This is just so bizarre, it either has to be a fabrication or…true. Either way, it makes for great reading and imagination fuel :
…the seeds from which these monster vegetables were grown spent two weeks orbiting the earth.
On their return they were cultivated in giant Chinese hothouses….
Scientist hope the pumpkins, as well as two-foot long (06.m) cucumbers, 14lb (6.3kg) aubergines, and chilli plants which resemble small trees, could provide an answer to the world’s food crisis.
It is thought the near zero gravity conditions in space result in super-sized fruit and vegetables with a higher vitamin content.
Crucially, the plants are said to produce harvests which are ten to 20 per cent higher than normal - offering a rich source of food for the country’s 1.3 billion people.
Researchers fired off a batch of 2,000 seeds into space in 2006 on the Shijian 8 satellite.
After germination the best specimens were selected for further breeding.
And now for the much awaited explanation for why sending seeds into space for a few weeks can result in monster fruit and veg :
…it is thought cosmic radiation, micro-gravity and magnetic fields may play a part.
Oh. Okay.
So what happens when a child is ‘germinated’ in orbit?
Giant Space Children to unleash havoc on Earth?
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Being paid to review video games would, for most guys under 40, be a dream job. But what’s it actually like to be a professional video game reviewer?
According to Charles Brooker, it was a pretty sweet gig. Until he told people what he did for a living :
As jobs go, it was a curate’s egg. On the one hand, I could legitimately sit around playing games until three in the morning without feeling guilty - even if I wasn’t specifically reviewing whatever I was currently playing, it all provided useful background knowledge. It never felt like work.
But on the other hand, whenever I told people what I did, they pulled pained, sympathetic expressions and automatically began treating me like some kind of adult baby, as though I’d suddenly started wheeling myself around the room on an undersized tricycle, gurgling and suckling on a dummy. Because games are for kids, right? So I was essentially a grown man reviewing Mr Men books, yeah?
And when I wasn’t viewed as a child, I was viewed as a nerd. How sad my little interests were. How dorky. It was bad enough enjoying the damn things but, being a games journalist, I took things one stage further by developing some understanding of how they were actually constructed. I might look at a new release and be impressed by the polygon count or the draw distance. Apparently this made me a tedious loser, because society decrees anyone who knows anything whatsoever about computers to be a boring idiot, while those possessing a similar level of nerd-knowledge of football or cinema or food are well-informed and sophisticated and sexually attractive and cool.
It’s low in fat, low in food miles and completely free range. In fact, some claim that Sciurus carolinensis - the grey squirrel - is about as ethical a dish as it is possible to serve on a dinner plate.
The grey squirrel, the American cousin of Britain’s endangered red variety, is flying off the shelves faster than hunters can shoot them, with game butchers struggling to keep up with demand.
…its new-found popularity is partly due to its green credentials.
‘People like the fact it is wild meat, low in fat and local - so no food miles,’ says Simpson.
Ridley reckons that patriotism also plays a part: ‘Eat a grey and save a red. That’s the message.’
Don’t worry if you’re repulsed by the idea of nibbling on all those tiny squirrel bones. Perhaps insect flesh is more to your fancy :
David Gracer lifts a giant water bug, places his thumbs in a pre-sliced slit in its underside, and flips off its head. “Smell the meat,” he says, sniffing the decapitated creature, and the people gathered around the table willingly oblige. Members of the New York Gastronauts, a club for adventurous eaters, they murmur appreciatively as they scoop out and swallow the grayish, slightly greasy insect flesh.
“Perfumey, tastes like salty apples,” one says. “Like a scented candle blended with an artichoke,” another adds.
The giant water bug, or Lethocerus indicus, a three-inch-long South Asian insect that looks uncannily like a local cockroach, is just one of the items on the menu of this bug-eating bacchanal.
Gracer, a self-described “geeky poet/nature boy” who teaches composition at a community college in Providence, Rhode Island, has made it his duty to persuade ordinary Americans to eat insects.
Gracer wants people to move away from getting their protein from traditional livestock such as cows, pigs, and chickens because raising livestock has a huge negative impact on the environment…,
“Americans have no idea how wasteful these large mammals are,” Gracer says. “If you want to feed a lot of people, insects are the best choice in terms of getting the biggest bang for your buck.”
