Known as Heracleion to the ancient Greeks and Thonis to the ancient Eygptians, the city was rediscovered in 2000 by French underwater archaeologist Dr. Franck Goddio and a team from the European Institute for Underwater Acheology (IEASM) after a four-year geophysical survey. The ruins of the lost city were found 30 feet under the surface of the Mediterranean Sea in Aboukir Bay, near Alexandria.

A new documentary highlights the major discoveries that have been unearthed at Thonis-Heracleion during a 13-year excavation. Exciting archeological finds help describe an ancient city that was not only a vital international trade hub but possibly an important religious center. The television crew used archeological survey data to construct a computer model of the city (below).

According to the Telegraph, leading research now suggests that Thonis-Heracleion served as a mandatory port of entry for trade between the Mediterranean and the Nile.

So far, 64 ancient shipwrecks and more than 700 anchors have been unearthed from the mud of the bay, the news outlet notes. Other findings include gold coins, weights from Athens (which have never before been found at an Egyptian site) and giant tablets inscribed in ancient Greek and ancient Egyptian. Researchers think that these artifacts point to the city’s prominence as a bustling trade hub.

Researchers have also uncovered a variety of religious artifacts in the sunken city, including 16-foot stone sculptures thought to have adorned the city’s central temple and limestone sarcophagi that are believed to have contained mummified animals.

For more photos, visit Goddio’s Heracleion website.

Experts have marveled at the variety of artifacts found and have been equally impressed by how well preserved they are.

“The archaeological evidence is simply overwhelming,” Professor Sir Barry Cunliffe, a University of Oxford archeologist taking part in the excavation, said in a press release obtained by The Huffington Post. “By lying untouched and protected by sand on the sea floor for centuries they are brilliantly preserved.”

A panel of experts presented their findings at an Oxford University conference on the Thonis-Heracleion excavation earlier this year.

But despite all the excitement over the excavation, one mystery about Thonis-Heracleion remains largely unsolved: Why exactly did it sink? Goddio’s team suggests the weight of large buildings on the region’s water-logged clay and sand soil may have caused the city to sink in the wake of an earthquake.

WATCH: Colossal Sunken Statues Of Thonis-Heracleion

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/29/heracleion-photos-lost-egyptian-city_n_3178208.html?utm_hp_ref=mostpopular

It all started in 2008, when the DHS declared that certain ‘border control agents’ could search the electronic belongings of individuals without suspicion — let alone a warrant. Bypassing the rights provided by the Constitutional to every citizen of the United States, the DHS immediately came under fire for the policy. The response? The DHS promised to have the policy reviewed within 120 days. The catch? The review was done two years late and by their own review panel known as the Civil Liberties Impact division.

Absent of any independent input in their secretive review, the DHS published a brief document stating that the suspicionless search policy was perfectly reasonable. Laptops, cell phones, camcorders, and all other gadgets were open game for the DHS within the ‘borders’ of the country.

ENTIRE STATES SWALLOWED BY DHS ‘BORDER’

As you can see in the image below provided by the ACLU which highlights the 100 mile radius established by the ridiculous DHS policy, the 197 million individuals living on this outlandishly-extensive ‘border’ accounts for nearly 2/3 of the entire nation’s population. From Washington D.C. to the entire state of Florida (thanks to its coastal positioning), the massive ‘border’ suffocates most of the major cities within the US — and most likely your home.

And chances are you won’t be hearing about in on the nightly news. That is unless the alternative media forces major news networks to cover it as has been successfully done in the past. What’s more is that the DHS has failed to even outline why they decided to uphold the policy, and has used the tired excuse of ‘national security’ as a defense from publishing their data beyond the brief document. In fact, the DHS claims that upholding the Constitution would actually be harmful to the public. In the explanation as to why these searches are necessary throughout virtually every major city, the DHS states:

“…Imposing a requirement that officers have reasonable suspicion in order to conduct a border search of an electronic device would be operationally harmful without concomitant civil rights/civil liberties benefits…”

What civil rights or civil liberties benefits? The report says nothing. It does fail to mention how the Fourth Amendment already imposes a ‘requirement’ that officers have reasonable suspicion before going through the belongings of any individual from New York City to Houston, however.

As of now, the ACLU has filed a Freedom of Information Act request to obtain more information from the DHS, and are engaged in a lawsuit after the DHS searched an individual and detained him through the use of this policy.

If the DHS has no problem coming after the Fourth Amendment despite operating under the Constitution as the supreme law of the land, will DHS offocials have any trouble coming after another amendment as well? Will the DHS uphold all of its constant injustices through internal reviews that don’t even provide details into the analysis? The fact of the matter is that if we allow the DHS to trample over the Fourth Amendment through suspicionless searches, it is inevitable that they will push even harder in their next policy update.

http://www.storyleak.com/are-you-living-in-fourth-amendment-exclusion-zone/#ixzz2MdBWj1tE

Reddit user jlitch uploaded the picture in mid-February with the deceptively innocent tagline, “Friend… caught this fishing in NJ.”

