On Friday night, a nude man jumped into a large tank at Ripley's Aquarium in Toronto for a brief swim with sand tiger sharks, sawfish, green sea turtles, green moray eels, and other fish. "The guy seemed totally relaxed... and like laughing," said one onlooker. Pretty ballsy. From CBC Toronto:

Security at the popular tourist attraction asked the man to leave shortly before 10:30 p.m. ET but he refused, said Jenifferjit Sidhu, a spokesperson for Toronto Police Service.

Instead, he swam to the edge of the enclosure and emerged from the tank before doing a backward flip into the water, she told CBC Toronto on Monday...

But before officers arrived, the man got out of the water, put on his clothes and left the aquarium. No marine animals were harmed during the stunt, Sidhu said.

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O’Naturel is a nudist restaurant in Paris. The New Yorker's Henry Alford had a bite and an eyeful:

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For reasons unknown, up to half of of people who freeze to death are found partially or completely naked. DNews looks into the phenomenon of paradoxical undressing. Read the rest

Warning: TITTIES.

Nipples, Nazi slogans, and racist slurs against Syrian war refugees have all collided on German Facebook to create the ultimate viral headline, and we at Boing Boing are *so very on it.*

A German photographer came up with a provocative way to pressure Facebook to do something about the recent surge in racist, xenophobic slurs against war refugees. His point: Facebook will censor images of female breasts in an instant, but anti-migrant hate speech is just fine by the social network's terms of use.

So last week, photog Olli Waldhauer posted this photo. The man is holding a racist sign that reads "Don't Buy From Kanaken," which references a Nazi-era slogan about stores owned by Jewish people. “Kanaken” is kind of like the n-word, but for refugees or migrants from the Middle East.

"One of these people is violating Facebook's rules," says the caption, and there's the hashtag #nippelstatthetze ("nipples instead of hate speech").

The image and the story are total viral crack for news outlets in Germany, and hey, we love boobs and outrage here in America too -- as well as our own racism and xenophobia.

Wonder if it'll lead to any change?

More on Verge, Washington Post in English. In German: meedia.de, tagesspiegel.de.

#nippelstatthetze https://t.co/JqQWHqctDS pic.twitter.com/m1BY95pRLy

— Micky Beisenherz (@MickyBeisenherz) October 29, 2015

#NippelstattHetze: Origineller Beitrag gg. #Facebook-Löschpolitik von @olliwaldhauer. https://t.co/LWVGyZrVJK pic.twitter.com/GP0oHPtjkl

— Der Tagesspiegel (@tagesspiegel) October 29, 2015

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Hopes and Fears has the answer for nine major cities (Spoiler: do not be seen naked in Damascus.) Wikipedia has a more complete list (Spoiler: if you want to be naked in public, go to England, but hope they don't make an example of you.) Read the rest

How magnanimous of them! Your breasts are now appropriate for their "authentic and safe" environment, so long as you're not doing anything bad with them. But don't get any ideas: "close-ups of fully nude buttocks" are still unacceptable.

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Stephen Gough, England's "Naked Rambler", is back in jail after failing to abide by a court order to "at least cover his genitalia and buttocks." Gough, famous for walking the length of Britain naked, spent six years in prison on earlier charges stemming from public nudity; authorities in the UK have spent hundreds of thousands of pounds prosecuting him. [AP] Read the rest

[YouTube Link] One of the funnier and more beautifully produced book trailers I've seen in a while! It's for the just-released book "Me the People," by Kevin Bleyer. Via Jason Wishnow:

Kevin Bleyer (Emmy Award winning writer for the Daily Show) personally rewrote the Constitution of the United States and needed his author’s portrait painted in the neoclassical style. I’d never been to a life drawing class before but heard they involve nude models.

Faces familiar to Daily Show fans include Kevin Bleyer, Jason Jones, and Samantha Bee. Directed by Jason Wishnow. Read the rest

On IO9, Ron Miller has published a selection from his collection of photos of 1970s cosplayers, dating from a costuming epoch where nudity was a lot more common than it is today. Among the clothed pictures (not reproduced here) is one shot of Elfquest co-creator Wendy Pini as one of her own elves.

One thing I noticed in going through the slides — mostly taken at Worldcon masquerades and a few other cons — is the great sense of whimsy that permeated SF costuming decades ago. This is something that seems to be missing, now that costuming is taken so much more seriously.

I recognize a lot pros in some of those old pictures, too — such as Elfquest creator Wendy Pini as one of her own characters.

Oh yeah — I remember another rule. Food was nixed for costumes after one joker covered himself entirely in peanut butter (he was a turd literally and figuratively), which eventually turned rancid after 3 or 4 hours under hot lights. Oh yes, indeedy, those were the days...

A Treasure Trove of Cosplay from the Swinging 1970s [NSFW]: Read the rest