AdamSmith

And of course...

Yes, It's True: Ben & Jerry's Introduces 'Schweddy Balls' Ice Cream Flavor by Eyder Peralta npr.org National Public Radio September 07, 2011 6:28 PM ET We thought it would never happen. When we reported that comedian on a new Ben & Jerry's ice cream flavor based on a Saturday Night Live skit that pokes fun at NPR, we thought it would never happen. Schweddy Balls ice cream. Ben & Jerry's But we were wrong. that "Schweddy Balls" ice cream is on its way to store shelves across the country. As we explained in June, "in case you don't get the reference, the skit is a hilarious commentary on NPR's, um, uniquely soothing sound. [Alec] Baldwin plays Pete Schweddy, a guest on a fake NPR show called Delicious Dish. Pete makes holiday treats like cheese balls, popcorn balls, rum balls and his famous Schweddy balls. The skit is an exercise in double entendres." We talked to Ben & Jerry's spokesman Sean Greenwood and asked him, "What are you guys thinking?" We were imagining someone who's never seen the skit walking the grocery aisles and stumbling on the flavor. Greenwood laughed. "We've always been a company that has had a sense of humor," he said. Sometimes, he said, they spend time discussing serious business and other times "we just do fun." "This is just plain silly," he said. And it tastes pretty good, he promised. The flavor is made up of "vanilla ice cream with a hint of rum and is loaded with fudge covered rum balls and milk chocolate malt balls." It'll be available for a limited time in about 30 percent of stores that carry Ben & Jerry's ice cream. Update On September 8 at 6:52 p.m. ET. The Taste Test: So, today, a few pints of "Schweddy Balls" ice cream made it . When it first arrived, several of our colleagues just stood there watching the ice cream like it was some kind of animal at a zoo. It took a brave soul to dig in and they stipulated, "No pictures." But once the newsroom dug in, the verdict was generous: It was delicious. My impression was mixed. I mean ice cream is ice cream, right? So it was good, but the rum is subdued in the vanilla ice cream so the balls — especially the malt balls — overwhelmed the flavor a bit. Being a Cherry Garcia guy myself, I appreciate some nuance in my ice cream, a bit of tartness to tame the sweetness of the ice cream. Now, don't get me wrong, I'm no prude, but the flavor — like the name suggests — was missing a bit of delicacy. http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2011/09/07/140266537/yes-its-true-ben-jerrys-introduces-schweddy-balls-ice-cream-flavor

World's earliest erotic graffiti found in unlikely setting on Aegean islandRacy inscriptions and phalluses carved into Astypalaia's rocky peninsula shed light on very private lives of ancient Greece Helena Smith in Athens The Guardian, Sunday 6 July 2014 09.57 EDT The erotic graffiti on Astypalaia also highlighted the extent of literacy at a time when the Acropolis in Athens had yet to be built. Photograph: Helena Smith Wild, windswept, rocky and remote, Astypalaia is not an obvious place for the unearthing of some of the world's earliest erotic graffiti. Certainly, Dr Andreas Vlachopoulos, a specialist in prehistoric archaeology, didn't think so when he began fieldwork on the Aegean island four years ago. Until he chanced upon a couple of racy inscriptions and large phalluses carved into Astypalaia's rocky peninsula at Vathy. The inscriptions, both dating to the fifth and sixth centuries BC, were "so monumental in scale" – and so tantalisingly clear – he was left in no doubt of the motivation behind the artworks. "They were what I would call triumphant inscriptions," said the Princeton-trained professor who found them while introducing students to the ancient island world of the Aegean. "They claimed their own space in large letters that not only expressed sexual desire but talked about the act of sex itself," he told the Guardian. "And that is very, very rare." Chiselled into the outcrops of dolomite limestone that dot the cape, the inscriptions have provided invaluable insight into the private lives of those who inhabited archaic and classical Greece. One, believed to have been carved in the mid-sixth century BC, proclaimed: "Nikasitimos was here mounting Timiona (Νικασίτιμος οἶφε Τιμίονα). "We know that in ancient Greece sexual desire between men was not a taboo," added Dr Vlachopoulos, who returned to the far-flung island last week to resume work with a team of topographers, photographers, conservationists and students. "But this graffiti … is not just among the earliest ever discovered. By using the verb in the past continuous [tense], it clearly says that these two men were making love over a long period of time, emphasising the sexual act in a way that is highly unusual in erotic artwork. " Found at the highest point of the promontory overlooking the Bay of Vathy on the island's north-western tip, the inscription has led the archaeologist to believe that soldiers may once have been garrisoned there. Two penises engraved into limestone beneath the name of Dion, and dating to the fifth century BC, were also discovered at lower heights of the cape. "They would seem to allude to similar behaviour on the part of Dion," said Vlachopoulos. The epigrapher, Angelos Matthaiou, said the graffiti had not only shed light on the very personal lives of the ancients but highlighted the extent of literacy at a time when the Acropolis in Athens had yet to be built. "Whoever wrote the erotic inscription referring to Timiona was very well trained in writing," said Matthaiou, for more than 25 years the general secretary at the Greek Epigraphic Society. "The letters have been very skillfully inscribed on the face of the rock, evidence that it was not just philosophers, scholars and historians who were trained in the art of writing but ordinary people living on islands too." Other rock art found at the site include carvings depicting oared ships, daggers and spirals – all still discernible despite exposure to the erosive effects of wind and sea. As the best-known motif of early Cycladic art representing the waves of the sea, spirals symbolised perpetual motion as the driving force in the life and thought of island communities. "We know that Greek islands were inhabited by the third millienium BC., but what we have found is evidence that, even then, people were using a coded language of symbols and imagery that was quite sophisticated," said Dr Vlachopoulos. Unit recently, Astypalaia has been better known for its ancient cemeteries of mass graves containing the remains of newborn infants. Now erotica has to be added to that sorry tale. "Few Greek islands have been properly explored or excavated and these findings are testimony to why it is so important that they are," said the archaeologist. http://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/jul/06/worlds-earliest-erotic-graffiti-astypalaia-classical-greece

