately there is no Shark Month & One Week celebration yet."

Whoops. We blame all the drugs we're not doing.

{from the minds behind Shark Week to the shitforbrains at Lunar Weight}

Son of a Pitch

"They just grow up and blow their elbows out so fast these days." The American Orthopedic Society for Sports Medicine released a report today detailing a surprising increase in the rates of ulnar collateral ligament (UCL) replacement surgery. Fully a third of all these "Tommy John" surgeries—which replace a ligament that is almost exclusively torn by throwing a baseball—were performed on kids high-school age or younger, an increase of over 20% in the last ten years.

In unrelated news, the American Association for Overbearing, Narcissistic Fathers Who Can Only Quash Their Feeling of Failure and Ennui by Living Vicariously Through Their Spawn reports that membership is up over 20% in the last ten years.

{from the American Orthopedic Society for Sports Medicine}

The Week in Sharks: ...and Other Things that Like the Taste of Seal

"In fashion, you're either in or you're oh god oh god my leg." Heidi Klum—supermodel, erstwhile fashion svengali, and all-around German person—considers scuba-diving in shark infested waters to be her bravest moment ever.

Even braver, the New York Daily News gushes, than "showing off her pregnant belly in tight outfits on Bravo's 'Project Runway,'" because fat people suck and are from space.

In her Parade Magazine interview, Klum explains how the shark schmooze helped her conquer her fears. "I'm not saying that everyone should swim with sharks," she says, "but sometimes you have to jump over your own shadow in order to learn something that you will never forget for the rest of your life." Such as, say... optics?

Klum made the dive as part of the Discovery Channel's Shark Week in 2003, which further goes to prove Lunar Weight's point.

Bollywood icon Zayed Khan also got fabulous with the cartilaginous. On a recent underwater shoot, he basically bro'd out with his toothy would-be antagonists. "They came and flapped their bodies next to us and slapped our shoulders like buddies," Khan told the Times of India. Little did he know they then turned around and put most of the contents of his trailer on eBay, since no one likes to work for scale. Or for denticle.

{from Parade and the Times of India, respectively; Lunar Weight hereby humbly threatens to bite Zooey Deschanel if it'll get her to consider hanging out with us an honor}




Or maybe Zooey'd dig us if we "sharked ourselves". As part of the Shark Week promotional run up, Discovery.com offers you the chance to morph yourself into that manic, sodden, Dunst-mouthed freak on their billboards.

Discovery's own flacks describe the e-mutilator as "totally viral." By which they presumably mean "akin to having smallpox." Since what those earnest nerdlings who haven't grown to embrace their own inherent attractiveness really need is a way to obliterate said attractiveness entirely.

Oh well. It beats blatant, unrepentant racism.

{from Discovery.com, who, to be fair, probably hate themselves as much as they hate their audience}




LW appreciates a good chomping in the name of class warfare, but it ain't gonna happen this time. A Great White sighting off the coast of Martha's Vineyard was reported, but an airborne search by what Bloomberg referred as "a fish spotter" failed to find confirmation.

The search failure may, in part, be due to the fact that people were making that shit up.

Because everyone's kinda bored right now.

Fortunately, some good came out of the silliness. The press managed to cite Jaws at every fucking opportunity, because, epistemologically speaking, nothing can be considered to possess material or temporal form unless Steven Spielberg has made an ass-ton of dough off of it.

{from the Boston Globe, and every bored hack stuck at a science desk bitterly driving staples into a Malcolm Gladwell voodoo doll}




Biologist-poet describes a whale shark on the move as "a bird as large as a bus". Though humans only ever encounter whale sharks placid and (prosaically) tail-propelled near the surface, when at depth, these largest-of-all-fish use gravity, fins, and the always-good-for-party-conversation laws of fluid dynamics to glide through the water column.

This unique method of swimming could be a means to conserve energy, or it could be an attempt to get Gerard Manley Hopkins to take that stupid windhover and shove it.

{courtesy FOX News, which claims to also have a whale shark video, but when LW clicks on the imbed, it plays lots of footage of Heath Ledger gallivanting about looking like a cross between Steven Tyler and a White Stripes groupie, then freezes}

UCSB Researcher Reveals Patterns of Extinction, Biodiversity; UCSB Graduate Nurses Hangover, Regrets

John Alroy of the University of California, Santa Barbara, utilized computer modeling to revamp the geological picture of planetary extinction/diversification patterns. Lunar Weight, ourselves a product of said esteemed University, stayed out 'til 3 a.m. and were late to work. Again.

Alroy and colleagues' research overturns conventional wisdom that There have been five or six mass extinctions since life began on Earth, suggesting instead that there were only three or four.

LW overturned a glass of orange juice and got it all over the floor and left it for our roommates to clean up because, as we said, we were late.