According to a set Facebook photos, this eellike creature was caught in the Raritan River, somewhere in northern New Jersey.

Perhaps most frightening, the rings teeth of displayed in the photo have a very clear purpose: Sea lampreys latch onto their prey, then secrete digestive fluids that slowly eat away and break down the host. The Great Lakes Fishery Commission reports a sea lamprey can be expected to kill upwards of 40 pounds of fish over the course of its life. Survival rates for particular species of host fish can be as low as 15 percent.

Unfortunately, we can’t be completely certain this photo really does depict a sea lamprey. “The photo doesn’t allow counting of gill openings (seven per side for sea lampreys), but based on size alone, this does appear to be a sea lamprey,” a New York Department of Environmental Conservation spokeswoman told Outside Magazine, according to the New York Daily News.

The species typically grows to 2.5 feet in length, but some sea lampreys have been documented at sizes of up to 3 feet long, reports the Gulf of Maine Research Institute.

Sea lampreys are a native to the Atlantic Ocean and are found along the U.S. Eastern Seaboard and the coast of Europe, as well as in the Great Lakes, where it is considered an invasive species.

The New York Daily News adds that appearances of sea lampreys in New Jersey have increased recently, as officials have begun to remove old dams, thus easing the creature’s progress upriver.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/02/26/sea-lamprey-photo-new-jersey_n_2766048.html

They’re usually thought of as a brutish, primitive species.

So what woman would want to give birth to a Neanderthal baby?

Yet this incredible scenario is the plan of one of the world’s leading geneticists, who is seeking a volunteer to help bring man’s long-extinct close relative back to life.

Professor George Church of Harvard Medical School believes he can reconstruct Neanderthal DNA and resurrect the species which became extinct 33,000 years ago.

His scheme is reminiscent of Jurassic Park but, while in the film dinosaurs were created in a laboratory, Professor Church’s ambitious plan requires a human volunteer.

He said his analysis of Neanderthal genetic code using samples from bones is complete enough to reconstruct their DNA.

He said: ‘Now I need an adventurous female human.

‘It depends on a hell of a lot of things, but I think it can be done.’

Professor Church’s plan would begin by artificially creating Neanderthal DNA based on genetic code found in fossil remains. He would put this DNA into stem cells.

These would be injected into cells from a human embryo in the early stages of life.

It is thought that the stem cells would steer the development of the hybrid embryo on Neanderthal lines, rather than human ones.

After growing in the lab for a few days, the ‘neo-Neanderthal’ embryo would be implanted in the womb of a surrogate mother – the volunteer. Professor Church, 58, is a pioneer in synthetic biology who helped initiate the Human Genome Project that mapped our DNA.

He says Neanderthals were not the lumbering brutes of the stereotype, but highly intelligent. Their brains were roughly the same size as man’s, and they made primitive tools.

He believes his project could benefit mankind.

He told German magazine Der Spiegel: ‘Neanderthals might think differently than we do. They could even be more intelligent than us.

‘When the time comes to deal with an epidemic or getting off the planet, it’s conceivable that their way of thinking could be beneficial.’

Scientists say that his plan is theoretically possible, although in Britain, like most countries, human reproductive cloning is a criminal offence.

But Professor Church’s proposal is so cutting-edge that it may not be covered by existing laws.

However, experts worry that neo-Neanderthals might lack the immunity to modern diseases to survive, and some fear that the process might lead to deformity.

There is also uncertainty over how they would fit into today’s world. Bioethicist Bernard Rollin of Colorado State University said: ‘I don’t think it’s fair to put people… into a circumstance where they are going to be mocked and possibly feared.’

In a scathing reaction, Philippa Taylor of the Christian Medical Fellowship said: ‘It is hard to know where to begin with the ethical and safety concerns.’

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2265402/Adventurous-human-woman-wanted-birth-Neanderthal-man-Harvard-professor.html?ito=feeds-newsxml

The free-floating object, called CFBDSIR2149, is likely a gas giant planet four to seven times more massive than Jupiter, scientists say in a new study unveiled today (Nov. 14). The planet cruises unbound through space relatively close to Earth (in astronomical terms), perhaps after being booted from its own solar system.

“If this little object is a planet that has been ejected from its native system, it conjures up the striking image of orphaned worlds, drifting in the emptiness of space,” study leader Philippe Delorme, of the Institute of Planetology and Astrophysics of Grenoble in France, said in a statement.

Orphan planet, or something else?

Delorme and his team discovered CFBDSIR2149 using the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope, then examined its properties with the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile. [Video: Rogue Planet Has No Parent Star]

The newfound object appears to be among a stream of young stars called the AB Doradus moving group, the closest such stream to our own solar system.

Scientists think the AB Doradus stars all formed together between 50 million and 120 million years ago. If CFBDSIR2149 is indeed associated with the group — and researchers cite a nearly 90 percent probability — then the object is similarly young.