It takes 869 gallons of water to produce a third of a pound of beef, about enough for a large hamburger. By contrast, to supply water to a quarter pound of crickets, Gracer simply places a moist paper towel at the bottom of their tank and refreshes it weekly.
Insects, he says, also need less food and space than vertebrate sources of protein and therefore could replace or supplement food resources that may become scarce in the future, such as fish stocks, which a recent study indicates may collapse by 2048.
Double-fist sized hamburgers dripping with cheese and lashed with bacon versus ground beetle dip. Dave Gracer has one hell of a sales mission on his hands.
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In the fallout from the fantastical conjob that convinced poor people to buy homes they simply could not afford, when prices were peaking, first you lose your house, then you lose everything in it :
The foreclosure crisis is hitting yet another American locale: the self-storage center.
As they lose their homes, people are turning to these humble cinderblock and sheet-metal boxes to store their stuff. But some people cannot keep up with their storage bills any better than they could handle their mortgage payments, and storage companies are auctioning off their property for a pittance.
A cottage industry has developed to profit from these lost and abandoned items.In three brisk days, Mr. Snyder held auctions at 23 U-Store-It facilities. At the first site, in Gurnee north of the city, he raised the door on an indoor unit, revealing what was essentially a one-room apartment…The contents sold for $675.
The next warehouse, in Waukegan, brought a unit full of — depending on how you look at it — cherished household possessions or somebody’s trash. Boyd bought the bulging plastic bags for all of $6.
For some units, $6 is too much. “A dollar bill, first dollar bill takes it,” Mr. Snyder implored in front of one unit. “Come on, this is everything they own!” To no avail.
What’s left of the dream - the dream they crammed into minds through political speeches, through ceaseless advertising, through dozens of ‘lifestyle’ shows telling you you’re nothing if you don’t own your own home, through all the newspaper and evening news shows hyping the ‘property boom’, and how you had to get in quick or miss out forever - are tatters almost worthless.
Well, maybe worth one dollar.
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Millions of sane and happy people across the West use cannabis infrequently for pain relief, often because the pharmaceuticals available can’t do the same job, with so few side effects. As the scientific data mounts in favor of medicinal cannabis, surely the days can only be numbered when doing so remains a crime.
Cannabis significantly reduces neuropathic pain compared to placebo and is well tolerated by patients with chronic pain conditions, according to clinical trial data to be published in The Journal of Pain.Investigators at the University of California at Davis, in conjunction with the University of California Center for Medical Cannabis Research (CMCR), assessed the efficacy of inhaled cannabis on pain intensity among 38 patients with central and/or peripheral neuropathic pain in a randomized, placebo-controlled, crossover trial.
Researchers reported that smoking low-grade (3.5 percent THC) and mid-grade (7 percent THC) equally reduced patients’ perception of spontaneous pain.
“[A] significant … reduction in [a 100-point visual analog scale of] pain intensity per minute was noted from both 3.5 percent and 7 percent cannabis compared to placebo,” authors wrote. “Separate appraisals using the patient global score and multidimensional [eleven-point neuropathic pain scale also] revealed that both active agents alleviated pain compared with placebo.”
“In the present experiment, cannabis reduced pain intensity and unpleasantness equally. Thus, as with opioids, cannabis does not rely on a relaxing or tranquilizing effect, but rather reduces both the core component of nociception (nerve pain) and the emotional aspect of the pain experience to an equal degree.”
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Rising world food prices are due to overpopulation, Prince Philip says in a rare documentary on the Queen’s husband of 60 years.
“The food prices are going up - everyone thinks it’s to do with not enough food, but it’s really that demand is too great, too many people,” said the outspoken royal, 86, according to a British newspaper.
“It’s a little embarrassing for everybody, no one quite knows how to handle it.”
Absolute twaddle. The main reason why food prices are soaring is from blood-sucking ‘food speculators’, who’ve discovered they can inflict as much damage and pain falsely inflating the prices of wheat, corn and rice as they did doing the same to oil.
Here’s how Philip managed to get religious leaders like the Pope to step into line with globalist environmentalism :
“It seemed to me that most religions attributed the world to some special creation and I said, ‘Well look, if you believe God created the world you ought to take an interest in its well-being’.”
Or at least take an interest in the establishment of a global tax, on carbon for starters.
