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Photo: Sergey Teplyakov/vkontakte
Russian police does not take kindly to protests, even those carried out by toys and dolls:
Police in the Siberian city of Barnaul have asked prosecutors to investigate the legality of a recent protest that saw dozens of small dolls – teddy bears, Lego men, South Park figurines – arranged to mimic a protest, complete with signs reading: "I'm for clean elections" and "A thief should sit in jail, not in the Kremlin".
"Political opposition forces are using new technologies to carry out public events – using toys with placards at mini-protests," Andrei Mulintsev, the city's deputy police chief, said at a press conference this week, according to local media. "In our opinion, this is still an unsanctioned public event."
Link - via Metafilter
Doc Pop spent seven hours creating this LEGO diorama featuring Lt. Pike pepper-spraying a line of protesting UC Davis students. It was installed in one the many abandoned newspaper bins in San Francisco. Someone removed it less than four hours later, but the photographs remain. Link -via Boing Boing
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We knew the Occupy Wall Street movement was widespread when we saw it had reached the Arctic tundra, but now it has been confirmed on the other end of the world as well! The protests have officially reached all seven continents. Link -via The Daily What
Students at Caltech didn’t do much public protesting against the Vietnam War or the draft or the voting age, but on January 6, 1968 they found time to rally for something dear to their hearts.
In what some observers suggest may be the emergence of the college’s social conscience, the enraged students voiced opposition to rumored canceling of NBC’s science fiction series Star Trek.
“It Is Totally Illogical to Cancel Star Trek,” read the sign of one bespectacled protester…
A nationwide campaign kept the series on TV for one more year. Link -via Buzzfeed
(Image credit: Harry Chase/Los Angeles Times Archive/UCLA)
This photograph, titled “The Peeple vs. Scott Walker” was posted by @escapetochengdu with no comment as to its origin. With Peeps diorama contests taking entries at several newspapers, it might even win a prize! Link -via Everlasting Blort
The Big Picture blog has a historic collection of forty images from the past two days in Cairo. Demonstrators heard rumors that president Mubarak would step down Thursday. The Egyptian president then delivered a speech in which he announced he was staying in office. Finally, on Friday he resigned from the presidency. This picture was taken only hours ago, after Mubarak handed power over to the military. Link
(Image credit: Dylan Martinez/Reuters)
Fed up with the ever-increasing cost of higher education, University of Colorado student Nic Ramos decided to pay his $14,000 tuition in cash. Specifically, with $1 bills:
You don’t often get to go to banks and walk out with a suitcase full of cash … Nic Ramos said staff were ”not too pleased” at having to count $14,000 in single dollar bills.
Link [self-starting video clip]
Alton Towers is a popular theme park in Staffordshire, England. The resort recently opened a thrill ride called the Carnival of Screams, featuring “killer clowns” that reach for visitors. However, the new attraction is touching a sore spot with clowns, who are protesting at the park’s gates.
One protestor, Fips the Clown, said: ”We are protesting because we feel the Alton Towers Resort’s new horror maze, Carnival of Screams, is an unfair depiction of clowns.
”It only serves to reinforce stereotypes of clowns as evil.
”I can’t believe this – it has taken us years to get over Stephen King’s ‘IT’ and now this just adds to further damage the reputation of clowns worldwide.
”This will do for clowns what Jaws did for sharks.”
The Carnival of Screams will only be open from October 16 through the 31st. Link -via Arbroath
What’s a fashionista to wear to a neighborhood protest? I mean, if you’ve ever had to find a jacket that matches a Molotov cocktail, then you’d understand the fashion dilemma.
Well, the Man may still be a force to be reckoned with, but fashion faux pas is no longer an issue with this: C.O.P. Suit, a personal protest wear by Elena Gianni, Benoit Espinola, and Ulrik A. Hogrebe, students of the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design:
Life can get messy when you don’t see eye to eye. For the easily disgruntled, the C.O.P. suit aims to be both armor and mode of disruption, offering not only protection but also a means of voicing your discontent. Inspired by the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, the “personalized protest wear” is also completely self-powered. It uses kinetic energy from common protesting gestures (fist pumping, chest thumping, baton swinging) to power the built-in megaphone, making rioting “hard on the ears, but easy on the conscience,” according to its inventors.
Need picketers to goose up your protest? You can hire picketers – yes, demonstrators-for-hire that march wherever you want them to march and chant whatever you want them to chant.
That in itself may be a smart solution, but when you’re a labor union protesting the hiring of non-union workers, then that’s just a whole ‘nother level of irony:
Billy Raye, a 51-year-old unemployed bike courier, is looking for work.
Fortunately for him, the Mid-Atlantic Regional Council of Carpenters is seeking paid demonstrators to march and chant in its current picket line outside the McPherson Building, an office complex here where the council says work is being done with nonunion labor.
"For a lot of our members, it’s really difficult to have them come out, either because of parking or something else," explains Vincente Garcia, a union representative who is supervising the picketing.
So instead, the union hires unemployed people at the minimum wage—$8.25 an hour—to walk picket lines. Mr. Raye says he’s grateful for the work, even though he’s not sure why he’s doing it. "I could care less," he says. "I am being paid to march around and sound off."
Jennifer Levitz of the Wall Street Journal reports: Link
The city of Reykjavik, Iceland held an election, and the Best Party won. In a multi-party election, the Best Party took 34.7% of the vote, more than any other. That means the party founder, comedian Jon Gnarr is now mayor. Gnarr formed the party to satirize the political system. In his campaign, he promised a polar bear for the zoo and a drug-free Parliament (by 2020). He now leads a city of 320,000 120,000 people.
