The weekend again….it seems like it comes around every week or so…..and news from around the world that means absolutely nothing to anyone.

I recently did a post about the bikini where it originated and why….after the bikini was introduced there came the monokini…..

Today marks what would have been Rudi Gernreich’s 100th birthday. A dancer-turned-designer, Gernreich’s designs were intensely body-focused and freeing, and noticeably lacking in prudery.

“As if I invented nudity,” the designer remarked to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram in 1964, on the subject of his famous breast-baring monokini. It’s mind-boggling that more than half a century later Gernreich’s most iconic design is unpostable on Instagram with its institutionalized nipple ban. Though provocative then and now, there is a rigor to the design of Gernreich’s monokini that is akin to that of Achille Castiglioni’s Arco Lamp, which was designed just a few years earlier.

Born into a Jewish family in Vienna, Gernreich was introduced to fashion through his aunt, who had a dress shop. In 1938 he escaped Europe with his mother and settled in California. He studied modern dance with Lester Horton from 1939 to 1944 (making costumes along the way). After his dance career, he got a job styling and doing advertising for Hoffman California Fabrics. In 1947 he designed dresses as a fabric promotion that were so well received he went on to develop a capsule collection.

https://www.vogue.com/article/as-if-i-invented-nudity-the-revolutionary-rudi-gernreich-of-monokini-fame-would-have-been-100-today

Water is becoming a problem in this country and across the world…..back in the day the Colorado River was ‘tamed’…..and now there is a plan to do the same to the Mississippi River…..

Work could soon begin on the great Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion, considered the “largest ecosystem restoration project in US history,” writes Boyce Upholt for Hakai Magazine. Aspects of the $2 billion engineering scheme have been in the works for decades, ever since people began noticing the alarming pace of land loss in the Delta caused by centuries of efforts to tame the Mississippi River. If nothing is done, Louisiana stands to lose the vital marshlands that dominate the Delta. Environmentalists, shrimpers, oil companies, coastal communities, tribes, and officials at all levels of government agree that something must be done, but nobody wants to live with the consequences of the proposed solutions.

It’s all about mud. Tributaries from 32 states plus two Canadian provinces drain into the Mississippi, which carries not only water but more than 300 million tons of dirt to the Gulf of Mexico each year. Over three centuries, efforts to tame the river have resulted in an uninterrupted system of levees stretching hundreds of miles and disrupting the natural distribution of all that mud. Adding to the problem, oil companies have built a vast and under-regulated network of canals, causing up to half of the land loss across the Delta by some estimates.

The proposed diversion will punch a gap in the levee system and enable restoration of thousands of acres of marshland. An impact study by the Army Corps of Engineers suggests existing ecosystems and communities will be dramatically altered in the process. However, for all the hubbub, Upholt concludes that it might not matter much unless something is done to address rising oceans caused by climate change.

I am not sure that messing with a river and its course is always the best plan.

I take my best friend MoMo for a walk every day rain or shine….and there is a chance that I am doing my part to help fight crime in my neighborhood…..

Employing drug-sniffing canines and patrol dogs offer one potential way to combat criminal activity, but it turns out that even the simple act of walking a dog can act as a deterrent.

A new study from researchers at The Ohio State University and the University of Texas at Austin, published in the journal Social Forces, found that communities in Columbus, Ohio with greater concentrations of dog owners experienced fewer incidences of crime. Researchers examined the crime rate for 595 Census groups from 2014 to 2016, as well as data from a 2013 survey about dog ownership. They also looked at information measuring the level of trust between residents in a given neighborhood.

Areas with high levels of neighborhood trust had lowered crime; areas with high levels of trust and greater concentrations of dogs were lower still. The dog-heavy areas saw just two-thirds the number of robberies and half the number of murders compared to low-trust areas.

It’s not that the dogs are warding off scofflaws—instead, the study suggests that owning a dog brings with it a greater level of community involvement. If you own a dog, you’re walking a dog, which means having more sets of eyes in a community as well as opportunities to interact with neighbors. The dog isn’t so much the reason as the spark for creating a more tightly-knit area that makes suspicious behavior more, well, suspicious.

https://www.mentalfloss.com/posts/dogs-lower-neighborhood-crime-study

Finally the probing question of the day is just how will we humans will change in the next 10,000 years…..a quick unofficial look forward……

Humanity is the unlikely result of 4 billion years of evolution.

From self-replicating molecules in Archean seas, to eyeless fish in the Cambrian deep, to mammals scurrying from dinosaurs in the dark, and then, finally, improbably, ourselves – evolution shaped us.

Organisms reproduced imperfectly. Mistakes made when copying genes sometimes made them better fit to their environments, so those genes tended to get passed on. More reproduction followed, and more mistakes, the process repeating over billions of generations. Finally, Homo sapiens appeared. But we aren’t the end of that story. Evolution won’t stop with us, and we might even be evolving faster than ever.

It’s hard to predict the future. The world will probably change in ways we can’t imagine. But we can make educated guesses. Paradoxically, the best way to predict the future is probably looking back at the past, and assuming past trends will continue going forward. This suggests some surprising things about our future.

https://www.freethink.com/science/future-human-evolution

That is the major useless news stories for this Saturday.

Do enjoy your weekend….I know I shall….

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”