Posted by Alex in Pictures on April 14, 2006 at 11:00 am
This is what a wall of 12 30-inch flatscreen monitors looks like. From the website:
When friend of QJ.NET "Crazy Jon" called us up and told us about a project he was working on, we didn’t believe it at first. But when we got to his house, sure enough — twelve 30-inch Dell flatscreen monitors are sitting in his office, and he’s grinning from ear to ear. Also among the pile of goodies are six NVidia GeForce 7900 GTX 512mb video cards, and three Turbo-Cool 1KW 1000-watt power supplies. Soon the QJ.NET crew was busy unboxing and tackling the project of mounting these bad boys.
Posted by Alex in Art, Pictures on April 14, 2006 at 1:04 am
Neatorama reader Dougall Meloney wrote to me about his daughter Cory Judge and her artwork – I particularly like this glass dragonfly she made. You can check out the rest of her artwork here: Link (Thanks Dougall!)
Apparently, some people like to chase tornadoes – why, I don’t know…
From the website:
The cone shape is generally part of the life cycle the tornado goes through on its way to another form, block, wedge or tube. This tornado kept the cone shape for about 5 minutes then changed to a dusty block of clouds on the ground. Shortly after this image was taken the tornado hit a small tank farm in open country igniting one of the tanks.
The man on the left is Joshua Blahyi, a Liberian warlord from the 90′s better known as General Butt Naked.
He’s not a nice guy:
“So, before leading my troops into battle, we would get drunk and drugged up, sacrifice a local teenager, drink their blood, then strip down to our shoes and go into battle wearing colourful wigs and carrying dainty purses we’d looted from civilians. We’d slaughter anyone we saw, chop their heads off and use them as soccer balls. We were nude, fearless, drunk and homicidal. We killed hundreds of people — so many I lost count.”
From Wikipedia:
Apparently, Blahyi believed that his nakedness was a source of protection from bullets. In addition, his acts of violence have a Satanistic tinge: he claimed to a South African Star reporter that he "met Satan regularly and talked to him" and that he took part in monthly human sacrifices from age 11 to 25 (Ellis 268).
Blahyi’s rampage ended in 1996, when the civil war in Liberia was coming to an end. "God telephoned me and told me that I was not the hero I considered myself to be," he said, "so I stopped and became a preacher."
Posted by Alex in Religion on April 13, 2006 at 11:42 pm
From the website:
Traditional Easter eggs, depicting Jesus Christ and other religious themes, lie in a basket at an Easter traditions fair in Bucharest, Romania, Sunday April 4, 2004. Romanians, the majority sharing the Orthodox religion, will celebrate Easter on April 11.
The world’s most expensive sandwich is for sale at Selfridges Department Store in London for £85 or $148. It is made from Wagyu beef, foie gras, black truffle mayo, brie de maux, roquet leaf, red peppers, mustard confit, British plum tomatoes, and sourdough bread.
Wagyu cattle are one of the most expensive breeds in the world. The Japanese cows are raised on a special diet, including beer and grain. They are supposed to be regularly massaged with sake, the Japanese rice wine, to tenderize the flesh.
It is called (ironically) the McDonald sandwich, after its creator Scott McDonald, the chef at the department store.
Muhammad Ali, one of the world’s most recognized people, has sold 80 percent of the marketing rights to his name and likeness to a firm for $50 million.
The 64-year-old former heavyweight champion, who suffers from Parkinson’s disease, will retain a 20 percent interest in the business. The new venture will be operated by a company called G.O.A.T. LLC, an acronym for "The Greatest of All Time."
A chunk of ice fell out of the sky and left a huge hole in the ground at Oakland’s Bushrod Park.
From the website:
Jacek Purat saved a piece of ice chunk that originally measured three feet in diameter. He says it came out of the southwestern sky, slammed into the ground along Shattuk Avenue and exploded into pieces. …
It burrowed about two-and-a-half feet into the ground, where Oakland firefighters retrieved it. …
ABC7 aviation expert Ron Wilson believes the only possible way it could have come from an airplane is if the plane’s valve for fresh water leaked at a high elevation. …
The other possibility is that it is a chunk of ice from space.
Indians in this remote mountain village in southern Colombia are marketing a particularly refreshing soft drink that harks back to Coca-Cola’s original formula, when "coca" was in the name for a reason.
Advertising posters here describe the carbonated, citrus-flavored Coca-Sek as "more than an energizer" — a buzz that just might be provided by a key ingredient, a syrup produced by boiling coca leaves.
Lebowski Fest is a bowling event celebrating all things relating to the Coen Brothers 1998 film, The Big Lebowski. It can be likened to a Star Trek convention in a very loose sense. The event takes place at a bowling alley and includes unlimited bowling, costume , trivia, farthest traveled, and bowling contests, prizes, and what-have-you. The friend of the Coen Brothers who inspired the main character played by Jeff Bridges, Jeff "The Dude" Dowd has been known to make an appearance and drink some White Russians.
Professor David Nutt believes that there is no reason why we can’t make hangover-free alcohol, like Star Trek’s synthehol.
Alcohol works in the brain mainly by latching onto signalling molecules called GABA-A receptors. There are dozens of subtypes of these; not all of them are associated with specific effects of alcohol. For example, memory loss may occur in conjuction with drinking because alcohol binds to alpha-5, a GABA-A receptor subtype in the hippocampus.