In his acceptance speech he tried to calm the fears of the other 65.3 percent. “No one has to be afraid of the Best Party,” he said, “because it is the best party. If it wasn’t, it would be called the Worst Party or the Bad Party. We would never work with a party like that.”
With his party having won 6 of the City Council’s 15 seats, Mr. Gnarr needed a coalition partner, but ruled out any party whose members had not seen all five seasons of “The Wire.”
Gnarr attributes the win to voters protesting the established parties. Link -via reddit
(Image credit: Hordur Sveinsson)
Like its name said, Angry People In Local Newspaper blog documents stories about people in small towns and cities who made newsprint because they’re angry about something.
It’s a blog by a journalist with nom de blog Scaryduck, who says "I feel sorry for local news photographers. They are hugely skilled and poorly paid, and sent out to photograph miserable people pointing at dog turds. Here, we celebrate their work"
This photo above are of people in Potts Point, New South Wales, Australia, protesting against "hoons." (There, I looked it up for you.)
Now let’s celebrate and visit the blog that will never ever run out of source material: Link (Photo: Alan Place / Wentworth Courier)
From the NeatoShop: Angry Mob Playset
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How can you make basketball more fun? Just add donkeys!
Donkey basketball is a popular annual event at the Snohomish High School in Washington. The donkeys themselves seem to have a good time, but not everybody’s tickled at the fun:
But not everyone thinks it’s fun and games. Animal rights activists quietly protested outside, saying it’s simply cruel.
"The donkeys are pushed, kicked, shoved, and prodded to do something that is unnatural for them and confusing," said protester David Schirk.
Some say the event is bad enough, but having it at a school makes it worse.
"I think it sends a really bad message to children on how to raise them and cruelty to animals and to all beings, and what does that teach our children?" said protester Carol Guilbault.
The Westboro Baptist Church {wiki} held a demonstration in front of the Twitter office in San Francisco on Thursday. Even more people showed up for a counter protest, featuring the best protest signs I’ve ever seen. See more signs at Laughing Squid. Link
(image credit: Rubin Starset)
The week before Thanksgiving, a woman named Michelle Deferio stood on a street corner on Syracuse University campus holding a sign proclaiming that homosexuality is a sin. That required a response, thought Chris Pesto, a junior drama major, who mounted a counterprotest of sorts:
Today (Wednesday, November 18th) I left my voice lesson and noticed two adults on campus holding signs that said “Homosexuality is a sin”. First, I would just like to say that I support people with their own opinions. I think that everyone is entitled to their right to think what they want. However, when someone comes on my campus, where I pay tuition to live, I don’t think it’s appropriate to rub such a hateful sign in someone’s face. I decided that because this woman thought it was okay to make me feel uncomfortable in my home, I would retaliate and make her feel just as uncomfortable, if not more.
This woman was wearing a ankle-length corduroy skirt, which, as we all know, is a fashion nono. So, in order to make her feel uncomfortable, I stood next to her and held a sign that said Corduroy skirts are a sin! I don’t think I have ever drawn so much attention in my life. SO many people asked to take a picture with me, I got laughs, high fives and there were the few that even cursed off the woman standing behind me.
fbomb blog has the story: Link - via Miss Cellania
Angry farmers took to the streets to protest low food prices in Brussels, Belgium. They dumped milk into the streets and threw eggs. One pictures shows a farmer aiming streams of milk directly from a cow’s udder onto policemen.
The protest organizers, the European Milk Board, said that more than 1,000 tractors and 5,000 people took part on behalf of “more than 80,000 dairy farmers”.
The group said milk prices are below 75 percent of production costs. Another European farm union organization, Copa-Cogeca, says that milk prices have plummeted 30 percent in a year and that dairy producers will lose up to 14 billion euros before the end of the year if nothing is done.
See the awesome full version of this cropped picture at the New York Times. Link -via Buzzfeed
(image credit: Georges Gobet/Agence France-Presse)
Well, today is the day. A week ago, Urlesque blog dared the Interweb to ban posts about cats.
Well, that ain’t right – so us Neatorama folks decided to stage a counter protest. To restore the cosmic balance caused by the lack of posts about cats today, we will post about cats, cats, and more cats!
Here are a few from the archives of the blog to kick start the whole thing:
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Patrick Abbazia attends his class bound in blue duct tape. He’s not doing it just to be weird – instead, he’s protesting a strange policy of the East Shore Middle School in Milford Connecticut: a "no-touching’ policy that bans physical contact between students!
"Going down the halls it is so cramped that it is hard not to touch anyone," Amanda Bollano said. "But if it is accidental, they won’t do anything. If it is intentional, you might get detention."
Patrick Abbazia said that he and his friends like to give each other "knuckles" and to high-five, and that to ban those actions — when fighting is the problem — doesn’t seem right.
"My mom says it’s not good for a person to go all day without touching,” the eighth-grader said.
(Photo: B.K. Angeletti / Connecticut Post)
Pramod Mutalik, who heads the little known Ram Sena and is now on bail after he was held following the attack, has said it is “not acceptable” for women to go to bars in India.
He has also said his men will protest against Valentine’s Day on Saturday.
The Facebook group urges its over 28,000 members to send pink chaddis (underpants) to Mutalik’s office on Valentines Day in protest. Link to story. Link to website. -via Arbroath