'Every hour a glass of wine' – the female writers who drankThe long list of male alcoholic authors is well known, but what about their literary sisters? Olivia Laing looks back on the great female writers who sought refuge in the bottle and salvation on the page Olivia Laing Edmund White wonder if Duras was not in the grips of what Freud had called the repetition compulsion. "I'm acquainted with it, the desire to be killed. I know it exists," she once told an interviewer, and it is this intensity, this absolute and uncompromising vision, that sets her work apart. At the same time, this statement seems to shine a light on how she used alcohol: as a way of giving in to her own masochism, her suicidal ideation, while simultaneously anaesthetising herself from the savagery she saw at work everywhere, filling the world.Duras's nightmarish childhood raises the question of origins, of what causes alcohol addiction and whether it is different for men and women. Alcoholism is roughly 50% hereditable, a matter of genetic predisposition, which is to say that environmental factors such as early life experience and societal pressure play a considerable role. Picking through the biographies of alcoholic female writers, one finds again and again the same dismal family histories that are present in the lives of their male counterparts, from Ernest Hemingway to F Scott Fitzgerald, Tennessee Williams to John Cheever. Elizabeth Bishop Elizabeth Bishop is a good example. Many members of her family were alcoholics, including her father, who died when she was a baby. Bishop's life was additionally marred by the kind of loss and physical insecurity often present in the family histories of addicts. When she was five her mother was institutionalised. They never saw each other again. Instead, Bishop was parcelled between aunts, an anxious child who, as a student at the liberal women-only Smith College, in Massachusetts, gratefully discovered the use of alcohol as a social lubricant, not realising until too late that it was also a potent source of shame, isolating in its own right. In the poem "A Drunkard", Bishop uses incidents from her own life to create an ironic portrait of an alcoholic, keen to explain their abnormal thirst. "I had begun / to drink, & drink – I can't get enough", the narrator confesses, a line that recalls John Berryman's frank "Dream Song" statement: "Hunger was constitutional with him, / wine, cigarettes, liquor, need need need". Shame was one of the central drivers in Bishop's drinking: first, the internalised shame she carried from her childhood and, later, the shame that followed her own appalling binges. Then, too, there was the matter of sexual identity. A lesbian in a period in which homosexuality was not sanctioned or accepted, Bishop found her greatest freedom in Brazil, where she lived with her female partner, the architect Lota de Macedo Soares. She spent her most peaceful and productive years there, though even they were interleaved with drunkenness, followed by the inevitable fights and confusions, and the frightening decline in physical health. Shame is also a factor in the life of Patricia Highsmith, who was born Mary Patricia Plangman in 1921, her surname an unwelcome memento of the man her mother had divorced nine days before she was born. She wasn't exactly welcome herself. Her mother had drunk turpentine at four months, hoping to abort the baby. "It's funny you adore the smell of turpentine, Pat," she later said. This grim joke recalls Cheever, whose parents also used to kid about having tried to abort him. Like Cheever, Highsmith had complex feelings about her mother, and like Cheever she had a pervasive sense of being fraudulent, empty, somehow a fake. Unlike Cheever, however, she was courageous in facing up to the direction of her sexual desires, though she did have a sometimes pleasurable, sometimes troubling sense of deviance, of running counter to society's grain. Patricia Highsmith at home in Locarno, Switzerland, in 1987. Photograph: Ulf Andersen/Getty She was an anxious, guilty, tearful child – lugubrious, in her own words. By eight, she was fantasising about murdering her stepfather Stanley and at 12 she was disturbed by violent rows between him and her mother. That autumn, Patricia's mother took her to Texas, saying that she was going to get divorced and live in the south with Pat and her grandmother. But after a few weeks of this all-female utopia, Mrs Highsmith returned to New York, abandoning her daughter without explanation. Left high and dry for a whole miserable year, Patricia never got over the sense of betrayal, the belief that she had been personally rejected. Her drinking began as a student at New York's Barnard College. In a diary entry in the 1940s, she wrote of her belief that drink was essential for the artist because it made her "see the truth, the simplicity, and the primitive emotions once more". Ten years on, she was describing days in which she went to bed at four in the afternoon with a bottle of gin before putting away seven Martinis and two glasses of wine. By the 1960s, she needed booze to keep going and as an eye-opener in the morning, lied