I'm not sure if the English language site Colombia Reports is the most reliable source of information, but regardless, I'm always going to be interested in a story with the headline "Wicked warlock 'hypnotizes 75 school children'":

Colombian authorities captured the mischievous magician Thursday who allegedly hypnotized 75 schoolchildren in the southern Colombian village of Mocoa.

The unethical warlock worked his voodoo magic at a local school where he allegedly put the whammy on a whopping 75 pupils. According to the police the malicious man was apprehended with two of his henchmen, while other authorities were trying to assess the situation of the spell-bound schoolchildren.

The children had to be sent to urgent care in a nearby hospital and allegedly have not recovered from the bewitching brouhaha.

Outraged parents have asked authorities to permit the mesmerizing man to go to the hospital and bring the children out of their trance.

[HT: Univision]

One professor of economics theorizes that ugly people should be protected under the Americans With Disabilities Act and Equal Opportunity. This is, of course, good news for your mother, who is so ugly that every night, her pillow cries:

The mechanics of legislating this kind of protection are not as difficult as you might think. You might argue that people can’t be classified by their looks — that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. That aphorism is correct in one sense: if asked who is the most beautiful person in a group of beautiful people, you and I might well have different answers. But when it comes to differentiating classes of attractiveness, we all view beauty similarly: someone whom you consider good-looking will be viewed similarly by most others; someone you consider ugly will be viewed as ugly by most others. In one study, more than half of a group of people were assessed identically by each of two observers using a five-point scale; and very few assessments differed by more than one point.

For purposes of administering a law, we surely could agree on who is truly ugly, perhaps the worst-looking 1 or 2 percent of the population. The difficulties in classification are little greater than those faced in deciding who qualifies for protection on grounds of disabilities that limit the activities of daily life, as shown by conflicting decisions in numerous legal cases involving obesity.

You know what they say...teach old people how to create graffiti, give them spray cans and chaos ensues:

Formal courses and workshops on senior graffiti are careful to keep their work legal, either spraying on large canvas or securing the rights to public spaces, like the walls of culture centers. But not all of Germany's seniors spray inside the legal lines.

At age 61, Walter F. — better known by his artistic name OZ — is renowned in Germany for the smiley faces and other signature doodles he sprays around Hamburg; some 12,000 of his works can be spotted in the city. But his indiscriminate spraying often lands him in hot water: This July, he was sentenced to 14 months in jail on 11 counts of property damage. The German press, which has followed OZ for over a decade, now affectionately refers to him as Hamburg's "Graffiti Oldie."

Unlike OZ, who has been spraying for years, most of the students participating in courses like those offered by Jutta Hinz's Mosaik Kreis or Stephanie Hanna's Senior Street Art are newcomers to the graffiti game. But some have followed in the footsteps of pros like OZ, taking what they learned in the classroom and transferring it to less-than-legal public spaces.

Hanna revealed that she sometimes sees graffiti that she taught in one of her past workshops while walking through the streets of Berlin. She told the Neue Zürcher Zeitung that apparently one or another of her students had taken to surreptitiously bringing what he or she learned in class to the city streets.

[HT: The Awl]

Maybe I'm being a stereotypical male here, grossed out by the birth process and anything related to it, but the trend piece in New York magazine about women eating their own placentas has me wishing the whole thing is a hoax. Turn away if you're eating anything right now:

Mayer then picks up the placenta, stands over the sink, and squeezes out the excess blood into a container. She pats it dry and starts peeling away its tough white ­membrane with her knife. “I try to send positive energy when I’m making medicine,” she goes on, as she continues blotting leaking blood (Mayer uses one roll of paper towels per placenta). “I think of peace, promise, and recovery, and hold the intention of integrating the energy of the mother and the baby.”

She then cuts the placenta in two. She will prepare one half according to the traditional Chinese method: wrapped in its membrane and steamed in a pot with a knob of ginger, a whole lemon, and a jalapeño pepper; then chopped up, dehydrated, and ground into a powder. She plans to dehydrate the other half raw.

The cooked half steams for half an hour, filling the room with the smell of meat and ginger. When Mayer takes it out, it has the texture and color of overcooked brisket. She chops it and lays it out on the parchment-lined dehydrator tray, below the raw version, which she has also chopped into slivers. In total, the placenta takes up four sixteen-inch trays.

When she turns on the dehydrator, another odor, unfamiliar to Mayer, fills the room. “It smells like something died in here!” she says.

Even the most devoted seafood lover has to admit, there is something oddly touching about 30 bald Buddhist monks dropping what must have been some serious cash to rescue 534 temperamental, snapping creatures from a boiling, watery grave with butter.

Maybe I'm paranoid, but I'm not a big fan of mysterious substances floating in the water and I can only assume it's some sort of sign that we're all doomed. I see no other possible conclusion to draw.

An unidentified orange substance is washing up on the shores of an isolated village in northwestern Alaska, and the only thing that investigators can say for sure is that it is not manmade.

Kivalina, a whaling community of about 425 people located in the Northwest Arctic Borough region, has reportedly experienced a rust-colored growth in its water: both in a local lagoon and, according to the Associated Press, even in some resident's rain buckets. What exactly the substance is, no one can yet say, but Anchorage-based NBC affiliate KTUU reported that the Coast Guard is conducting tests to uncover its origin.

"It is not man made, it is not a petroleum substance," Petty Officer David Mosley told KTUU.

[Time]

I had no idea that there was a world championship of Microsoft Excel, but if there's some 15 year kid (who seems to have some strange resentment towards "Asians") from England winning the thing, it's probably too late for me to develop mad Excel skills, win $5000, and finally feel good about myself for once. Oh well.

• God.

I could be wrong, but I wouldn't be surprised if a certain polling company's building ends up turning into a pillar of salt:

A new poll shows that little more than half of Americans say they approve of God's job performance, per Public Policy Polling, a Democratic firm based in North Carolina.

Only 52% of voters said they were pleased with how God seemed to be handling the universe when asked the question, "If God exists, do you approve or disapprove of its performance?"

Many didn't seemed not to want to make the Almighty angry — 40% were "unsure."

Of those who voted, 9% said they didn't approve. Younger voters, ages 18 to 29, were more likely to disapprove of God's works.

Voters were asked to rate God's performance when it came to issues like creating the universe, handling the animal kingdom and controlling natural disasters.

Spoiler alert: Leachman's character finds out she might have contracted an STD via her husband's philandering and it all goes downhill from there.

Someone I Touch is available on Netflix Instant.

It's a dance for a lady. What sort of dance and what sort of lady, I'm not sure, but he says it's a dance for a lady, so I'll have to take him at his word.