adlocker

New York legislators had voted just hours before to legalize same-sex marriage, and already the phone was ringing at the Falls Wedding Chapel. It was a lesbian couple in central New York, looking forward to an August wedding after 28 years together.
“They were literally giggling over the phone,” owner Sally Fedell said.
Fedell and others in the wedding business in this careworn city once famous as a wedding and honeymoon destination hope the change last week will provide an economic spark once the unions become legal July 24, a month after the law was signed. And the buzz is statewide.
From Niagara to New York City and Watertown to White Plains, retailers are predicting an upswing in wedding sales and services once the state joins Connecticut, Iowa, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont and Washington, D.C., in offering same-sex weddings. Caterers, hotels, florists and banquet halls all could benefit, experts say.
Richard Crogan sees the new law from two perspectives: He’s president of the Main Street Business and Professional Association in Niagara Falls – and he and his partner, Michael Murphy, are thrilled to finally be able to marry at the falls.
He’s envisioning a homecoming for gay people who left to marry elsewhere, including across the river in Canada.
“Those gay kids that moved out to be accepted can come back,” he said. “New York state is their state. They can come home and be themselves.”
Weddings are big business: The average cost of a U.S. wedding is $26,500 – part of an $84 billion nationwide market, according to Conde Nast’s Brides magazine’s 2011 wedding study.
An analysis by the New York City comptroller in 2009, the last time gay marriage was debated in New York, found that the practice would push $210 million into the state’s economy over three years.
The city’s tourism agency is developing a campaign called NYC I Do to make it “the gay weddings destination,” which it said could create “hundreds of millions of dollars in additional economic impact.”
Its website has begun listing hotels offering all-inclusive packages for same-sex couples wanting to celebrate their nuptials in the city, with titles such as Love Has No Boundaries and The Right To Unite Package.
David Wolfe, creative director at The Doneger Group Inc., which advises stores on fashion buying, said, “This could be a real windfall for stores to take advantage of. The gay population in metropolitan New York is as affluent as you get.”
The Michael Andrews Bespoke, an appointment-only tailor shop for men in Manhattan’s upscale NoHo neighborhood, was already seeing an uptick in phone calls and inquiries.
“Clearly this is going to be a real benefit for the wedding industry,” said owner Michael Andrews, predicting the state would become a destination for gay weddings.
He expects to see 10 to 20 percent growth in his business because of the new law, he said, especially because two grooms will need double the formal wear.
“It’s a real boon for us,” he said.
But is there something blue in the cards? Tiffany & Co., famous for its blue gift boxes in addition to its high-end jewelry, was coy.
Along with housewares seller Williams-Sonoma, Tiffany helped pioneer a change to gender-generic wedding registries. It declined to say how it was girding for what could be a boom in gay wedding sales, stating only that “Tiffany has always been there to help out all of our customers celebrate their life’s more important occasions.”
Mary Ellen Keating, spokeswoman at Bloomingdale’s, said she expects an upsurge in the retailer’s registry business in Manhattan. The department store changed its site from “wedding registry” to just “registry” in the 1980s.
David Paisley, senior projects marketing manager for Community Marketing Inc., a San Francisco-based marketing firm that tracks the gay market, however, believes the first surge of initial celebrations will be small because the larger ones will take longer to prepare.
In Niagara Falls, the benefits could be as wide as the famous falls themselves in a town that would like to revive its gilded identity as a romantic getaway.
“It has this brand that existed from the 1800s, when we were the only place you could get to from the East Coast for a long-distance wedding or long-distance honeymoon,” said John Percy, president and chief executive of the Niagara Tourism and Convention Corp. “Then the states exploded and Las Vegas appeared and Orlando appeared and all these other places appeared that became honeymoon destinations, as well.”
“I’d love to bring it back,” he said.
Tourism officials there suggest they can capitalize on the city’s already-established rainbow theme. It’s an ode to the rainbows that appear in the falls’ mist, but the rainbow is also recognized as a symbol of gay pride.
The Rainbow House Bed and Breakfast on Rainbow Boulevard is already attracting attention from gay couples wanting to marry, said owner Laura Lee Morgan, who booked her first gay wedding, for an Ohio couple, at the inn’s wedding chapel Monday morning.
The business was started by her gay brother, who died of AIDS-related causes 21 years ago. She thinks he quietly intended the name to have a dual meaning, though it’s always attracted heterosexual couples, too.
“He had a good sense of humor,” Morgan said. “It’s like it’s come full circle.”
The city is also still home to places such as the Bridal Chapel of Niagara Falls, Hanover House Weddings and A Romantic Wedding Chapel, and ancillary businesses such as Harris and Lever Florists, which supplies many of the bed-and-breakfasts that cater to newlyweds.
“If it benefits them, it’ll benefit us,” said Dominique Rubino, behind the counter of the shop on Main Street.
Crogan, anticipating a renaissance in Niagara Falls almost as much as marrying his partner, predicted good things.
“The city will be amazed at how it will change,” he said. “It’s going to force change. It’s starting already. There’s so much buzz.”

