Līnijkuģis tika nolaists ūdenī 1911. gada 15. oktobrī un sāka savas gaitas flotē 1914. gada 14. maijā. Ieguvis devīzi "Lai izturēt jebkuru triecienu". Kuģis karoja divos karos un pēc Itālijas zaudējuma 2. pasaules karā, to kā reparāciju ieguva PSRS. Kuģa kravietilpība bija 25 tūkst. t un tambija 305., 120. un 76. kalibra lielgabali.
http://top.rbc.ru/society/22/08/2013/871155.shtml
2.
Kanādas zobārsts grib klonēt Džonu Lenonu, izmantojot viņa zobu
BNS/AFP
Zobārsts Maikls Zaks no Kanādas Albertas provinces Reddīras pilsētas cer izmantot mirušā eksbītla Džona Lenona zobu, kuru viņš pērn nopirka izsolē, lai iegūtu šīs slavenības klonu.
Zaks, kurš novembrī iegādājās Lenona zobu par apmēram 16 tūkstošiem latu, ir to nosūtījis uz Pensilvānijas Štata universitāti. Tās zinātnieki pēta iespējas ekstrahēt Lenona ģenētisko kodu no šī trauslā materiāla, ziņoja Kanādas laikraksts «Globe and Mail».
«Es esmu satraukts un sajūsmināts par iespēju, ka mēs spēsim pilnībā iegūt Džona Lenona DNS - es ceru, ka ļoti drīz,» sacīja Zaks. «Tā kā zinātnieki strādā pie mamutu klonēšanas veidiem, tad tā pati tehnoloģija noteikti var padarīt par realitāti cilvēku klonēšanu,» uzskata Lenona zoba īpašnieks.
Lenona zobs savulaik bija daļa no ierakstu industrijas pārstāvja Alana Makgī kolekcijas. Makgī to bija ieguvis no bijušās Lenona mājkalpotājas Dorotijas Džārletas, kurai Lenons bija uzdāvinājis šo zobu pēc tā izraušanas.
3.
На пляже нашли вонючего монстра с рогами
Utro.ru
Посетители пляжа вблизи города Вилларикос в Испании были озадачены необычным зрелищем: волны выбросили на песок разлагающийся труп неизвестного морского чудовища. Ученые полагают, что речь идет об акуле, но их настораживают рога.
«Мы понятия не имеем, что это за вид. Тело в очень плохом состоянии и отвратительно пахнет, – цитирует Dailymail Марию Санчес, координатора спасательной службы, обслуживающей пляж. – Голову достала из воды отдыхавшая на пляже женщина, мы помогли перенести на песок все остальное».
Длина тела существа составляет около четырех метров. Разложение зашло слишком далеко, поэтому опознать вид животного присутствовавшим на пляже не удалось. Морские биологи, которым показали фотографии, предположили, что речь идет об одном из видов акул, так как в теле вместо костей были хрящи. Однако их удивили рога, которые были на голове у животного.
«Возможно, анализ тканей прояснил бы ситуацию, – заявил представитель местной администрации Пако Толедано, – однако расшифровка ДНК стоит достаточно дорого, кто за это будет платить?» Он отметил, что никогда в этом районе никто не видел ничего подобного.
http://rus.tvnet.lv/hi_tech/nauka/235634-na_pljazhje_nashli_vonjuchjego_monstra_s_rogami
4.
В Меджумурской жупании нашли «голову инопланетянина»
21 августа 2013 г.
В хорватском регионе Меджумурская жупания нашли необычный предмет, который сочли головой инопланетянина. С таким заявлением в беседе с 24 Sata выступил глава муниципального образования Доня Дубрава Иван Штефич.
По словам чиновника, «голова» была найдена во время работ на кладбище. Когда на территории комплекса захоронений проводили раскопки, из-под земли достали этот странный предмет. При этом Штефич отметил, что на ощупь находка весьма мягкая, напоминает резину, имеет похожие на глазные отверстия углубления, а также приятно пахнет. Глава Дони Дубравы сравнил аромат, исходящий от «головы», с запахом средства после бритья.
