moonbuggy

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`Earlier this afternoon, a reader sent in an image highlighting what he claimed was the Silver Surfer’s chromy nut sack. He said this screen grab came from the currently posted trailer for FANTASTIC FOUR: RISE OF THE SILVER SURFER.

Initially, I had my doubts — who wouldn’t? It HAD to be fake. I mean, the notion of Surfer cruising around with his metallic junk swinging in the wind just didn’t make a whole lot of sense.

Finally, curiosity got the best of me (it wasn’t the homo-erotic kind of curiosity…not that there’s anything wrong with that), so I jumped to the QuickTime HD version of the trailer and started frame-by-framing through the scene in question.

And, sure enough, there it was…the Silver Surfer’s shiny package!’

`Eleven employees of a West Seattle automobile dealership allegedly were involved in a plot that resulted in the theft of more than $100,000 from a mentally ill man, King County Prosecutors say.

First, salesmen sold the man a high-priced truck, then they broke into his home to steal more cash, say prosecutors and Seattle Police. They also allege that one salesman then talked the man — by then committed to a mental health unit at Harborview Medical Center — into selling the truck to him at a fraction of its value.’

‘During a soccer game in South America sudden gusts of winds blew signs off the stadium and at the players. Check out the guys dodge these 200-300 lb signs.’

Although, you could probably read “dodge” as “get hit in the head by” in some cases. 🙂

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`Jeffrey Sanger picked the optimal place to have a heart attack: his Fire Department paramedic class. [..]

The drama started when he felt chest pains as about a dozen paramedics prepared to begin a training session at the Emergency Medical Service Training Center in Fort Totten, Queens. He suspected it was just indigestion, and stayed in the locker room.

But his instructors followed him, worried that he was experiencing the typical symptoms of a heart attack.

Sanger at first protested that he was all right, but collapsed within minutes and stopped breathing.’

`Smithfield Foods actually faces a more difficult task than transmogrifying the populations of America’s thirty-two largest cities into edible packages of meat. Hogs produce three times more excrement than human beings do. The 500,000 pigs at a single Smithfield subsidiary in Utah generate more fecal matter each year than the 1.5 million inhabitants of Manhattan. The best estimates put Smithfield’s total waste discharge at 26 million tons a year. That would fill four Yankee Stadiums. Even when divided among the many small pig production units that surround the company’s slaughterhouses, that is not a containable amount.’

Long article, but interesting. I didn’t realise pig shit turned ponds pink. 🙂

(420kB Windows media)

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‘A charter school alerted authorities to a 29-year-old sex offender who tried to enroll there, pretending he was just 12, in what sheriff’s officials said Friday may have been an attempt to lure children into sexual abuse.

The Yavapai County sheriff’s office also said Neil Havens Rodreick II conned two men he was living with and having sex with into believing he was a young boy. One of them, 61-year-old Lonnie Stiffler, called himself Rodreick’s grandfather when he tried to enroll him at Mingus Springs Charter School as “Casey Price.”

“This is the weirdest case I’ve seen in 18 years,” sheriff’s spokeswoman Susan Quayle said. “If it wasn’t so sad it would be funny.”‘ [..]

Stiffler and Robert James Snow, 43, “were very upset when the detectives told them they had been having a sexual relationship with a 29-year-old man and not a pre-teen boy,” Quayle said.’

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This guy has had his Xbox 360 break twice. The first time Microsoft sent him out a box to ship it back to them in for repairs. Apparently they’ve changed their policy now and the customer has to provide the box and ship it to Microsoft, and Microsoft will ship it back in the same box.

Unfortunately, this guy isn’t particularly happy about not getting a free box, so he’s soliciting donations to buy the biggest box possible [a cargo shipping container, basically] just so Microsoft will have to pay to ship it back to him.

`Since 2002 Skyacht Aircraft, Inc. has been developing a new type of aircraft called the Personal Blimp. The goal of this work has been to create an aircraft capable of quiet, steerable, sustained, and affordable flight. When the first Personal Blimp, named the Airship Alberto, made its first flight on October 27, 2006, it became the first and only aircraft to meet this seemingly straightforward goal.

The Personal Blimp uses hot air (rather than Helium) for lift and virtually silent electric motors for propulsion. To put it another way: the Personal Blimp is a hot air balloon that can be maneuvered about in nearly perfect quiet. Passengers in a Personal Blimp have a serene experience of flight unavailable in any other type of aircraft.’

‘We got activity out here but I don’t think we need to report it.. It appears to be fornication.. We’re taping it..’

Hooray for FLIR, I suppose. 🙂 The guys on the radio back at base seem pretty keen to make sure they get a copy of the tape made.

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`Let me tell you why they are so cool.’

`The thing is, if you carefully construct an example document, you can get a compression ratio much higher. How much higher? MUCH, MUCH higher. For example, if you created a PNG image containing just one colour repeated over and over then you could easily get a 1000:1 ratio. For a text document containing 1 character repeated over and over, it’s possible to shrink 100Gb to about 6k. Think about that, it is a huge difference: 1.7e7:1.

That’s all well and good as an interesting experiment, but what does it mean for an average user? Imagine I had constructed one of those zip files that had shrunk 100Gb down to 6k and I sent you that file. If you trusted me, you might try to open it. Therein lies the problem [..]’

`The graph shown above relates the arithmetic mean IQ measured in various country’s populations, to the fraction of each country’s population that believes religion is very important.

The green diamonds represent individual countries; the yellow line is a linear regression (y = mx + b), calculated by the least squares method. The United States data point is circled in red.’

