Museum Visitor Falls Into Giant Hole That Looks Like A Cartoonish Painting On The Floor

Like a real-life version of a Looney Tunes cartoon, a visitor to a Portuguese museum was injured last week when he stepped into an art installation resembling an inky void. Currently on exhibit at the Serralves Museum in Porto, Descent Into Limbo by Anish Kapoor includes an actual 2.5m hole that’s painted black — so it appears to have no depth at all.

According to Britain’s Times, attendees of previous showings of the work have questioned “whether there really was a hole in the floor or whether it was simply a circle painted with an extremely dark black paint”. Presumably there will be no doubts going forward.

Though the Descent Into Limbo installation was reportedly surrounded with warning signs and staffers warning visitors not to get too close, there was no barrier around it. How the museumgoer, whom Portugal’s Publico reports was an Italian man in his 60s, was able to step into the hole isn’t known, but he was briefly hospitalised for the 2.5m fall. The museum closed the exhibit to assess what happened, but says it plans to reopen it soon.

In addition to being known for his over-sized installations (including the giant reflective Cloud Gate “bean” in Chicago), Kapoor made headlines in 2016 when he secured the exclusive artistic rights to a physics-defying material called Vantablack.

Developed by a British company called Surrey NanoSystems, the material is able to trap photons in-between lab-grown carbon nanotubes, which bounce around until they’re eventually absorbed. Just a scant 0.035 per cent of visible light is reflected by an object covered in Vantablack, making it impossible to see any curves or contours — or to accurately gauge the depth of a hole if you don’t know what you’re looking at.

Descent Into Limbo debuted years before Vantablack was announced to the public, and was instead created using a dark paint that produces the same depthless, black hole effect. For at least one hapless art lover, it seems that was enough.

Via: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/visitor-falls-into-sir-anish-kapoor-s-descent-into-limbo-83kqpxxb3

Man Killed After Being Hit By Two Drunk Drivers

New York State Police say a man has died after his car was hit by two intoxicated drivers traveling in opposite directions on an Albany-area highway.

The vehicle was struck and went across a median on Interstate 90 in East Greenbush at around 1 p.m. on Saturday. Then it was hit by a westbound vehicle.

The victim’s name hasn’t been released.

Troopers say the eastbound driver, 23-year-old August Rice of Rexford, and the westbound driver, 41-year-old Rex Tucker-Moss of Poughquag, both face charges including vehicular manslaughter.

Police also say Tucker-Moss is charged with aggravated DWI because he had two children, ages 10 and 7, in his car.

Both men were released from the Rensselaer County Jail after posting bail. The lawyers representing each man weren’t immediately available for comment Monday.

Via: https://nypost.com/2018/08/13/man-dead-after-his-car-gets-hit-by-2-drunk-drivers-police/

Car crash leads to a fight and deaths of both drivers

The two men who were killed early Sunday morning after a vehicle collision caused a fight on Interstate 5 in Natomas were identified Monday.

Their vehicles hit each other in the northbound lanes of I-5 around 3:44 a.m., prompting the men to drive farther up the freeway near Del Paso Road, get out of their cars and fight, California Highway Patrol spokesman Mike Zerfas said.

Jason Dykes of Sacramento was killed in the fight, the Sacramento County Coroner’s Office said. The Coroner’s Office identified the other man as Jose Rodriguez-Carrasco of Oroville. Witnesses said one man was chasing the other with a bat, according to police dispatch traffic archived on Broadcastify.com.

“The witness I spoke to, she said she saw a guy with a bat chasing another man,” a police officer says. After the confrontation, a person witnesses described as a Hispanic man in his 30s – likely Rodriguez-Carrasco, 37 – was “hitting vehicles with a bat or a pipe,” the dispatcher said, “and there’s a male lying in the roadway and bystanders are giving the male CPR.”

Dykes, 39, was killed in the fight after suffering what appeared to be blunt force trauma, Zerfas said. Then, Rodriguez-Carrasco, walking north on the freeway, was hit and killed by passing driver, Zerfas said. “It escalated from a traffic collision to a fight to a homicide,” he said Sunday.

Via: https://www.sacbee.com/news/local/crime/article216610405.html#storylink=cpy