STATUS UPDATES
A week in which Salvador Dali found new life in a cookbook and scientists identified a “beardog”
DISCOVERED
The remains of a beardog, a meat-eater that evolved into a predator. The newly identified fossils — 38 million years old — were originally lumped into a miscellaneous, “well, what else could it be” category, Jack Tseng, co-author of a new study, explained. “Now we’ve taken these fossils out of the trashbin and put them at the base of the beardog tree.”
LIONIZED
Famously red-sweatered Ken Bone, after eschewing the belligerence of the presidential candidates to ask an articulate debate question about energy policies. Since then, he has inspired countless memes, an Esquire fashion piece and the inevitable tawdry offer from an adult website. He’s also launched his own “official” T-shirt. In red, of course.
APOPLECTIC
Trainspotting novelist Irvine Welsh, who dismissed the decision to award Bob Dylan the Nobel Prize for literature as “an ill-conceived nostalgia award wrenched from the rancid prostates of senile, gibbering hippies.” He later tweeted the real source of his objection: the award “renders categories like ‘music,’ ‘literature,’ ‘film,’ etc. superfluous.”
LIBERATED
Two former Uber drivers, who are now free to claim unemployment benefits following a ruling by New York regulators. The ride-sharing business considers its drivers independent contractors, not employees. “I think this is a gamechanger,” the executive director of the city’s Taxi Workers Alliance told the New York Times. “
REDISCOVERED
Salvador Dali’s surrealist cookbook. Released in 1973 and long-forgotten, Les diners de Gala is being reissued in November. “If you are a disciple of one of those caloriecounters who turn the joys of eating into a form of punishment, close this book at once,” Dali advised at the time. “It is too lively, too aggressive and far too impertinent for you.”
DISGRACED
Sheriff James Fitzgerald, who reluctantly resigned from his $91,000-a-year job in Washington’s wealthy Howard County after a report accused him of using the N-word, asking a black deputy “Are you getting the chicken special?” and making crude comments about women’s breasts. Despite the investigation’s findings, Fitzgerald had, until last week, refused to step down.
APOLOGETIC
Former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, who condemned Hillary Clinton for claiming she’d been in New York on 9/11. “I was there that day. I don’t remember seeing Hillary Clinton there.” She wasn’t. She also never said she was. She did, however, tour Ground Zero the following day, with Giuliani. Told of the criticism he’d unleashed, he said, “I probably deserve it.”
ESCAPED
Rainbow trout, 80,000 of them, after a cargo vessel tore a hole in a net at a fish farm off the Denmark coast, about 200 kilometres west of Copenhagen. Environmentalists are urging the nation’s anglers to “grab their rods” and catch as many of the runaway fish as possible, The Independent reports, to prevent them from disrupting the reproduction of wild trout by eating their eggs.