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The Sporadic Chronicle
Fight silliness - buy Danish products.
12 Feb 2006
When religion meets quackery we get Rose Grail Elixir:
This is a proprietary formula that can not be duplicated. ... most sacred formula was given to an Ordained Priestess of The Holy Rose Grail in a vision by Mother Mary ... begins the re-encoding of the two physical DNA strands with the complete Divine Template of the Adam Kadmon. When this happens, it is the beginning of complete transmutation/metamorphosis into a Luminous Ascended Being reflecting the Golden Flame of the Christ.
Testimonials proclaim remarkable effects including "energy surging through me exploding into golden particles that shone like a starburst filling me and my auric field with an intense brightness that I had never seen or felt before…..a truly remarkable experience!" Now available at only $33 + shipping for a small bottle.
08 Feb 2006
Surreal tragedy of the day: "Four Die In Afghan Cartoon Riot". Of all the things to die over.

08 Feb 2006
In an article sadly plagued by the word "boffin", up pops a tired old stereotype of technical people:
Mumbling, avoiding eye contact, talking to their shoes - [their] biggest challenge can often be talking to another human being.
They can decipher the most complicated equation but trying to work out the social etiquette required to converse with someone else leaves them baffled - and making small talk can be plain scary. ...
Ridiculous. It's ages since I've had to figure out a complicated equation.
05 Feb 2006
Some accidents are stranger than others. For example, Boston's great molasses flood and the London beer flood were fairly strange. But neither was quite as strange as the unfortunate incident of the oil drillers, the lake, and the salt mine:
As the freshwater poured in through the original 14-inch-wide hole, it quickly dissolved the salt away, making the hole grow bigger by the second. The water pouring into the mine also dissolved the huge salt pillars which supported the ceilings, and the shafts began to collapse. ...
Meanwhile, up on the surface, the tremendous sucking power of the whirlpool was causing violent destruction. It swallowed another nearby drilling platform whole, as well as a barge loading dock, 70 acres of soil from Jefferson Island, trucks, trees, structures, and a parking lot. ...
Within two days, what had previously been an eleven-foot-deep freshwater body was replaced with a 1,300-foot-deep saltwater lake.
Whoops. Fortunately - unlike in the beer and molasses floods - nobody was killed, so I'm sure everyone involved can look back on it today and laugh.
03 Feb 2006
Another news story shaking the country today is the shock revelation that the US and UK had made really quite detailed plans to invade Iraq as much as 7 weeks before actually doing it. Astounding, I know!
But the dastardly plottings didn't stop there. Oh no, not by a long way. The bellicose Texan had other plans afoot, including "flying U2 reconnaissance aircraft planes with fighter cover over Iraq, painted in UN colours". Mr Bush added: "If Saddam fired on them, he would be in breach [of UN resolutions]". If "painting a U2 in UN colours" means providing the UN with a U2 - and I don't see what else it can realistically mean - then firing on such a flight would indeed be a breach of UN resolutions, as Security Council resolution 1441 makes clear:
UNMOVIC and the IAEA shall have the free and unrestricted use and landing of fixed- and rotary-winged aircraft, including manned and unmanned reconnaissance vehicles...
...while the covering letter from Hans Blix and Mohamed ElBaradei says "On the question of aerial imagery, UNMOVIC may wish to resume the use of U-2 or Mirage overflights". Hmmm... U2 overflights the maverick cowboy warmonger was almost too keen to help with. Is there no tactic to which Bush will not stoop?
Expect this scandal to be headline news for weeks.
03 Feb 2006
One of the concerns of those opposed to the publication of the Danish cartoons is that depicting Mohammed with a bomb-shaped turban reinforces a "crazed Muslim terrorist" sterotype. Given signs brandished by some of the demonstrators outside the Danish and French embassies in London today, I suggest that Danish cartoonists should be the least of Muslims' worries about creating impressions of violent zealotry: I don't doubt that many or most protestors were expressing disapproval quite legitimately, but clearly some were inciting and threatening severe violence. Meanwhile, a leading terrorism law expert warns that "Further suicide bombings in the UK must be expected". Gosh, that's a shock - thank goodness for expert insight.
03 Feb 2006
The Cartoon Affair gets ever more heated - now even Mandy's sticking his oar in. Newspapers in Germany, Italy, Holland Spain and France join the Scandanavians but so far the British media seems to be avoiding the subject: even the "Cartoon row in pictures" thing on the BBC website studiously avoids showing us what the fuss is all about. Here, so you can judge for yourselves, are the 12 cartoons (source - Brussels Journal):
[Please note I am an Equal Opportunities Blasphemer, in which capacity I also present to you the balloon Jesus, gory Jesus and fatty Jesus from 'Jesus Of The Week', the somewhat rubbish 'Jesus - The Teenage Years', and not forgetting 'Piss Christ' - a 20 year old depiction of Jesus submerged in human urine]
The Jyllands-Posten cartoons
So now you know. Oh, and it's a sad reflection on the standard of journalism that some of the best background to this whole business is to be found on the amateur Wikipedia:
Jyllands-Posten commissioned and published the cartoons in response to the inability of Danish writer Kåre Bluitgen to find artists to illustrate his children's book about Muhammad, for fear of violent attacks by extremist Muslims.
Point made.
01 Feb 2006
Do you have alien implants in your ears? Features readers' tales of alien implants, including the classic lines "I had an implant come out of my left nostril a few years ago", and "In the holistic healing circles that I move in, [alien] ear implants seem to be pretty common."
01 Feb 2006
The loons at The Truth Seeker explain how Tony Blair stifles dissent by using "subliminal messages passed through cellular and digital phones, assisted by networks of towers used for bio-neurological invasive techniques and mind control, in preparation of police state manipulation programmes, so mental castration is compulsory, and there will be no crime or desire for change."

