Lifestyle
Menendez Brothers-Inspired Clothes Sell on eBay for Halloween
You’re bound to see one or two Menendez Brothers-inspired costumes this Halloween … as folks on eBay have already curated everything you’d need amid renewed interest in the siblings’ parental murders case.
Check it out … one seller has listed a Los Angeles County Jail uniform … specifically advertised as a take on Lyle’s prison “overalls.” Be advised, it’s listed as “pre-owned,” so no telling who had it last … or what they might have done to get the garb.
Similarly, a different eBay seller is trying to offload a blue L.A. County Jail shirt … that looks an awful lot like the ones worn by Erik and Lyle. At least 10 people are interested, and 4 have already sold, so better act fast if you want to lock in the look.
Of course, TikTok is also pitching the costume idea, bringing together several preppy ’80s ensembles … including one inspired by Erik and Lyle’s days as student tennis athletes.
If you’re eager to jump on the trend this Halloween, you don’t even have to do much digging online … as sellers are tagging Menendez-esque clothing items with the brothers’ surname … including chunky blue sweaters and designer jackets.
Following the release of Ryan Murphy‘s TV crime-drama series, “Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story,” and the companion documentary, “The Menendez Brothers,” Erik and Lyle’s faces seem to be everywhere.
In fact, Los Angeles County District Attorney George Gascón‘s office is reviewing new evidence in the siblings’ case … which could spell freedom for the controversial brothers.
So, it’s no wonder eBay is jumping on the trend now … before it’s too late to ship items in time for Halloween!
Lifestyle
A polarizing, provocative French novelist says he’s written his last book
Early in Michel Houellebecq’s novel Submission, its professor hero talks about what makes a writer worth reading: “[A]n author is above all a human being … and whether he writes very well or very badly hardly matters — as long as he gets the books written and is, indeed, present in them. (It’s strange that something so simple, so seemingly universal, should actually be so rare …)”
Few writers are more present than Houellebecq, the international literary superstar who’s one of a handful of writers who invariably jangles my nerve-ends. Trenchantly ironic about our self-centered society, his novels are barracuda-toothed provocations, idea-laced fictions filled with dodgy sex, joyless masculinity, swipes at Islam, derision toward ’60s freedoms, contempt for the media elite, attacks on the EU and casual misanthropy. Houellebecq is surely the most acclaimed literary figure to have praised Donald Trump. In France, he’s routinely called a genius — or a creep.
In fact, his fiction is brainier, trickier and more stimulating than his polarizing reputation suggests. It’s not just that his novels have been eerily prophetic about what’s happening in society. He cuts to the heart of things in a way that makes most of his American counterparts look like well-schooled functionaries doodling prettily on the margins of life.
A sense of doom — social and personal — looms over his new novel, Annihilation, which the 68-year-old Houellebecq has said will be his last. Although far from his best, it’s a fascinating book tinged by mortality. You can feel this one-time bad boy crawling out of his comfort zone to do something he’s pointedly not done before: explore middle-class family life and the healing power of love.
As usual, Annihilation features a de-centered male hero. Fiftyish Paul Raison is a high-level Paris bureaucrat who’s in a sexless marriage to another bureaucrat, Prudence. Bored and vaguely disaffected — he doesn’t believe in much of anything — Paul’s going through the motions, when his world starts falling apart.
In the public sphere, there’s a series of cyberattacks designed to send seismic shocks through the existing global order. In his personal life, his father has a stroke, and Paul’s forced to engage with his family, especially the devoutly Catholic sister he’s been largely ducking for years. Even as he’s confronted by an often-byzantine medical system, he must deal with a group of anti-government radicals, and a health crisis of his own.
Although deftly translated by Shaun Whiteside, Annihilation is slow getting started and too diffuse by half — I began skipping the boring dream sequences. But Houellebecq has always had one of those narrative voices that draws you in, as in this book’s opening line: “Particularly if you’re single, some Mondays in late November or early December make you feel as if you’re in death’s waiting-room.”
Houellebecq’s major works — Atomized, Platform, Submission and Serotonin — were all worshiped or reviled for their seeming cynicism. Yet beneath their dryly funny, sometimes shocking surfaces, they’re the work of a radical conservative — to borrow a description Norman Mailer used of himself. Houellebecq’s books dissect how, in our modern society, people, in particular men, feel hollowed out. “Anything can happen in life,” says the hero of Platform, “especially nothing.”
No longer bound by the old religious, national and tribal belief systems, Houellebecq’s characters inhabit an atomized world whose individualism leads to the bleak consolations of technology, consumerism and the soulless sex typified by pornography. His great satire, Submission, in which Islam takes over France, was pilloried as an attack on that religion. In fact, it’s a book about a French culture so decadently anemic that it finds a kind of comfort living under the certainties of Sharia law.
