This is the CON half of PRO/CON pair of columns talking about expectations for the upcoming season of The Walking Dead beginning tonight at 9 p.m. on AMC. Unless you are on Dish Network. In that case you’re screwed.

The Walking Dead is big on the metaphorical zombie.

People can be worse than the ghouls roaming the Georgia highways. Friends can lose their humanity. Loved ones can crumble in a moment of weakness and be more dangerous than whatever viral menace mangled the world.

Appropriate to the subject matter of the show, my love for AMC’s biggest hit also underwent a transformation. See, I started writing recaps for TWD because I loved the first season. Loved it. Not only was it enjoyable, but for those who enjoy the horror half of “genre” popular art it was important.

It had the capability to do for horror what Battlestar Galactica did for science fiction. Maybe it would never snag the Emmy hardware but it could perennially stay in the mouths of critics enough to demonstrate what well-told, violent, smart suspense is not something to be ashamed of.

Unlike BSG, Dead has a massive audience. The finale for season two brought in a gargantuan 4.7 ratings, making it the most watched scripted program on cable. In comparison, Battlestar’s superb second season finale Lay Down Your Burdens II brought in a 1.9 share.

I wanted to write about a show I loved.

I wrote about a show that frustrated me on a weekly basis.

My love morphed into a bitter screed ambling across your browser every Monday morning. It’s not how I wanted it. This was supposed to be a celebration, instead I was a “walker” wearing a party hat.

So why write about it again this season?

After all, the undeniable creative influence of Frank Darabount is still missing. And even if you have faith in new honcho Glenn Mazzara, who is to say that the network forces that nickle’d and dime’d the old boss out the door won’t hamper the new ones?

Also, does anyone who had to suffer through a month and a half of looking for Sophia really going to get super excited that the Walking Dead will have even MORE episodes (16, up from 13) in the upcoming season? Who’s ready for three hours worth of Rick trying to find his keys?

Even the exciting, new characters are booby-trapped by expectations.

Michonne has a fairly simple character arc in the comics, well suited for the medium. Will that hold up on this show? How differently will she act.

Meanwhile, has there been a character on modern television more ripe for “BUT IN THE COMICS?!?!!?” fan griping than The Governor? He can’t be a mustache twirling villain, he needs to have his heartbreaking motivation, he needs to be charming, he needs to believe that sexual assault is on the table when discussing torture options.

With the signature storyline of the series now at hand, this is a make or break season for TWD critically. I’d love to say that the evidence suggests you be exited to for it.

I’d love that.

Hell’s Canyon is a name where you actually expect weird stuff to happen on a regular basis. Knowing that Hell’s Canyon is in Idaho only makes it worse.

For 36 year-old American beauty queen Jamie Hilton it got worse.

During a fishing trip to Hell’s Canyon with her husband, Jamie stumbled and slammed her head causing severe swelling and other complications.

In an attempt to save her life, doctors removed a quarter of her skull to prevent the swelling from causing any more damage.

When the mother of three, a former Mrs Idaho, woke from the operation she found a lump in her stomach and a large portion of her head missing. Mrs Hilton posted a photo of the skull in her abdomen on her blog entitled ‘Miracles… believe in them’ as well as a photo showing a scar running the length of her head.

That’s where her little skull-friend stayed too…for 42 days!

When Jamie had recovered from the first portion of the surgery, it was time to remove the incubating skull-piece from her belly and return it to her dome. You’d think science and medicine would’ve come up with some kind of awesome adhesive at this point like ‘Gorilla Bone & Organ Glue” but nah…

Using industrial strength staples, doctors stapled the skull piece back into place, sewed her pretty little noggin’s fleshy covering back up and called it a day.

Jamie is currently in recovery, doing well and happy as can be.

Guess who’s going to be the ‘astronaut at the table’ when it comes to her interview at the next beauty pageant? Yup…the chick who carried her own skull in her belly like a baby.

Winning!

[Metro.Co.UK]

Andrew is live in Cape Canaveral to watch SpaceX launch their first supply mission to the International Space Station and he is joined by CBS’ Molly Wood! Justin is live at TWiT’s studio in Petaluma, CA and is joined by Tom Merritt. Brian is somewhere in Dallas and is joined by his ever buoyant enthusiasm.