That's certainly a constant worry.
31 Jan 2006
Libya's shutting its embassy and gunmen are raiding offices, while the Saudis are recalling their ambassador and starting a boycott, all because a man was portrayed in cartoon format:
there had been calls for boycotting Danish products in Friday prayers and on Saudi television and in newspapers.
What do the Danes sell to Saudi Arabia in boycottable quantities anyway... bacon???

So it's boycotts is it? In that case I shall buy Danish products wherever possible as an anti-silliness measure. For that matter, I'll try to get round to posting some cack-handed cartoons of prophets and deities to see if I can draw some fire from the plucky Danes.
29 Jan 2006
According to assorted crazy people, the Earth is variously hollow, is not moving or is getting bigger.
29 Jan 2006
As Google decides to censor itself to please the Chinese government, compare and contrast a Google UK search for images of Tiananmen Square, versus a Google China search for images of Tiananmen Square.

How do they put it in the Google philosophy: "You can make money without doing evil. ... The need for information crosses all borders"

Quite.
26 Jan 2006
Seen on DVD: 'The Sea Hawk'. Possibly the first Errol Flynn film I've seen, and it was wonderful - I haven't enjoyed a film quite so much in years. It's got pretty much everything anyone could want in a film: swordfights, people swinging from ship to ship on the rigging, a boo-hiss baddy, swordfights, intrigue, a monkey, and more swordfights. At one point Errol's crossing swords with four soldiers in a corridor. It was all looking a bit dicey for him until he stabbed one and knocked the others over by throwing a chair at them.
Take that! Hero and villain, locked in mortal combat.
The outcome, of course, is never in any doubt: Errol Flynn singlehandedly saves England from the Armada. Now that's what I call great cinema.
26 Jan 2006
Yesterday evening I went to see Kevin Warwick talk at Hatfield. You may remember Kevin Warwick - or "Captain Cyborg" - as that guy who stuck an RFID chip in his arm, plugged some electrodes in his nerves, claimed to the "the world's first cyborg" and announced that watching 'Richard and Judy' makes you cleverer.

Now some people say that Kevin is a headline-grabbing publicity-junky whose work is not as groundbreaking as he makes it appear. They point out that the RFID chip he put in his arm was no different from the ones which had been implanted in cats and dogs for years, that his brief nerve-electrode study pales in comparison to widely deployed and permanently embedded heart pacemakers and cochlear implants for the deaf, and that his claim to be able to implant children with tracking devices was technically impossible and ethically dubious.

Kevin's supporters say that he is a genius visionary (for example, here's Kevin doing some serious cybernetics research), he's often on television, and Warner Brothers trusted him to write a puff piece for 'The Matrix' describing it as a plausible scenario. And the man himself points out that no lesser authority than the X-File's Gillian Anderson described him as "Britain's leading prophet of the Robot Age", which ought to settle it.

