If you’re a data junkie like me, then you’re keeping a firm eye on the only important election that’s due to occur this year. I don’t mean the racially-obsessed slogan-filled joke happening locally, but rather the ongoing scramble for power and control of the throne in the new Rome of the modern age. To get your daily info, analysis and critiques from the Columbia Journalism Review on the unfolding saga of the 2004 US Elections, go to The Campaign Desk.
And speaking of politicians, what do you think happens to the corpses of dead dogs and cats? You think they get buried? Burned? How about ‘rendered’, which is a nice way of saying ‘melted down’, and then sold as beef by-products. Now ready to be put into (hopefully) only pet food, and then eaten again. Hmm, isn’t this species-cannibalism exactly how Mad Cow Disease was spread in the cattle population in the first place? Read the somewhat disturbing news item Rendered dogs and cats sold as beef by-products.
And in case you think that because I’m a vegetarian, I’m starting the column off with a vile ‘oh, the poor dogs and cats’ type of item … who do you think wins in a fight between a bird and a car travelling at 180 miles and hour? (Sounds a bit like those stupid maths questions from school, doesn’t it? Like: “If it takes a train 40 minutes to get from Soweto to Pretoria, how long does it take a psychopath to have sex with a rabbit?”) Anyway, this link was up and down at time of writing but hopefully it should be fixed by the time you read this. Have a look at Bird Versus Car.
Gear change. South Africa is governed by rather stereotypical lefties and do-gooders who can’t see that they’ve turned into what they feared the most. (Come on, apart from skin colour and switching the word democracy for apartheid, there’s zero difference between the arrogant attitude of the previous regime and the current one.) This loosely leads into a rather fun online test from the Harvard Psych Department. Go discover what your conscious and unconscious stereotypes are, at The Implicit Association Test.
There’s that old saying about ‘Time flies when you’re in a coma, but fruit flies when you’re having fun!’ Okay, it wasn’t that funny. But put scientists and agressive fruit flies together with a touch of Fight Club and you have the rather bizarre but cute phenomena of science researchers betting on fights in The Fruit Fly Fight Club.
Get-your-war-on time. Most of the time the photos you see coming out of Iraq are chosen for one or another point of view that the publishing newspaper wants to convey, so it can be useful to browse through a load of pictures that haven’t gone through the filters, so to speak, so that maybe you get a slightly wider overview of the Iraq Occupation in action. Go browse through the disturbing and occasionally very beautiful photographs at Photographs From Iraq.
The ‘Up yours you corrupt Commie’ time. It’s not a well known fact, but Lenin had a thing for Rolls Royces — so much for being one of the workers, right? Take a look at a page in both Russian and English, examining the Rolls which Lenin lusted after (and which used to belong to Czar Nicholas, before his slaughter). See Lenin’s Rolls Royce.
For those of you Passion fans who’re curious about the realities of this Christian faith thing, have browse through this next site, which seems mostly about plugging a book on the subject, but which has a few interesting bits and pieces. Try Vintage Faith.
And so the hell-bent-on-whitewashing-the-facts 911 Commission trundles on, not asking the right questions or looking at the glaring signs of deliberate State involvement in setting up 911. (Funny how the black boxes for all the airplanes on 911 ‘haven’t been found’, and ditto it’s even funnier how come the hundreds of millions of dollars made by unknown persons with advance knowledge, using the stock market, haven’t been followed up on). Here’s a reprint by Israeli daily paper Haaretz, of the strange (and also not followed-up-on) news item about how the Internet messaging system Odigo was used by unknown persons to send a warning in advance of 911. Odigo 911 Advance Warning.
The smoking guns continue to pile up and be ignored by both the 911 Commission and the US mass media. Read this report about an ex-FBI translator who is very clear on the fact that Condaleeza Rice has lied about advance knowledge of 911.
And given that around 7 – 9 of the original 911 hijackers (as announced almost immediately by the FBI) are alive and well, and that most of the alleged hijackers come from Saudi Arabia, it’s odd that Saudi Arabia is the one place there’s been no military action against. Then there’s the odd Bush-Bin Laden connection, and of course the very strange fact that the US gathered up all Bin Laden family members (and other Saudis) in the days following 911, when the entire US airspace was shut down, and flew them all back to Saudi Arabia. Read Government Documents Show 160 Saudis Flown Out of US Between 9-11 and 15-11.
