courtesy of Sarah Baker

Lincoln Restler on the night of his election to the New York State Democratic Committee last year.

​Last year, Brooklyn politics-as-usual got a shakeup via the election of glasses-sporting 27-year-old Lincoln Restler to a State Committee seat as the District Leader for Williamsburg and the surrounding environs. Restler and the New Kings Democrats, a grassroots lefty organization in Brooklyn, took on crooked Brooklyn Democratic Party boss Vito Lopez and won, showing that with the right amount of effort and door-knocking, an upstart can get voted into local elected office.

The Voice wrote about NKD a bit last year during that election cycle. Recently we heard from Sarah Baker, a NKD organizer who's now involved in a new project down in D.C. with other young Brooklyn political minds. She and Carlos Odio, an Obama campaign veteran, are running the Candidate Project, whose goal is basically to replicate Lincoln Restler's success all over the country by recruiting progressives to run for local elected positions (the political establishment in Washington now being seen as something of a lost cause). Odio is the director of the project and Baker's title is digital director. Yesterday they launched the 2,012 for 2012 initiative, which will attempt to get 2,012 regular people elected to local offices in the 2012 cycle. Brooklyn hipster-pols are going national!

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Ageless, really. Sexless, too.

​According to new scientific research, "happy faces" are the hardest to read for an accurate age estimate, reports MSNBC. Not only can smiles and laughs cover up (or camouflage) age wrinkles with happiness-wrinkles, smiling faces have "a halo effect," which means we think that a happy person is more attractive, younger, and more fun to hang out with. Which they pretty much are, honestly (unless they have a really annoying laugh).

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Jim and Cindy would not approve.

​Today in yucko parenting trends reported by Good Morning America: some parents are letting their teenagers have sex at home! This is because the home is a presumably safer environment, where there are condoms, and it's clean, and...parents are around? Plus, kids are going to do it anyway. So, what's really wrong with this? Well, for all the practical reasons a parent might come up with for why it would be better for their teen to have sex at home than, say, out in the woods where they might be slain by an ax murderer and possibly pick up ticks, there's still the cold, hard reality that teens and parents do not and should not want to think about each other having sex. That's just biological.

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​Meet Peter Thiel's Fellows: a handsome selection of the finest innovators under 20 years old. And by handsome, we mean 18 of them are boys, two of them are girls. But is anyone really that surprised of the ratio? Probably not. (Back to that later). Thiel's 20 Under 20 were selected based on a rigorous criteria, and while there were over 400 applicants to Thiel's program, which debuted earlier this year, only 20 of them made the final cut, winning $100,000 and a two-year tenure with the foundation's network of masterminds. In exchange, of course, for their resignation from Harvard, MIT, Yale, and the rest of the Ivy League brigade.

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​Here's some happy news: If you manage to make it to the ripe old age of 75 -- and chances are good for that these days if you stay out of traffic and away from the slippery edges of tall buildings and don't play with guns and such -- you will be perfectly justified in, even obligated to, reward yourself for your longevity with a daily pint or glass of wine. And in doing so, you will be less likely to suffer from dementia! Win-win.

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​Jacqueline Bouvier (Kennedy Onassis) wrote quite a lot of letters -- there was no email, after all -- to her boyfriend at Harvard, a 21-year-old fellow named R. Beverley Corbin Jr., in the late 1940s. A Christie's auction held on Thursday landed them in the hands of a "French lady" and "very big fan of Jackie Kennedy," who made the purchase over the phone, reports CNN. She paid $134,500 for 22 letters and a printed telegram. The letters had been estimated at between $25,000 and $35,000 pre-auction, but the power of Kennedy Onassis clearly bumped that up a bit.

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​In what will certainly be seen as terrible, horrible, no good, very bad news by the cast of the Jersey Shore, New York state legislators want to ban indoor tanning for under-18-year-olds. That would make New York state horribly pale. It would also make New York state the first in the nation to ban indoor tanning for youngsters, and probably ruin a LOT of proms, at least until people get used to not being orange. The American Cancer Society has named this ban one of the top priorities of this legislative session, and while we'd like to popularize pasty legs as much as anyone, we can't help wondering if there are bigger fish to, proverbially, fry. Also, you can always go outside, you guys (we hear it's good for you)! Or...to New Jersey. [WSJ]

​Did you know that America is in danger of running out of nudists? Yep, they're dying off, and those who are still alive, hanging out, being naked, are more and more grayed and wrinkly every day. The Wall Street Journal reports on this unfortunate confluence of people getting old and young people apparently wanting to be less naked (a/k/a "wear clothes") in public, which has caused the nudist resort industry to have to actually recruit young nudists.

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​As you stumble home at 4 a.m. after a night of debauchery only to rise by 8 a.m. for work, and do it again and again, you might not think that your lifestyle is doing much to combat nature's curse, that is, getting old. But it is! (Well, it may depend on how many days of debauchery.) But either way, you can tell your friends living peaceful (a/k/a "dull") lives in Atlanta or Columbus or Rochester that your city has a younger "RealAge" than theirs.

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​Have you heard of the Jolly Rancher Hairdo? This is a hairdo in which Jolly Ranchers are tied to the ends of the hair. How could any kid, or candy fanatic, not love this hairstyle? When a seven-year-old student at a Chicago school excitedly sported it for picture day after seeing the style in a magazine, her computer teacher could not believe it, or, actually, claimed that her (likely candy-restricted) boyfriend would not believe it. So she took a photo. Inevitably, it ended up on Facebook.

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