Clearly, seeing him talk was not an unintentional comic goldmine I could afford to miss.

The talk was a strange mixture. It told me nothing about his own implants I didn't already know from reading the news at the time, briefly mentioned some serious and interesting therapeutic work other people have done connecting electronics to the human nervous system, and veered into wild speculation about the future. The future according to Kevin will be ruled by cyborgs, with plain old ordinary humans relegated to a subordinate subspecies. He revealed that as a cyborg with your brain connected - in some totally unspecified way - to the network, your mind could be "wherever the internet takes it". Among the benefits of this, he said you would be able to: Also he showed lots of 'Kevin meets celebrities' TV clips, including one of him on CNN asking Will Smith - star of 'I, Robot' - how he'd like to be cybernetically enhanced. Clearly, this establishes his expertise and eminence in this domain.

Oh, and he said the government phoned him the other day asking about the possibility of giving people RFID chip implants instead of passports. But he told us not to tell anyone he said that, because he'll "just deny all knowledge".

The man really is quite potty.

* I have no idea what he meant by this. He explained that when physicists want to solve a 10-dimensional problem they get a computer to do it. This means computers understand more dimensions than humans do, so when you become a cyborg you can harness this power to think in more dimensions. I am deeply unconvinced by this for a whole sackful of reasons, but mainly just puzzled why he stopped at "thinking in five dimensions". Why not 6, or 8, or 10? Possibly he's done some rigorous study which reveals 5 to be an upper limit on the dimensional understanding of cyborgs. Yes, that's probably it - either that or he just wildly plucked a number out of mid-air.
24 Jan 2006
Crazy man Greg Szymanski has been deep within the bowels of the Vatican looking for the devious plans, lies and mind control of the secret world government.
I remember sneaking around the Vatican, on one occasion taking a flight of stairs down to the basement level in search of the secret room and the catacombs. ... "One night alone in this place and I know I could break the biggest story in my lifetime," I thought to myself... That particular day after trying to uncover the exact location of the Illuminati's secret induction ceremonies, I stopped for cheese and a glass of white wine...
There's nothing more refreshing than cheese and wine after a hard day of trying to locate the Illuminati's secret room.
24 Jan 2006
Finally the government acts to protect children from the haggis menace.
19 Jan 2006
FleshEatingBacteria.net: the tale of one man and his necrotising fasciitis.
Warning: don't click on his picture links if you're squeamish.
18 Jan 2006
Having covered the "William Shatner to sell his kidney stone" story, I feel morally obliged to mention that William Shatner has sold his kidney stone:
Star Trek actor William Shatner has sold his kidney stone for $25,000 (£14,000) to an online casino, to raise money for a housing charity.
£14,000 for a piece of bodily waste. That's the mark of a true legend.
the auction price includes the surgical stint and string used to permit passage of the stone.
<Expression of blank incomprehending horror>
16 Jan 2006
There's confrontation and shenanigans in Antarctica with Greenpeace members getting themselves knocked overboard:
"We were out defending the whales. We have been out there for about an hour. I was driving our boat and we were in a good position and the whaler fired its harpoon” ... As the harpoon line tightened, the boat's driver, Canadian activist Texas Joe Constantine was thrown overboard. ...
"We were in a good position": directly between the harpoon gun and its target is a good position? No - it's a stupid position. Just consider that statement applied to other situations: If you go out of your way to put yourself in front of harpoon guns you are going to get harpooned, and you'll have only yourself to blame when it happens.