And if the discovery team is right about CFBDSIR2149′s age, the body is likely a planet, with an average temperature of 806 degrees Fahrenheit (430 degrees Celsius), researchers said.

There’s still a slight chance that CFBDSIR2149 is a brown dwarf — a strange object that’s larger than a planet but too small to trigger the internal nuclear fusion reactions required to become a full-fledged star. Additional observations should help decide the matter.

“We need new observations to confirm that this object belongs to the AB Doradus moving group,” Delorme told SPACE.com via email. “With a good distance measurement and a more accurate proper motion, we will be able to increase (or decrease) the probability that it is indeed a planet.”

The new study was published today in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

Billions of starless planets?

The discovery of a starless alien planet would not be shocking, at least not anymore. In the last year or so, astronomers have spotted a number of such orphan worlds — so many, in fact, that some scientists think parentless planets are the rule rather than the exception.

One 2011 study, for example, estimated that rogue worlds outnumber “normal” planets with obvious host stars by at least 50 percent throughout the Milky Way. If that’s the case, the galaxy that includes Earth probably also hosts billions of orphan planets.

And gas giants may be in the minority among these solitary wanderers, researchers say.

“We now know that such massive planets are rare and that Neptunes or Earth-mass planets are much more common,” Delorme said. “We also know that massive objects are more difficult to eject [from solar systems] than light ones. If you follow the rationale, you deduce that ejected exo-Neptunes and ejected exo-Earths should be much more common than objects like CFBDSIR2149.”

It’s exciting to have a starless planet so close to Earth, researchers say. Future telescopes should be able to learn a great deal about CFBDSIR2149, since they won’t have to contend with the overwhelming glare of a nearby host star.

“This object is a really easy-to-study prototype of the ‘normal’ giant planets we hope to discover and study with the upcoming generation of direct-imaging instruments,” Delorme said. “It will help to improve our forecast of these objects’ luminosity and hence help us discover them ?and, once discovered, it will help us understand the physics of their atmospheres.”

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/14/orphan-alien-planet-starless_n_2128848.html

The eruption apparently stretched out a “half million miles into space,” The Register adds. Fortunately, the sun is about 93 million miles from us. And, says NASA, the eruption “did not travel directly toward Earth,” though it did give a “glancing blow” to the planet’s “magnetic environment” on Monday.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2012/09/05/160593797/wow-nasa-video-shows-mind-bogglingly-gorgeous-solar-eruption

Hey Ray. What’s up? You can call me Mickey.

I can call you Mickey? Mickey is preferred?

Mickey. Like Mickey Mouse.

But without the humongous ears.

Right….. how you doing?

Very well man. How are you?

Good.

Well I’ve never started an interview with a question like this, but how are they biting out there today?

Today was a little slow actually. The fish bit tremendously, but they weren’t the big ones I was hoping for, but we caught fish all day, which is all you can ever ask for.

Excellent. Is it always fish that you keep and eat?

Usually, yeah. Usually we’re targeting fish for the table. But, stuff will happen. Every charter wants something different. A lot of Ween fans on the boat, so a lot of people are traveling in. I have people in from Australia. If they’re staying in a hotel room and they’re making a vacation out of it, they can’t always keep fish. I charter in Key West in the winter time. Down there, you can take your catch to just about any restaurant and they’ll cook it for you.

That’s amazing.

That shit doesn’t fly in Jersey. That hippie stuff. Laughs

Generally, you do need to be able to deal with it yourself or throw it back.

No, I mean if they don’t want to keep them, I’ll keep them. It depends on what it is. In the spring, in the fall we’re going to after really, really big striped bass and the limit is two per angler over a certain size. They have to be pretty big to keep, like in the 9/10 pound range. Now all summer we’re going for flounder and black sea bass, which were two of the best eating fish that swim in the ocean.

Black sea bass and flounder like we’re targeting right now are delicious, they’re all going in the cooler. If the charter doesn’t want them, me and my mate will both eat as many as we can get.

How long have you been into sport fishing?

My entire life. I started fishing, God, my son is 11? I probably started fishing alone when I was like 7. My parents built a house down on the Jersey shore right on the coast. My father ran sport-fishing boats. Not as a living, but we always owned boats. I started fishing with him, but I surpassed him pretty quickly like as how into it I was. On the days he wouldn’t take me on the boat and that he had something else to do, I would go out and fish by myself on the bay or off the surf all day. Local ponds when we were back at home inland. I’ve always lived on the Delaware River, like I still do. Ton of river fishing… I’ll just give you the whole story. Early 2000, I don’t want to say I rediscovered it, cause I never really stopped doing it. Ween was so far along in our career and we’d done so much touring. It was something that I really looked forward to when I got home, knowing that the grind of touring that I was going to have some solitude, some time by myself fishing. What happened was, one of my old roommates, I fished with for years, almost every day. He went into guiding. I knew that if he could do it, I could do it. Cause we had about the same skill level and knowledge level. And it had never occurred to me, I started fishing with him so much on his charter boat that I just thought, it was in my head, this is what I want to do, this is what I have to do. Not as a replacement for being in a band, but this is how I can buy a big boat and pay for it.