This Week in Terrifying Robots
Whenever I ask people what they hope scientists are working on, they all scream “Naps!”
Specifically, many of them are begging for scientists to develop personal time-stasis machines that would easily fit under a desk or in the backseat of a car that one could crawl into during the workday, stop time all around them while they caught thirty or forty winks, and then emerge refreshed without anyone being the wiser except for asking a few pointed questions about hair mussiness.
Others ask for some sort of suit/helmet combo that would allow them to bend the space/time continuum and to reclaim the naps that they refused to take as small children.
That is what right-thinking people want scientists to be focusing on. Well, that and dashboard-mounted DestructoRays.
Instead, the scientific community has yet again been relentlessly zeroing in on the antithesis of naps.
Case in point: Kilobots. See? Scientists aren’t even pretending they’re not dangerous anymore.
The reason that the roboticists at Harvard University didn’t go ahead and call them Kill-O-Bots is that the “kilo” is meant to indicate that they’re designed to team up by the thousands. Isn’t that comforting?
Harvard’s Self-Organizing Systems Research Group developed quarter-sized robots with little pin legs that can respond en masse to commands.
Which means they can do precision choreography like they’re the eensiest little celebrants of Kim Jong-Il’s birthday, or perhaps hoping to blow the Internet away with their creepy little interpretation of “Thriller.”
And, yes, Self-Organizing Systems Research Group, that sound you just heard was that of a single sequined gauntlet being thrown.
Though now that I’ve typed that, I’m concerned that, like the original video, the kilobots’ interpretation will also end with someone being trapped in a house and attacked on all sides.
Because in addition to responding as one to their creator’s commands, the bots are designed to be cheap, so they can be cranked out by the thousands and, when the Robot Takeover comes, swarm all over you no matter where you are hiding.
Whap at them if you must, but it will only drag out the inevitable end.
In the meantime, Harvard roboticists, I’m keeping an eye on you. If I see any news items about mysterious deaths that appear to be the result of disastrously overambitious acupuncture sessions, I am definitely calling someone.
Right after I change my name and skip the continent.
If you’d like to see where the kilobots will be carrying you, Gulliver-like, once you have been subdued, look no further than this chicken-processing robot featured on Dvice.
While it works with a slow, implacable pace in the clip, when it’s really cooking the robot can de-bone 1,500 chickens an hour. And it helpfully does the job with the carcasses in an upright position so you can get a real feel for how you’ll look on the slightly larger model.
Even if you’re used to cutting up and cooking chickens, you may find the eerie clinical calm and efficient flesh-removal disturbing. Though it may be worth watching the clip to see the bot’s inventor, speaking very seriously through a an interpreter about chicken breasts, make the international sign for “gazangas.”
And as unsettling as the de-boning robot is, trust me: You don’t want to see the re-boning robot.
This Week in Terrifying Medicine
Fortunately, we may have one hope for fighting the robots off. No, not the indomitable human spirit. Indomitable old people.
Gizmodo reports that hospitals are giving stunning numbers of medically questionable double CT scans to Medicare patients, which means our nation’s old people are getting a lot of radiation thrown at them. True, that seems worrisome at first glance. The elderly person stereotype is one of fragility.
But I’d like to know where the fragile old people are hiding; the old people in my life all got to be old precisely by virtue of being tough old birds with no intention of going down lightly.
The movies are wrong. Our future mutant saviors will not be the young. They will be our old people, who have a love of flesh-based civilization,  have all of our important cultural lore locked in their brains, and have been soaking up radiation like cranberry sea breezes.
Besides, the old are our best early warning system. What other population can Hulk out with impunity?
They will use their trifocals to aim and intensify their heat vision; their pacemakers, pins, and fillings to charge up their plasma blasts; and their sheer stubborn cussedness to get us to do anything, absolutely anything, if only they will stop talking about what the Weather Channel has been saying about the humidity in Montana, where none of us are right now.
And then we will wave and shout our thanks as they grab their golf clubs and bocce balls and fly off, perhaps a little more slowly than the average superhero and slightly to the left, to kick some metal robot ass.
And we had better have some Sanka ready for them when they get back.
Our Elder Mutant Heroes will take the robots down, put them in headlocks, and force them to develop emotions just so they can feel guilty about not calling last weekend.
Once more, humanity will assume its rightful robot-dominant place in the world.
And we will revere our Elder Mutant Heroes forever more.
And, forever more, the Elder Mutant Heroes will make the rest of us come to the Palace of Silver Justice every other day to help reprogram, because they unplugged everything to clean the wainscoting and now they can’t make the kilobots stop blinking 12:00.
Be afraid.
Ali Davis is a writer and performer in Los Angeles. Her book is available in paperback or on Kindle. It’s funny enough to very nearly take your mind off the fact that you are covered in tiny hostile robots.

