A reborn doll is a vinyl baby doll that has been enhanced to resemble a human baby. The process of creating a reborn doll is referred to as reborning.
And by “enhanced,” they don’t mean slapping on some make up. Here is the description of one doll (yes, they’re all named) as written by the creator artist:
Lynsee’s hair is hand-dyed premium mohair in a light brown with blond highlights. It is very soft and straight but can be coaxed into a soft wave. It is painstakingly rooted one or two strands at a time and securely glued on the inside. It can be washed and combed gently. The crown of her head is rooted directionally in the way hair naturally grows. Her coloring is lovely…peaches and cream, lightly blushed in all the right places. Tiny blood vessels and veins are visible in spots where her skin is a little thinner.
Of course, 6-pound 1-ounce “Lynsee” gets less cute when the magnets implanted into her head to hold on her barrette start to fuck with your pacemaker, but otherwise, she’s real cute.
Lynsee Fiona’s “adoption fee” is $250.
Sometimes these dolls are treated as real infants, which increases the Freaky Shit Factor (FSF) by, like, 19 fold. BUT, to their credit, there is some evidence that suggests that holding a doll as if it were a real infant can have the same positive emotional benefits of holding an actual infant. Whatever. Still creepy.
And now the creepy photos!
Taffy
Jessica
Josie
Katie
Emily
Click to enlarge (you know you want to)!
All of the above were made by Margie Spry. Check her site here.
Super-ally Kathy Griffin gave a nine-minute speech yesterday at the California state capitol defending the rights of gay people to get married. To opponents to marriage equality she asked, “What the fuck is it to you!?”
Perfect.
The CA Supreme Court is yet to issue their ruling on the legality of Prop 8 but most analysts agree that it will probably stand.
When I first came across FrankMusik’s (aka Vincent Frank) cover of Amy Winehouse’s “Rehab,” I was jarred by how completely re-invented the song had been – not just through a shift in genres (think Mika + Scissor Sisters with a dash of Patrick Wolf) but in melody and rhythm, too. While my initial impulse was to delete the track (I’m fierce with the delete key), I kept it around and was then shocked to find myself humming it in the shower a day later. Since then, I’ve totally embraced it and am not even sure I remember how the original goes.
Coincidentally, while I was aimlessly wandering down my own path of FrankMusik discovery, friend and music god Sean was already on it (no surprise) and e-mailed me (thanks, Sean!) his first single, “Better Off As Two.” It’s more tame than “Rehab” and shows great promise for his debut album (produced by Stuart Price!) of the same name, to be released in June 2009.
Finally, FrankMusik toured with Keane recently on their Perfect Symmetry support tour – a gig that was offered to him after he produced the following remix:
As should be clear by now, I’m a huge “Family Guy” fan and as I recently admitted, I’m also kind of a huge “Star Trek: The Next Generation” fan. SO, as you can imagine, I’m pretty excited for Sunday’s “Family Guy” episode, where the Griffin family attends a Star Trek convention and Stewie later kidnaps the cast.
Nine of the original cast members, including Patrick Stewart – lent their voices to the episode (is there anyone they didn’t get?).
Fox has posted a 2-minute preview clip, which also includes interview snippets with creator Seth MacFarlane:
Sure, there’s the potential for a lot alienating inside jokes but who cares – I’ll get them and I’ll love it.
Trivia: Patrick Stewart has lent his voice to the show before, mostly notably for one of my favorite quotes ever: (Stewart speaking to Lois about a mess he made in the bathroom) “Lois, my post-sex pee stream forked in half and got everywhere.” I think of that quote – in Stewart’s voice - everytime I, well, you get the idea…
Earth Hour encourages you to turn your lights off this Saturday from 8:30 to 9:30 PM in your local time zone to support anti-global warming efforts ahead of the upcoming Global Climate Change Conference.
This year, Earth Hour has been transformed into the world’s first global election, between Earth and global warming.
Earth Hour began in Sydney in 2007, when 2.2 million homes and businesses switched off their lights for one hour. In 2008 the message had grown into a global sustainability movement, with 50 million people switching off their lights. Global landmarks such as the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, Rome’s Colosseum, the Sydney Opera House and the Coca Cola billboard in Times Square all stood in darkness.
[...] WWF are urging the world to VOTE EARTH and reach the target of 1 billion votes, which will be presented to world leaders at the Global Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen 2009.
This meeting will determine official government policies to take action against global warming, which will replace the Kyoto Protocol. It is the chance for the people of the world to make their voice heard.
Interestingly, Earth Hour is not asking you to go without all your electronic devices… just lights. In fact, they’re encouraging you to take photos (um, with flash, I guess) to upload to Flickr, videos to upload to YouTube, and to even live blog your hour.