Both Laugh

And I always really wanted to get my Captain’s license with the Coast Guard. That was a really big challenge. That was a lot of fun. That was about seven or eight months of studying pretty hard. I passed, obviously. I took out a loan from the bank, bought a boat. I was able to pay it off. I’ve been chartering full time for about four years. Around 2000 I realized, “This is it. This is the hobby I’ve been searching for.” You just find that you need something in your life other than just one thing. Especially something like making music, where it’s my hobby and my passion first before it’s my job. When it starts to become something more work-like, like…. When we used to live together we were recording all the time in Ween. After we moved out and got married and all that stuff. We had to set aside time to work. Then we started finding that we had to set aside time somewhere else away from our town where there were no distractions, family and managers and whatever. So we would go far away, always on the ocean somewhere. We wrote albums in Maine and at the Jersey Coast. As the band became more structured, tours were planned a year in advance. You know, since I’m getting older. I started to really value my time that I was home and not working on either a rehearsal or writing a record or something. And it was like, damn, it’s been right in front of me all the time. The thing that I’ve done my whole life that I’ve loved. But it took for my friend Chris to start doing it for me to realize, “This is for me.”

So you’ve got this running full time right now, five days a week?

Five days a week yeah. I’m booked about a year in advance.

You’re booked about a year in advance? Wow.

Yeah. Yup.

Going along with that, do you see this as you want to get this really going as a set business where you doing this all the time for the next four or five years?

It is. It definitely is. The band’s not working right now. I sat down with my wife and we did a budget and we figured out what our monthly nut is, and my accountant. I figured out how many trips I’d have to run to sustain my lifestyle as it is without the band. And I was like shit, I’m doing really well. Believe me, you do not go into fishing to make money, that’s for sure. Very, very, very hard work, and there’s not a lot of money in it, especially in this economy. Most people don’t have 800 dollars to throw away on a full day fishing. But, it’s something special, especially for a Ween fan. Which a lot of my charters are fans of the band. It’s like the ultimate gift for someone for their birthday or Christmas or a big anniversary present, and I take up to three people, so I’ll get three guys to split the cost. It’s great. Around Christmas time, I send out gift certificates. I book between like fifty and seventy-five trips. A lot of people give gift certificates for my boat as Christmas gifts for their husbands or boyfriends or whatever.

Two questions I want to ask you in two different directions. 1. When you have these Ween fans that come, they take you up on this opportunity, do you ever have people that ask you to play songs?

They don’t ask me to do songs. I’ve never had that. No. I get asked a lot of questions, I sign a lot of CDs, and I get a lot of photos taken. I don’t mind that at all. Kind of the same attitude I always took with the band. People would discover us in a really backdoor way not even always like a good way, Beavis and Butt-head slagging us off or Phish covering one of our songs. I feel like once they got to the band and went through the discovery process on their own, I never cared how they found about Ween. However they found out about it, if they love it, great! With the fishing, I’ve introduced a lot of people to the sport. I’m very proud of that. Cause maybe they’ve never been fishing or done a little bit of fishing, but never had someone put them on to a lot of big fish. I get calls back, I get repeat customers, I get people having me write down what tackle to buy so they can buy so they can do it on their own. I’ve helped people to pick out boats. It’s great. You know, ha ha, once the hooks are in them.

Laughs

They found out it’s something they have a passion for. Very cool.

And now the second question, It’s been a long time since I did any fishing myself. My grandfather taught me when I was 12 years old and younger. We used to fish up in Massachusetts, up near the border of Vermont way up in the wilderness. This is mostly trout and salmon fishing in the rivers there, you have to forgive my ignorance, I’ve never been sport fishing I’ve never been deep sea fishing, we always used worms and night crawlers. What kind of bait are you using for the fishing your doing?

That’s too broad to answer. I might do something different every single day. If you only target the big striped bass, there’s a lot of different ways to catch them. It’s like bass tournaments you see on lakes on ESPN2. There’s a saying that, “When you first start fishing, you’re trying to catch fish. As you fish more, you’re trying to catch bigger fish. And then the third and final step, when you get good at it, you try to catch fish the way that you want to catch them.” Some ways are more fun than others. The easiest way to catch fish, and the least fun is with bait. I can take you out on the river with live minnows, and everything in the river that swims is gonna hit a live minnow. The most fun way to catch them is to have a surface popper, something that skips along the top, cause you can see the hit. There’s a huge explosion as they rock it out of the water with their mouth’s open and attack it. You’re not going to catch as many fish as you’re gonna get on live minnows.

