Barbie’s friend Ken celebrates milestone birthday: 60

Ken is turning 60, two years after his best friend Barbie did.

Mattel launched a reproduction of the original Ken doll on Thursday to commemorate his 1961 debut. That slender doll with blond felt hair wears a red bathing suit and comes with red sandals and a yellow towel. Over the years, Ken’s body type, hair textures and fashion choices have become more diverse.

The company said it is working with several fashion designers to celebrate Ken’s birthday and showcase him as an influencer. The designs will be viewable on Instagram with the handle @BarbieStyle.

Barbie and Ken were named after the children of Mattel founders Elliot and Ruth Handler.

When salvage crews began cutting apart the capsized Golden Ray, a shipwreck the size of a 70-story office building with 4,200 cars within its cargo decks, in early November they predicted the demolition could be wrapped up by New Year’s Day.

Four months later, the job remains far from finished.

Both ends of the cargo ship have been cut away and carried off by barges in a pair of giant chunks. But roughly three-fourths of the vessel remains beached on its side off St. Simons Island on the Georgia coast, where the South Korean freighter overturned soon after leaving port Sept. 8, 2019.

“It’s been nothing but problems out here,” said Andy Jones, a St. Simons Island resident who heads to the wreck site in his small fishing boat most days to monitor the demolition and post updates to a YouTube channel. “It’s a disappointingly slow pace.”

Salvage experts decided more than a year ago that the Golden Ray, measuring 656 feet long, was too big to remove intact. They settled on a plan to carve the ship into eight massive chunks, each weighing up to 4,100 tons.