Twenty-five years ago today, the Sex Pistols gained fame by casting aspersions on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Queen of England. We are all officially old.
Archive > October 2002
He supervises a sixty-six million dollar a year industry. He condemns gambling but enjoys horse racing. He blames upholding laws regarding the separation of church and state as the cause of the September 11th attacks against the United States, but accepted a recent ‘faith based initiative’ grant from the Bush administration. Also shortly after September 11th he called Mohamed “a killer” – but then again in 1991, he said Methodists, Presbyterians and Episcopalians reflect “the spirit of the Antichrist.” He solicited millions of dollars in charitable donations from his television show, then invested the money in his for-profit South African diamond mine. Who is he? Pat Robertson. Where did this information come from? Americans United for Separation of Church and State. What does all this make me want to do? Oh, I don’t know…
On this day (29 October 1984) a Los Angeles businessman, identified only as Arnold G., proposed marriage to his girlfriend Carol and asked her parents for their consent. After the engagement had been announced, Carol’s father took Arnold aside and confided that his daughter had been born by artificial insemination because he was unlikely to father a child. He named the sperm bank, to which Arnold had donated as a student. Arnold obtained a court injunction to inspect the records and found that he was the father of his bride-to-be, and of 806 other children. The wedding was called off. Source? Fortean Times, of course.
Pleasant links to James Burke, James Burke links to Pleasant, which brings us to steam engines.
At Long Last… The all new Yawning Animals page!
Why do we need each other’s criticism, responsible skepticism, and a commitment to science? How about this…
What a pleasant year it has been!
Do you like made-up pulp book covers? I know I do. Here are some for you.
“An experiment in which crabs were subjected to microgravity in a diving plane could one day help robots and humans work better in space.” Or provide the best read-it-in-your-1920s-radio-voice headline in weeks. Shoes for industry!
Hey Kenna, let’s find some films by this guy and watch them.
Two Japanese telecoms giants have developed technology that turns the human body into a broadband-paced link that allows e-mail addresses to be exchanged through a simple handshake, a report said Monday. The technology, developed by Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corp. and its subsidiary NTT DoCoMo Inc., uses the body’s conductivity and adds the smarts of a personal digital assistant (PDA), the Nihon Keizai Shimbun said. A device attached to a PDA can send and receive weak electrical signals through people, with human bodies as communications circuits, the paper said, citing sources close to the companies. Apparel and handbags have their own conductivity, allowing an electrical connection to a PDA that can remain in one’s pocket, the paper said. In this way, people can exchange e-mail addresses, names and phone numbers while shaking hands, with the data automatically written into both their PDAs, the paper said. The companies have confirmed in an experiment that data can be transmitted at 10 megabits per second, comparable to the speed of a broadband Internet connection, it said.” I said ‘kreepy-kewl.’
How many books are there about gay homeless men finding long-term love and sexual fulfilmnet? At least one.
“This is a formula, a master plot, for any 6000 word pulp story. It has worked on adventure, detective, western and war-air. It tells exactly where to put everything. It shows definitely just what must happen in each successive thousand words. No yarn of mine written to the formula has yet failed to sell.”
Richard Dawkins said: “Anybody who thinks Joe DiMaggio was a cricketer has to be ignorant, stupid, or insane (probably ignorant), and you wouldn’t think me arrogant for saying so. It is not intolerant to remark that flat-earthers are ignorant, stupid, or (probably) insane. It’s just true. The difference is that not many people think Joe DiMaggio was a cricketer, or that the Earth is flat, so it isn’t worth calling attention to their ignorance. But, if polls are to be believed, 100 million U.S. citizens believe that humans and dinosaurs were created within the same week as each other, less than ten thousand years ago. This is more serious. People like this have the vote, and we have George W. Bush (with a little help from his friends in the Supreme Court) to prove it. They dominate school boards in some states. Their views flatly contradict the great corpus of the sciences, not just biology but physics, geology, astronomy, and many others. It is, of course, entirely legitimate to question conventional wisdom in fields that you have bothered to mug up first. That is what Einstein did, and Galileo, and Darwin. But our hundred million are another matter. They are contradicting—influentially and powerfully—vast fields of learning in which their own knowledge and reading is indistinguishable from zero.”
At least as of this very second, the BBC is not online. Not in the sense of technical difficulties – in the sense that this address is going to another page. Looks like someone forgot to pay the bill.
According to station KATU, internal e-mail from the Eugene, Oregon Police Department shows that “Mechanics [...] found themselves repairing video cameras on patrol cars over and over again – and believed the officers were sabotaging the equipment to avoid oversight of their work [...]” The Wobblies always said direct action gets the goods, but I can’t think of many times before now that the police could be considered privacy advocates. Do police have the right to ‘privacy’ on the job? Does anybody? Where do you draw the line?
Nutters With Attitude is ‘a collection of “mad music” from the UK pressure group Mad Pride, consisting of twenty artists/groups with a wide range of styles and music. Mad Pride works with many musicians, and regularly organizes benefit concerts, including the Mad Pride Free Festival in North East London which attracted several thousand psychiatric patients/survivors/punk fans in the Summer of 2000. Mad Pride claims that this CD collection proves their claim that “madness is the new rock ‘n’ roll”.‘ Mad Pride appears to be closed but archived. You can still get the CD, though.
