In a fast-paced, self-contained adventure, Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill thrillingly expand on one of Century’s most memorable characters, venturing into dazzling polar territories and fictional domains including those of Edgar Allen Poe and H. P. Lovecraft, with all of these vectors headed for an unforgettable encounter at the living, beating and appallingly inhuman HEART OF ICE...
If there’s one classic movie star I’d love to have met, it’s Boris Karloff. Now, he’s mostly remembered for his breakthrough role in Universal’s 1931 adaptation of Frankenstein: if you close your eyes right now and imagine Karloff, chances are it’s in green face paint with bolts in either side of his neck. But there was a hell of a lot more to him than that.
Karloff was an amazingly talented actor who brought something special to just about every role he played, and it would have been amazing to get the chance to sit down and talk to him about his life and career, to get his perspective on fame, Hollywood, horror, acting, and all the rest of it. Unfortunately for me, though, Karloff died long before I was born. He passed away 44 years ago, at the age of 81. The only consolation, really, is that he made a hell of a lot of films before then, and many of them are fantastic...
...Kohfeldt pointed out to me that the toilet has all the traits of a toilet from a ship—including an open side slot for seawater to be pumped in. The knobs on the faucet bear text written in Blackletter—the famous and classically German family of typefaces that Hitler adored. (The Nazis, in 1933, chased typographer Jan Tschichold out of Germany for advocating use of sans-serif fonts instead of Blackletter, among other design travesties.) The toilet has been a “functional tourist attraction” since 1952, Kohfeldt said. People would take road trips—as I had—just to see it. (Indeed, the toilet is listed in Roadside America’s online guide.)...
Our cats may be cuddly pals and adorable internet memes, but they are also destroying the environment more efficiently than humans. They have been called one of the "worst" invasive species. And a new study published today in Nature Communications suggests that cats are responsible for killing several endangered bird species in the United States, and decimating bird populations on islands all over the world. In the US, cats kill as many as 3.7 billion native birds annually, making them a bigger threat to these creatures than buildings, towers, windows, poison, and cars. But there is a solution to the problem.
The biologists who worked on the new study pored over research culled over the past several years to estimate how many cats live in the US, and what their killing habits might be. They estimate that roughly 84 million owned cats live in the US, and that there are 30-80 million un-owned cats, which include feral cats, barn cats, and cats who are not allowed inside. The researchers "estimate that free-ranging domestic cats kill 1.4–3.7 billion birds and 6.9–20.7 billion mammals annually." They emphasize that "un-owned cats" are the culprits here. Though the numbers may be shocking, their discovery isn't particularly startling. Un-owned cats have already been implicated in 33 modern bird, mammal, and reptile extinctions, write the researchers in Nature Communications...
