Good Morning Lowcountry

Friday mash-up

Grab a frappuccino. It's GMLc's weekly smattering of news from elsewhere.

Fist bump. The Washington Post's Reliable Source columnists reported that Michelle and Barack Obama's celebratory fist bump, aka dap or daps, on stage Tuesday night in St. Paul, Minn., was heard 'round the world.

"It thrilled a lot of black folks," said author and commentator Ta-Nehisi Coates.

Slate magazine's Christopher Beam noted the various media references to it: "closed-fisted high-five," "fist pound," "knuckle-bump."

"What's hilarious is watching the formal, AP Stylebook-loving media trying to figure out what to call it," he wrote.

The sarcastic brain. Dr. Katherine P. Rankin studied sarcasm by using an MRI to locate the place in your brain where the ability to detect sarcasm resides, The New York Times reported. It's called the right parahippocampal gyrus, but you knew that.

Those who have a head injury or dementia don't get sarcasm, brain scientists say.

"A lot of the social cognition we take for granted and learn through childhood, the ability to appreciate that someone else is being ironic or sarcastic or angry — the so-called theory of mind that allows us to get inside someone else's head — is characteristically lost very early in the course of frontotemporal dementia," said behavioral neurologist Dr. Bradley F. Boeve.

Medicated soldiers. Time magazine reported that about 12 percent of combat troops in Iraq and 17 percent of those in Afghanistan are taking daily doses of antidepressants or sleeping pills "to calm nerves strained by repeated and lengthy tours in Iraq and Afghanistan."

"Generals, history shows, have plied their troops with medicinal palliatives at least since George Washington ordered rum rations at Valley Forge," Time reported. "During World War II the Nazis fueled their blitzkrieg into France and Poland with the help of an amphetamine known as Pervitin. The U.S. Army also used amphetamines during the Vietnam War."

Atolls going under. The Pacific island nation of Kiribati might already be doomed because of climate change, its president said this week and Agence France-Presse reported.

President Anote Tong said communities and crops have been destroyed by seawater in the country of 33 coral atolls on the equator.

"We may be beyond redemption, we may be at the point of no return where the emissions in the atmosphere will carry on to contribute to climate change to produce a sea-level change that in time our small low-lying islands will be submerged," Tong said.

World's most expensive real estate. London is the world's most expensive real estate market, Business Week magazine reported. Space there averages $6,191 per square foot. "Your $1.5 million would buy only a small studio in the smartest parts of town," Business Week reported.

Monaco, at $5,888 per square foot, is No. 2; followed by St. Jean Cap Ferrat and Courchevel in France; followed by Hong Kong.

Historic modernist real estate. Newsweek reported that auction houses such as Christie's are trying to establish name-brand modernist homes as a new asset class. Example: Richard Neutra's Kaufmann House in Palm Springs, which was auctioned last month for $16.8 million.

Many more historic houses/museums, such as Philip Johnson's Glass House, have been left to the National Trust for Historic Preservation and can't be sold, Newsweek reported.

You ate WHAT? Forbes Traveler has rounded up some of the more bizarre food festivals in America — like the annual Bugfest at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, or the Waurika Rattlesnake Hunt, held in Waurika, Okla., every April. Deep-fried rattlesnake meat, mmmm.

Then there's the Gilroy Garlic Festival in Gilroy, Calif. ... the Waikiki, Hawaii, SpamJam ... the Chitlin' Strut in Salley, S.C. ... the Roadkill Cook-Off in Marlinton, W.Va. ... and the Turkey Testicle Festival of Huntley, Ill. The granddaddy of them all, Forbes reports, is the annual Weird Food Festival in Los Angeles.

Missing lighthouse. Historians in Wellfleet, Mass., had believed for decades that their harbor's 30-foot lighthouse had been taken down and destroyed in 1925, AP reported. This month, they learned that it had just been moved — to the California coast.

Wellfleet historian Helen Purcell said the discovery of the lighthouse at Point Montara, 25 miles south of San Francisco, was a shock. The lighthouse was first built in 1881. There is no known documentation on exactly how it was moved across the country.

GMLc

Comment at www.charleston.net/news/gmlc. Call 937-5564. Write gmlc@postandcourier.com.