Помимо «головы» под землей нашли и еще один похожий предмет, только меньшего размера. Копатели предположили, что если первый, крупный предмет можно назвать головой, то второй – сердцем неизвестного существа.
Штефич и его коллеги призвали экспертов изучить находку и дать ей свою оценку. Кроме того, было предложено продолжить раскопки (не нарушая захоронений) и вызвать соответствующих специалистов, чтобы те могли изучить находящийся на глубине около метра материал.
http://rus.tvnet.lv/hi_tech/hobbi/235454-v_mjedzhumurskoy_zhupanii_nashli_golovu_inoplanjetjanina
5.
Pink Robots at the Gate
Published: August 21, 2013
PALM SPRINGS, CALIF. — Kenny Irwin Jr. is not one of those brooding, creatively blocked artists, as one glance at his father’s backyard confirms. Ken Irwin Sr. once owned a pristine two-acre spread in a prized part of town. Then he made the generous or foolish decision, depending on your viewpoint, to hand over the property to his son as a place to build and display the astonishing over-scaled sculptures that Kenny Jr. makes by fusing found materials with tons of glue.
Now, Santa’s Battle Wagon and a team of 12 robot reindeer occupy a patch of lawn near the pool, while a 50-foot-tall, 54-ton robot made partly of junked electronics diverts attention from the tasteful desert landscaping.
And forget about playing a few sets on the tennis court.
“Now it’s elf village, with post-apocalyptic extraterrestrial nuclear elves,” Kenny Jr. said, leading a visitor on a walk through a landscape resembling the set of a Tim Burton film. Wearing a beige shalwar kameez and a long, untrimmed beard (he became a Muslim a decade ago), Kenny Jr., 39, had the gleeful smile of a child given a very large sandbox to play in.
Georgia Eisner, his older sister, recalled how, years before he took over the backyard, he would appropriate her possessions as material for his art while she was away at boarding school. “It was clear my typewriter ended up in one of his structures,” she said. “My shell collection disappeared. He glued it to the wall.”
Remembering her exasperation, she added: “I would think, can’t I have a normal brother who plays sports? He was the weirdo that was always off playing by himself and talking about outer space.”
Kenny Jr.’s ideas come in a geyserlike rush, he explained, inspired by vivid dreams of aliens and distant planets. His main challenge is keeping up with them. “The amount of energy that goes through me is absolutely, utterly relentless,” he said. “Think of it as the floodgates are unleashed and the flood doesn’t ever stop. It’s been that way my whole life.”
For several years, his creative energy has been channeled into Robo Lights, the ever-expanding holiday display he began in 1986, at age 12. Last year, 20,000 people visited the sprawling installation, which features Santa’s Pink Robot Store and a manger scene with baby Jesus wearing a Sumo-style topknot and wise men bearing gifts of toy microwaves.
Twin Palms, the estate Frank Sinatra owned one block over, grows paler as a neighborhood attraction every year.
In October, an indoor version of Robo Lights will be on display at the American Visionary Art Museum, or AVAM, in Baltimore, said Rebecca Alban Hoffberger, the museum’s director and founder. Kenny Jr.’s work will be part of an exhibit on technology called “Human, Soul and Machine: The Coming Singularity.”
“Kenny is one of a handful of people who continue to fascinate me,” Ms. Hoffberger said. “There’s a lot of sci-fi work out there, and it tends to look alike. His work looks like no one else’s.”
LIKE A ONE-MAN RECYCLING CENTER, Kenny Jr. collects old phones, cassette tapes, wood, the innards of slot machines, garbage can lids, pool filters, a neighbor’s wrecked glider, an air compressor from a commercial building — anything he can get his hands on, basically — and using multiple cans of Touch ’n Foam sealant, gives form to his visions.
His sculptures have a Seurat-like quality: a pink Clydesdale looks monumental from a distance; up close, its hooves are revealed as boxy computer monitors, its noble head a printer and fax machine glued together, its mane a tangle of power cords.
