Since I got behind on my regular series here, consider this make-up work.

– Behold my steed: Old-school tech meets 21st-century bicycles with Trotify, a wooden device that makes your bicycle sound like a galloping horse (h/t Danielle).

Yes, this totally sounds like something someone thought of while high, but then actually got around to building while sober. Kudos for that, I suppose.

– Was there also show & tell?: You might not expect parents to be asked to attend a parent-teacher conference at their adult children’s places of work, but you’d be wrong if your kid works at one particular startup in New York City (h/t Jen).

It was actually a full-day event, beginning with breakfast tacos and mimosas—which might be the most upscale-hipster thing I’ve heard of in quite some time. No word, however, on whether employees’ drawings adorned the walls.

– From the “Awkward Moments in the Courtroom” files: A judge ruled that a man involved in a child support dispute over twin girls was the father of only one of the girls. Presumably these were fraternal twins. As the New Jersey Law Journal reports:

Judge Sohail Mohammed in Passaic County Superior Court ruled the man, identified in court documents as A.S., must pay child support only for the twin who was determined through a DNA test to be his offspring, but not for the other. Mohammed ruled the DNA paternity test used in the case, conducted by Laboratory Corp. of America, accurately and reliably established the father’s paternity for only one of the twins.

The twins’ mother, identified as T.M., was in a relationship with A.S., and she initially identified him to the Passaic County Board of Social Services as the father of the twins when she applied for benefits, according to Mohammed. The board filed an application seeking to establish paternity of A.S. and to make him pay child support. But the mother testified in the case that she had sexual intercourse with A.S. and with another, unidentified man within the span of a week.

Mohammed dismissed with prejudice the application to find that A.S. had fathered the other child.

***

[Karl-Hans] Wurzinger[, laboratory director of the Identity Testing Division at Laboratory Corp. of America,] testified that the twins born to T.M. were born from two eggs that were fertilized from different fathers during the same menstrual cycle. An article Wurzinger published in 1997 said approximately one in every 13,000 reported paternity cases involved twins with separate fathers, according to Mohammed’s ruling.

Today, although there is no central registry of births related to the phenomenon, the incidence of twins with separate fathers is believed to be on the increase, due to assisted reproductive technologies, medical stimulation of ovulation, promiscuity and other factors, Mohammed said.

I make no judgment regarding “promiscuity,” although it’s not clear how the judge intended to use the word. I’ll just say that I am impressed—and now my cynicism as a former family law reveals itself—that the court went the extra mile to get at the truth here.

– Well, it’s bad for my constitution, anyway: A male store clerk in Iowa reportedly refused to sell tampons to a female customer.

Not for religious reasons. Just because he thinks they’re “gross” (h/t Jen).

He had a female clerk ring the woman up, so it worked out fine. This barely even counts as news, except that certain religious folk who demand that people bend to their views in various arenas kind of have us all on edge.

– And now for something NSFW: I haven’t played any of the Metal Gear games since the original 8-bit NES version in the late ’80s, so I don’t know much of anything about the various characters except Solid Snake and Big Boss—and even then I don’t know much. This bit of WTF involves a character from Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain [Huh? -Ed.] known simply as Quiet:

Quiet (Russian: ТИХИЙ) was a mute female sniper who was active during the 1980s, and was feared by the Afghanistan-occupying Soviet forces. Whether she was actually mute or simply unwilling to speak is unknown. Eventually, she managed to save Big Boss, and effectively surrendered herself into Diamond Dogs custody. Because of this, despite Kazuhira Miller‘s insistence that they kill her due to her being too much of a liability due to discovering the location of Mother Base, Ocelot and Big Boss instead suggested that they lock her up, although Big Boss agreed that she might have to be killed if she proved to be too much of a threat to Diamond Dogs’ existence, adding that he would be the one to kill her. At some point, she was tortured by Ocelot and managed to neutralize three Diamond Dogs soldiers on Mother Base. As Miller feared, she had been ordered to destroy Diamond Dogs.

I preserved all the links in that blockquote in case you want to investigate further to find out what the hell they’re talking about. I got “mute female sniper,” Afghanistan, 1980’s, and Soviets, so I think I have the general idea. This still doesn’t really answer the question of why she’s, ahem, so unbelievably hot.

She appears to have skin that can change color, which is apparently explained by the presence of octopus genes that have endowed her with chromatophores. (Suspension of disbelief: engaged.)

The color-changing ability might also, apparently, explain why a bad-ass rogue sniper, who is feared by the 1980’s-era Soviet military, runs around in the field with very little clothing—she needs to keep skin exposed so she can camouflage herself. I guess she needs pants and a bikini top to stay warm in the Hindu Kush? It’s probably more because of the ESRB. It’s not like warriors fighting in the nude is unheard of in history, but this game is at least partly marketed to kids (young adults, whatever.)

That’s a theory, of course, as to how she dresses. It still doesn’t explain the decision to make a character endowed with octopus DNA so, ahem, endowed in other ways. Quiet is based on motion capture of the phenomenally-attractive Stefanie Joosten:

But it still seems like they did some, uh, embellishing.

Anyway, my point in bringing all of this up is that they revealed the Quiet action figure (action doll?) not too long ago, and, well, they have kept with the theme of making the character sexy. The doll has large breasts. Large, squishy breasts (h/t Tauriq). (I’m posting these as thumbnails, because of reasons.)

I couldn’t help but notice the extra face, largely because it is creepy as f***. I guess they couldn’t get the doll’s skin to actually change color (have they never heard of Zartan???), perhaps without sacrificing, um, squishiness.

Anyway, it’s cheaper than a RealDoll, I guess.

[Normally, I would end the post here, because how can you top the WTF of gropeable action figure boobs? You’ll see. -Ed.]

– Meanwhile, on Fox: A Fox affiliate in New York apparently found that deliberately-unrealistic boobs were too much to show on the evening news. (Please note that was not the national “news” network that your racist uncle loves to watch. This was a local affiliate of the network that canceled Firefly. Judge accordingly.)

Fox 5 New York has come under some minor heat after making the bizarrely inartful decision to blur Pablo Picasso‘s Women of Algiers during an evening news segment about the famous painting’s record-breaking auction sale for $140 million.

They reportedly showed the unedited painting on the morning news the following day. It seems to me like more impressionable children (at least the ones who haven’t seen actual boobs yet, thanks to the internet) might be in front of the TV during the morning news hour than during the 10:00 p.m. broadcast. Then again, I’m not a TV news executive, so what do I know?

---

Photo credits: Andy Karmy [CC BY 2.0], via Flickr; Quiet GIF via badspot.us; Quiet/Joosten via Imgur, GameFAQs, w12.fr; Quiet doll images by Hideo Kojima, via Twitter; Picasso image by Fox 5 New York, via Mediaite.