Listen to the sounds of the launch! Hear how NASA has taken their social media communication with new heights in an impromptu interview with one of the men who makes it happen! It’s Space! Space! Space! in this commercial free episode.

Special thanks to NASA, TWiT, Leo Laporte, Lisa Kentzell, Tom Merritt and Molly Wood.

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[ UPDATE: Giant Eye Mystery Solved! ]

Florida always seems like it’s sitting on some kind of undiscovered Hell-Mouth.

Between Bath-Salt Zombies, giant snakes slithering through your lawn, Night Creepers and lizards eating humans there’s just something…not…quite..right.

Which brings us to Pompano Beach..in Florida.

Some guy’s going for his morning stroll and spots something odd drifting around in the surf. Just like in any other horror film, the dude goes to investigate…and kicks it over…revealing at a huge eyeball staring right back at him.

“It was very fresh,” he said Thursday. “It was still bleeding when I put it in the plastic bag.”

Police referred him to the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission who, frighteningly couldn’t identify what species the eye came from.

The Fish and Wildlife officers place the eyeball on ice and sent it to the Fish and Wildlife Research Institute for analysis.

In the end who really cares about where the eyeball came from…the Fish and Game Commission people should be looking for the thing that ripped apart the thing with the giant eyeball.

[Sun Sentinel]

It was totally bound to happen.

People have been enjoying the sweet nectar of pork we all afftectionately refer to as bacon on a overly indulgent basis for a long, long time.

Forget the dead rising up to walk amongst us and gnaw on our fleshy parts.

This story might be the first sign that something much more sinister is taking place on farms around the country…

A pig uprising.

On a small farm in Oregon, police have reportedly found the false teeth and a few remains of farmer 69 year-old Terry Vance Garner in the pen where he keeps his pigs.

According to Garner’s old brother, Michael, one of the pigs had apparently bitten Terry last year when he accidentally stepped on a piglet. While no one’s sure what exactly took place the horrific and creepy fact is that a bunch of pigs ate a farmer and had no problem with the taste of man-meat.

District Attorney Paul Frasier told local papers and news media:

“For all we know, it was a horrific accident, but it’s so doggone weird that we have to look at all possibilities.”

[BBC UK]

New research from scientists presenting in Proceedings of the Royal Society has put a damper on getting viable DNA from samples older than 8.5 million years. In studying fossilized moa bones, they discovered a half-life for DNA of about 521 years, meaning that getting even fragments of DNA older than 8.5 million years would be unlikely. While mother nature has a habit of throwing us curveballs, and that up until recently, the fact that DNA would last this long was considered an impossibility, would-be dinosaur breeders need not despair. There’s no reason a simple thing like lacking DNA should stop us from bringing back giant chomping things with tiny little arms. Recreating a T-Rex was always going to involve some genetic tampering.

We’d never use the original recipe to begin with
Let’s assume for a moment that we did have an intact strand of DNA from a T-Rex and a viable way to get it to replicate inside a cell and make a baby dino. We’d have to tamper with the DNA anyways for a variety of reasons.

1. First is that the world has changed since these giant scavengers roved the plains looking for food. In their era, 65 million years ago, the air had 150% more oxygen. To get your T-Rex in your dino zoo to do anything other than limp around and wheeze, you’d need to change its blood cells and lungs into something that could deal with our much thinner oxygen. This kind of re-engineering would have a dramatic effect on the whole creature from behavior to life-span. A T-Rex in 2012 wouldn’t behave the same way as she would have back in her day. Imagine watching an NBA basketball game played at 20,000 feet altitude. They’d be off their game, so would a T-Rex in our atmosphere. While our modified creature may look like a T-Rex, it’d be a very different animal. We’d have to give her a new designation, T-Rex+.

2. Not all the information is in the DNA. It’s not just our DNA that makes us who we are. Other epigenetic factors outside of DNA also help build organisms. A complete strand of DNA won’t likely have the DNA methylation or histone modifications needed to build an accurate dinosaur. These instructions can be critical. Early attempts at cloning that resulted in over-muscular cattle or sheep that died prematurely were due to missing vital instructions contained outside the DNA. To clone a dinosaur we’d have to make educated guesses about these instructions based on modern birds and reptiles.

