(no subject)

[spatch]

One of my friends, who I'll call RC here, has made the Weekly World News.

Well, her picture did.

About 10 years, and many pounds ago, she did a brief stint as a plus-sized model and signed her rights away to some series. Nothing salacious, mind you, just people clip art. The stuff's used everywhere, and she's seen herself pop up in the strangest places, from the cover of the latest version of Our Bodies, Ourselves (that's pretty cool) to an ad for a toilet seat for oversized people (well, at least she's happy in the picture.) Since she signed away the rights and pocketed the pay at the time, she doesn't get royalties.

But how many people can you say you know who've been in "America's Extreme Magazine"? This week, RC found herself in the March 6 edition of the Weekly World News on page 25 as the "voluptuous Lucy Lovelace", dropping some serious knowledge on folks -- that overweight people make better lovers because "they're happier." Check out the quote and everything. Now she loves the WWN to begin with, it's her favorite spoof magazine, and while she's not as proud "as if [she had] actually submitted a story and had it published there", she's getting a real laugh out of it.

I don't know how I can even think of hating life when it gives me such awesome stories.

Comments

[hotpoint.livejournal.com]

Yow! I hadn't even thought that they'd use royalty-free clip art, but it fits perfectly with their "Photoshop? What's that? Where's my paste pot and X-acto knife?" visual style. And, why hire photographers if half of your pictures are of alien chicken-headed baby Elvis impersonators?

In the mid 1980s an acquaintance of my family sent us a packet of different citations of a research paper she'd worked on. The research involved taking a tissue sample from the preserved (salted) pelt of a quagga, a now-extinct relative of the zebra from southern Africa, that had been on exhibit in a museum. Using primitive, pre-PCR techniques to extract recognizable fragments of genetic material and compare them with the equivalent sequences in the zebra and the horse, they were able to demonstrate that the quagga was more closely related to the zebra than the horse, since there were about twice as many differences in the DNA snippets between Q and Z as between Q and H, and that they likely all had a common ancestor in the 4 million years ago range.

The packet we received contained the abstract from the paper as published in journal form, the article from Nature magazine, the article from Scientific American, the article from the New York Times, and the article from the Weekly World News.

The article from the Weekly World News was, of course, entitled "MAD SCIENTISTS ARE CLONING DINOSAURS AS WEAPONS OF THE FUTURE", and in addition to citing the work of Higuchi et. al. on the quagga, also referenced unnamed Chinese researchers attempting to implant mammoth embryos into elephants and Soviet professors getting military funding to recreate T. rexes. (Mind you, Jurassic Park hadn't been published for another six years.)

That packet helped me immensely with an assignment in high school to cite examples of media distortions of scientific research. It also showed me that the editors of the WWN were doing their best to keep abreast of current discoveries, and gave me that first glimmer of insight into its humor potential.

[saint-buddha.livejournal.com]

Many years ago, I read that most of the writers from WWN are ivy-league graduates in an article in the Smithsonian magazine.