Alroy's work, which samples the overall rates at which fossils of specific families and species appear in rock strata of specific ages, redraws the accepted mathematical models for species diversification, which are based solely on the earliest and latest appearances of each species. Alroy's curve looks like a plateau, with a rapid increase in biodiversity followed by a "leveling off" where no new species appear, instead of the old model's assumption of constant species replenishment.

LW's work involved redrawing Beavis. You wouldn't think it's hard, but something about the lower jaw just gets us. Oh, whoops, we were supposed to fetch that file half an hour ago. Coffee. Something fried. Ugh.

The University of California at Santa Barbara: we make winners.

{from Eurekalert, and read to us by kindly old librarians who know there's beauty inside the heart of us young hoodlums}

June 27th: Shark Week to Begin, All Chance of Sex to End

The Discovery Channel just released the lineup for this year's Shark Week. Shark Week runs June 27th through August 2nd, putting the "yes!" in "chondrichthyes!"

We'll quickly editorialize here regarding a persistent flaw in the week-long celebration of all things aquabitey: documentaries about shark attacks are not shark documentaries. They are documentaries about people stupid enough/delicious enough to get bitten by sharks. If we wanted to watch Eating Stupid/Delicious Person Week, we'd release barracudas into Heidi Montag's swimming pool.

Still, we're anticipating a week of denticles and Dewar's. We may even try to liveblog it, though the majority of our speech will consist of "Dude! See that? Awesome!"

Though to be fair, it's never not fun to watch Les Stroud find new and innovative ways of getting himself killed.

{from TV Squad; show descriptions in the lede link, if you have no faith in sharks to be unconditionally awesome (though that makes you a dirty dirty sea lion lover, ork ork)}

Fossil Flatfish One-Up God, Look Both Down and Up on His Creation

Fossilized fish with fucked-up faces delight Darwinists, further malign Ben Stein.

In one more indication that the world is going to halibut in a handbasket, Matt Friedman, a University of Chicago grad student, identified three related fossils that may be the missing links between the suave, symmetrical fish we know and love and the flounderish, filet-able freaks known as flatfish, which have both eyes on one side of their body.

These cock-eyed beasties still have eyes on opposite sides of their head, but one has migrated towards the top of the skull, making them look like, well, idiots—but idiots that evidently gained some sort of survival advantage (Not Exactly Rocket Science speculates that the fish may have used the "normal" eye to scan the underwater environment while "its head was lifted just high enough above the surface to give [the other eye] a view").

Aside from helping better trace the tree of life, Friedman's finds help undermine the distinctly American brand of anti-intellectual sophistry known as "Intelligent Design," or I.D. In brief, this school of thought holds that the natural world is too "perfect" to have evolved by the gradual selective pressures called for by evolutionary theory, therefore must have been cut from whole cloth by a sentient being.

The crux of this argument is what's known as irreducible complexity, as promulgated by Michael Behe. The idea is that certain biological structures (Behe's baby is a certain bacterial flagellum) have no benefit to survival and reproduction unless their many parts are all interlocked. Therefore, there's no way each piece could've come about separately through natural selection and differential reproductive success.

NOVA already demonstrated that Behe is full of shit, and used pretty pretty computer graphics to do so. (LW will link to the "Judgment Day" episode whenever possible, as I.D. is the genital herpes of the scientific establishment—impossible to get rid of and prone to ruining everyone's fun)

Nonetheless, flatfish have often been held up as another indication of irreducible complexity, since, until now, there was no series of fossils showing an eye slowly and steadily making its way across animal after animal to join up with its counterpart on the other side. Friedman's find shows that—and for the love of finches, this should be obvious already—just because we haven't found something doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

Indeed, these protobut not only existed, they'd already been examined and blown off. Friedman found the benchmark fossils in the basement of the Natural History Museum in Vienna, and that fact is, in itself, indicative of a subtler but in some ways more important philosophical victory by the epistemological traditions of science over I.D.

I.D. is, in itself, uncurious. It forms an end to inquiry, an end to searching. It provides little motivation to rifle through stacks of dusty rocks in Austria, because what's your journal article going to be, "Fossil finds confirm the continued non-deadness of God"? For all its inherent undertones of Eternity (a perk of the whole God job), it ends up being the nontheistic traditions of science that sketch out a neverending road of inquiry, an edifice constantly being built. It affirms the idea that pleasure can be found in process of drawing the world, one rock at the time.

Whereas the supposed superiority of I.D. comes from its ability to answer everything, in total, right now, so everyone can go about the more important things like inheriting various winds or some shit like that.

{from Nature (the magazine) News, and dramatized in Lunar Weight's debut production, "Inherit the Wino," showing every third Tuesday afternoon at the New Jersey Turnpike's very own Vince Lombardi Rest Area}