This Week in Terrifying Subterranean Worms
By far the biggest science story of the week was the discovery of worms two miles beneath the earth’s surface, which is way below where anyone expected to find critters that complex.
The new worm species, named H. mephisto because why be coy about it, live in a very different world than we know: No sunshine, only tiny amounts of oxygen, and nothing to do but scarf up bacteria and dream of burrowing into the ear canals of unwary spelunkers.
The discovery has biologists excited partly because of what it reminds us about life on Earth: It’s going to pop up in places and ways you didn’t expect, it’s probably going to be disgusting and/or hostile when it does, and OH, GOD, THERE’S ONE ON YOUR SHOULDER!
The fact that the worms eats unicellular life forms is intriguing too. As The Washington Post points out:
“Research into the distribution of underground microbes in recent decades has led scientists to conclude that more than half of the biological mass on Earth is below the surface.”
One you’re done saying your region’s preferred version of “Ick,” you’ll realize that that is a whole lot of microscopic food.
Which means it’s possible that there are many other complex multicellular organisms in the general direction of down waiting to be discovered. And by “be discovered,” I mean “twine around the wrists and ankles of the lucky scientist who is about to win a posthumous Nobel Prize.”
To shift up a gear in dorkiness, the existence of H. mephisto also suggests that life on other planets may have more of a shot than we thought. The fact that the worms seem to be doing perfectly well far underground in extreme conditions and without any other complex life forms around means that others might as well.
The desolate surface of Mars may be a clever disguise. Maybe the underground crevices and steam vents are where the action is.
Future interplanetary explorers, bring strong ropes, flashlights, and your best stomping boots.
And hope those little suckers don’t get any bigger on other planets. Maybe pack a few sandworm hooks, just in case.
This Week in Terrifying Oceans
But why worry about what’s under the ground on other planets when what’s under the ocean on this one is so ready to kill us?
Wired Science posted a charming little piece about how jellyfish have spent the past several hundred million years waiting for their chance to re-assert full aquatic domination, and now they’re pushing into the final phase of their plan.
You may have read about the increase in jellyfish blooms in recent decades. Turns out that what with the pollution, the overfishing, and the added heat, we’ve played right into their tentacles. And their numbers are on the rise.
If you’re imagining a beautiful bouncy wonderland of Finding Nemo jellyfish, cut that out right now. Wired linked to an article about a species of these squashy bumbershoots of doom that grows up to 450 pounds and 6 feet across.
Why the article? Because they sank a fishing boat.