Aliens, robots and monsters appear in Kenny Jr.’s work with obsessive frequency. But he maintains that his inspiration doesn’t come from comic books or B-movies. His robot sculptures are “instantaneously generated creations that go through my mind,” he said. “I know exactly what they look like, and I make them.” (An interest in the far-out is perhaps hereditary: Kenny Jr.’s paternal grandmother was a singer and bandleader whose 1969 album, “Into Outer Space with Lucia Pamela,” a jazzy account of her “trip” to the moon, is a cult classic for its wacky naïveté. Tony Kushner wrote a play about her called “Flip Flop Fly.”)
Kenny Jr. beamed into the larger culture briefly in 2010, when Conan O’Brien asked him to design the holiday set for his talk show. The host appeared delighted with the results (Godzilla wielding a candy cane; a Christmas U.F.O.), though it was hard to tell if the creator was in on the joke. In a backstage interview, Kenny Jr. answered Mr. O’Brien’s sardonic questions about “Mr. and Mrs. Sanmagnetron Claus” with deadpan sincerity, seemingly oblivious to the incongruity of a man in full Islamic dress designing Christmas decorations.
Still, the exposure didn’t translate to wider recognition for his art. Kenny Jr. isn’t represented by a gallery, but sells his art out of the house. And beyond the Visionary Art Museum, his work is not championed by museums, including the Palm Springs Art Museum. He works each day in relative obscurity, treating his father’s palm-shaded yard as his Roden Crater, his Chinati Ranch.
For Kenny Jr., who as a child showed greater affinity for animals than for humans, art is an attempt to connect. “The major reason I create is to share with people,” he said. “I always saw what enjoyment people got out of my art. It made me happy because it makes them happy.”
In addition to his astonishing sculptures, Kenny Jr. makes ballpoint-pen drawings that blend futuristic and Islamic imagery, and strangely beautiful ceramics in which materials like pigeon feathers or cicada skins are encased in resin skulls. As with the sculptures in the yard, the smaller works have started to fill the large house he shares with his father, and Kenny Jr.’s uncontrollable creative output has put a strain on his family.
Ms. Eisner called the living situation “so Grey Gardens.” She sighed, and added: “It makes it impossible to function as a family there, because everywhere you turn there’s art and stuff.”
“I SAID, ‘O.K., KENNY, put some lights up.’ Either it was the greatest miracle or the greatest mistake of my life,” Ken Sr. said, and laughed. He was sitting in the air-conditioned, vaulted-ceiling living room of the house he designed and built, which has a conversation pit and electric-blue rug that date it to the era when Burt and Dinah roamed Palm Canyon Drive. Viewed through sliding-glass doors, Kenny Jr.’s sculptures loomed impressively on the lawn, as if eyeing the house and its residents for a takeover.
Ken Sr., who is 83 and retired, was for many years a real estate developer who owned La Mancha, a local resort whose private villas were popular with celebrities like Elizabeth Taylor. He has 10 children; Kenny Jr. is the second-youngest, born to Ken Sr.’s second wife, Suzanne Rosenbloom, who died in 1994. (Her father was Carroll Rosenbloom, a businessman and National Football League team owner.)
While Kenny Jr.’s artistic talent was apparent at a young age, he often had trouble channeling it. Ms. Eisner said her brother’s personality could be “very combative,” and recalled his being kicked out of several boarding schools.
Kenny Jr. contends that his educational overseers “didn’t like me making art. They were against it. That’s why I kept getting kicked out.”
At Cranbrook Schools, in Michigan, he was encouraged by an instructor who raved to his parents about three large iron sculptures he made at 15. Ken Sr. had them trucked to Palm Springs and placed in the yard. But Kenny Jr. struggled academically and socially, and instead of providing her brother counseling, Ms. Eisner said, her parents took a more passive, he’ll-figure-it-out approach.
As Kenny Jr. grew older, and his installations consumed more and more of the property, “I had to make some decisions,” Ken Sr. said. What he decided was to become his son’s Lorenzo de’ Medici, supporting Kenny Jr. financially and allowing him to turn prime Southern California real estate into “a canvas.”