They may not have had much need for wheels, or shaving, or most forms of communication, but our neanderthal relatives sure knew how to eat healthy, when they weren’t poisoning themselves learning what not to eat :
Our early ancestors lived on a diet lacking in cereals, dairy products and refined sugar for centuries before farming developed and some scientists believe that the human body is still best suited to this kind of food.
Volunteers in the trial, run by the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, were allowed to eat only foods from a prescribed list, which included fresh or frozen fruit, berries or vegetables, lean meat, unsalted fish, canned tomatoes, lemon or lime juice, spices and coffee or tea without milk or sugar, for three weeks.
All dairy products were banned as well as beans, salt, peanuts, pasta or rice, sausages, alcohol, sugar and fruit juice.
After three weeks, the 14 volunteers who completed the study had lost an average of five pounds…
Scientists found that volunteers who ate the stone age fare for just three weeks had lowered blood pressure and a reduced risk of clots.
It’d be interesting to know what health professionals in the future make of our age of highly processed, sugar and salt rich foods. We’ll probably come up trumps with some of the worst and most physically destructive eating habits in the entire history of man.
They won’t understand in the future, of course. We will be mocked. But they’ll have no idea, no comprehension, of how utterly fantastic so much of the food we’re told is bad actually tastes.
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“We have come together today to say goodbye to an old friend, and beloved relative to so many gathered here. We will all miss him, and remember him fondly. Now let us begin the dissolving of his body….” :
Since they first walked the planet, humans have either buried or burned their dead. Now a new option is generating interest — dissolving bodies in lye and flushing the brownish, syrupy residue down the drain.
The process is called alkaline hydrolysis and was developed in this country 16 years ago to get rid of animal carcasses. It uses lye, 300-degree heat and 60 pounds of pressure per square inch to destroy bodies in big stainless-steel cylinders that are similar to pressure cookers.
Entrepreneurs are racking their brains to think up a way to make this an acceptable part of the modern American green-friendly funeral. Claiming that dissolving your loved one in lye and then tipping the syrup down the drain is far more eco-friendly than carbon-belching crematoriums is part of that initial green push for acceptance, and approval.
Not surprisingly, many people find this process an appalling way to deal with the dead.
It’s going to be a tough sell.
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The Robert Downey Iron Man movie certainly isn’t the first piece of American entertainment where a fictional superhero steps in to do what the military and politicians cannot.
Since they were born on the eve of the second world war, America’s superheroes have been enlisted for all sorts of undercover propaganda duties, from promoting patriotism, war bonds and recycling (even of comics themselves) to warning about health, drugs and landmines.
So it’s nothing new that Iron Man, the latest in Marvel’s pop-icon pantheon to hit the big screen, is coming to the rescue of the United Nations. In a specially customised comic book, Ol’ Shellhead and his costumed cohorts will battle that most terrible of supervillains, a tarnished public image, by demonstrating the UN’s positive, proactive roles. Will it work? It’s debatable: over the years these earnest, message-laden stories have not always been too effective as weapons of mass persuasion.
When it comes to propaganda, superheroes were probably at their most convincing in the early 40s, when they and their frequently Jewish creators and publishers, were tackling Hitler himself long before America entered the fray after Pearl Harbor. Seventy years ago this year, two young bespectacled Cleveland Jews, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, saw their nerdish fantasies published on four-colour newsprint as Superman burst off the pages of the first Action Comics and sparked a battalion of imitators. Their Man Of Steel started out as a champion against corrupt employers and other scoundrels but he and other superheroes would soon find the perfect bad guys in the Nazis and the Japanese.
For the February 27 1940 issue of Look weekly, Siegel and Shuster were commissioned to create a two-page expose showing How Superman Would End The War. After he pummels Germany’s fortifications on the Siegfried Line, Superman grabs Hitler and Stalin and flies them to Geneva where they are found guilty of “unprovoked aggression against defenceless countries” by the League Of Nations, forerunner of the UN. This condemnation of the Nazis seems to have worked as propaganda. It reportedly infuriated Joseph Goebbels, himself a master propagandist, so much that he angrily proclaimed “Superman is Jewish!” in a meeting.