Right now what we’re doing, there’s a number of ways. Randy and I, my mate, today we had five people on the boat. Randy and I will fish with buck-tailed jig, and jig them up, which is more finesse fishing. You get the snag more and whatever. We don’t really let the charters do it unless they’re experienced. We don’t want to lose ten-dollar lures one after the other. We’ll have them using squid, cut bait, dead minnows. When we striper fish, what we do is its called “match the hatch.” If the stripers are feeding on big 24-inch baits you want something that matches the profile that they’re feeding on. If they’re feeding on little sand eels, you want something skinny a lure that mimics an eel. Very important with any kind of fishing to know what they’re feeding on unless it’s like a catfish. In which case you can throw out a chicken head and they’ll eat that, or liver or dog food. laughs

Really?

Yeah, really.

Well this is probably equally impossible to answer as the bait question. As a life-long fisherman, is there one particular catch that sticks out in your mind? Is there one particular catch that’s like, “That’s the greatest thing I’ve ever caught”?

There’s a lot of them. That’d be like me trying to tell you my favorite song ever written. You’d be really surprised. There’s been days… what was it… yesterday, I took a charter out. I had charters, Thursday, Friday and Saturday and we caught hundreds and hundreds of fish on each trip. Yesterday, I took these guys out and the fish weren’t biting. They weren’t there. It was like someone came in overnight, like a dragger, a commercial boat and dragged the bottom of all of our spots. I mean, that’s not what happened, but that’s what it seemed like. How can you catch two hundred fish and then the next day, not have any fish? And that’s when having a captain with some experience and skill comes in. Some guys won’t burn the fuel. They take you to one spot, if you don’t catch, too bad for you. They take your money and they don’t care if you ever come back. We work really, really hard, we want our customers to go home with fish and have a good time. So we ran like 20 miles yesterday, we went offshore. And we found them. And we didn’t catch nearly as many fish as we caught the days before. But I was very, very satisfied with the trip when we were done because it took some doing and we made it happen. So I’ve had slow days. You would think what was the greatest day, maybe it was the day we caught a hundred of this or that, some days, it’s the day when you stand on your head to make it happen, and it makes the whole trip. You catch one but it’s fifty pounds, enough for twelve people. I couldn’t say. I’ve had some trophy fish that I’ve caught. You never know how it’s going to reveal itself, a great day of fishing. You know what I mean?

That’s the laymen’s notion of what sport fishing and sea fishing is like. They have that image of that taxidermy blue marlin framed up on the wall.

You know one thing that’s very important is to keep bends in the rods for people, and I’ve argued with my mate about this a lot. Like he’s on the boat, he’s a great fisherman, but I have a better sense of what the people are there for. So sometimes it’s like, you have to change the plan. It’s supposed to be fun, first and foremost. It’s like music. If you’re not having fun doing it and you’re not making great music, quit. It’s supposed to be fun like anything. If you hate it, don’t do it. I don’t know why I’m using him as an example. We take a lot of pride in what we do, let’s put it that way. But sometimes though I’ll look and I’ll see, these people, what we’re doing is not necessarily the best thing for these people. Let’s dumb it down a little bit for them and entertain them.

That’s really quite nice of you, your time and your business to make sure they get their money’s worth.

It’s important, and I know it, because I’ve chartered a lot of boats myself. When Ween goes on tour, I always hire local captains. I do my research when I get our tour schedule to see where our days off are. If the fishing is good in that place, I’m not going to fish anywhere. If we’re in like, Australia or something, you best bet your ass I’m going out. Very bountiful waters there. I know some guys, some people in the business here in Jersey, like I said, it’s a tough business to make money at. So they have one place they go. They don’t want to burn the fuel, and they might know when they go there that the bite is off. But they’re not willing to burn that couple hundred extra bucks of fuel to put people on fish, and I hate that. I think that they should quit. They’re in the wrong business.

In the end it’s all about repeat business right?

It really is.

So you’ve got your business plan. You’re working. You’re out there. You’ve got a year’s worth of registrants. There’s no way I can’t ask you, do you have any plans for the next two or three years even. Do you have any plans to get back to music? To tour? To record in any capacity?

Well first of all, it’s kind of common knowledge that it wasn’t my idea to stop Ween. I was very, very, very happy. I was painted somehow, a lot of it was from my partner Aaron, in this light where it was, “All Mickey wants to do is fish.” And he and I both know that’s not the truth. I never started fishing as a substitute for Ween. There’s plenty of room in my life for both things. It’s only two things that I do, other than I’m a father and a husband. I never put fishing before Ween ever, in the last four years of guiding, and then never even on a personal level before that, and Ween got to the point in the last five years where we’re much more organized, things were much more regimented. And our tours were pretty much planned out in January for the calendar year. So okay, we’re going to do this many gigs this winter, we’re going to do this many gigs this spring, and it was all ironed out, and I would wait until it was all confirmed up and then I would book my charters around that.