Chip Rosenbloom, a cousin who is a filmmaker and an owner of the St. Louis Rams, also provides support, helping to offset the $10,000 electricity bills Robo Lights incurs each year. “He has a unique talent, and what else is he going to do?” Mr. Rosenbloom said. “Kenny is not a guy who’s going to have a 9-to-5 conventional job.”
Among family members, opinion is divided over how Kenny Jr.’s single-minded fixation on art should be handled, his father said. Some believe Ken Sr. is too indulgent of his son, and that it would be healthier for Kenny Jr. to get a place of his own. They also question the long-term viability of his art career. Some of Kenny Jr.’s art can seem inscrutable, like Microwave Theater, the long-running Web video series in which he melts consumer electronics in microwaves. (He has so far taped 660 highly repetitive episodes.)
Ken Sr. has a different perspective. “He may someday make a living at it,” he said. “But that’s not the primary motivation. He likes creating things.”
He added: “It’s not so much that I’m foolish or a good guy for letting him use the property. He is a naturally creative artist. To make one sculpture, he skinned a refrigerator. Can you imagine skinning a refrigerator? It would be criminal if I stifled his creative abilities.”
For his part, Kenny Jr. said he is “grateful beyond words” that his father has given him the financial freedom to work on his art, and the space to do it. “Without that,” he said, “things would not be good.”
Under their patron-artist setup, Kenny Jr. lives rent-free in the rambling Spanish-style house and sleeps in his childhood bedroom, or, as Ken Sr. calls it, “The Cocoon.” The low-ceilinged room is crammed with rocks and skulls that Kenny Jr. has glued to the walls, and a giant computer monitor glows eerily in the dim light like the motherboard of a spaceship.
Ms. Eisner joked, “I won’t go in there.”
Still, she said, she has watched her brother mellow and come into his own with age, and lately she sees the wisdom in her father’s hands-off parenting. “People didn’t really get him,” Ms. Eisner said. “He’s had to swim double strength against the tide. So to have an ally like my dad was probably good for him.”
IN THE COACHELLA VALLEY, land of golf courses and retirees, you don’t see bumper stickers proclaiming “Keep Palm Springs Weird.” Against the clean-lined midcentury architecture for which the city is known, placing two six-foot pink robots in the front courtyard is akin to waving a freak flag.
As Kenny Jr. was showing off a lime-green robot made from a pool heater, two middle-aged women out for a morning stroll walked up to the house for a closer look. They were in town from Oregon for a Bunco contest, said Dolly Boals, one of the women. “We call ourselves the Bunco Babes,” she said.
Asked if the sculpture had caught her eye from the street, Ms. Boals replied, “Whose eye wouldn’t it catch?”
The women appeared mesmerized by the towering artworks, and by Kenny Jr. in his flowing shalwar kameez. Usually he comes across as stilted and a little awkward, but basking in the attention of these new fans, he lit up.
After the women left, Kenny Jr., still pumped up from the interaction, explained that he uses the huge, colorful installations as billboards. He depends on donations from visitors, and the largess of neighbors who give him their junk, to create more art. “With the few meager sales I make in the course of a year, it can be difficult,” he said. (One of those sales was to a notable collector: Michael Eisner, his sister’s father-in-law, last year bought the resin sculptures of a flamingo and a duck filled with seashells, and installed them in the living room of his Malibu home.)
The hope for Kenny Jr. and the family members who support him is that he will gain an audience and a venue beyond his father’s backyard. But on most days, he is the only person in the sculpture park. Standing in a corner of the yard, listening to him describe his newest installation, a visitor had a chilling thought. What happens when there is no space left?
Kenny Jr. dismissed that concern. “You’re talking years and years away,” he said. “By that time, I’m hoping I’ll have other outlets for my art, like museums or galleries or other cities.”
Then he turned back to his latest work. “Now this robot is made from nothing but six-outlet power strips,” he said. “They’re glued together and also bound with wire. It’s called an Electro-bot.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/22/garden/pink-robots-at-the-gate.html?_r=0