‘A lightweight enemy could have helped speed up rusting on the collapsed Minneapolis bridge: pigeons.
Experts say corrosive pigeon droppings caked on the bridge could have made steel beams rust faster. Investigators still haven’t pinpointed what caused the collapse, and haven’t said whether the birds had a part in the disaster that killed at least 13 people.
But inspectors in a late 1980s report noted a “coating of pigeon dung” on the bridge. Pigeons have long been a structural pest, because their dung can eat through concrete.’
Followup to Divers suspend Minneapolis search.
‘A good night’s sleep may be a recipe for happy and healthy life, but an NI company is adopting the same creature comforts for cows.
Frazzled bovines down on the farm can now look forward to taking to their ‘cow beds’ at the end of a stressful day in the fields.
Wilson Agriculture in Coleraine has been given a government grant to support its production of Pasture Mats and Poly Pillows to ease the lives of cows forced to lie on uncomfortable concrete floors. [..]
However, animal welfare charity Compassion in World Farming cautioned against keeping cattle indoors permanently and not going out to pasture.
“Living indoors too much can increase lameness,” said a spokesman.’
‘A Melbourne schoolboy has cracked the Federal Government’s new $84 million internet porn filter in minutes.
Tom Wood, 16, said it took him just over 30 minutes to bypass the Government’s filter, released on Tuesday.
Tom, a year 10 student at a southeast Melbourne private school, showed the Herald Sun how to deactivate the filter in a handful of clicks.
His technique ensures the software’s toolbar icon is not deleted, leaving parents under the impression the filter is still working. [..]’
‘The BBC and Fox will collaborate on a Buffy The Vampire Slayer spin-off starring Anthony Stewart Head entitled Ripper, according to a report.
The Daily Star quotes a source as saying that Buffy creator Joss Whedon is “keen to work with the BBC” and that “they’ve got the green light to start filming”.
According to the alleged insider, Ripper, which has been mooted since Buffy finished in 2003, “will follow Bufyy’s mentor Giles (Head) after he decides to come out of retirement in his native England to solve ghost stories and other mysteries”.’
‘Reckless teenagers are leaping in front of moving cars on busy roads as part of a dangerous new stunt craze.
Darwin motorist Smokey Lyons said he and his wife were shocked when a young boy jumped at their car on Saturday.
“We didn’t even see him until it was too late,” he told the NT News. [..]
“He hit the windscreen, then bounced off and rolled along the left side of the car. It made a hell of a racket … bang, bang, bang down the side of the car.
“When I looked in the rear-view mirror he was on the ground and appeared to be hurt but then he got up and jumped on the next car coming along behind us.
“We couldn’t believe it.”‘
‘A Moscow man who ill-advisedly decided to sit watching telly in the nude in the flat he shared with his ex-missus earned himself a wedding-tackle-torching for his trouble, the Evening Standard reports.
The unnamed man’s former wife evidently took exception to his vodka-swilling TV viewing, and duly set fire to his penis. A police spokeswoman admitted it was “difficult to predict” if the human candle would make a full recovery from the ordeal which he described as “monstrously painful”.
He added: “I was burning like a torch. I don’t know what I did to deserve this.”
In case you’re wondering, the couple divorced three years back, but continued to cohabit, an arrangement “common in Russia where property costs are very high”.’
‘The Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft is pressing ahead with its proposal to have internet service providers send warning notices to customers who have been identified as illegal downloaders, and disconnect the services of repeat offenders.
It has the support of the music industry, represented by the Australia Recording Industry Association (ARIA), and Music Industry Piracy Investigations (MIPI).
AFACT says the ISPs are not doing enough to combat the illegal downloading of movies and music, which it says increases ISPs’ costs by chewing up bandwidth and robs income from those who sell the content legally.
A report produced last year by web monitoring company Envisional found the per capita rate of television show piracy in Australia was the highest in the world. It said Australians accounted for 15.6 per cent of all online TV piracy.’
‘During World War II the Army Corps of Engineers needed to hide the Lockheed Burbank Aircraft Plant to protect it from a Japanese air attack. They covered it with camouflage netting and trompe l’oeil to make it look like a rural subdivision from the air.’
Guy manages to smash his face pretty good.
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see it here »
Things have been a little quiet here these past few days, primarily because I decided to spend some time making a web site full of nothing but random images that amuse, interest or disgust me.
It’s basically good to go, so go check it out if random images are your sort of thing. 🙂
There’s a very small amount of extra functionality on it’s way aswell [more navigation options and some ratings], and I’ll be adding more pictures as I come across them too.
If you (dis)like it or have any suggestions, leave me a comment here so I can do something about it. 🙂
‘A man accused of spying on female campers while they used a campground latrine was arrested last weekend.
Clackamas County deputies said Richard Berkey, 63, was spotted by campers in a latrine area at the Big Fan Campground near Bagby Hot Springs in Estacada.
After he was seen hiding in dense foliage, Berkey was chased down and tackled by Jason Dugan, who was camping with friends, according to deputies.
“He didn’t say anything and I caught a side profile and I just knew. I took off up the hill and I yelled for one of my friends,” said Dugan.
Three men then took Berkey to their campsite and tied him to a tree while another camper left in search of authorities.’
‘A 14 year old boy from Brevard, North Carolina was nearly killed Sunday while trying to stop his Xbox 360 from overheating.
The boy’s mother told local news that his Xbox 360 kept turning itself off after about 5 minutes. Her son had read online that he could stop it from cutting off by cooling the power supply. “I saw him put the cord on top of a box in the living room”, said the boy’s mother. “When I left to go next door he was playing a game but when I got back he was laying on his back on the floor and unconscious”.