I probably won’t be home at 8:30 PM this Saturday, so my lights will already be off.
PS: This is one of the comments (and the accompanying profile pic) currently on the Earth Hour website:
I plan to turn on every light, every electronic device and am planning to spank my monkey to the glory of excessive energy usage during this hour!!! Go ahead buy into the ********* as if you will make any difference.
Love it!
Update: Newsday is reporting that (some? all?) Times Square billboards, the Chrysler and Empire State buildings, and the decorative light “necklaces” on East River bridges will all go off in observance of the event.
Last month, the judges pleaded guilty to fraud and now face 7 years in jail. (That’s it?!)
Today, Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court has advised “expunging the records of low-level offenders who appeared in Ciavarella’s courtroom without lawyers — a group he has said numbered ‘easily into the hundreds.’”
Pennsylvania law stupidly allows juveniles to waive their right to counsel if done “knowingly, intelligently, and voluntarily” and if the judge explains the juvenile’s rights to him/her. The Supreme Court determined that most of the juveniles that waived their right to counsel in Ciavarella’s court did not do so according to the above conditions.
The Supreme Court will next examine more serious juvenile convictions from Ciavarella and Conahan’s courts.
Well, it turns out barely four feet tall 13-year-old Alfie is not the father. Apparently the 15-year-old mother was slutting it up something crazy and her mother told her to lie and say she was a virgin when she met and had sex with Alfie, in hopes she they could make some money off of the tabloid interviews that would inevitably follow. (And the Mom of the Year Award goes to…).
Thankfully (?), a trusty DNA test cleared everything up; i.e., they used Alfie and the newborn as tools in a massive and disgusting scam.
I don’t have any more energy to spend on this ignorant trash. If you do, you can read the story here.
Dave Eggers (author of “A Heartbreaking Work Of Staggering Genius”) and Spike Jonze (director of “Adaptation” and “Being John Malkovich”) have adapted Maurice Sendak’s beloved childhood classic, “Where The Wild Things Are” for a live-action film to be released on October 16, 2009; Jonze also directs. God, I loved this book as a kid.
Trivia #1: The song featured in the trailer is, of course, Arcade Fire’s “Wake Up.”
Trivia #2: Interestingly, the credits state that music is by Karen O, of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs.
Trivia #3: Eggers also co-wrote the upcoming film, “Away We Go.”
Trivia #4: 80-year-old Sendak was recently in the news for coming out of the closet after living with his partner, now deceased, for 50 years. He never told his parents: ”All I wanted was to be straight so my parents could be happy. They never, never, never knew.”
Fall Out Boy – Beat It (Michael Jackson Cover ft. John Mayer; Studio Version) I love Michael Jackson and strongly believe that other artists should not even attempt to cover his songs. That said, I was surprisingly pleased with what Fall Out Boy (particularly Patrick Stump’s vocals) and John Mayer (on guitar) could pull together on this hard rock interpretation of the MJ classic.
This Is Ivy League – Crown Of Love (Arcade Fire) “Crown of Love” has always been one of my all-time favorite Arcade Fire tracks. For their interpretation, This Is Ivy League strips the song down and brings much more intimacy and attention to the beautiful and haunting lyrics.
Complex Magazine recently posted a pre-Photoshopped image of famous-for-doing-nothing* Kim Kardashian, which wouldn’t have been that big of a deal except that they yanked it a few hours later and re-posted a cleaned-up version. Soon thereafter, that image was also removed.
Sigh. It’s so sad to see it side-by-side knowing that this shit happens every. freaking. day.
AskMen.com, which has 7 million unique readers a month, has an incredibly useful list of ways to tell the woman in your life she’s becoming a bit too chunky to be seen with your perfect washboard abs and head full of thick, luscious hair.
I had to quote from the blurbs occasionally because they’re just that good. SNL couldn’t write this shit if they tried. Let the countdown begin! (Note: these are not meant to be comedic.)
10 - Buy her clothes that are too small (“You might say, ‘Oh, I thought you were a size 8. Isn’t that what you were last summer?’”) 09 - Sign her up for yoga under the pretense of “stress relief” 08 - Set out on your own weight loss plan 07 - Serve her unsatisfactory portions (“By making her ask for more food, you might succeed in shaming her into an acknowledgment of her recent weight gain…”) 06 - Improve your own diet 05 - Playfully grab her love handles 04 - Ask her to wear an old dress 03 - Sabotage her chair ( “…nothing says ‘better lose some weight’ like a broken chair.”) 02 - Leave “now” and “then” photos lying around 01 - Take her to places where she has to wear a swimsuit
And remember: “if she confronts you about trying to shame her into losing weight, the key approach here is denial, as you reply: ‘Do you actually think I would be that manipulative?’ Of course you would, but she doesn’t need to know that.”
