A grim, amazing bit of reporting, about a life that’s almost too hard to imagine:

Samuel Mluge steps outside his office and scans the sidewalk. His pale blue eyes dart back and forth, back and forth, trying to focus. The sun used to be his main enemy, but now he has others. Mr. Mluge is an albino, and in Tanzania now there is a price for his pinkish skin. “I feel like I am being hunted,” he said.

Discrimination against albinos is a serious problem throughout sub-Saharan Africa, but recently in Tanzania it has taken a wicked twist: at least 19 albinos, including children, have been killed and mutilated in the past year, victims of what Tanzanian officials say is a growing criminal trade in albino body parts.

Many people in Tanzania — and across Africa, for that matter — believe albinos have magical powers. They stand out, often the lone white face in a black crowd, a result of a genetic condition that impairs normal skin pigmentation and strikes about 1 in 3,000 people here. Tanzanian officials say witch doctors are now marketing albino skin, bones and hair as ingredients in potions that are promised to make people rich.

Image: Guillaume Bonn/NYT

Beautiful gallery of medieval magic ceremonies, re-created in a book from the 1960s. I ordered my copy today! From The Nonist:

Can you begin to imagine the amount of time spent by the human race in pursuit of magic? I am not speaking metaphorically here. I mean can you imagine the sum total man-hours devoted to actively invoking, incanting, intoning, beseeching, divining, scrying, summoning, chanting, conjuring, and casting? And though, so far as we know, not a single minute of all that feverish sorcery yielded the intentional result with greater efficiency than chance, magic continues, and will continue, probably forever. And do you know why? Well, setting aside the fact that the whole endeavor is damn poetic specifically because of its futility, fascinating because of its baroquely fanciful trappings, pathos-packed because of its provenance, and let’s face it, pretty hilarious on the whole, there is another, simpler reason; one which I believe will be self-evident if you take a gander at what I’ve set out for you below…

As you can see the simple answer is- Because its fun! I mean come on! In what other context do sad old dudes get to prance about waving wands over nubile flower-carrying virgins, flanked with skulls and incense and sheer fabrics? At what other point in their lives do most older women get to heft daggers and dance around naked together and point longswords at blindfolded initiates? The occult is just too damned fun to disapear. Not so much for the goats and chickens, granted, but for humans? A really swell time.

Many Same calls itself a “universal archive of sameness,” but you don’t need no high-falutin language to enjoy 41 pictures of cats in a box. Or 45 pictures of people passed out. It’s kinda like Hans Eijkelboom, but more bizarre.

via DGSF Ryan

Someone found a unicorn—really more of a scared looking deer with a single, scraggly horn on its noggin, but still:

An animal expert in Italy is claiming to have found proof of the existence of unicorns after he stumbled upon a young roe deer with a single horn growing from the centre of its forehead. The 10-month old animal is part of a herd of deer that are otherwise equipped with two antlers at the Prato natural science centre in Tuscany. ”It’s proof that the mythical unicorn celebrated in iconography and legends was probably not just a fantastic creature but a real animal: a deer or other species with an anomaly similar to that of our deer,” said the centre’s director Gilberto Tozzi.

Do check out the pic—it’s funny, but was too small for DG.

Having partially developed inside caterpillars, the larvae of the wasps manipulate their hosts into watching over them as a mother or bodyguard might.

Yeah that’s right…For those of you who prefer to read your news, link to article on New Scientist

Previously, Zombie Locusts on DG

Some amazing pics from Brent Stirton, who documented the search party for four mountain gorillas killed in Eastern Congo last year. One of them was a silverback alpha male, the leader of the group, who was shot.

via we make money not art

Warning: This is a long-ish video (20 minutes). But it’s fascinating, once you get into it, for two reasons: Dude wants to “cure” aging and thinks the first human beings to live 1,000 years have already been born. And he LOOKS LIKE FATHER TIME.

Awesome: An open-source directory of good-looking (and very Dutch) patterns. Check them all out. Via Many Stuff.

The next show goes down June 21st. I bet that little girl is back with the ‘rents. She’s what, eight years old? Via The World’s Best Ever.

A fascinating story, penned by my former boss, about sex with robots, and how the theme evolved into its current form on Battlestar Gallactica:

What may not be so obvious is that “Galactica” is, like “West Side Story,” gently pushing the same message as “Romeo and Juliet.” When the robots and humans are not trying to kill one another, they rather convincingly fall in love. Montague or Capulet, Puerto Rican or Anglo, human or robot — true love transcends all divides, or so the show seems to be saying.

That, presumably, is why an episode shown on May 20 was titled “Guess What’s Coming to Dinner?” Stanley Kramer’s similarly named romantic comedy from 1967, “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” is about the engagement of an African-American man and a white woman, which causes consternation for her liberal parents. Interracial marriage was still illegal in 16 states when that movie was made; its tag line was “A love story for today.”

Do the writers of “Battlestar Galactica” think their saga is a love story for tomorrow? If so, they wouldn’t be alone — which perhaps goes to show that our universe is even stranger than that of “Galactica.”

Image via AIDS-3D.