Even scarier, jellyfish aren’t just sting-y, they’re stingy. Most animals excrete something that’s useful to microorganisms that put energy back into the food chain. Jellyfish just nourish a bunch of microjerks that don’t do much for the rest of us at all.
Essentially, Jellyfish are taking up way more space on the global couch, but all they ever bring to movie night is Smirnoff Ice.
So they’re filling our oceans, slowly starving us out, and capsizing our boats. And we’re helping with the first two. We’re practically sliding down the ladder from predator to prey.
As the sea levels rise higher and higher, get ready for a whole new etiquette to emerge. If you really want to make a good impression when you meet someone, be sure to compliment his or her tentacle scar patterns.
Then serve up a delicious lunch of jellyfish samosas, jellyfish salad, peanut butter and jellyfish sandwiches, whatever that hideous thing the jellyfish didn’t want is, and flan.*
*May contain jellyfish.
And be afraid.
Ali Davis is a writer and performer in Los Angeles. She once managed to wrap a jellyfish all the way down her arm like a barber pole. And yet somehow she still found the strength to make her book available in paperback or on Kindle.

As us Americans celebrate our independence from the aliens today, Princess Charlene of Monaco is mourning the loss of hers. We've already heard about how days before Charlene Wittstock married Prince Albert, she got her passport taken away when she tried to flee to her native South Africa. But now the media is saying that Charlene tried to quit that bitch not once, not once, but three times.

A source tells the French newspaper Le Journal du Dimanche that Charlene even crawled off to the South African embassy in Monaco to beg them to hide her in a laundry basket and wheel her far far away from Prince Albert, but they shook their heads no. When Charlene was caught trying to escape for the third time, Prince Albert made her some kind of offer, which she agreed to.

'Several sources have even confirmed that an arrangement was reached between the future bride and groom.'

The couple are due to fly to South Africa on honeymoon on this week, presenting Charlene with her best chance yet of escaping Monaco.

Prince Albert faces a DNA test over claims he fathered a third illegitimate child, the palace confirmed.

A royal official said that both the illegitimate children were kept away from Albert's marriage so as to avoid 'media exposure.'

Even though Prince Albert's shooting secret love children out of his peen like he's a proud graduate of Lil' Wayne's anti-condom university, none of them can claim the throne because they were birthed out of wedlock. So some hos are saying that Prince Albert wants Princess Charlene to give birth to the next king or queen of Monaco before he unlocks her handcuffs.

The royals in Monaco don't do shit, right? They just put on a prince and princess costume and wave at their subjects from a balcony? They have about as much ruling power as the prince charming dildo I've had my eye on. So imprisoning a South African woman because they believe she will give them the perfect-looking heir apparent is taking this monarchy shit way too seriously. Monaco should just do what Disneyland does when they need a fake prince to wave at their guests from a balcony: hold a casting call and hire the prettiest gay with the shiniest hair and whitest teefs! And they only have to pay him with minimum wage and a couple of free guest passes.

Three members of the Air Force have asked to be discharged because they are gay, moving quickly to get out of the military under the ban on openly gay service before its expected repeal later this year.
Pentagon officials said the other military services have not seen any similar effort this year under the so-called don’t ask, don’t tell law that prohibits gays from serving openly. Defense Secretary Robert Gates has said there are no roadblocks to ending the 17-year-old ban, but it probably won’t happen until mid-summer. Gates leaves office this week.
According to the Air Force, during the past month two female staff sergeants and a male 2nd lieutenant made statements identifying themselves as gay and asked to be separated quickly from the service. Only one other person, an airman 1st class, has been discharged under the law since last October.
Air Force Secretary Michael Donley approved the discharges of the two women, and accepted the resignation of the airman who requested separation from the service. Gates issued an order last October that said no one could be discharged under the gay ban unless it was approved by the secretary of the military service involved.
The armed services are wrapping up their training of the force on the new law, passed last December that allows gays to serve openly. Before the law can go into effect, defense leaders have to certify that it will have no adverse impact on the military. So far, military leaders say they have seen no widespread resistance to the policy change.
In a survey of the troops last year, two-thirds predicted little impact on the force’s ability to fight. But the greatest complaints about the change came from combat troops, including many in the Marine Corps and Army.
Gates has met with the military and civilian leaders of the services and has started to prepare for certification. But the final action will be left to the next defense secretary, Leon Panetta, who will be sworn in on Friday. The repeal would take effect 60 days after certification.
In a statement issued Monday, Alexander Nicholson, executive director of Servicemembers United, said it is shocking to see incidents of people “trying to force the Pentagon to let them out of the service obligation” because the law is still on the books.
Servicemembers United is the nation’s largest organization of gay and lesbian troops and veterans.