3. A T-Rex isn’t just one animal. A human being isn’t just all the genetic and epigenetic information that make us. If we cloned you but left out all of the bacteria living in your stomach and intestines, you’d probably starve to death in weeks. A human being is a symbiote of about 50 million organisms. We’re the ones that get to call the shots (mostly). A carrion eating creature like a T-Rex is going to need a lot of critters, many long extinct, to help it digest its food. Making our T-Rex+ will mean creating a new pack of digestive bacteria, possibly borrowed from buzzards and komodo dragons. The end result would be a creature that behaves differently than a T-Rex. Did eating a bunch of hadrosaur meat give the T-Rex a tryptophan buzz that sent it into a mating frenzy because that’s when the bacterium like to spread? We may never know. We’d only be able to make an approximation.

How to make a T-Rex+
Now that we’ve accepted the fact that even a cloned T-Rex was never going to be an authentic, original article, we can get on with making a T-Rex that does everything we wanted it to do in the first place; Terrify and eat things.

Right now biologists are assembling genetic tool kits that allow you to custom design organisms. These are computer programs that tell a DNA replicator in what order to place the base sugars of ATGC, that then go onto to form the instruction set place into a cell. We’ve already created single-cell organisms from instructions that were sent via email. A next step is to move onto more complex forms of life. Along the way we’ll be able to add features like kinds of photosynthesis, proteins that perform special functions, instructions to manufacture vaccines, etc. One day you’ll be able to code for a specific kind of mouse or chicken and then make enhancements. If we took the chicken genome and tinkered around a bit, we could probably make something like a dinosaur, but suited for today’s environment. Paleontologist Jack Horner has already begun working with researchers to reverse-engineer ostriches into something like a dinosaur by switching off all of the later-evolved functions that made dinosaurs into birds.

The blueprint for this creature will be everything we know about the T-Rex. We can design bone structure, ligature and a thousand other tiny details we’ve learned from the fossil records. Although we may never find DNA, we have found cells inside T-Rex fossils, resembling the same kind in ovulating birds. Cells, protein and other kinds of information can help us build a replica that’s perhaps 95% accurate. Which really means more from a marketing point of view. A chimpanzee is arguably 96% of a human (or vice versa). We also share 40% of our genes with a carrot…

What is a T-Rex anyway?
To the purists, our T-Rex+ wouldn’t be the same. Even a full clone would still make some compromises that would leave them unhappy. But our T-Rex+ would fulfill our idea of what the creature is supposed to be. And even that’s an evolving concept. If Jurassic Park were filmed today, the animators would probably have to add a lot of feathers to the theropods like T-Rex. T-Rex DNA can only tell us part of the story about these creatures. While intact DNA could tell us a lot, maybe the best thing we can do is to make a bunch of creatures that look like them and set them loose in some place and see how they interact.

The T-Rex’s reign lasted for several million years. The animals that lived at the end of that period were different genetically than the ones at the beginning. Even individual T-Rex’s probably varied in temperament just as much as kittens from the same litter. There is no ideal T-Rex because they were all different.

These T-Rex+’s won’t be the same as what once walked the earth. But placed into a Cretaceous-like environment, we could understand how it filled out its ecological niche. These creatures would undoubtedly surprise us and have just as much to teach us as the animals we based them.

For a final thought, here’s a photograph of two sets of bones. Although they look almost identical, they’re separated by about 100 million years of evolution. The one on the right is a wolf. The one on the left is a Tasmanian Tiger. Sadly, the Tasmanian Tiger is now extinct (hopefully only temporarily).

Although they have 100 million years of evolution between them (we diverged from chimpanzees only about 10 million years ago and share more common relatives with a wolf than the the Tasmanian Tiger does) they evolved to fill very similar niches. Yet, for some reason, man was able to hunt the Tasmanian Tiger to extinction, possibly due to some other environmental factor that made it threatened, while the wolf still thrives.

The T-Rex was a hardy species whose reign was ended by an asteroid impact that shut down the photosynthesis process that fed the plant eaters they preyed upon. Without that cataclysm, who knows how long they could have lasted? Maybe part of their survival mechanism is their innate badassness that causes a monkey species to bring them back 65 million years later.

Has mysterious device that has a major city in a panic fallen into the wrong hands? The infection that affects millions of people every day and replicates every second could be permanently changing the brain of someone you love! Can we decode the brain. Wait, is there water on Mars? Because I heard there was. Or wait. Was it not? Brian asks the age-old question: What’s got seasons?