about her drinking and lied too about all kinds of large and small details – about what a good cook and gardener she was, though her garden at the time was dried-up grass and she often lived off cereal and fried eggs. Much of how she felt and behaved went into her work, passing fluidly into her most famous character. Tom Ripley is not always a heavy drinker but he shares with the full-blown alcoholic his paranoia, his guilt and self-hatred; his need to obliterate or escape his painfully empty, flimsy self. He is forever splitting or slithering into other, more comfortable, identities, though this in itself is shameful and often serves as the impetus for his casual and dreadful murders. In fact, Ripley's entire career as a killer mimics alcoholism in that it is driven by a need to constantly repeat an activity in order to snuff out the trouble the activity has caused. Then too there's the atmosphere of the books, the looming sense of anxiety and doom, instantly familiar from any number of alcoholic works. Consider this passage from The Talented Mr Ripley, in which Tom is in Rome, trying to convince himself he won't be caught for Dickie's murder: Jane Bowles in 1967. Photograph: Terrence Spencer/Getty Tom did not know who would attack him, if he were attacked. He did not imagine police, necessarily. He was afraid of nameless, formless things that haunted his brain like the Furies. He could go through San Spiridione comfortably only when a few cocktails had knocked out his fear. Then he walked through swaggering and whistling. Cut the name, and it could be lifted directly from Charles Jackson's The Lost Weekend or almost any page of Tennessee Williams's drink-besotted diaries. There is no doubt that personal unhappiness is part of why both men and women develop the habit of drinking, but these intimate stories leave out something larger, something less easy for any individual to challenge or address. What lives were like for women in the west for the majority of the 20th century is ably and angrily summed up by Elizabeth Young in her introduction to Plain Pleasures, the collected stories of Jane Bowles. "Up until the 1970s women were discounted and despised," she writes. "They were, en masse, classed with children in terms of capability but, unlike children, were the butt of virtually every joke in the comedian's repertoire. They were considered trite, gossipy, vain, slow and useless. Older women were hags, battle-axes, mother-in-laws, spinsters. Women were visible in the real world, the world of men, only while they were sexually desirable. Afterwards they vanished completely, buried alive by the creepy combination of contempt, disgust and sentimentality with which they were regarded." By way of illustration, she tells a story about the writer who Truman Capote, William Burroughs and Gore Vidal considered among the greatest of her age: a giant of modernism, despite her tiny output. After having an alcohol-induced stroke in middle age, Jane Bowles was sent to see a British neurologist, who patronisingly told her: "You're not coping, my dear Mrs Bowles. Go back to your pots and pans and try to cope." This intense disregard for women, this inability to comprehend their talents or inner lives, was typical. Similar scenarios can be found in the lives of almost any 20th-century woman writer of note. Take Jean Stafford, who these days is more likely to be remembered for her marriage to Robert Lowell than for her Pulitzer prize-winning stories or her extraordinary, savage novel The Mountain Lion. This latter work was published in 1947, while she was drying out at Payne Whitney, a mental hospital in upstate New York. There, her psychiatrist was less interested in her reviews than in insisting she improve her grooming, switching her habitual baggy sweater and slacks for a blouse and skirt, with pearls for dinner, like, Stafford said wryly, "a Smith College girl". Jean Rhys I can think of no writer who better expresses these pressures and hypocrisies than the novelist Jean Rhys, who can hardly be described as a feminist and yet who wrote so bitterly and so bleakly about the lot of women that her work is disturbing even now. Rhys was born Gwen Williams on the island of Dominica in 1890, to a British father and Creole mother. Like F Scott Fitzgerald, she was a replacement child, conceived nine months after the death of her sister. Like Fitzgerald, she had a pervasive sense of standing outside, of not being quite real or legitimately lovable. She came to London at 16, a pretty and hopelessly ignorant girl. Her expectations of a new and glamorous life were dashed by the puddingy greyness, the bitter cold, and the competent, casually cruel people. Her father died while she was at drama school, but instead of going home she slipped away, becoming a chorus girl and changing her name to Ella Gray. Ella Gray, Ella Lenglet, Jean Rhys, Mrs Hamer: whatever name she was travelling under, Rhys was always on the verge of drowning, always frantic to find a man who would scoop her up and lift her into the kind of safe, luxurious world she craved. Unused to love, she picked badly or perhaps was just unlucky, choosing