Harper's Bizarre But GQ Banal
Findings Factoids Trump Tedious Texting

By Peter Carlson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, April 3, 2007

The world is a wondrous place, filled with humans and other bizarre creatures, and the folks who write the Findings column in Harper's magazine give us the latest inside info on just about all of it. This month, for instance, Findings reveals these choice tidbits:

"Dutch children are the happiest in Europe."

"Male chimpanzees frequently beat their mates with branches in order to punish promiscuity."

"People who take naps are less likely to die of heart disease, as are women who can convince their mates to snuggle with them. Men apparently derive little benefit from snuggling."

Findings appears on the last page of Harper's every month, a goofy little goodbye gift to the departing reader. It's a compendium of odd scraps of information, many of them gleaned from recent studies, scientific and otherwise. The items are presented quickly, with no breaks between them, and written in a deadpan, "just-the-facts, ma'am" style. Take, for instance, this passage from the December issue:

"Scientists confirmed that losing money is scary. The pope was planning to abolish limbo. Lesbians have more orgasms; dung beetles with ostentatious horns tend to have smaller testicles; too much testosterone can kill brain cells; and people who look at black-and-white pictures of bananas tend to see a slight yellow tint in the fruit."

Sometimes the revelations in Findings read like the facts printed on the inside of Snapple caps: "Perfectly spun eggs can jump" and "male mice shed tears to show their virility." Other Findings items seem like something from one of the more creative supermarket tabloids: "A Brazilian cat gave birth to a dog" and "A British chicken named Freaky underwent a spontaneous sex change."

And sometimes Findings items read like the plot summary of a particularly weird sci-fi movie: "The Japanese developed a robot wine steward capable of chemically analyzing and identifying foods; when presented with human flesh, however, the robot thought it was prosciutto."

Reading Findings, you develop a new appreciation for fruit flies, whose lives are made a lot more interesting by the weird experiments that scientists devise for them. "Biologists at Yale University learned how to make fruit flies jump, walk, flap their wings and fly on command by using lasers to stimulate specific neurons," Findings reported a couple of years ago. "Geneticists succeeded in giving fruit flies a gene that makes them gay," it reported later. And finally there was this fruit fly update: "Researchers who gave methamphetamine to fruit flies discovered that the drug resulted in long sleepless nights, heightened activity, and frenzied though ineffectual sexual activity."

Sounds like a typical weekend for Keith Richards.

Mice are also the subject of some strange studies reported in Findings: "A nasal spray was developed that clears Alzheimer's plaque from the brains of infected mice; scientists found a way to make mice age faster; and it was discovered that MDMA, otherwise known as Ecstasy, relieves the symptoms of Parkinson's disease in mice."

Which makes you wonder: What's it like to have a job spritzing nasal spray into the noses of Alzheimer's-afflicted mice? That kind of work could make you a little wacky, and Findings does suggest that scientists might be stranger than the beasts they study.

"Scientists figured out how to genetically alter mosquitos so that their gonads glow in the dark," Findings reported in December.

"Scientists were trying to develop bathroom fixtures that clean themselves," Findings noted last April.

"Researchers in Michigan devised a robot hand that can perform breast exams," Findings reported in 2005.

What's with these scientists? Are they warped, or what? Maybe somebody should study them.

If somebody does, the findings will no doubt appear in Findings. Keep an eye out.

BlackBerry Small Talk

Magazine journalism marches on into the brave new world of electronic communication. For GQ's special "Love, Sex and Madness" issue, writer Marshall Sella conducted an interview with bad girl actress Lindsay Lohan -- entirely via BlackBerry messages!!

"Because that's how the kids are communicating these days," Sella writes in an introduction. And, he adds, Lohan is "an icon of her generation."

How did this high-tech experiment work out? Not so good. It turns out that Lohan's BlackBerry text messages are about as banal as anybody else's text messages.

"Here now wearing marc jacobs pumps and a kate and kass dress, vintage chanel messenger and topshop tights and peace sign earrings from kaviar and kind," she writes.

Sella gets that message and fires one back asking Lohan if she plays poker.

"Weird! I just e-mailed my friend sara pantera saying I'm going to start playing poker again! I bought two puppies today! Sober impulse buying of companions who will help me stay home etc," Lohan replies.

Sella sends back a message endorsing dogs and asking if Lohan likes cats.

"Cats scare me," she writes. "I just think of bad luck from black ones like I had in 'Just My Luck'! I need a boyfriend. Geez."

Back and forth they go until Sella asks Lohan, who is busy filming a movie, to tell him about the happiest moment of her life.

"Gotta think sex scene today," she writes back.

"Best message ever," Sella answers. "What do you think about during a sex scene?"

And he never gets another message from her again.

Oh, well. It was a nice try, anyway. And it generated just enough copy to give GQ an excuse to make it a cover story and run five pages of pictures of Lohan without too many clothes on.

A Vote for Pork

It's official: Field & Stream has announced that "Hogs Are the New Deer."

Deer are nice, but you can hunt them only during deer season. You can hunt wild hogs pretty much all the time, the magazine reports. The little porkers run wild in 31 states, including Maryland and Virginia, and they taste good, too. And get this: "The loose restrictions on hog hunting in many places has led to a number of fringe techniques, from spearing the animals to killing them with handheld knives."

But you've got to be careful. Wild hogs are nasty critters wielding sharp tusks. "Imagine a 700-pound elk compressed into the body of a 250-pound animal," says Jim "The Hogfather" Matthews, publisher of the California Hog Hunter newsletter.

Before you head out to hunt hog, Field & Stream suggests that you pick up a bottle of Harmon "Hog in Heat" to attract the beasts. "It's 100 percent urine," the magazine raves. "Careful -- a little dab'll do ya."