PLUS a WeirdThings LIVE EVENT THIS SUNDAY FOR THE SPACEX LAUNCH!

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We’ve seen tissues and body parts grown in petri dishes before. Nothing new, right? Now we’ve seen a human being’s own body used as a petri dish to grow a body part for her own body!

Sherrie Walters, a woman from Baltimore, has become that human being/test subject for an extremely radical and extremely weird procedure. Plastic surgeon and reconstructive surgeon Patrick Byrne has been looking for someone like Sherri Walters for quite a while to basically test a theory he had.

The discovery of a rapidly-spreading basal cell cancer in her ear in 2008 required the removal of part of her ear, part of her skull and her left ear canal. But now, in a groundbreaking and complicated set of surgeries, Johns Hopkins doctors have attached a new ear made from Walters’ own tissue.

Byrne used cartilage from Walters’ ribs to stitch together a new ear matching her right ear. He then implanted it under the skin of her forearm, where it grew for months.

Byrne later surgically attached the ear and its blood vessels. Then surgery Tuesday added shape and detail to the ear.

Walters still has two minor surgeries to go before the whole bizarre procedure is over with and she gets that ‘new’ ear.

And she’s got some sage advice before you ever end up in this situation:

“And it’s a cliche but use the sunscreen and if you are not sure about something, get it checked because that’s what I didn’t do.”

Different parts grown in different places? Hmm.

Every single guy right now is probably thinking about a particular woman in Total Recall.

Knock it off.

[CBS Baltimore (via @ManusFerrea}]

Get your copy of the Avengers yet? If not, why are you waiting? Right now on Amazon you can get a digital copy that will play on your iPhone or iPad (and available also as a stream for your Apple TV), the Blu-Ray, the 3D Blu-Ray, a DVD copy, the movie soundtrack and a gazillion extras all for just $29.99. Thirty bucks and you’ve got versions in nearly every format! List price is $49.99! That’s $20 off! All Avenger. All the time.

Besides the discs, you’ll get a code to enter into iTunes that will let you play Avenger from the cloud on iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch and other platforms.

Using this link also helps Weird Things.

Get the Avengers super-combo at Amazon for just $29.99

SpaceX tests revolutionary new tech but is NASA ready to send up another manned mission? Are we at the cusp of a new era of exploration? How many hours does it take to maintain a relationship according to Elon Musk? A massive shortage on a delicious crop panicks the boys. BF = PIMP. Wait, are we ALSO at the cusp of the Maker Age?

Strap in for yet another edition of the Weird Things podcast!

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Yeti sightings are up throughout Russia! In fact, what could be a pack of the mysterious cryptids have repeatedly come in contact with various groups of Siberian fishermen.

One person who reported spying the beast said “We shouted, ‘Do you need help?’ They rushed away, all in fur, walking on two legs, making their way through the bushes and with two other limbs, straight up the hill.

The person who made the report added: “It could not be bears, as the bear walks on all fours, and they ran on two. Then they were gone.”

On a second sighting on the bank of the Mras-Su River several days later, an unnamed fisherman was quoted as saying: “We saw some tall animals looking like people.”

Yeti expert Igor Burtsev, who has previously claimed to be in possession of a Yeti hair sample, says the recent uptick in sightings is worth noting. He also believes a pack of 30 are currently living in the Kemerovo region of Russia.

[Fox News]

Clean water. For first worlders who have it on tap, access may not seem like a big deal. For 1 out of 6 people on the planet, clean water, free of parasites and pollution is an expensive luxury. Diarrhea from tainted water is the second leading cause of death for children under five.

Recognizing this problem, über inventor and potential Tony Stark rival to Elon Musk, Dean Kamen and his Deka engineering group set out to create a water filtration system that was more efficient than anything before. The result is the Slingshot, a system that can take anything from muddy pond water to salty sea water and produce drinkable water. Powered by solar panels in rural locations, the Slingshot is a technological oasis that can help solve the greatest environmental problem facing our planet.

Kamen tackled this problem because more people die every year from bad water than any current or projected environmental crisis. Coca-Cola teamed up with Kamen as part of their long-term vision of minimizing their environmental impact. They plan to roll out 30 by the end of the year and thousands more by 2014 in rural locations where the kiosks could provide the daily water needs of hundreds of people.