So I really didn’t like that. It still bothers me that I was painted in that light, where it was like, he doesn’t care about his band. It’s just absolute total bullshit. And it was just a cover… I told him as much too and he stopped doing that. “Don’t tell people that. That I’m busy fishing.” I never put anything before Ween. I dedicated twenty-eight years of my life to it. So, I don’t know. It’s common knowledge that Aaron just went away for a long stint in rehab. He’s trying to get himself sober, and get his life on track, and that extends way deeper than just Ween. And I love Aaron, he’s one of my best friends in the world, my whole life. So, I kinda thought, that maybe the band would be on ice for a year, or two, or three, or five, and I was totally cool with that. However long it took for him to be healthy and more importantly happy, I was prepared to do it, and I was going to wait for him to take the lead on it. And the next thing I know I read in Rolling Stone that he said that he was breaking up the band. And I was heartbroken. I still am. It’s only been a month. And I also knew, you shouldn’t make a decision like that, the day you get out of rehab or the week you get out, and I think he regrets it. I don’t think that you’ve seen the last of Ween. I wouldn’t be surprised if we played before the year is over to be honest with you.

Oh really?

Really.

So in your mind, you’re not even convinced that Ween’s over? It might be where Aaron’s at right now…

I don’t think it is at all. I wouldn’t promise it or guarantee it. It’s entirely up to Aaron. This is a free country. If he doesn’t want to do it, I don’t want to do it with him. You know what I mean? I’m not gonna force him to do it? But I know that after 28 years as long as the two of us are still alive, there’s a Ween. There was no reason to break it up. It could just have sat there, and you reserve the right to change your mind. And he can still reserve that right, whenever he likes. But I’m not going to give away anything. We certainly don’t have any dates planned that I’m not telling you about or whatever, but I wanna wait until he wants to do it, basically. I’m guessing. You really would have to ask him these things. This is actually the first statement I’ve made about it. I didn’t put anything on my Facebook page after it happened and I don’t know what’s going on. You know what I mean? It was a total shock to me. The whole world knew about it before I did.

Anyway, you know, like I said, there’s nothing that I’m not telling you that I’m keeping a secret. I’ve spoken with him, and you haven’t seen the last of us. Like I said, I wouldn’t even be surprised. It might not look the same as it did before. We might just go out and it might be the two of us like Simon & Garfunkel sitting there. Whatever it takes to reconnect and make it fun again for us. The most important thing to me is that he’s healthy and that he’s happy doing it, and like I said, if after 28 years of doing it, I could see why the idea of quitting it would be kind of romantic for a minute. Okay a new start to life, I’m freed up now, I don’t have the pressures of seeing it looking ahead a year. Maybe he felt a little trapped? This is all me guessing. If he told me he wanted to record for the next three days, I’d cancel all my charters. There wouldn’t even be a question about it, but the band has been running on flat tires. For the last year, I think he needed to really stop and get healthy and it was kinda like, the sooner the better. Things happen for a reason when they happen. Whatever’s the catalyst for that to happen, happened, and he’s on the right course. I would rather wait and have a happy, healthy Ween, then go out and have him feel like it’s a drag. I’m very, very happy with my life. It’s not something I would’ve ever done. I’ve been very happy with the way things have been.

Correct me if I’m wrong. I think it’s safe for me to assume, without Aaron there wouldn’t be a Ween tour? Ween wouldn’t do anything again until Aaron wanted to come back?

No. But I would do something else though. You wouldn’t live with a woman for 28 years and then break up and then start dating the next day. It’s just not the way things work. Right now my relationship with music is a bit muddled.

You think that in this next period, I know you said your relationship with music is a little muddled…..

No, I play, all the time. Where we live, we live out in a rural area. Same town we grew up in. So I play all the time. I play like two or three, four gigs a week, with different friends of mine. I jam all the time. I’m at my fighting weight right now. I’m ready to do a tour now. I never stopped playing or put the guitar in the closet for a year. As far as doing it as a career, that’s where my relationship with it is muddled right now. You feel like, “Oh, I should just move right on to the next thing.” Like I said, you wouldn’t break up with a woman after twenty eight years and propose to another one the next day. That’s where I’m at right now. “Okay, step back, take a breather. Think really good and hard under the assumption that maybe Ween isn’t going to do something,” and I’m waiting for it to reveal itself. You know what I mean?

Totally. You think there’s any chance you might do more stuff with the Moistboyz?

We’re playing this weekend. Yeah, that band never broke up. It’s just my partner in the band moved to Austin, Texas so that was the end of that. We didn’t stop for any reason. That was a very, very productive band., and a lot of fun to be in. Our local bar where we’ve played in a million times, both Ween and every band I’ve been in. It’s their fortieth anniversary this weekend, and I wanted to do something special, so I bought Guy [Heller], that’s the other Moistboy, I bought Guy a plane ticket with my frequent flyer miles from Austin. I’m flying him in and we’re rehearsing the next four days, and we’re playing Sunday and Monday night. One at the local bar, and then one at this other club out here in PA. I might. You know, it’s been a month. Is today Tuesday? It’s been a month to the day, or maybe five weeks to the day, that I woke up from a nap and had two hundred voicemails. I was like, “What happened? Wha? Wha?”