Longtime readers will know I’ll use any excuse to intro technology and sex-related items, so the idea of combining neon and breasts is too alluring to miss. Go have a look at when technology meets bras, and no, I’ve no idea whether this’ll help or hinder breast cancer, but it’s great to look at. Put your head between them and go blubble blubble blubble at Neon Bras.
To show that current events are a little more complex than the media would have you believe, take a look at this little-covered story about comments by Phillip Zelikow, who is part of the 911 Commission. Iraq War Launched To Protect Israel.
‘Comic strips that thankfully aren’t trying to be funny about Master-Slave relationships’ time. Have a look at the quietly weird but interesting strips on display at Exercises In Style.
To catch millions of listeners this April 1st, Howard Stern set up a completely new radio show, featuring ‘Cross and Lopez’, two squeaky-clean Britney-playing DJs who spun records and stated apologetically that they were the official replacements for Stern’s show, which had been taken off the air. This lasted for over an hour of the opening of the usual Stern morning slot, freaking out millions of listeners and fooling news services around the US, who reported it as fact. To find other, less large-scale April Fool hoaxes, take a look at The Museum of Hoaxes April Fools Day Gallery.
Remember Lost in Translation? Or more specifically, the incomprehensible adverts and shows which the actor was participating in? To get a taste of the reality of what happens when West and East collide, watch this advert for soy sauce at KikoMan.
Or if you’re curious as to what happens when you combine cartoon characters and a certain classic song from Queen, make sure you’ve got Flash enabled and watch Megaman Titanium Rhapsody.
You’ll recall me going on, a column or two back, about the coming poo from climate change and the slowing down of the warming current near the UK. Well, I noticed this recent anomaly as a first sign that things are going to unfold as I figured. Consider First Hurricane In Southern Atlantic.
And in other cheerful news, scientists are noticing that, thanks to sewerage and fertilizer runoff, large spots in the world’s ocean, are effectively dying. No wonder I&J and those other fish companies have been pushing their ‘deep water’ fish, seeing as there’s probably little or no ‘shallow water’ fish remaining to keep us in fish fingers. Read Dead Zones In The Sea.
But wait, there’s more! Have you heard about the new moon we may well have in our skies soon? No? It’s rather odd that only certain ‘safe’ kinds of information relating to outer space get covered at all, these days. Take a look at New Moon For Earth.
And the ultimate nasty fun bit of news. Usually when something from outer space is coming (in astronomical terms) very darn close to Earth, the scientists will grudgingly mention it. So there’s a certain strange and odd silence about a 3 – 5km long asteroid with an admittedly ‘unpredictable’ spin, heading in our direction. It’s called Toutatis, and it makes a flyby every four years or so. This time round, the distance between it and the Earth, is a mere 4 Moon-distances away from us. So where are the astronomers who get trotted out by Nasa onto CNN every time some massively far-off object enters our solar system? Toutatis is an extinction-event sized object which is going to be so close that even our conventional space craft would be able to reach it in a couple of weeks flight when it’s at its closest to us. I assume you’ll join me in hoping that Earth’s gravity doesn’t change the asteroid’s orbit or attract any part of it into a new orbit. So when is the date of its closest point, you ask? 29 September 2004.
Start your journey towards reading about what the mass media aren’t saying, by looking at Nasa’s own orbit-animation page for Toutatis, and advance the date towards September 29 and see how close this asteroid is coming to us. Toutatis Official NASA Animation.
Then read Toutatis – Coming Too Close?. And for any of you who have astronomer/scientist connections, for hardcore science data on Toutatis itself (which is actually two asteroids that have joined together), see Toutatis Data.
And for those curious about whether or not any of the various ‘prophecy’ literature (from the Bible, through to Nostradamus) has mentioned some big bloody piece of rock smacking into Earth, go read Myrrdin’s Warning.
Until the next time, if the Madam & Eve cartoonists don’t get me.