The Reuters article

Here’s a video of Dean Kamen demonstrating the Slingshot:

What are the biggest drawbacks of driving an electric car today? Elon Musk has solutions.

In an event Tesla and SpaceX CEO, Elon Musk described as being just as important as the SpaceX ISS cargo mission this summer, he unveiled his plans to solve practical problems of electric vehicle ownership with a new network of charging stations. He revealed six stations are already in place as of today that let you drive from Lake Tahoe to San Francisco to Los Angeles and then on to Las Vegas opening up a sizable portion of California and Nevada to people wishing to take their Teslas a little further than the corner grocery store.

Within two years Musk says Tesla plans to have installed a network that goes from coast to coast, making a cross country trip in an electric car a practical reality.

The superchargers will give their 85 kWh battery a 150 mile range in 30 minutes. While that’s a bit longer wait than at the gas pump, the charging is free to all Tesla Model S owners. Buying a car that gets free energy for life is a radical, game changing idea – the kind of thing Musk has become known for.

The charging stations will be covered in solar panels (provided by Musk’s other company, Solar City) and put power back into the grid when not charging up the Superchargers.

The revelation of the Superchargers gives us some insight into Musk’s grander vision for Tesla. It’s not just a company that makes electric cars, it’s a transportation system. He could be well on his way to changing the electric car the way Apple did the phone.

http://www.teslamotors.com/supercharger

Here’s Tesla’s official press release:

***

TESLA MOTORS LAUNCHES REVOLUTIONARY SUPERCHARGER ENABLING CONVENIENT LONG DISTANCE DRIVING
DRIVE THE MODEL S ELECTRIC CAR ANYWHERE IN THE COUNTRY ON PURE SUNLIGHT FOR FREE

MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 24, 2012
Tesla Motors (NASDAQ: TSLA) today unveiled its highly anticipated Supercharger network. Constructed in secret, Tesla revealed the locations of the first six Supercharger stations, which will allow the Model S to travel long distances with ultra fast charging throughout California, parts of Nevada and Arizona.

The technology at the heart of the Supercharger was developed internally and leverages the economies of scale of existing charging technology already used by the Model S, enabling Tesla to create the Supercharger device at minimal cost. The electricity used by the Supercharger comes from a solar carport system provided by SolarCity, which results in almost zero marginal energy cost after installation. Combining these two factors, Tesla is able to provide Model S owners1 free long distance travel indefinitely.

Each solar power system is designed to generate more energy from the sun over the course of a year than is consumed by Tesla vehicles using the Supercharger. This results in a slight net positive transfer of sunlight generated power back to the electricity grid. In addition to lowering the cost of electricity, this addresses a commonly held misunderstanding that charging an electric car simply pushes carbon emissions to the power plant. The Supercharger system will always generate more power from sunlight than Model S customers use for driving. By adding even a small solar system at their home, electric car owners can extend this same principle to local city driving too.

The six California locations unveiled today are just the beginning. By next year, we plan to install Superchargers in high traffic corridors across the continental United States, enabling fast, purely electric travel from Vancouver to San Diego, Miami to Montreal and Los Angeles to New York. Tesla will also begin installing Superchargers in Europe and Asia in the second half of 2013.

The Supercharger is substantially more powerful than any charging technology to date, providing almost 100 kilowatts of power to the Model S, with the potential to go as high as 120 kilowatts in the future. This can replenish three hours of driving at 60 mph in about half an hour, which is the convenience inflection point for travelers at a highway rest stop. Most people who begin a road trip at 9am would normally stop by noon to have lunch, refresh and pick up a coffee or soda for the road, all of which takes about 30 minutes.

“Tesla’s Supercharger network is a game changer for electric vehicles, providing long distance travel that has a level of convenience equivalent to gasoline cars for all practical purposes. However, by making electric long distance travel at no cost, an impossibility for gasoline cars, Tesla is demonstrating just how fundamentally better electric transport can be,” said Elon Musk, Tesla Motors co-founder and CEO. “We are giving Model S the ability to drive almost anywhere for free on pure sunlight.”

