Caption Michelle Obama and Mother Robinson at game six of the NBA Finals

That's Flea from the Red Hot Chili Peppers at right.

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Victorian Flea Circuses: A Lost Art Form

If you can make a flea cooperate with you, you're probably good at politics I have to say, this is probably the strangest subject we ever talked about on Dark Roasted Blend. However, it is such a rich showcase of miniature art and craftmanship, and the "wow" factor is there as well: A flea, with legs finer than a human hair, can pull up to 700 times its own weight! A flea can lift up to 60 times its own weight! A flea can jump over 150 times its own height! When we build circuses on Mars, or asteroids one...

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Blogger unmasked, court case upended

It was a Perry Mason moment updated for the Internet age. As Ivy League-educated pediatrician Robert P. Lindeman sat on the stand in Suffolk Superior Court this month, defending himself in a malpractice suit involving the death of a 12-year-old patient, the opposing counsel startled him with a question. Was Lindeman Flea? Flea, jurors in the case didn't know, was the screen name for a blogger who had written often and at length about a trial remarkably similar to the one that was going on in the courtroom that day

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Red Hot Chili Pepper Research Spices Up Historical Record

Contact: Gregory Harris gharris@ucalgary.ca 403-220-3506 University of Calgary Red hot chili pepper research spices up historical record Archaeologists trace domestication and dispersal of Capsicum species Next time you're shaking Tabasco sauce on your eggs or dried chili pepper flakes on your pizza, you might pause to thank the indigenous Latin American cultures of more than 6,100 years ago that made it possible. Three University of Calgary researchers, together with international colleagues, have traced the earliest known evidence for the domestication and spread of chili peppers by analysing starch microfossils recovered from grinding stones, sediments and charred ceramic cookware. In a...

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Stadium Arcadium

Early in the second hour of the Red Hot Chili Peppers' mammoth new double album, the guy who once yelped, "I want to party on your pussy!" whisper-sings a gentler, though not unrelated, proposition: "All I want is for you to be happy/And take this woman and make you my family." The delicate "Hard to Concentrate" is the most vulnerable Peppers tune ever -- a full-on marriage proposal from Anthony Kiedis, with Flea's muted bass and John Frusciante's layered guitars slow-dancing over Afrobeat hand drums. The twenty-eight-song, box-set-length Stadium Arcadium isn't a middle-aged concept album about trading in your tube...

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