men who left her or who were somehow incapable of providing the sort of financial and emotional security she needed. She had an abortion, married, had a baby who died and a daughter, Maryvonne (who spent most of her childhood being cared for not only by someone else but in a different country from her mother), married for a second and then a third time, and was throughout these misadventures always at the brink of destitution, the very outer edge. Alcohol quickly became a way of dealing with this trouble and confusion, of blotting out the darker elements, temporarily filling an unbearable black hole of need. As her biographer Carole Angier puts it: "Her past tormented her so that she had to write about it, and then writing tormented her: she had to drink to write, and she had to drink to live." But what emerged from the muddle and mess was a series of miraculously lucid novels: strange, slippery marvels of modernism, about alienated, rootless women adrift among the demi-monde of London and Paris. These books – Quartet, After Leaving Mr Mackenzie, Voyage in the Dark and Good Morning, Midnight – show the world as it appears from the vantage of the dispossessed. They are about depression and loneliness, yes, but they're also about money: money and class and snobbery and what it means if you can't afford to eat or your shoes are wearing out and you can no longer keep up the little genteel illusions, the ways of getting by, of being accepted in society. Rhys is brutal in her depiction of a world in which there is no safety net for a woman alone and getting older, running short of the only reliable currency she has. In the magnificently unstable Good Morning, Midnight she shows precisely why such a woman might turn to drink, given limited options for work or love. At the same time, and like her near-contemporary Fitzgerald, she uses drunkenness as a technique of modernism. The novel is written in a wonderfully flexible first person, slip-sliding through Sasha's shifting moods. "I've had enough of these streets that sweat a cold, yellow slime, of hostile people, of crying myself to sleep every night. I've had enough of thinking, enough of remembering. Now whisky, rum, gin, sherry, vermouth, wine with the bottles labelled 'Dum vivimus, vivamus … ' Drink, drink, drink … As soon as I sober up I start again. I have to force it down sometimes. You'd think I'd get delirium tremens or something." During the war, Rhys vanished yet again from public view, re-emerging in 1956 after the BBC ran an advert looking for information on the author believed to be dead. She spent the 1960s shipwrecked in the aptly named Landboat Bungalows in Devon, living with her third husband, the nervy Max Hamer, who had been in prison for fraud and was now invalided after a stroke. In this dismal period, Rhys was tormented by extremes of poverty and depression and also by her neighbours, who believed she was a witch. She was briefly put in a mental hospital after attacking one of them with a pair of scissors. The drinking continued unabated, worse than before. All the same, she was working away on a new novel, Wide Sargasso Sea, a prequel to Jane Eyre that drew on her childhood in the Caribbean, her feelings of being an outsider, left out in the cold by the icy, inscrutable English. "No one," Diana Athill writes in Stet, "who has read Jean Rhys's first four novels can suppose that she was very good at life; but no one who never met her could know how very bad at it she was." Athill became Rhys's editor around this time, befriending her as did Sonia Orwell and Francis Wyndham, who were the protectors and guardians of her renaissance, the success that came too late and after too much hardship to make a real difference to Rhys's ravaged internal world. In her writing about Rhys, Athill puzzles over what might be the central question of the alcoholic writer, which is how someone so very bad at living, so incapable of facing up to trouble and taking responsibility for their own mess might be so very good at writing about it, at peering directly into what are otherwise total blind spots. "Her creed – so simple to state, so difficult to follow – was that she must tell the truth: must get things down as they really were … this fierce endeavour enabled her to write her way through to understanding her own damaged nature." This fierceness is everywhere in Rhys's work, converting self-pity into a pitiless critique. She shows how power works and how cruel people can be to those who are beneath them, revealing, too, how poverty and social mores pinion women, limiting their options until a Holloway cell and a Parisian hotel room come to seem pretty much indistinguishable. It's not by any means a triumphant kind of feminism, an assertion of independence and equality, but rather a savage, haunted account of stacked cards and loaded dice that might drive even the sanest woman to drink and drink and drink. • Olivia Laing's The Trip to Echo Spring: On Writers and Drinking is out now in paperback (Canongate, £10.99). http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/jun/13/alcoholic-female-women-writers-marguerite-duras-jean-rhys