The gist is that religiosity is inversely proportional to intelligence. I’m not all that surprised. [shrug] 🙂

Stephen Colbert describes the recent renaming of Cingular to AT&T and gives a summary of the current telecommunications industry in the US.

(3.3meg Windows media)

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`A California man faces up to 101 years in federal prison after a jury found him guilty of sending out e-mail scams as well as related crimes. [..]

Goodin, who was arrested last year, was found guilty of operating a sophisticated phishing scheme, the prosecutors said in the statement. As part of the scam, he sent e-mails posing as AOL’s billing department to trick people into giving up their credit card information, according to the statement. He then used the credit card data to make purchases, prosecutors said Tuesday.’

`You don’t find fans of Cartman and Kenny on the Parks and Recreation Commission in the central Ohio city of Marysville. The panel has decided it’s time to rename a local park that has come to be known as “South Park.”

City administrator Kathy House says having a park with the same name as the popular but often controversial cartoon show has become inappropriate.

One member of the parks commission says they wanted to get away from “South Park” — far away.’

`China last week successfully used a missile to destroy an orbiting satellite, U.S. government officials told CNN on Thursday, in a test that could undermine relations with the West and pose a threat to satellites important to the U.S. military.

According to a spokesman for the National Security Council, the ground-based, medium-range ballistic missile knocked an old Chinese weather satellite from its orbit about 537 miles above Earth. The missile carried a “kill vehicle” and destroyed the satellite by ramming it.

The test took place on January 11.’

Sometimes when you fly sideways around a corner at high speed you don’t see large animals standing in the middle of the road until it’s too late. 🙂

(369kB Windows media)

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`The rules are simple: I put the self-timer on 2 seconds, push the button and try to get as far from the camera as I can.’

‘.. is an art intervention that involves placing a gigantic banana over the Texas sky. The object will float between the high atmosphere and Earth’s low orbit, being visible only from the state of Texas and its surroundings. From the ground the banana will be clearly recognizable and visible day and night; it will stay up for approximately one month.’

`A man who ran several marathons while claiming disability benefits has been given a 10-month prison sentence.

Paul Appleby, 47, from Mansfield, Nottinghamshire, started claiming benefits in 1994 – saying he needed a wheelchair or walking frame to walk.

But Appleby, who claimed £22,300 in total, joined a running club in 2001, competing in road races and marathons. ‘

This is an old trailer for the first Star Wars movie. It makes the whole movie look stupid, so I assume they came up with a better one before the movie was actually released. 🙂

(4.9meg Flash video)

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`The “reckless” action of the party host precipitated the explosion that killed a 22-year-old New Milford man and injured several others last fall, according to a lawsuit filed in Danbury Superior Court.

The legal action, filed on behalf of Darren Snyder, a 36-year-old restaurant owner who was hurt in the blast, identifies Matt Johnson as the person who tossed an empty beer keg into the fire during a pig roast on his parent’s Aspetuck Ridge Road property in October.

After cooking for several hours, the stainless steel keg blew up, taking the life of another party guest, Sean Caselli.’

`It ranks among the most enduring mysteries of the cosmos. Physicists call it the Fermi paradox after the Italian Nobel laureate Enrico Fermi, who, in 1950, pointed out the glaring conflict between predictions that life was elsewhere in the universe – and the conspicuous lack of aliens who have come to visit.

Now a Danish researcher believes he may have solved the paradox. Extra-terrestrials have yet to find us because they haven’t had enough time to look. [..]

He found that even if the alien ships could hurtle through space at a tenth of the speed of light, or 30,000km a second, – Nasa’s current Cassini mission to Saturn is plodding along at 32km a second – it would take 10bn years, roughly half the age of the universe, to explore just 4% of the galaxy.’

`After a losing a pile of money at a casino, a man drove directly to the Casino Control Commission and put his name on a list of people banned from the casinos for life.

It’s a decision he immediately regretted – even more so when he learned that in this case, what happens in Atlantic City does not stay in Atlantic City.

The state commission, identifying the man by his initials, S.D., on Wednesday rejected his bid to become the first person allowed to gamble in the state again after placing himself on the list.

The self-exclusion list was established in 2001 as a way for compulsive gamblers to avoid the temptation. People can choose to be banned for one year, five years or life. There are about 525 people are on the list now – about half for life.’

This is a blanket specially designed for people who don’t wanna bother getting dressed when friends come over. It actually looks like it works fairly well. 🙂

(2.4meg mpeg)

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`New research shows that the level of nicotine in major brands of American cigarettes has gone up by 11 per cent in the period 1998 to 2005. [..]

The scientists examined annual data submitted by tobacco manufacturers to the Massachusetts Department of Public Health (MDPH). [..]

Upon analysing the data the scientists found that the manufacturers have increased the level of smoke nicotine yield in cigarettes by an average of 1.6 per cent for each year between 1998 and 2005. And they did this in two ways. First by directly altering the concentration of nicotine, and secondly by changing the design features to increase the delivery efficiency of nicotine.’

`Three thieves who allegedly stole 14 global positioning system devices didn’t get away with their crime for long. The devices led police right to their home.

Town officials said the thieves didn’t even know what they had: they thought the GPS devices were cell phones, which they planned to sell.

According to Suffolk County police, the GPS devices were stolen Monday night from the Town of Babylon Public Works garage in Lindenhurst. The town immediately tapped its GPS system, and it showed that one of the devices was inside a house. Police said that when they arrived there, Kurt Husfeldt, 46, had the device in his hands.’

Some guys change the Windows shutdown sound on their friends lap top, then film him using the computer in a library.

Baa!

(3.0meg Windows media)

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