I don’t know how heteros ever manage to breed.
I mean, you’ve got men that have been made so fearful of talking to women about weight that, as an alternative, we’re telling them to force women to ask for second helpings or to orchestrate the “accidental” breaking of chairs? I almost don’t know who I feel worse for: the women or the men.
Imogen Heap is a rather strange choice for a music spotlight since it’s been a while since she’s released anything major and there doesn’t seem to be anything on the horizon (more on that later). BUT, I was just able to get one of my all-time favorite Imogen tracks in a non-DRM format, so I needed an excuse to share it with you all.
Imogen is no stranger to lending her songs – original or otherwise – to compilation albums and if you only own “i Megaphone” or “Speak For Yourself,” here are some gems that definitely should be part of your collection.
“Glittering Clouds (Locusts)” is a great high-energy track full of building momentum and Imogen’s signature sound. It was tucked away on a compilation/concept album in which each track is written about a different Biblical plague. (Random, I know). Imogen’s track is the clear stand-out on the album and it’s absolutely worth downloading.
Another great track you may have missed is the song she wrote for the first ‘Chronicles Of Narnia’ soundtrack. (Random, I know). Again: signature sound, very beautiful, and surprisingly good considering she wrote just for a movie.
Can’t Take It In (from The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe)
“Not Now But Soon” was also written for a specific purpose: the Heroes TV soundtrack. Imogen also released it as a single and there was speculation that it would serve as the lead single for her frequently delayed new album, but that no longer appears to be the case: Direct Current Music reported on March 12 that the new album has a internal release date at RCA of July 14 with the lead single being the yet-unheard track “Canvas.”
Octomom, who is living off public assistance and the revenues from her ever-frequent television interviews, has fired the free nursing service that was helping care for her kids.
Octomom will instead pay a nursing service, since when you’re a single mother raising 14 children, you’ve always got some extra cash to throw at a nursing service.
Apparently Octomom was concerned (paranoid) that the free nursing service was spying on her and reporting back to child welfare agencies. Yeah, good mothers who aren’t complete hot messes always have this fear.
So far, the hospital has only released four of the octuplets to her care.
In a new video with RadarOnline, Octomom discusses the octuplets’ father, which she described as a man with whom she has a long-term Platonic relationship with and whom also fathered her other six children. She stated the father was upset when he learned Octomom was having 8 more children. (Was anyone excited about these kids except for Octo-crazy?)
Octomom has no intention of revealing the man’s identity, however, and that apparently goes for everyone: at one point in the video, the voice of an off-camera child can be heard asking, “What’s his name?” Octomom did not respond.
Trivia: “Octomom” returns 1.75 million hits on Google. Octomom’s real name, Nadya Suleman, returns 633,000. Ouch.
Information Age Prayer is a subscription service utilizing a computer with text-to-speech capability to incant your prayers each day. It gives you the satisfaction of knowing that your prayers will always be said even if you wake up late, or forget.
We use state of the art text to speech synthesizers to voice each prayer at a volume and speed equivalent to typical person praying. Each prayer is voiced individually, with the name of the subscriber displayed on screen.
Get that? If you’re too busy to actually be religious, you can pay to (allegedly) have some computer (probably located in the basement of a web-savvy 13-year-old atheist) say your prayer for you. Of course, you’ll never have any proof that your prayers are actually being said, but that’s besides the point.
To ensure that your omniscient God knows who paid to have that computer “say” a prayer, IAP displays the purchaser’s name on the screen while the prayer is said.
Conveniently, (it is the information age, after all), IAP will allow you to subscribe to certain prayers so they’ll always be said – they’ll even initiate automatic re-billing! They’re so nice!
Check out the website to get the full crazy, complete with requisite cloud imagery (that’s where God is!).
It’s time. Equality is something that has always been a hallmark of America and no group should be deprived of it. New York, which has always been at the forefront on issues of equality, is appropriately poised to take a lead on this issue.
The Daily News reports that “with the ascent of Kirsten Gillibrand to fill Hillary Clinton’s vacant US Senate seat, Schumer was the last remaining statewide elected official who backed civil unions over full marriage equality.”
Really? The last statewide official?! Well, gee, let’s get our gay marriage on!
Schumer also said he supports the full repeal of DOMA.
As I promised earlier, here are more photos – first and fifth in a series – from last week’s underwater volcanic eruption near Tonga. Click the pic for the full size version or go here for the complete gallery.
