Futurismic

Ah, December – time to crank out the ’silly season’ media stories to fill the gaps in between the “best of the decade” posts. So here’s a way-out weird  news article for you: an LA-based company called My DNA Fragrance (there’s a clue in the name) has joined forces with a collector of celebrity hair and started making perfumes based on DNA extracted from snippets of the barnets of superstars. [via The Daily Swarm; image by Sjors Provoost]

No, apparently this is a true story. But I hope you’ll excuse me the levity of slicing a quote from the coverage and using it out of context (purely for the lulz, you understand):

“The biggest seller is Elvis, but MJ is selling very well too. It’s a powerful fragrance and there is no alcohol in it.“

Oh, the irony.

We’ll leave aside the speculations about our bizarre obsession with celebrity (after all, is this so different from touching relics of the saints and other such Medieval behaviours?), and leap instead straight to the copyright problem. What happens if my hair is harvested without my knowledge, while I’m treading the red carpet somewhere*? Don’t I or my descendants have a right to the profit from perfume based on my DNA? How many changes would need to be made to a DNA string to make it legally ‘different’ to the originating source?

And most importantly, what the hell does Eau de Michael Jackson smell like?

[ * Hey, this is a speculative website, okay? ]

OK, so the blurbflies from Jeff Noon’s novel Nymphomation were little flying critters that sang or chanted their advertising copy at you, but this is the first time I’ve seen anything along the lines of using actual insects as an advertising medium, even if via the surreal yet lo-fidelity marketing method of gluing tiny banners to the tushies of everyday houseflies:

Top marks for slightly gross innovation, if nothing else. Knowing the way the marketing business grabs trends and runs with them until they become ubiquitous to the point of infuriating banality, animal-based advertising will probably be massive by next summer and deader than last season’s butterflies by early 2011. So I’m going to grab the opportunity while it’s still fresh; if anyone needs me, I’ll be wandering the Canadian hinterlands, stencilling the Futurismic logo onto climate-refugee polar bears with photo-reactive spraypaint. [hat-tip to Geoff 'BLDGBLOG' Manaugh]

[* - my husband actually yelled this in his sleep once.]

Does Not Equal is a webcomic by Sarah Ennals – check out the pre-Futurismic archives, and the strips that have been published here previously.

[ Be sure to check out the Does Not Equal Cafepress store for webcomic merchandise featuring Canadians with geometrically-shaped heads! ]

…as we were, here is news of the first incursion into the collossal garbage patch that has collected in the Pacific Ocean:

Scientists surveyed plastic distribution and abundance, taking samples for analysis in the lab and assessing the impacts of debris on marine life.

Before this research, little was known about the size of the “garbage patch” and the threats it poses to marine life and the gyre’s biological environment.
…
On August 11th, the researchers encountered a large net entwined with plastic and various marine organisms; they also recovered several plastic bottles covered with ocean animals, including large barnacles.
…
“Finding so much plastic there was shocking,” said Goldstein. “How could there be this much plastic floating in a random patch of ocean–a thousand miles from land?”

This reminds me of the great junk armada depicted in Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson.

[via Physorg][image from Physorg]

Ahem. A mysterious browny-black goo with hair in it is drifting southward from the Arctic:

Something big and strange is floating through the Chukchi Sea between Wainwright and Barrow.

Hunters from Wainwright first started noticing the stuff sometime probably early last week. It’s thick and dark and “gooey” and is drifting for miles in the cold Arctic waters, according to Gordon Brower with the North Slope Borough’s Planning and Community Services Department.

Brower and other borough officials, joined by the U.S. Coast Guard, flew out to Wainwright to investigate. The agencies found “globs” of the stuff floating miles offshore Friday and collected samples for testing.

…

“It’s definitely, by the smell and the makeup of it, it’s some sort of naturally occurring organic or otherwise marine organism.”

Very weird. Cthulhu spawning? Cosy catastrophe? The blob? The larval stage of the World Tree?

[from abn news, via Blood & Treasure][image from Margaret Anne Clarke on flickr]