The great escape

A bear in a Berlin zoo made it past several barricades while trying to escape. He was finally taken down by a zoo attendant with a tranquelizer gun.

Check out the incident with the bicycle.

Anime is coming

Cool article on Anime and how Japanese animation is about to blow America's mind.

C'mon, haven't you seen Princess Mononoke or Akira or Ninja Scroll? If not, please go rent them. (You'll probably want to buy Princess Mononoke.)

Also, an intersting story in here about how the Wachowski brothers used the one of my favorite anime movies to get Hollywood to pony up for The Matrix movies.

Ghost in the Shell rocks! And holy crap, you have got to see the trailer for Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence!

Legos man, Legos...

steelbuddha is right about the Lego-chadnezzar; it is incredible.

Why airline security sucks

People are scared, again. With the bombing of two commercial airline flights in Russia, people around the world are scared that their airport security sucks. And they're probably right.

The problem with airport security, besides being mostly run and staffed by inadequate people doing an near incompetent job is the way searches are conducted, which is randomly. When you are flying, you go through about two to four searches, most of them randomly. That means that, in my case in France at CDG Airport, you have an anti-social , pre-op transvestite woman who can't get laid and probably has trouble putting her navy blue security uniform on every morning calling the shots on just who the hell gets searched on the tarmac before boarding the plane. And if Lola the CDG security officer only decides to search people with passports from countries other than France and steal - err- confiscate their lovingly searched for and valuable souvenirs while letting someone who may be carrying a fake French passport or even be a French citizen with a bomb to grind with their home country get through to blow-up the plane, well that's not so good, is it?

If you have not realized it yet, airport security is playing a random, roulette wheel of chance with your life as you are about to take to the not-so-friendly skies. And this doesn't only happen in France, but here in America, too.

And to think that all they would have to do to prevent a passenger from boarding a plane with a bomb or weapons is to search every single passenger. Not randomly search the little old Irish-American grandma or the young adult manchild of Middle Eastern descent. Just search every bloody person flying on the damn plane. You see, when my life and the life of my loved ones are at stake, I don't like to leave anything to chance. But airport security does. What do they care? All of their little lives they've had to take what other people give them and make next to nothing for doing a thankless job that they may not even be qualified to perform. Sure they're going to take away your tiny metallic swan salt and pepper shakers, porcelain provincial spoon holder, and little Eiffel Tower key chains away from you as you get your wife's hysterically crying American ass, and your own, out of their beautiful country and with a particularly bad taste left in your mouth that is definitely French in origin.

Goodbye, and don't let the airplane door hit you in the ass on the way into the plane.

And it is such a comfort to know that after your souvenirs have been confiscated for being weapons, and after your wife's tears have dried, and after your thimble-full of complimentary scotch warms your insides, that you are presented with a lovely lunch that you can eat. With stainless steel serrated knife and fork. Uh, I'm sorry, but where I come from, a metal knife that can cut into cooked flesh just may be considered a weapon. Unlike my lovely swan salt and pepper shaker which I'm sure adorns Lola the pre-op transvestite's shabby kitchen table. And I hope she chokes and dies alone while eating her dinner after putting too much pepper on her meal and is later fed upon by her five cats until someone discovers her days later, sprawled out on the kitchen floor in her lime green bathrobe and five-o'clock shadow.

Ahhhh. All better now. Have a nice flight.

Surviving the Apocalypse

Which Survivor of the Impending Nuclear Apocalypse Are You?
A Rum and Monkey joint.

Revenge

Revenge is a dish best served cold. - Old Klingon Proverb

I always knew revenge was sweet. Sure, I've seen those after school specials parading as movies about how revenge doesn't solve anything and I never bought it.

Revenge is justice. Justice is good. Feeling good makes you happy.

I don't believe that taking revenge is bad Karma. I see taking revenge as the wheel of Karma coming around to spank someone for a past iniquity.

And now studies show that the human brain truly finds revenge to be rewarding.

The Haiku Year

Check out The Haiku Year. I found this while hitting the "NEXT BLOG" button.

Cool. I love Haiku.

Wear a condom or else

Who cares if porn stars wear condoms? Do they have laws making morons wear helmets? What they need to do is have a law making it mandatory for stupid people to wear condoms so that they don't reproduce.