...? It still shows up correctly on my Win7 laptop and iPhone. Glad you found it in any event.

Just discovered this... http://underview.com/ ...possibly the best in some respects, certainly one of the most obsessive, web sites about '2001' I've ever come across.

Remind me never to get sick when time-traveling in the past. Ten weird and terrifying medical instruments from the pastJune 26, 2014 | by Mark Lorch iflscience.com Photo credit: 18th century German cranial brace and bit to create holes in the skulls. Wellcome Library Share28.1K Tweet132 73 Reddit9 7 The UK’s largest medical charity, the Wellcome Trust, has made its vast database of images freely available to all. The collection holds photos of hundreds of years worth of medicine, instruments and scientific culture. For me, the progress of science best described by advances in medicine and the instruments used to practice it. Here is a list of a few of my favourites. Nothing quite says medicine like a syringe. And this collection has plenty, from the 17th century brass or 18th century ivory enema syringes, to the 20th century’s glass and stainless steel ones, all clearly made to last much longer than our modern disposable versions. 17th century French brass syringe Science Museum, London 18th century Sri Lankan Ivory enema syringe Science Museum, London 19th century Japanese self-administering enema syringe with a piston and reservoir Science Museum, London Then there are the surgical instruments, like the 16th century tools below. Those on the right include a double-bladed knife, a forceps for extracting arrow head and a bullet extractor. Wellcome Library Others like the Belgian Iron “scolds bridle” mask from the 1550s that was used to publicly humiliate and punish, mainly women, speaking out against authority, nagging, brawling with neighbours, blaspheming or lying, are just horrible inventions. Wellcome Library London More preferable are the “Jedi” helmets from the 1980s, used in conjunction with MRI scanners to investigate the brain without having to crack open the cranium. The word “Jedi” was used to ensure that children put it on without too much fuss. Science Museum, London There is also this steampunk steel hand and forearm with brass wrist mountings from 1890. Wellcome Library, London And finally how about the slightly disturbing model eye… Model eye by W. and S. Jones, London, 1840-1900 Wellcome Library, London …to go alongside the original eye pad Box of eyeballs from 1900 Wellcome Library, London Mark Lorch does not work for, consult to, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has no relevant affiliations. This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article. Read more at http://www.iflscience.com/technology/ten-weird-and-terrifying-medical-instruments-past#5bl3Z75iwgqoWvPh.99

For me, big dicks serve that purpose.

Agree completely that combo is not appealing.

