I was talking to a woman tonight who said she’d seen a man on the Metro wearing a thong. It might have been a G-string, but she pegged it for a thong because of the tell-tale whale tail. This reminded me of the passage in Ariel Levy’s Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture where she described the origins of the thong, dating it back to the thirties. Here’s a linkable piece on the same:

Fashion historians trace the thongs’ first public U.S. appearance to the 1939 World’s Fair when New York Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia mandated that the city’s nude dancers cover themselves. Fashion designer, Rudi Gernreich has been credited with introducing the first thong bikini in 1974. Another reference states that thongs, originally called tangas, hit the beaches of Brazil in 1977.

Levy goes with the La Guardia theory. This seems to me like a crucial bit of pop cultural history that ought to be more widely known, though I have to disagree with the above about the “tanga,” which all readers of the Victoria’s Secret catalog know is really like a lace version of a boy short.

God, what weird problems late-stage humanity has developed:

 

More than 9,000 pieces of space debris are orbiting the Earth, a hazard that can only be expected to get worse in the next few years. And currently there’s no workable and economic way to clean up the mess….

Even if space launches were halted now — which will not happen — the collection of debris would continue growing as items already in orbit collide and break into more pieces, Liou said in a telephone interview.

“On the other hand, we are not claiming the sky is falling,” he said, “We just need to understand what the risks are.”…

A 2004 NASA report identified Russia as the source of the largest number of debris items, closely followed by the United States. Other sources were France, China, India, Japan and the European Space Agency.

Russian space junk. Now there’s a problem no one envisioned in 1957.

Worldwide platinum stocks are likely to be depleted by the end of the century, according to a new study on the earth’s finite supply of metals, and it’s not just the wedding band industry that’s to blame. Catalytic converters and hydrogen fuel cells rely on the precious ore, but the earth only has so much metal to give. (Buy now and the great-grand-kids will be rich one day.) Copper stocks should be fine as long as large swathes of the globe remain undeveloped, but if the entire globe were as developed as the U.S., the global store of copper on Earth would be eaten up by the transformation, and we’d have to start recycling it, along with glass and newspapers.

I can’t say I’ve ever given global stocks of metal a moment’s thought, but it does stand to reason that, like deposits of oil and natural gas, such stocks are finite. Of course, by the time we start running out of metals, sea levels will have risen enough to reduce land mass and demand, so maybe things will all even out in the end. 

This site is still under construction, so consider this the “soft launch.” Until the hard launch, I reserve the right to alter anything about the site, including the published text and name, at whim. As on most blogs, which are something between the new op-ed pages and wire services for trivia, I will use anonymous sourcing heavily.

Over at the department of the bleeding obvious, lawmakers are shocked to discover that debtors are continuing to fiile for bankruptcy with the courts because they are flat broke:

The law requires debtors to see credit counselors before they file for bankruptcy protection. It is a prerequisite that banks and credit card issuers hoped would steer consumers away from bankruptcy court and into plans that would allow them to repay debts over a few years.

But so far, that is not happening.

The counseling agencies say most debtors are in such deep financial trouble that they cannot qualify for a debt-management plan….

In the first 13 weeks after the new law took effect Oct. 17, only 4.5 percent of the 14,907 debtors counseled by MMI had sufficient income to be considered for a plan to pay back debts over a few years. Of those 669 debtors, only 42 have signed up so far for such a debt-management plan.

So, basically, people are continuing to file for bankruptcy, despite, the new law, because they don’t have the money to pay their debts. Who’d have thunk?

The idea that people lightly filed for bankruptcy was always absurd, and the new data shows just how ridiculous this Repulican propaganda point was.

Useful in depth piece on the nation and the new president, “ma Ellen.”