It's easy. You want to have a child. You go to take a test. If you score at idiot level on the sections Common Sense and Good Parenting, you fail the test and are issued condoms and not allowed to reproduce. If you pass, you can have a baby. This will prevent the mass proliferation of idiot-mongos from cutting you off in traffic, letting their unattended children run wild in the mall, and keeping their baby up in R rated movies at 10:30PM on a Friday night so they can cry for fifteen minutes after some guys head explodes on the screen. When people and their progeny act like this it makes me want to scream!

But porn stars? Let them do what they want. I mean, how many porn stars have you had personal contact with? Now think about how many times you've had to deal with asshole parents and their mongo children acting with no regard or respect for other people?

My idea doesn't sound so bad now, does it?

Americans slip into poverty

The Census Bureau reports that the number of Americans living in poverty has increased with 1.3 million people now joining the other Americans living in poverty in this country.

That's a lot of poor people.

And to make things even worse, the bureau also reports that over 1.4 million Americans no longer have health insurance.

Approximately 35.8 million people lived below the poverty line in 2003, or about 12.5 percent of the population, according to the bureau. That was up from 34.5 million, or 12.1 percent in 2002. - The Guardian

More news from the future

Designers and engineers are building homes that could be used in the future and will be tested in Antarctica. The builders are using the same materials that are used for spacecraft and their equipment and hoping to make them completely self-sufficient by installing a solar energy systems on the pods.

Check out the picture. How very Jetsons. I want a Jetson home. Or, at least, to live at Xanadu, the home of the future would be good.

I really want to live in Xanadu. Really. I want to lounge in quasi-futuristic clothing and sip martinis while slow dancing to Sinatra with my wife and watching 2001: A Space Odyssey on a large screen television. Ahhhh, that would be livin', wouldn't it?

Register to vote

I found a link to register to vote online at The System. The argument there in favor of Bush is one of the more intelligent ones I have read, but I disagree with it. I believe Kerry, because of his even entering the Army and being shipped off to Vietnam to serve instead of lying low in the National Guard, warrants my vote. That and his agenda on giving people the same government sponsored healthcare that congressmen get is a good idea. Why should the people who are our public servants get free healthcare when hardworking Americans have to pay large amounts of money for it or not even have insurance at all? That is a bit hypocritical, I think.

But it's a free country, or it used to be before the Patriot Act.

What it comes down to for me in this election is I'm voting on the guy I think would have my back in a bad situation, and could count on not to run away or screw me over. And I don't think Bush is that man. After we saw him freeze-up for more than five minutes in a classroom after learning that our country was under attack on 9/11, and after the WMD/Iraq fiasco, I have no faith in this president. (Did you just here Padme saying, " I call for a vote of no confidence in Chancellor Valorum"?) That, and the current administration's intolerant view on homosexual unions (I have known several homosexuals and they did not choose to like people of the same sex no more than I could choose to be attracted to women), ties to the Saudi royal family, and our ballooning debt are all other valid reasons for me not to vote for Bush.

Of course, I wish we had a candidate like General Wesley Clark as our president, or maybe even Jimmy Stewart in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, but General Clark just was not political enough and Jimmy Stewart is dead.

And just more proof that we really don't want change in this country, how the hell does a man who served in our armed forces in Vietnam, was promoted to a four-star general, graduated from the US Military Academy at West Point and received a Masters Degree in Politics, Philosophy, and Economics from Oxford not get to be president?

You can register to vote online at Working for Change. Be warned that after you fill out the information, you will have to print a .pdf and then sign and mail it to your state's electoral offices.

The oceans as a power source

It has been estimated that the world's oceans can produce enough electricity to meet the world's power needs. The problems with this are that not many people have tried this before and the maintenance of such generators is unknown. But quite a few energy companies are looking into ocean power and are currently building generators to harness electricity from waves.

Synaesthesia

Synaesthesia is a condition in which people associate words and numbers with colors or sounds, or other sensory information. There's an interesting article here.

It is also like this quiz I received in my email:
How much does:

15+ 6 =






3+ 56 =






89 + 2 =






12+ 53 =







75+ 26 =






25+ 52 =






63+ 32 =






I know! Calculations are hard work, but this is the real thing! Come on, a few more...