Scrot Bloat Inordinate and often incapacitating swelling of the male genitals, due to a build up of seminal fluid. Generally experienced after prolonged periods of enforced celibcy, combined with an inability for self-relief. Opposite of {raisin balls]. 'I've broken both wrists! Man this scrot bloat hurts!' http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Scrot%20Bloat

Raisin balls To have shrunken and shriveled testicles due to excessive ejaculation. Often experienced by chronic maturbators. Opposite of Scrot Bloat 'I'm so lonely, I've got raisin balls.' http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Raisin%20balls

Brooklyn Museum spikes its fall season with "Killer Heels" Wedges, platforms and stilettos are all part of the mix in this exhibition sure to delight the shoe fetishist in you By Howard Halle Tue Jul 1 2014 timeout.com Previous Next Photograph: Brooklyn Museum; Brooklyn Museum Collection Unknown Chinese artist, Manchu women's shoe, c. 19th century People—women and men alike—can't seem to get enough of high heels, and the higher the heel, the more likely that it will attract attention. That ability to captivate is the driving principle behind the Brooklyn Museum's upcoming exhibition "Killer Heels: The Art of the High-Heeled Shoe," which will take over the institution's first-floor gallery starting September 10. The show argues that whatever the sexual connotations of high heels—and however much pain they inflict upon the wearer—they are first and foremost art objects. To illustrate this very sharp point, the exhibit will trot out examples of fetishy footwear from the 16th century to the present, courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Costume Institute and the Bata Shoe Museum in Toronto. "Killer Heels" will be on view until February 15, 2015, leaving plenty of time to come out to the Borough of Kings and swoon. Just one request to all you masochists out there: Please don't lick the shoes. http://www.timeout.com/newyork/art/brooklyn-museum-spikes-its-fall-season-with-killer-heels

Hmm. A Quick Way to Make Today’s Stars Seem OldBy Guy Cimbalo vulture.com Today’s stars aged 50 and over are more well-preserved than ever, whether through exercise, diet, surgery, or chemicals. And because of it, many of them seem ageless and forever young (at least when in makeup, Photoshopped, or flatteringly lit on the big screen). Want to learn a trick to suddenly make them feel more aged, though? Compare them with past notable actors who at the same age just seemed old. George Clooney (52) is a year older than Wilford Brimley was when Cocoon was released. Daniel Day Lewis (56) is the same age as Walter Matthau was when The Bad News Bears was released. Julianne Moore (53) is two years older than Gloria Swanson was when she appeared in Sunset Boulevard. Harrison Ford (71) is two years older than Burgess Meredith was when Rocky was released. Marisa Tomei (48) is the same age as Jean Stapleton was when All in the Family started.* Samuel L. Jackson (65) is two years younger than Jack Lemmon was when Grumpy Old Men was released. Ellen DeGeneres (54) is one year older than Bette Davis was when she appeared in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? Denzel Washington (59) is a year younger than Andy Griffith was when Matlock began. Kim Cattrall (57) is one year older than Olympia Dukakis was when Moonstruck was released. Bruce Willis (58) is a year younger than Spencer Tracy was when The Old Man and the Sea was released. Tom Cruise (51) is the same age as Tommy Lee Jones was when Men in Black was released. Demi Moore (51) is the same age as Rue McClanahan was when she started The Golden Girls. * This post has been corrected, as the All in the Family star was originally misidentified as Maureen Stapleton, not Jean. We apologize for the mis-Stapletoning. http://www.vulture.com/2013/10/quick-way-to-make-todays-stars-seem-old.html

Astronomers in Ukraine Named a Star "Putin is a Dickhead" Aleksander Chan gawker.com E As tensions rise in Ukraine in their battle against pro-Russian separatists, a group of Ukrainian astronomers have come up with a way to deliver a cosmic burn: by naming a star "Putin-Huilo!" after Russian President Vladimir Putin. "Huilo" (or as it is sometime seen, "khuilo") is a useful Ukrainian word that roughly translates to "fucker," "asshole," or "dickhead" in English. According to The Wire, the star was adopted through the Pale Blue Dot Project, which allows anyone to adopt a star (and name it) for $10. "Khuilo" has taken on a life of its own as a meme/insult of choice to use in reference to Vladimir Putin: In June of this year, an Urban Dictionary entry formally defined khuilo: "Khuilo is the president of Russia Vladimir Putin." So, now a word which originally was slang for penis is synonymous with "terrible dictator." Ukrainian rock bands started using it in their music, and even politicians picked it up. Ukrainian parliament member Oleh Lyashko was caught singing it, as was the minister of foreign affairs Andrii Deshchytsia. http://gawker.com/ukraine-name-a-star-putin-is-a-dickhead-1600039424

Could it be that hito is the -- unpictured -- surrogate parent?

I just restrained myself from posting some pics. But Google it.