Note that though Greenpeace and others describe Japan's whaling as "illegal", this isn't true:
Neither [the Australian nor New Zealand] government has legal grounds to stop the whaling ...
New Zealand's commissioner to the International Whaling Commission, former prime minister Geoffrey Palmer, said the annual slaughter of whales, although reprehensible, was not illegal. "We have been looking at the legal theories that are available against the Japanese for some months ... and there is no legal theory that is available that can prevent, in our view, the Japanese from doing what they are doing," Sir Geoffrey said.
Some people, when threatening to ram whalers, ought to remember that those ships are armed. Otherwise this could all get extremely ugly.
14 Jan 2006
For some reason I seem to be in the address book of William Shatner's PR agent. Josh Silberstein of Fullturn Media e-mailed me on Wednesday to let me know that William Shatner will be hosting the Golden Groundhog Awards on the 2nd of February, so I thought I'd better let you all know:
this year Hollywood is gearing up for what promises to be a momentous date. That's because on February 2nd, the highly coveted Golden Groundhog will be awarded to the Best Underground Movie of 2005. The Golden Groundhog Awards were established to recognize genuinely outstanding films that lacked the distribution and marketing support needed to become the blockbuster hits they deserved to be. It was announced today that the awards ceremony will be hosted by William Shatner, an actor who has enjoyed tremendous success on the silver screen, but who also knows from firsthand experience that great films can fall through the cracks.
I swear I'm not making this up.
12 Jan 2006
At long last, someone gets round to tackling the world's fluorescent pig shortage:
Taiwan, home to the world's first transgenic glowing fish, has successfully bred fluorescent green pigs that researchers hope will boost the island's stem cell research ... "There are partially fluorescent green pigs elsewhere, but ours are the only ones in the world that are green from inside out. Even their hearts and internal organs are green," [Professor] Wu said.
I wonder if they can work out a way to make them flash on and off? That would be cool. Creepy and wrong, but cool.
11 Jan 2006
Anthony is running an effort to send medical and pharmacy books to Iraq, which you may wish to consider supporting.
11 Jan 2006
Schoolchildren's drawings provide an inspirational message of international harmony and peace.
09 Jan 2006
The Lumberjack World Championships feature events such as women’s underhand chop, springboard chopping, the 60 foot traditional climb and boom run.
09 Jan 2006
I can't quite believe someone invented these:
Meet the Bible Bar – This fantastic-tasting, all natural whole food bar contains the seven foods which the Lord calls good in Deuteronomy 8:8 - Wheat, Barley, Honey, Figs, Olive Oil, Grapes, and Pomegranates.
It's natural, it's raw, it's theologically pure:
The Bible Bar bar is unbaked and contains no additives or artificial ingredients. ... Each bar is bursting with God-given nutrients...
It's an ideal sin-free pick-me-up between meals:
The Bible Bar is a great way to control hunger pangs while still providing your body with the highest level of biblical nutrition.
And they should keep you biblically regular, too.
08 Jan 2006
How to cook a turkey in a steel dustbin. You never know when that sort of information might come in handy.
Via the Meatriarchy.
08 Jan 2006
The Principality Of Camside seems to be the invention of a disaffected Australian who's declared war on the government of Australia. He's also launched a couple of constitutional court cases which have failed in spectacular fashion. For a fee you can register your business and apply for citizenship in his funny little made-up country.
Psychic chanelling and aliens are also mentioned.
07 Jan 2006
Horsham District Council has a "recurrent problem of some of the red bins [for dog poo] being filled to overflowing", allegedly because of people scooping up dog poo in their gardens, then carrying it all the way to the poo bin instead of just putting it in their own bins. This might warrant the deployment of CCTV to identify persistent offenders because, as the spokesman explains...
"We don't want overflowing bins because it messes up the emptying schedules. We have to do extra runs to take the waste away, and it's costing us time and resources. It's not the biggest issue but it's one of those niggly little things that causes operational difficulties."
Now, if I were in charge and some bins were overflowing I'd install larger bins. It must take years spent at Council Training School to learn that the correct response is the installation of CCTV to identify offenders - assuming such offenders even exist, and the bins in question don't happen to be on a popular route for walking lots of especially well-fed dogs.
04 Jan 2006
Cat calls the police, saves the day. Top quote:
"I know it sounds kind of weird," Officer Patrick Daugherty said, unsuccessfully searching for some other explanation.
Via the invaluable Fortean Times Breaking News.
03 Jan 2006
Wonderful picture from Saturn at Astronomy Picture Of The Day.
03 Jan 2006
I really can't believe someone actually invented this:
The RailDriver desktop cab controller replaces the keyboard for Train Simulator and gives players the tactile feedback that prototype engineers so heavily depend on when operating real locomotives. Let's take a look at the RailDriver and see how it might affect your Train Simulator experience.
The "Train Simulator experience"? That's just the beginning. A truly devoted player can get an entire cab.
02 Jan 2006
Ben Goldacre's Bad Science is full of good stuff at the moment including a couple of corkers about newspaper science reporting and wine magnetisers. On a different "Bad Science" note, there's Bad Science Projects ("The Scientific Method Gone Horribly Wrong").
02 Jan 2006
Umbrellas, umbrellas, umbrellas, lots and lots of umbrellas everywhere.
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