123+ 5 =






QUICK! THINK ABOUT A TOOL AND A COLOR!




Scroll further to the bottom...


A bit more...


Just a little further...


You have just thought about a red hammer, haven't you????


If this is not the case, you are among 2% of the people who have a "different," if not "abnormal," mind.

98% of the folks would answer a "red hammer" while doing this exercise.
If you do not believe this, pass it around and you'll see!

Mighty Mouse

Scientists have geneticly enhanced a mouse so it can now run farther and eat more without gaining weight.

I feel a Hulk moment coming on, hold the gamma radiation and pass the gene protiens.

The first rule of Fight Club is

You do not talk about Fight Club.

I guess I'm breaking the first rule. As I walked about my house at 6AM with a flashlight, aided by the occasional candle, and took a cold water shower, I realized that living in a house deprived of electricity because of hurricane Charley is much like living with Tyler Durden.

I know this because Tyler knows this.

Living in a world deprived of the creature comforts afforded those with electricity and hot water hardens you. You realize what the value of your fellow human beings is worth as you reflect on the assholes running stop signs and giving you a dirty look as if you were the offending party. You sit there in the heat of a Central Florida summer with your windows open and the radio on and your new tanto knife on the glass coffee table in case some shitheel looter/thief attempts a break-in (people have ben held-up at gun and knife point in Central Florida during this hurricane recovery period, but they keep it out of the news) and know that everything in your life is a sham; the electricity, television, entertainment, celebrity gossip, wars in foreign lands, crooked politicians, commercials, money, hot meals...You sit there sweating into your beautiful red sofa enjoying a cold beer from your new refrigerator, the cooler, and your anger and hate well-up inside your guts and you realize the extent of your contempt for everything not pure and right with the world. And I'm not talking about what the television and the business of religion tell you is morality, right and wrong. I'm talking about know in the marrow of your bones what is right and wrong.

And in this moment of cold water dowsing your hot, naked body and the out-rush of air from your lungs from the shock of the change in temperature on your skin, you know how much you hate this over-marketed, trendy-little world.

So, what I'm trying to say is that the Kissimmee Utilities Authority, along with Nick and Jessica, Britney, and every politician and insurance company, can bite me.

Why should I even bother?

What good is homeowner's insurance? The insurance companies don't have to pay out much for disasters in Florida, due to their lobbying of state politicians, and now we homeowners may also have to pay back in to a fund to "help" out the insurance agencies. I thought we paid insurance for the insurance agencies to help us out in a fix?

Hey, wanna know what? If you're thinking of moving to Florida from someplace else, stay there! This state has so many screwed-up laws that are always on the side of businesses and not people, that if you live here you get bent over and given the treatment on any given day of the week.


Aaarrrrrrrrggghhh!

The Scream has been stolen

Art thieves have stolen Munch's The Scream from an Oslo, Norway museum. And it appears that the painting was not insured for theft, either.

I bet someone's getting screamed at right now for that lapse in judgment.

SP2 is officially crap

After two weeks of people and companies gettting overly frustrated with the installation of Microsoft's SP2, it's official: Microsoft screwed up, again. The service pack is hard to get, messes with other programs that most people are running on their PCs, and even screws up corporate programs built, and dependent on Windows tech.

Nice going Microsoft. You just made Linux look a like a very viable alternative.

Stunt pilots to rescue stardust

NASA is employing stunt pilots to snag a capsule in mid-air. I'm sure this will work out better than when they employed Bruce Willis and his crew of drillers to save the world from meteors.

Man, I hated Armageddon.

More Solar Sails

Cosmos 1 is a spacecraft that will use a solar sail as a means of propulsion. This solar powered craft is a project of The Planetary Society and may be launched as soon as 2005.

If this intersts you, you could check out my previous post about solar sail technology.

Britney loses it

According to this site, Britney Spears goes cuckoo. The question that sent her over the edge had something to do with her mouth.

Waste not

Greenpeace has documented marine life that is destroyed as waste through heavy fishing in the North and Baltic seas. They hope to help bring about international fishing laws that could help stop endangering marine, and eventually human, life.

Bear drinks beer

A bear drank 36 cans of beer and passed out. The bear also passed up Busch beer for the Rainier brand beer.