In his Look strip, Superman was restrained from giving the captive Fuhrer “a strictly non-Aryan sock on your jaw”. A year later, another Jewish partnership, New Yorkers Joe Simon and Jack Kirby, unleashed their super-patriot Captain America, garbed in the stars and stripes flag, who finally gave Hitler that threatened punch on their first issue’s front cover. This was too much for some American Nazi sympathisers and opponents of their country entering the war. Simon and Kirby’s studio became the target of hate mail, obscene phone calls and sinister types lurking outside, until mayor Fiorello LaGuardia himself rang Simon to assure him of round-the-clock police protection, saying, “You boys over there are doing a good job. The city of New York will see that no harm will come to you.” Once the war was won, however, Captain America hung up his shield. Somehow his comeback as a 50s “commie basher” in the Cold War and Korea never caught on.
As for the UN, superheroes have come to its rescue before. In November 1967, The Justice League Of America featured the UN symbol on the cover of issue 57, in a very right-on plea for racial harmony called “Man, The Name is - Brother!” The UN even had their very own team of superheroes devised by Wally Wood for Tower Comics in the 60s. Called the THUNDER Agents (The Higher United Nations Defence Enforcement Reserves), they were led by Dynamo, dressed in the UN’s blue and white colours. Rather than relying on Marvel’s characters, the UN could have resurrected this team, but THUNDER Agents vanished after only 20 issues and only aging comic collectors remember them now.
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A surreal video of Richard Pryor playing the barman of a gay star bar, that is, a gay bar populated by the aliens of the Star Wars cantina. The Star Wars cantina costumes were hauled out of storage, cleaned up and further detailed for the Richard Pryor Show in 1977 :
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The best anti-Billary heckle so far, from a thinly attended rally yesterday in West Virginia :
“Down with the monarchy.”
Ouch. That’s gotta sting.
Dana Milbank profiles Billary in its last days of last shots at the nomination. Unless Billary knows something the rest of the Democrats do not.
UPDATE : In the significantly more racially divided America of 1977, Richard Pryor provided his take on the first black President of the United States :
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“…you will notice that Asian countries have stopped buying US government bonds. The US secret government has retaliated by artificially raising food and oil prices.
We are in the middle of World War 3. The US and Israel have been taken over by Nazis and the rest of the world is trying to take them down.
The reason the society has not started assassinations yet is that the Nazis in the Bush/Clinton administration want any excuse to start all out world war. However, if starvation begins in earnest, there will be assassinations.”
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It’s the equivalent of the Lyndon B. Johnson administration filling brick ovens with filing cabinets full of Vietnam War memos and letters and vaporising it all. Digital letters and memos are so much easier to disappear.
There may well be international criminal charges and war crimes trials for George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, once they’re gone from the White House, but their faithful and faithfully compromised lackeys don’t intend to make it easy. Too many have far too much to hide :
The Bush administration has not found disaster recovery files for White House e-mails from a three-month time period in 2003, according to court documents filed this week, raising the possibility that messages sent before and after the invasion of Iraq may never be recovered.
The White House chief information officer, Theresa Payton, said in a sworn declaration that the White House has identified more than 400 computer backup tapes from March through September of 2003 but that the earliest recorded file was dated May 23 of that year.
That period was one of the most crucial of the Bush presidency. The United States launched the invasion of Iraq on March 20, 2003, and President Bush declared the end of major combat operations on May 1.
Two federal statutes require presidential communications, including e-mails involving senior White House aides, to be preserved for the nation’s historical record. The White House’s electronic archiving system has come under scrutiny from Democrats who allege that nearly 500 days’ worth of White House e-mails from 2003 to 2005 may be missing.
A question worth asking is whether the storage systems for Bush White House digital records were ever intended to preserve the true record of communications between senior officials during the launching of the War On Iraq. Why would they want records kept of what they knew was an illegal invasion and occupation?
If all digital traces of a period of communication between, say, Vice President Cheney and Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, has now been disappeared, then it never happened.
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It’s over for Billary. If they fight on, they will only sink further into debt and public ridicule. The story will not be how brave Billary is being for refusing to quit, but how crazed Billary is for believing the White House in 2009 is something owed to them, even if the public doesn’t want it.
Barack Obama will face off against John McCain. The vast majority of Democrats back Obama, and once Billary quits the backing will become almost unanimous. McCain, meanwhile, is losing voters to Obama already. Americans really don’t care about the Reverand Wright beat ups, but they want to get the hell out of Iraq. If Obama fully commits to ending the War On Iraq, there’s no reason why he cannot win the White House.