Professor Nutt suggests that if molecules that bind poorly to the bad subtypes like alpha-5 could be developed, it would be possible to retain the pleasant effects of alcohol without the bad side-effects.
In Florida, Customs and Border Patrol has seized a giant shipment of 14,000 brass knucles disguised as belt buckles from Pakistan and China.
"There is no way this could be used as a belt buckle," Local 6 reporter Erik von Ancken said. "This is not a novelty, it is solid metal used for only one reason police tells us. In fact, even the packaging is a joke — it is spelled ‘b-u-k-l-e.’ The packaging, from Pakistan and China, reads ‘belt buckle’ but police say that is ridiculous."
For those who don’t know about captcha (completely automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart), it is a question used to prevent automated bots to submit a form.
Take a look at Rafita Mirabal stare down a charging 400-lbs bull with nothing but a red cape and a short sword. Oh, did I tell you he’s 9 years old?
Rafita already has had about two dozen fights in bullrings since 2005, including his latest challenge on Sunday in Texcoco, just east of Mexico City.
His contests differ slightly from a regular bullfight. The animals are younger and somewhat smaller, and he does not give the matador’s final death blow with his sword. The ban on swordplay isn’t to protect Rafita, but rather the sport’s reputation.
As Japan has fewer and fewer children, toy companies there have discovered an alternative market: adults who are nostalgic for their childhood toys (in this case: a very geek-chic belt!)
Major toymaker Bandai recently launched adult-size reproductions of an action hero belt worn on the 1970s megahit Kamen Rider ("Masked Rider") TV series.The new belt sells for about 30,000 yen, the equivalent of $270.
Kawauchi said it would give hard-working middle-aged men an opportunity to spend money on themselves by buying the leather belt, which flashes with LED lights.
As the former boys have acquired not only purchasing power but also girth, the belt stretches 44 inches, about double the size of the children’s version that first came out in 1971.Bandai sold a staggering 3.8 million of the original Kamen Rider belts, letting a generation of Japanese boys shout out "Transform!" and spin their arms around to become cyborg heroes with blinking belts.
If you have been living under a rock and don’t know what cthulhu is, maybe you should start here: Wikipedia’s entry on HP Lovecraft and Cthulhu Mythos, then read his work here: Link
Authorities said that Sarah and Kris Everson faked having a sextuplet as a hoax to tap the generosity of others to pay their bills!
Those who heard the Eversons’ sad story of tight finances set up a Web site to solicit contributions — including a van, washer and dryer, cash and gift certificates. A real estate agent was even working to find the family new housing.
Hours before admitting it was a scam, Sarah Everson showed an Associated Press reporter pictures of her in maternity clothes, her baring a huge pregnant-looking midsection, even sonogram images she claimed were of her infants. She showed off a tiny nursery, a closet full of baby clothes and the tiny diapers premature newborns must wear.
She said the entire story of her children’s births was being kept secret by a court order enacted because a member of her husband’s family was trying to kill the Eversons and their new sextuplets.
America’s Overvalued Real Estate Blog’s entries are each "a nasty overpriced wreck". This one is titled Garden Shed:
Occasionally, nasty overpriced wrecks are described as "garden sheds". However, this particularly disgraceful Seattle listing might actually have started its life as a storage facility for horticultural implements. …
And who can blame the current owner of this garden shed. Just install two windows, a door and some inside partition walls, and quicker than you can call a local realtor and say "reasonably priced starter home", he has a $375k property on the market. That is the sad reality when a city suffers from a bubble; sheds become houses, crack houses become single family homes, and beach huts become seaside mansions.
Many more overvalued properties listed! Link (Thanks Dave Birt!)
Yves Brun and colleagues from Indiana University discovered that the world’s strongest glue is produced by the bacterium Caulobacter crescentus to stick to river rocks.
The adhesive can withstand an enormous amount of stress, equal to the force felt by a quarter with more than three cars piled on top of it. That’s two to three times more force than the best retail glues can handle.
"There are obvious applications since this adhesive works on wet surfaces," said study leader Yves Brun, an Indiana University bacteriologist. "One possibility would be as a biodegradable surgical adhesive."
But making it has proved challenging. Like a mess of chewing gum, the gunk globs to everything, including the tools used to create it.
A new FBI-style crime-fighting agency called the Serious Organised Crime Agency (Soca) has been launched in the UK, complete with a logo designed to scare the living daylights out of criminals:
The Serious Organised Crime Agency (Soca) has chosen a fierce big cat bearing its fangs and leaping over a stylised silver globe, with a crown capping it all.
It’s bold but bears a striking resemblance to the logo of the 1980s children’s cartoon series Thundercats. So was the comparison to the show – which featured humanoid cats battling evil mutants in the Earth’s distant future – intentional? Soca declined to comment.
Former Assembly Speaker Herb Wesson, D-Los Angeles, left, kicks Zhang Xiao Ju betweent the legs during a demonstration performed by Buddist monks at the Capitol in Sacramento. In their first visit to the United States, a group of Shaolin martial artists from SongShan, China, on Monday demonstrated acrobatic flips and shows of strength. With the monks urging him on, Wesson made several kicks to the monk, who showed no emotion.
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