There's a political joke in here somewhere...

Please leave a comment

I have recently added a comment feature to the site. Now you, too, can publish on the web by clicking the comments link at the bottom of each entry, near the date, which will take you to a page where you can leave a comment and read what others have to say.

So start commenting. This is the web. It is supposed to be interactive.

You can do it. I believe in you.

Buy a penis

A man wants money more than he wants to have sex ever again. He is selling his penis.

What is the going rate for a penis these days? I only know that we don't have a shortage of assholes, so those should be relatively cheap.

Holy Crap! It's Hurricane Charley!

Want to know what it's like to be in a house hit by a 105 mile-per-hour winds? Your house shakes and the ground, too, as you think you feel and hear a freight train rub against your roof and walls as it passes by you. If you look out the window all you can see is the swaying of trees and the occasional transformer exploding in whitish-blue light. Then you step away from the window and move to the part of the house without windows and say an Our Father and a Hail Mary.

We are alive and well. My house is in not-so-good-shape, though. But, considering the damage in my neighborhood and especially on my block, we made out alright. Almost every tree over ten years old has been uprooted, some of these trees were huge and probably a good sixty-plus years old. There are several sheds wrapped around trees or smashed against walls. You can see right into people's homes because they have no roof.

And we have no electricity. That means we can only charge our cell phones in the car while it is running, which you don't want to do because it is hard to find gas in Central Florida. And ice. I can't find any damn ice anywhere.

Last night my wife and the two beasts laid around our candle-lit living room with all the windows open and listened to the radio and the constant hum of gas-powered generators filling the neighborhood. We drank slightly chilled, but safe bottled water and white wine while we trashed the contents of what used to be our well-stocked refrigerator. It's amazing how much money you spend on glazes and condiments and produce. Later, I read Clive Barker's Weaveworld out loud while the dogs lay on the floor exhausted, enjoying the coolness of the tiles.

Welcome to the early Twentieth Century.

Even now, I am posting this from my PC at work. At least they have power. And a roof over their heads.

And I really am sorry about those people in Punta Gorda.

And I really hate most of the people in my neighborhood. I guess they don't understand that you have to treat intersections without traffic lights as a four-way stop and that you should drive a little slower and a bit more carefully due to the hundreds of trees that have fallen down and are spilling out into the road.

Man, I hate people.

Rat population cocaine problem

You'd think British scientist have better things to waste money on than finding that rats can get addicted to cocaine like humans.

This will definitely help the British with their rat-cocaine problem, but first they need to find the source. I think they should place some undercover agents to infiltrate the rat population and maybe set up a sting operation where an operative, posing as a rat, will try to buy cocaine from a rat drug dealer. After they arrest this rat, he will rat on the rat supplying him. Then, and only then, will the British be able to bring down the rat cocaine cartel.

Hurricane Charley Party

You know what you do when a hurricane comes to town? First you rush to the store to get batteries and flashlights and candles and canned food and non-perishable food items and liquor. Then you sit around and drink and wait for the power to go out and hope nothing really bad happens. I'll be getting to know Johnny Walker tonight as I brace for the storm. On second thought, I should drink my beer first because if we lose power then the frosty beverages will know longer be frosty. And anyway, you can drink scotch warm and without ice, but not beer. Unless you're from England.

Solar Sails

I first read about this idea about three years ago and wondered if they were ever going to go through with it: One of the ways a spacecraft could travel long distances without using up all of its fuel or having to carry a large fuel supply on the trip is by using large solar sails that use protons from the sun to push the craft through space. And the Japanese are currently testing solar sails for future space flights.

Baseball

Besides it being baseball season again, I can't explain why I have been watching so much baseball. I used to watch football, but they have so many damn commercials. Every time some football player grabs his crotch they have a round of commercials. If anyone from the NFL is reading this: Please stop having so many damn commercials because it slows down the game. At least in baseball you know it's supposed to be a long game. Plus baseball has the whole team effort thing in the field plus individual talent thing with the guys going to bat, and you don't have some monster getting injured every fifteen minutes, which only means more commercials. And baseball also has math in the batting averages and earned runs allowed averages, which I enjoy comparing.

And the Red Sox beat the Devil Rays last night. Again.

