It All Started With a Fence...

    Gijsbert Rider claimed that he and his wife felt "threatened" by two of the residents at a mobile home park near his home in the south of the Netherlands. He proceeded to build a fence around his property. A dispute arose with the local building council. Ultimately a judge ruled that the fence had to come down.

     That's when things began to...escalate. Mr. Rider evidently took to heart the expression, "a man's home is his castle." and prepared to repel boarders with a bow and arrows and several Molotov cocktails.

   
     In spite of his attempts to set several policemen afire, the Dutch SWAT team managed to take him into custody without loss of life.

     A video clip can be found here.

     So much for "Good fences make good neighbors."


     Be seeing you.

     www.rnw.nl

No Pants, No Shirt: Free Groceries (NSFW)

     When the owner of a new supermarket in the city of Süderlügum, near the German/ Danish border, offered a basket of free groceries worth  €270 to the first hundred shoppers willing to shop naked, he really only expected a few hardy souls to respond. Instead however, so many prospective naked shoppers turned out that he had to admit them in batches of twenty. 

     Markets on the German side of the border are already very popular with Danes because of lower prices on sweets and alcoholic beverages.


     Your move, Wal-mart.


    Very NSFW video clip at the link.


    Be (ahem) seeing you.


     

Give Peace Rabbit a Chance

          In Dedham, Mass. a series of sculptures, eventually to total fifteen, of large rabbits have been commissioned. Evidently the rabbit figures in the town's history as well as being emblematic of the local pottery. A local veteran who is an accomplished artist decided to create "Leroy", seen above, to honor the memory of a local vet who had died in January.

     The project was begun as an attempt to raise funds and generate local interest in the arts.

     Then a local veterans group became upset over the fiberglass rabbit's proximity to the local veteran's memorial...even though it was created by a vet to honor the memory of another vet.
    The artist has re-named the bunny "Peace".

     More, including a television clip at the link.

     Be seeing you.

     

Not a Crime Scene, Just My Rec Room

     Last week a couple of men were walking a dog in the Swedish woods on their way to a fishing competition when they happened upon an abandoned bunker from the Second World War. When they explored inside they found a bed, several candles, a bag full of rope, and another bag full of leather restraints and sex toys. Fearful that they had happened upon a crime scene they notified the police.

The purple satin sheets should have been a clue.

        After about a week a single mother in her 40s, whom the press calls "Lena" in an attempt to preserve her privacy, came forward and informed the police that the bunker was simply a hideaway she had set up for a little BDSM experimentation.

     "I just want to test my limits." she said.

     Presumably the abandoned bunker lent a certain verisimilitude to some of the role playing...not to mention the assurance of privacy.

     Be seeing you.

     Mystery and Sex Bunker

     

   

The Strawberry Milkshake Lake

     The picture above was taken at Lake Retba in Senegal. The lake gets its vivid pink color from cyanobacteria that are present because of the high salt content-50% higher than in the Dead Sea.

Like the Dead Sea, it is very easy to float in the water there...if one does not mind the layer of salt crystals that form on the body when you dry off.

bangstyle

Be seeing you.

Craps Again!

   

     The town of Webster, Texas found itself in the unusual position of having an exact tie in their runoff City Council election. The two candidates for the council seat, Diana Newland and Edward Lapeyre, each received 111 votes. The contest was decided by rolling dice, with Ms. Newland being the winner.

    I think they may be onto something here. Considering the quality of leadership the voters of Texas have been giving us lately, why not just skip the election and go directly to the dice? It's not like they could do any worse.

Besides, the high-rollers have been deciding our elections for years anyway.

Why not make it official?

Be seeing you.

Belt-fed Badminton

Russian police have a new "non-lethal weapon" for crowd control at protests. Tear gas and pepper spray sometimes are lethal and tasers kill at an alarming rate here in the states. Water cannons would kill by the hundreds in the Russian winter...if they didn't freeze solid first. Thus the Russian weapons designers have come up with the 22mm fully automatic, pneumatic, birdie launcher.

It launches birdies with a 300 atmospheres of pressure blast of air either one at a time or fully automatic. This ought to give the Russian constabulary the upper hand...unless the Russian tennis team joins the protests.

Be seeing you.

rt.com

Great Invention Caused By Coffee Jones

     Consider the web-cam. Hard as it may be to believe, it was invented for a purpose other than allowing drunks to share close-ups of their genitalia with casual acquaintances. I know, it's hard to believe, but it is true none the less. The first web-cam was invented in the early paleo-cyber era of 1991. It was used to tell the people at Cambridge University if there was any coffee in the break room.

    All of the computers on the floor had access to the above live image. Then, in 1993, the image was streamed live to the web.

    For more see wikipedia

     Be seeing you.

The Blood Light

    The Blood Lamp is a teaching tool about understanding our carbon footprint. To activate it one must break off the top, crush a tablet to powder, dissolve it in the liquid in the bulb, then add a drop of blood. A chemical reaction produces light.

Be seeing you.

     http://www.miket.co.uk/blood_lamp.html

Cyber-Ghosts and Dresser Drawers

     There was a story I read long ago. I think it was by Ray Bradbury. It is certainly in his style. In the future all fiction has been banned and burned. The ghosts of Poe and Lovecraft and all the others live on in a haunted mansion on Mars as long as one copy of their work remains. The fragmented memory of that story was called to mind by the recent passing of good Mr. Bradbury together with the recent anniversary of the passing of a friend who was cut down relatively young and suddenly by a particularly aggressive cancer.

    We tend to hold on to the strangest former possessions of the dead and other reminders. We put off cleaning out the closet for months, even years. When Grandmother died her dresser drawers still held her underwear for years, protected by cedar and melancholy. I know I am not alone in this reluctance because there is a thriving business in New York City that does this sad chore for a fee for those who cannot bear to. Likewise I have my dead friend's e-mail address in my contact list. His blog lives on, I am sure. Tim Leary's blog marches on and he has been gone sixteen years now. He waits for me there to keep an interview that death cheated us of, still smiling. Robert Anton Wilson's site is still running too. That is the wonderful thing about the computer age. Cyber-monuments are inexpensive and easy to maintain. No matter how badly the medical costs lay waste to a man's estate a friend or relative with a password and a few dollars a year can give your words and ideas a kind of immortality.

     In this way the iconoclast may actually have the last word after all. Perhaps Leary and Wilson will be remembered after Nixon's "Six Crises" is consigned to the remainder bin of history.

     At least it pleases me to think so.



     Be seeing you.

<fnord>

     

The Last Glass of Dandelion Wine

    My first encounter with Ray Bradbury happened before I had read any of his stories. I remember I was seated in the auditorium at my grammar school. They showed us a 16mm film of a man with thick glasses wearing a sweater who talked about what it was like being a professional writer. I still remember his kindly smile as he told us that he didn't sell a story the first year that he wrote, or the year after that. He explained that it wasn't until the third year that he made his first sale. He also rode a bicycle, just like I did! He didn't drive a car. He chose not to. I learned two important things from Mr. Bradbury before I read a single word he had written; I learned not to give up, and I learned it was all right to be eccentric.

    Later on, in high school, I discovered that Mr. Bradbury was the only sci-fi/fantasy writer who was in my English text book. There are others now I am sure, but he paved the way. This is as it should be. Of the writers of his era he wrote short stories that compared favorably to O Henry or Ambrose Bierce.

     Now he has left us. I hope there are dragons where he has gone. 

Not Harvey Dent...

...Just a man who spent 28 years driving a truck.

During all of that time the sun's rays shone on the left side of his face through the glass.

From The New England Journal of Medicine, via tywkiwdbi

Be seeing you.