Mickey, I can’t tell you how much I appreciate how honest and forthcoming you’re being about all this. It’s pretty common in music. It’s also pretty common the fence gets mended and things work out. But a lot of times there’s a big PR hush, let’s not talk about it, and sometimes for good reason.

This age of social media is cool, but it has its downsides. Really, really… Ween is very old school in the way we do things, and there are some things that I’m really not comfortable with. One is the stealing of music, and for whatever reason, you’re not allowed to complain about it. But now, I get it. It’s not the way people get their music anymore. They download it. I had a guy on the boat today. I said you ever hear of Moistboyz? He said, “Oh yeah.” I said, “Yeah we’re doing some shows this weekend,” and he was like, “Oh yeah, I love that song ‘Stroker Ace’.” I was like, “That’s Ween!” and then I realized, he never bought the record. He doesn’t know who it is. He downloaded it is.

Or someone gave it to him.

Yeah, but that’s the norm, and I get it. That’s cool, but that’s one thing. I’m not going to complain. Every time I complain I get kicked in the balls by a million people. That was officially not a complaint. The other thing was, there was this big drama last year. Aaron got too drunk to play in Vancouver, and it got picked up by the wire services and all this. And I was laughing; do you know how many times that’s happened over the years? But that was before shit was going up on Twitter and YouTube and Facebook as quick as someone could hit send on a camera phone. And it’s funny to me that was made such a big deal of, this pivotal moment for Ween. This big crash and burn moment. It was like, God, how many times have we done that? Not even just him. Maybe it was me one time? People were asking me like somebody died? My father called me on tour, “What happened last night?” Nothing, Aaron was fucked up. Like Joe Cocker never fell down on stage from drinking too much? Did no one care? It’s different, but Ween is so old fashioned.

It’s funny because, I actually remember the day that show happened, and I saw the reviews of it. And every publication that covered it, I kind of had the same reaction. Granted that’s odd to happen at a show, that doesn’t necessarily mean anything.

It happened two hours and forty minutes into our set. We’re like forty-four songs into our set. It’s not like we couldn’t play the first song or whatever. It was like, we had put in double the amount of time on stage that most bands put in, and it mostly went all right. It’s not even really worth talking about to be honest with you. It’s just non-anything. It was a big deal and people were pissed and rightfully so. But the amount of attention it got… it wasn’t even stand-out amongst Ween meltdowns. I don’t know if it would even crack the top 10. I’ve crawled under the stage before, like on the first song, freaking out on LSD and then stayed under there until it was safe to come out twenty minutes later.

For the record I completely agree with you. I’m a journalist, it’s my job to always be looking for stories and headlines, but at the same time was like, guys get a grip. This isn’t such a big deal.

Oh whatever. I’m not criticizing one way or the other. It’s just obvious to me. We’re very old-fashioned as a band. The way that we work, the way that we make our records, the way that we tour, the lengths of our sets, the way we think about ourselves. We watched the industry go through four or five changes in just the time the band has been together. There was a time when a band like us didn’t have a chance of being on a major label. That obviously changed. I remember when it was a big deal that Husker Do got signed to Warner Bros. It was like this joke had been played on Warner Bros and they didn’t know about it, how stupid and naïve I was. And then the next minute a few years later, instead of the Janet Jackson’s topping the charts, it was the Chili Peppers and Nirvana and Pearl Jam, and then that changed. One minute you have to make a video and it has to cost $200,000 and MTV has to play it, or your record has no chance. Now, they don’t even show music videos. We just have watched this shit turnover and turnover and turnover. What we do is old fashioned, we’ve been able to stay in the same spot we started out in without having to modify or change anything.

I wonder, because it’s become such a big deal in the last year has been the direct-to-fan movement. Which has been bands and managers taking their own action…

I actually don’t. I don’t know what is going on out there.

Really?

I don’t listen to music, first of all. Unless it’s on my own time doing something else. I listen to sports radio. Unless we’ve played on a festival with a band, I have no idea. I’ve still never heard The White Stripes.

Wow.

I’ve never heard a million things out there. I stopped. I listen to music. I listen to Hendrix, I listen to the Beatles I listen to the same stuff that made me want to make music. I have a record collection that’s bigger than most record stores. But as far as new stuff going on, I don’t know what’s going on. But I cut you off.

Well essentially it’s like a business protocol. Instead of the traditional means of distribution and putting CDs in stores, it’s an ecommerce platform for the web. There are ways to sell downloads, physical CDs, vinyl. The idea being, you can partner directly with them to handle the technology and the code and then for a fee they allow you to sell your own stuff. Then there’s the potential to make more than you could from any given label selling it. The trade off is of course you’re doing more of the work, so there’s a time expense. That’s because one of the bigger rising trends because it’s so hard to get a major label deal that pays, and royalties are so small.