A further peak into my head

As if reading this bloody blog is not enough, here is what's making the ole cogs in the electro-chemical noodle twirl:

I'm reading Don DeLillo's Underworld and am in awe of his 60 page prologue that is like a long steady-cam take ala Scorsese in Goodfellas that encompasses a kid jumping a turnstyle to enter the Dodgers-Giants World Series in 1951, down on the field with the players, up in the press box, and in a box with Jackie Gleason, Frank Sinatra, and J. Edgar Hoover on the day that the Russians exploded their second atomic bomb. This is amazing writing like Ellroy on American Tabloid and Burroughs in Naked Lunch.

Also reading Carl Sagan's argument against the fantastic in The Demon Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark. Although he makes some valid points, I am not entirely convinced that just because we can't measure it or it explain it that it does not exist. Sure, there are some real looney toons out there, but you cannot ignore the repeated patterns of some of the strange things that people encounter around the world.

And I'm also reading Barry Glasner's The Culture of Fear, which is a look at how the media plays-up rare occurrences to "increase awareness" and fear, how certain organizations do not represent statistics properly, and how people with money can sway people's opinions with labeling and exaggeration. You know what I fear? Stupid people and Bush in a second term.

My goddamn rock solid ghetto shiznit name is

Fallopian Teapot, Yo.
What's yours?
Powered by Rum and Monkey.

Genocide or not?

Genocide: The deliberate and systematic destruction of a racial, political, or cultural group.

Maybe the European Union is not clear on just how the hell you define genocide in Sudan, especially when it is not at their doorstep like when it was happening in Croatia.

Gorilla asks for help

No, this is not the movie Congo (what was Laura Linney thinking?).

Koko, a gorilla that knows sign language communicated to her handlers that she had a pain in her mouth.

Rockstars for Democracy

If you like acts like Pearl Jam, Dave Matthews Band, and the Dixie Chicks, then you can attend a concert to support the voting of Bush out of office (provided his friends don't find a way to illegally re-elect him again).

Go to the MoveOn PAC page and check it out. You can register for advance ticket purchases, too.

For you Florida residents: Pearl Jam is coming to Kissimmee and the Dave Matthews Band are going to Gainesville.

Mandelbrot challenges financial institutions

Benoît Mandelbrot, mathematician and father of the fractal, has written an open letter to the financial institutions of the world to create a more far-ranging economic theory to bolster the world economy against falling markets and crashes.

Missing your dead pet?

Clone him. A company that claims they have cloned kittens says it would gladly clone your pet for a very nice fee.

More freedom

IBM is forwarding the Open Source movement by encouraging other companies to not to take legal action against Open Sourced technologies that may infringe upon patents.

African Hero thrown in prison by US

Richard Sita is a hero. I don't like to use the "h" word, but it seems to warrant use when it comes to Mr. Sita. What else do you call a guy who risked his life and was tortured and beaten to help save the lives of a group of kids? And now Mr. Sita, who was given political asylum by the US has, thanks to the Patriot Act, been imprisoned for almost a year without a fair trial.

Without a fair trial, without evidence, through circumvention of the Constitution. And this is America?

(found through Disinfo)

The Future is coming

Maybe we will get those flying cars soon, or at least a jetpack, maybe (Man, do I want a jetpack!).

Pentagon backed science is working on a way to shoot particles of energy at biological matter to freeze it in place. These new "directed-energy weapons" are even trying to boil the liquid in a human body using microwaves, supposedly to be used as a deterrent and make it very uncomfortable for people entering an area they are not supposed to be in. These weapons sound like alien invasion weapons from H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds or something.

They also sound pretty damn scary to me.

Rucker blogging on Boing Boing

Author Rudy Rucker has a guest-starring blog on Boing Boing with some very interesting things going on, like Chaos, fractals, and things about writing. My favorite quote from him is:

I think the blog is the start of the lifebox, that is, the electronic copy of one's personality.

I agree with this. This is why my tagline is "Adrian Langton's conciousness on the web, uploaded on a regular basis." This blog is my digital imprint on the web. Even my friend Mike checks the blog before he calls me to see what kind of a mood I'm in or what kind of a day I'm having. Sometimes the anger scares him, but the world is not a perfect place and if I can't change it, then I will complain about it.