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In the UK, some 4.5 million CCTV cameras, and billions spent installing and maintaining them, has proven to be a complete waste of money.
CCTV cameras don’t stop crime, they just move it on, and increase the work load for police and investigators. As Philip K Dick pointed out back in the early 1970s, authorities can have all the surveillance cameras and audio recorders they want, but someone still has to sit down and sift the data, and that’s the cruncher.
Note in the story below how the alleged failure of CCTV cameras to radically cut crime is used as an argument to now ramp up the monitoring and surveillance of innocent people to extraordinary new levels.
Massive investment in CCTV cameras to prevent crime in the UK has failed to have a significant impact, despite billions of pounds spent on the new technology, a senior police officer piloting a new database has warned. Only 3% of street robberies in London were solved using CCTV images, despite the fact that Britain has more security cameras than any other country in Europe.
The warning comes from the head of the Visual Images, Identifications and Detections Office (Viido) at New Scotland Yard as the force launches a series of initiatives to try to boost conviction rates using CCTV evidence. They include:
· A new database of images which is expected to use technology developed by the sports advertising industry to track and identify offenders.
· Putting images of suspects in muggings, rape and robbery cases out on the internet from next month.
· Building a national CCTV database, incorporating pictures of convicted offenders as well as unidentified suspects. The plans for this have been drawn up, but are on hold while the technology required to carry out automated searches is refined.
“We are [beginning] to collate images from across London…The images are from thefts, robberies and more serious crimes. Possibly the [database] could be national in future.”
Cheshire deputy chief constable Graham Gerrard, who chairs the CCTV working group of the Association of Chief Police Officers, told the Guardian, that it made no sense to have a national DNA and fingerprint database, but to have to approach 43 separate forces for images of suspects and offenders.
…there were discussions with biometric companies “on a regular basis” about developing the technology to search digitised databases and match suspects’ images with known offenders.
The end aim is a national grid of cameras linked to a central database (which will live on police and Scotland Yard servers), with the video flooding in constantly ’searched’ by face, body and gait recognition technology to build up a virtual CCTV life of those deemed worthy of surveillance.
That’s after they release your image to the net because you are suspected of being involved in a crime.
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The next time you’re taking a holiday and enjoying the snorkelling in the refreshing Cuban waters off Guantanamo Bay, don’t forget to pick up a few souvenirs before you head back to your non-cage home :
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…from the moment we first open our eyes, we possess the essential mental equipment to make sense of the confusion around us.
We are natural-born mathematicians - for example, six-month-olds can distinguish the quantities eight from 16, and 16 from 32. Babies will infer that a rolling ball will keep moving. They also know that when that ball rolls behind a screen it should pop out the other side. And although they can only babble, babies tell us that the germ of our instincts about age, gender and race are laid down in the cradle.
Hopefully we will never learn what babies really think about all those people looming into view pulling stupid faces and talking in weird, high-pitched voices.
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There’ll be a review of the new album up here in the next day or so.
Trent Reznor makes releasing albums that will be scooped up and appreciated by millions look easy. The major record labels are watching his soaring new wave of success closely, and nervously, for good reason. Nine Inch Nails is now selling hundreds of thousands of CDs, DVDs, books and downloads direct to fans, using free albums as a promotional tool for the live shows.
It’s a business model for bands both huge and just starting out which makes major record companies irrelevant.
1912 : The sky is brilliant blue, clumped with clusters of fluffy clouds. “I see,” a child begins, “a doggy! A..a…horsey! And…oh, that one looks my Floaty my goldfish.”
2012 : The sky is brilliant blue, small clouds made of soap bubbles and shaped like corporate brands dash and turn on the wind currents. “I see,” a child begins, “a Disney! A…a…Nike! And that one looks like Hillary Clinton in profile!”
Skyvertising, according to ‘flying logos’ creators Flogos, will soon be polluting blue skies above our cities. You can see their video pitch here.
(Flogos will) shape your logotype into a “cloudy” mixture of soap-based foam and helium - and send it off to drift for miles, as high as 6 kilometers up…
Any form can be made (of any color) and almost any specified location covered. The company seems to maintain that “flogo” shapes are environmentally friendly (they just evaporate after a while, and airplanes will fly through them like through any cloud).