Photo: Dana Stephenson/Getty Images
Photo: Dana Stephenson/Getty Images
I really can’t imagine the amount of force at work here.
The 150th anniversary of the [the start of the] Civil War is in 2011. Here are some fun facts, none of which I knew:
- Alabama, Virginia, Mississippi, Texas, Louisiana , Georgia, and Florida observe Confederate History Month in April
- Most Southern states recognize Confederate Memorial Day as a legal holiday
- Some Southern states celebrate Confederate Memorial Day on the June birthday of Confederate President Jefferson Davis (makes sense)
- Texas and Arkansas observe it on Jan. 19, the federal holiday for slain civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. (does not make sense)
With the big sesquicentennial celebration rapidly approaching, organizers are attempting to spread the holiday state-by-state to the entire nation.
Organizers say that the idea of the confederacy is often used as a political tool and that, when told accurately, there is more positive to be told than negative. However, since many simply associate the confederacy with slavery – which angers those who have ancestors who died in the war – organizers have tried to shine a new light on people’s currently held notions.
In recent years, they have sought to redefine the Confederacy in multicultural terms, pointing out that Jews, Hispanics and blacks fought for the South. They argue that the war had little if anything to do with slavery, and they have become vocal in their opposition to white supremacist groups that use the Confederate flag as a symbol of hate.
However, Jonathan Sarris, associate professor of history at North Carolina Wesleyan College, says that’s a just a big lie:
To say that it is not racist but about multiculturalism is an attempt to adopt a modern mind-set. You can call it a victory for the forces of multiculturalism when even the defendants of the Confederacy feel they have to pay some lip service to the idea of tolerance.
Georgia state Sen. John Bulloch, a Republican who sponsored the bill recognizing Confederate History Month in that state, said Confederate History Month is no different than Black History Month. He further noted that it would increase tourism, especially to areas with Civil War battlegrounds.
Black history is a very important part of the heritage of American citizens, so we recognize it. The War Between the States is a very significant part of the history of the United States, so why should anybody look at this any different? With Georgia being part of the Confederacy, this is something that is very significant to us.
I’m not sure how you can seriously expect this to be a nationwide celebration when 17 of the nation’s states weren’t even states at the start of hostilities and 14 of those only became states after the North won.
CNN reported on Friday that Governor Palin will officially reject about half of the federal stimulus money allocated for her state and some believe she’s simply playing politics ahead of her 2010 reelection bid. Palin said she believes the funds will only put her state in a “deeper hole.”
In a statement released Friday, Palin said she is open to accepting more of the federal funds, especially the $170 million she is currently rejecting that is allotted to education.
Looks like that hole is sometimes okay.
The article states that other, generally conservative governors, including South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, Texas Gov. Rick Perry, and Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour have all vowed to reject some or all of the stimulus funds headed toward their states.
Texas, with a January unemployment rate of 6.4%, is entitled to $555 million of federal funds. Eligibility for the funds, however, is dependent upon the state expanding unemployment benefits and Gov. Perry does not want to accept the stimulus money because his state would have to raise taxes to cover the expanded benefits once the stimulus funds ran out.
A valid concern but it doesn’t address the goal of the stimulus money or other ways to help the 6.4% of people in his state that are unemployed.
It’ll be interesting to see how this is received by the voting public.
Completely Unrelated: Everyone read The Onion’s Point/Counterpoint: “Gov. Palin Has No Foreign Policy Experience, Refuses To Acknowledge Global Warming, And Supports The War In Iraq” – versus – “Please Keep Your Voice Down, My Poor Retarded Child Is Sleeping,” right? Well, you should.
Taffy
Jessica
Josie
Katie
Emily
Posted by Mark 
Posted by Mark 
Posted by Mark 
When I first came across FrankMusik’s (aka Vincent Frank) cover of Amy Winehouse’s “Rehab,” I was jarred by how completely re-invented the song had been – not just through a shift in genres (think Mika + Scissor Sisters with a dash of Patrick Wolf) but in melody and rhythm, too. While my initial impulse was to delete the track (I’m fierce with the delete key), I kept it around and was then shocked to find myself humming it in the shower a day later. Since then, I’ve totally embraced it and am not even sure I remember how the original goes.
Earth Hour encourages you to turn your lights off this Saturday from 8:30 to 9:30 PM in your local time zone to support anti-global warming efforts ahead of the upcoming Global Climate Change Conference.
Photo: Lee Thompson
Octomom, who is living off public assistance and the revenues from her ever-frequent television interviews, 
Said Schumer (D-NY):
The 150th anniversary of the [the start of the] 