Dismissive of both the Left and market-driven society, Houellebecq is such a sly and ambiguous writer that I’m not always sure when he’s kidding. I often identify with his characters, and even when I find certain pages repellent, Houellebecq challenges my perceptions. He gets me asking whether I’m in touch with my real self, or whether I’ve unthinkingly donned a set of attitudes passed on by our culture.
And in Annihilation, he surprised me. After a career spent, as he puts it, “clearing away the sources of hollow optimism,” he ends Paul’s story with some of the tenderest pages — and tenderest sex — of his career. This is a book about discovering the ties that bind and about letting yourself be bound by them. Filled with acceptance if not serenity, it has the happiest ending you can have in a book by a writer who doesn’t believe in happiness.
Lifestyle
Millions of pounds of meat are being recalled. Here's what to look for in your fridge
Public health authorities are urging Americans to check their fridges and freezers after recalling more than 11 million pounds of ready-to-eat meat and poultry items over possible listeria contamination.
The Oklahoma-based company BrucePac, which sells pre-cooked proteins, is recalling 11,765,285 pounds of meat and poultry that it shipped to grocery stores, restaurants, schools and other institutions nationwide, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS).
The FSIS says it detected listeria during routine testing of finished products containing BrucePac poultry, which a subsequent investigation confirmed as the source.
The bacteria can cause a serious infection that is especially dangerous for people who are pregnant, over 65 or have weakened immune systems. There have been no confirmed reports of adverse reactions linked to the products, it adds.
Authorities first announced the recall last week, but have since expanded it to cover more than one million additional pounds of meat and poultry products. That amounts to hundreds of items from dozens of popular brands, sold at over a dozen grocery chains across the country.
The USDA also confirmed this week that the products have been distributed to schools and says it will post a school distribution list on its website once one is available.
The recalled products include salads, wraps, pasta bowls, burritos, enchiladas and many other ready-made frozen and family meals, and come from brands including Fresh Express, Rao’s, Boston Market, Atkins, Dole, ReadyMeals, Taylor Farms, Home Chef and Signature Select.
The stores that carry them include Aldi, Amazon Fresh, Giant Eagle, H-E-B, Kroger, Meijer, Publix, Target, Trader Joe’s, Walmart, Wegmans and 7-Eleven.
The affected goods were produced between May 31 and Oct, 8 and bear the establishment numbers “51205” or “P-51205” either inside or underneath the USDA mark of inspection. But BrucePac cautioned that the number is only on packages it ships directly to customers, not retail packages.
“Because we sell to other companies who resell, repackage, or use our products as ingredients in other foods, we do not have a list of retail products that contain our recalled items,” the company said in a statement, adding that the best way for people to identify contaminated products is through the USDA website or by calling the company or retailer from which they got the package.
The USDA is maintaining a list of recalled products — which is 345 pages long as of Wednesday — and urging people to use the search function to look up individual products, stores and brands and throw away any that they may have at home.
Authorities say they are also “concerned that some product may be available for use in restaurants, institutions, schools and other establishments” and are urging them to throw the goods out immediately.
For its part, BrucePac says it is working closely with the USDA to notify consumers, contact the food companies and distributors affected and ensure “all necessary actions are taken to ensure a safe food supply.”
“We will not resume production until we are confident the issue has been resolved,” it added.
What to do if you’re worried
The USDA is urging people to toss any affected products and monitor its website for more information as it becomes available.
It says consumers with food safety questions can call the toll-free USDA Meat and Poultry Hotline at 888-674-6854 or email MPHotline@usda.gov, and can report complaints about any meat, poultry or egg products online.
Anyone concerned about illness should contact their healthcare provider, the department adds.
Eating food contaminated with listeria can cause listeriosis, an invasive infection that spreads beyond the gastrointestinal tract and must be treated with antibiotics.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says listeria infection is the third leading cause of death from foodborne illnesses in the U.S., estimating that 1,600 people are infected and 260 people die from it each year.
The infection can be fatal in older adults and people with weakened immune systems, and can cause miscarriages, stillbirths, premature delivery in pregnant women as well as life-threatening infections in their newborns.
Symptoms of listeriosis include fever, chills, muscle aches, nausea, diarrhea, stiff neck, loss of balance and convulsions. Symptoms could begin within a few days of eating contaminated food in some cases, but in others could take 30 days or more to show up, according to the Mayo Clinic.
The USDA says anyone in the higher-risk categories who experiences flu-like symptoms within two months after eating contaminated food should seek medical care and tell their health care provider about the food.
Listeria concerns have been responsible for other recalls in recent months, including an outbreak linked to Boar’s Head deli meat that resulted in 59 hospitalizations and 10 deaths across 19 states this summer. The USDA has since opened an internal investigation into its handling of prior reports of safety violations at Boar’s Head’s Virginia plant.
NPR’s Chandelis Duster contributed reporting.
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