Ween is really, really lucky. When we started and we made our first few records, and then we made the subsequent records for Elektra, we had the power of a Time Warner lay the framework that enables us to go make a living today. I can’t imagine being a band…. I get these emails every day. I get dozens of emails from Ween fans, and it’s a link to their Facebook or whatever the current hosting thing for shit like that. And I’m like, “I’m not going to do that.” When we started, we had to borrow money from our parents to get $300 bucks to go get studio time, until we started four tracking and doing everything that way. Dub cassettes or pay for someone to press a 45. Then I had to go get padded envelopes and stamps and send it. Part of me feels, it’s like egotistical, “I ain’t going to check out your music.” You gotta work a little harder. But the way we used to have to do it, there was a weeding out process. You really had to hustle to get yourself noticed, or written about or booked. My buddy books a local club here, and he doesn’t get any physical media in the mail. He goes to their web sites. A band will call him for a booking and they’ll send him a link where he can hear a few songs and see some press photos. And that’s kind of cool, but you don’t have to do a whole hell of a lot. I can decide that you and I are a band right now. We can call it whatever we want, and if we can get together in the same room and take a picture of us. We can cobble something together and get a gig at this club by tomorrow.

Get a couple of bloggers to talk about us, they’ll think we’re the new thing, the new hype.

I could just rip something off some CD I don’t think the guy at the club has ever heard of, put in on a site and we’re done.

I think we need to do that. I really do Mickey.

I don’t know how I went off on that tangent. It’s just different. I’m not complaining. I’m not saying, “Oh you should have to do all the shit work.” That’s not where I’m coming from. It’s just glaringly obviously from the way we did it. I feel old talking about this shit in this context.

Last question. Did you hear about actor Jesse Eisenberg declaring that Ween was the only band he listened to?

Yeah, he’s a huge fan. I’ve heard a lot of stories before that even, and since about his Ween fandom. “Oh man, that guy loves you. I was working on the set of this or that, I was wearing my Ween t-shirt. He came over to me and he didn’t stop for 20 minutes.” He seen us a bunch of times apparently, but never introduced himself.

Are you a fan of his acting?

Yeah, I think he’s great actually. I love Zombieland. The one I love.

That’s a great movie.

My son is really into zombies. He’s eleven years old. Walking Dead. Zombieland. Anything zombies. We’ve watched that movie like a hundred times, but I’ve never seen The Social Network and I hear it’s a great movie.

Oh my god. You have to see it.

I hear it’s killer. And it’s an interesting story I hear. Who would be interested in seeing a movie about that? It doesn’t sound like a great concept for a film. But apparently, it’s really, really compelling. People’s opinions I really trust have unanimously told me that I have to see it.

Honestly, if I had to rank it. In my opinion, it’s one of the strongest movies in the last decade.

That’s what I’ve heard. When people that talk about it, their opinions about it are that strong and positive. He got nominated for an Oscar, right?

Yup. He was up for best actor for that.

Well, there you go.

At the Farnborough International Airshow in southern England on Wednesday, Sir Richard Branson, the founder of Virgin Group, announced the company’s plans to build LauncherOne, a low-cost satellite launch vehicle that will put satellites into orbit, the Associated Press reports.

In a video posted on Virgin Galactic’s website on Wednesday, Branson extolled the virtues of the smaller and more powerful satellites that have developed over the last few decades, but also lamented “the old and inefficient method used to get satellites into orbit.”

Enter LauncherOne, a two-stage rocket. Like the six-passenger SpaceShipTwo that will to carry people on suborbital missions, LauncherOne will be air-launched from the belly of the twin-fuesalge WhiteKnightTwo mothership.

According to press materials from the company, LauncherOne will be able to carry a payload of up to 500 pounds, and will cost under $10 million.

Reuters reports that LauncherOne will begin testing in 2015, and is expected to be operational the following year.

“I’m immensely proud of what we have already achieved as we draw near to regular suborbital flights on SpaceShipTwo,” Branson said in a statement from the company. “Now, LauncherOne is bringing the price of satellite launch into the realm of affordability for innovators everywhere, from start-ups and schools to established companies and national space agencies. It will be a critical new tool for the global research community, enabling us all to learn about our home planet more quickly and affordably.”

Virgin Galactic said that four companies have already committed to using the rocket and put down deposits. The Telegraph reports that asteroid mining company Planetary Resources, whose investors include filmmaker James Cameron and Google chairman Eric Schmidt, is among those companies.

Virgin Galactic also announced on Wednesday that 529 people have signed up for trips aboard SpaceShipTwo, which exceeds the total number of people who have traveled to space thus far in human history.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/11/launcherone-launcher-one-virgin-galactic-satellite-video_n_1664745.html?utm_hp_ref=science