1. Supercharging hardware is standard on Model S vehicles equipped with an 85 kWh battery and optional on Model S vehicles equipped with a 60 kWh battery.
ABOUT MODEL S

With the most energy-dense battery pack in the industry and best-in-class aerodynamics, Model S has the longest range of any production electric car in the world. Model S comes with three battery options to fit the unique needs of different drivers. The 85 kWh Model S has received a U.S. fuel economy rating of 89MPGe and an EPA rated range of 265 miles.
Model S is the first premium sedan designed from the ground up to take full advantage of electric vehicle architecture. A revolutionary powertrain sits under the floorboard of Model S, creating an ultra-low center of gravity. Paired with an aluminum body engineered for superior handling, Tesla has created a vehicle that raises the bar for performance and efficiency while meeting the highest standards for safety.

Without an internal combustion engine or transmission tunnel, the interior of Model S has more cargo space than any other sedan in its class and includes a second trunk under the hood. Model S seats five adults and two children in optional rear-facing child seats. Model S Performance models accelerate from 0 to 60 mph in under 4.4 seconds. The interior features a 17″ in-dash touchscreen with internet capabilities, allowing for streaming radio, web browsing and navigation.

Customers can reserve a Model S at one of Tesla’s retail stores or online.

ABOUT TESLA

Tesla’s goal is to accelerate the world’s transition to electric mobility. Palo Alto, California-based Tesla designs and manufactures EVs and EV power train components for partners such as Toyota and Daimler. Tesla has delivered more than 2,350 Roadsters to customers worldwide. Model S, the first premium sedan to be built from the ground up as an electric vehicle, began deliveries in June 2012.

What you’re looking at isn’t the newest trend in ‘crop-circling’. The thing that created this spectacular-looking sand sculpture isn’t an alien trying to communicate with humankind, either.

The master craftsman behind this amazing looking design is something far less scary and almost kind of adorable.

Yoji Ookota, an office worker who left his cubicle life to pursue his love of underwater photography, recently discovered something that no one had seen until his camera caught sight of it.

A six-foot-wide, elaborate geometric shape 80 feet under the surface of the water on the sea floor. Then he began to spot more of them. Ookota dubbed them the ‘mystery circles’.

As Ookota began to study the circles to find out how they were created, he found the culprit.

An adorable little male puffer fish.

In an amazing display of engineering and the need to be loved, the male puffer fish uses its fins and works day and night to create these things in order to attract females to mate with them. Once the puffer fish creates the ridges, males have even been seen filling their mouths with shells and blowing them onto the ridges they created like they were doing some primitive, animal form of bedazzling.

Females, attracted by the final design, join the male in the center of the design and mate. Later on the female returns to the center of the ‘mystery circle’ and lays her eggs.

These ‘mystery circles’ aren’t just for decoration either. Those shells used to ‘bedazzle’ the ridges appear to serve as nutrients to the young fish when they hatch. According to the most recent research, the design isn’t just for decoration and attracting a mate. The design also features a small bit of engineering. Scientists are discovering that the ridges also serve to protect the eggs from predators and currents that could scatter the eggs across the ocean floor.

This fish has more motivation and interior design abilities than most guys we know.

Weirdly amazing.

[Spoon & Tamago]

Because some people just can’t get the job done while locked in a room by themselves with some fun magazines or just some mental photography, some genius in China has developed something to help those people out…

The lonely Chinese scientist who created this was probably suffering from Carpal Tunnel Syndrome and couldn’t even hold a tablet that was playing his favorite movies any longer without discomfort.

(Insert your sad-face pervy scientist emoticon here)

Now this once-sad scienstist has solved ALL of his problems! This thing even has adjustable controls and a built-in dvd player so you can watch your favorite ‘films’.

Like the krill in Finding Nemo, there’s nowhere for your little swimming future-yous to go but in the perpetually slurping maw of a robot that looks like the original Pong arcade game’s second-cousin from the hills.

Clicking play on that video above will either bring laughter, what some like to call ‘cringy-I-smelled-poop’ face or a look of awe and wonder and possibilities to your precious little faces.

The director of the urology department at Zhengzhou Central Hospital said the machine was being used by infertility patients who are finding it difficult to retrieve sperm the old fashioned way.
A website which is selling the machine for $2,800 promoting it stating ‘it can give patients very comfortable feeling.’

Is this the end of prostitution? As newer versions of this machine hit the market, will the older ones find their way into dark alleys and those fun-smelling booths in the back of porn shops or will they start showing up in brothels to replace human workers as the recession keeps taking a chunk from EVERYONE’S budget?

Only time and enough oddly satisfied customers will tell.

[DailyMail UK]