While his mother was away the boy had taken the power supply and wrapped it in plastic and tape. In an attempt to cool it off, he submerged it into a pan of water with the cord still plugged in. The boy had regained consciousness by the time paramedics had arrived. He was taken to the Transylvania CommunityHospital in Brevard where he spent the night.’
What is says. NSFW without headphones, tho if you work in IT you might be able to get away with it. Claim it’s a standard diagnostic tool and you’ll be fine. 🙂
‘There are few who would call postal delivery exciting. The reasons for this attitude are difficult to pin down, but it seems there is something inherent about the meticulous sorting and distribution of various pieces of paper that fails to capture the imagination. Nevertheless, over the last century there have been those who have wanted to change that: visionaries who looked beyond the truck and mailbag and imagined a means of delivering credit card bills and erotic magazines that would defy the heavens and shake the very Earth itself. Rarely has history seen a concept so grand, and so impractical, as Rocket Mail. [..]
This success was met with great excitement. While naysayers quibbled over such details as the wisdom of launching intercontinental cruise missiles to deliver postcards during the height of the Cold War, others were already mapping out a bright future for rocket mail. [..]’
‘There’s a student in medical school who wants to specialize in sexual disorders, so he makes arrangements to visit the sexual disorder clinic.
The chief doctor is showing him around,discussing cases and the facility, when the student sees a patient masturbating right there in the hallway.
“What condition does he have?” the student asks. [..]’
‘The minister of defense checked the Web page again — still nothing. He stared at the error message: For some reason, the site for Estonia’s leading newspaper, the Postimees, wasn’t responding. Jaak Aaviksoo attempted to pull up the sites of a couple of other papers. They were all down. The former director of the University of Tartu Institute of Experimental Physics and Technology d been the Estonian defense minister for only four weeks. He hadn’t even changed the art on the walls.
An aide rushed in with a report. It wasn’t just the newspapers. The leading bank was under siege. Government communications were going down. An enemy had invaded and was assaulting dozens of targets.
Outside, everything was quiet. The border guards had reported no incursions, and Estonian airspace had not been violated. The aide explained what was going on: They were under attack by a rogue computer network.’
Followup to Russia accused of unleashing cyberwar to disable Estonia.
‘University of Minnesota astronomers have found an enormous hole in the Universe, nearly a billion light-years across, empty of both normal matter such as stars, galaxies and gas, as well as the mysterious, unseen “dark matter.” While earlier studies have shown holes, or voids, in the large-scale structure of the Universe, this new discovery dwarfs them all. [..]
Astronomers have known for years that, on large scales, the Universe has voids largely empty of matter. However, most of these voids are much smaller than the one found by Rudnick and his colleagues. In addition, the number of discovered voids decreases as the size increases.
“What we’ve found is not normal, based on either observational studies or on computer simulations of the large-scale evolution of the Universe,” Williams said.’
Throw villagers into the air to kill them, then steal their money.
That’ll teach ’em.
‘A stainless steel pen, 8cm long. However when you unscrew the top, the ‘nib’ is a solid piece of metal. There is no ink, yet this pen will write on virtually any type of paper. This is what it looked like when we tried it on a piece of normal paper…’
I could have sworn I posted this ages back, but I can’t seem to find it in the archives, so here it is again.
The illest mother fucker in a cardigan sweater.
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see it here »
‘He rode his mule into town looking for work.
No, it wasn’t the opening scene of a Western movie. It was what Rod Maday did last week, ending a six-week odyssey from his hometown of Boy River, Minn.
“I’ve done about 1,500 miles and I’ve got the saddle sores to prove it,” he said.
Maday said he lost his driver’s license 10 years ago after he was accused in a hit-and-run, and was having a hard time finding work in Minnesota. He heard that Wyoming had plenty of jobs that paid well.
He set out with two mules. About a month ago, both mules got loose and one was hit by a car. It had to be euthanized.’
‘The confessions came thick and fast from other politicians after Mr Rudd’s revelations.
First, Defence Minister Brendan Nelson admitted he visited a strip club almost 30 years ago.
“I remember being at one when I was 20, in Adelaide,” he said on ABC radio in Adelaide. [..]
Then Victorian Premier John Brumby suggested strip clubs were the only reason people visited Sydney.
“The last time I attended a strip place would have probably been in the 1970s, when I was a student, I think if my memory’s correct it was probably in Sydney,” he said. [..]
Queensland Government ministers were falling over themselves to fess up and even Deputy Premier Anna Bligh owned up to a bit of mischief.’
Followup to Rudd visits strippers.
‘A man sending a text message avoided being hit by a train going in one direction only to be struck by another train, reported WLWT-TV in Cincinnati.
Witnesses told police the man was looking down at his cell phone as he crossed some railroad tracks around 9 a.m. in Elmwood Place.
Witnesses said the man waited for a southbound train to pass, put his head down and started walking across the tracks.’
‘A Fair Lawn school custodian is alleging in a lawsuit that his co-workers laced his pizza with the hallucinogen LSD in an attempt to poison him at an office party in 2005.
Dominick A. Rao, a janitor with the district since 2000, was served pizza out of a different box than the other custodians, his attorney, Richard Mazawey, told the Record of Bergen County for Monday editions.
“He said he felt like his body and system were melting from the inside out, like he was living in a kaleidoscope,” Mazawey told the newspaper.’
‘Scientists have discovered that inorganic material can take on the characteristics of living organisms in space, a development that could transform views of alien life.
An international panel from the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Max Planck institute in Germany and the University of Sydney found that galactic dust could form spontaneously into helixes and double helixes and that the inorganic creations had memory and the power to reproduce themselves.
A similar rethinking of prospective alien life is being undertaken by the National Research Council, an advisory body to the US government. It says Nasa should start a search for what it describes as “weird life” – organisms that lack DNA or other molecules found in life on Earth.’
