moonbuggy

(1.2meg mpeg)

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(1.4meg avi)

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(9.2meg Windows media)

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Joy Division was a great band.

Most of these are live clips from concerts, so the sound quality isn’t the best. There’s a few good quality video clips though.

see it here »

‘More than 200 years since the first boatload of English convicts reached our shores, overcrowded British jails are once again considering sending their prisoners Down Under.

In a desperate move to combat what has become a national crisis, Prime Minister Tony Blair announced he will do anything possible — including sending convicts overseas — to relieve pressure on the country’s “full to bursting” prison system.

The Daily Telegraph reports that Australia’s High Commissioner to the UK Richard Alston acknowledged the prospect of accepting UK prisoners at a recent function.’

`The tiny skeletal remains of human “Hobbits” found on an Indonesian island belong to a completely new branch of our family tree, a study has found.

The finds caused a sensation when they were announced to the world in 2004.

But some researchers argued the bones belonged to a modern human with a combination of small stature and a brain disorder called microcephaly.

That claim is rejected by the latest study, which compares the tiny people with modern microcephalics.’

//:=| typical Hitler (with a disdainful expression)

//:=O bombastic Hitler (shouting)

//8=) stoned Hitler (courtesy of his personal physician from 1936-1945, Dr. Theodor “uppers ‘n’ downers” Morell)

‘Most major cities have subway systems–New York, LA, Chicago, Washington. In the early years of the twentieth century, when the river trade was flourishing and it ranked in the top ten largest cities in the nation, Cincinnati decided to build one for itself. The major impetus was the draining of the Miami and Erie Canal, along which the subway would be built.’

‘Welcome to Wiltshire’s Secret Underground City… the 35 acre subterranean Cold War City that lies 100 feet beneath Corsham.

Built in the late 50s this massive city complex was designed to safely house up to 4,000 central Government personnel in the event of a nuclear strike.

In a former Bath stone quarry the city, code named Burlington, was to be the site of the main Emergency Government War Headquarters – the hub of the Country’s alternative seat of power outside London.’

‘The good kind of rape though. In his upcoming autobiography, “Let’s Face it – 90 Years of Living, Loving and Learning,” Douglas reveals that he lost his virginity was he just 15 years old–to a school teacher! The movie legend claims he didn’t know his teacher could have gone to prison for statutory rape if their relationship had been discovered. Recalling his lover, Douglas writes:

“I had been a ragamuffin kid of 15 coping with a neighborhood filled with gangs… Under her guidance I became a different person. I am eternally grateful. By today’s standards she would have gone to jail. I had no idea we were doing something wrong. Did she?”‘

`The longest war ever fought by humans was not fought against other humans, but against another species — Ursus spelaeus, the Cave Bear. For several hundred thousand years our stone age ancestors fought pitched and bloody battles with these denizens of the most precious commodity on earth — habitable caves. Without these shelters homo sapiens would have had little chance of surviving the Ice Ages, the winter storms, and the myriad of hungry predators that lurked in the dark.

The cave bears, Ursus spelaeus and their cousins Ursus deningeri, were fierce, 20-foot long versions of Grizzly bears with huge teeth and razor sharp claws. Until Neanderthals, and the later Cro-magnons appeared on the scene in Europe and the Mid-east, these giant beasts infested every cave from sea level to altitudes near 10,000 feet. [..]’

`Since the Middle Ages thousands of towns, villages, and other human communities in Great Britain have been abandoned.

Some places have been abandoned at a single point in time, while others have been gradually depopulated until there was no-one left. In some cases the forces of nature have made a major contribution to the abandonment, but more often economic and social changes have caused people to move away, or the decision of a powerful individual, organisation, or government has compelled inhabitants to leave.

This website commemorates all abandoned communities.’

With stories about how various places came to be abandoned, etc..

`he partially mummified body of a baby, wrapped in 1950s newspapers, was found Monday by a woman going through her deceased parents’ belongings in a southeast Florida storage facility, according to police.

“It was a baby boy, partially mummified,” said Delray Beach police spokesman Jeff Messer. “The woman was pretty upset when she found it. You could make out the features pretty clearly.” The child had hair, he said.

The body was in a small suitcase, which was placed inside a larger suitcase, said Messer, who viewed the remains.

“It was spooky,” Messer said.’

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)

see it here »

If embedded Flash video doesn’t seem to play properly, try the embedded Windows media file on the other side of the link.

(793kB Windows media)

see it here »

This is the official “Account of the Accident”. It’s quite long but kinda interesting, if you like that sorta thing. 🙂

The full report is also available.

`Duncan, a medium who conducted seances across Britain, was arrested at a time when officials feared details of the upcoming D-Day landings in France could be revealed.

She disclosed — allegedly through contacts in the spirit world — the sinking of two British warships long before the news was officially made public.

She also told the parents of a missing sailor that his ship, HMS Barham, had sunk. That was true, but to preserve morale, the sinking was not announced.

Found guilty of witchcraft, Duncan was jailed for nine months.

Martin said wartime leader Winston Churchill called the conviction “tomfoolery.”‘

Pitfall was a game you could play on your Atari or Amiga. It was great. 🙂

see it here »

`A reader in New Zealand wrote to ask about the Playmate photos unwittingly taken to the moon in 1969 by Apollo 12 astronauts Al Bean and Pete Conrad. We described in the December 1994 issue how pranksters on the ground crew had reprinted Playmate photos on fireproof plastic paper and inserted them with captions into each of the astronauts’ cuff checklists. [..]

Conrad told us in 1994: “I had no idea they were with us. It wasn’t until we actually got out on the lunar surface and were well into our first moon walk that I found them.” Bean recalled: “It was about two and a half hours into the extravehicular activity. I flipped the page over and there she was. I hopped over to where Pete was and showed him mine, and he showed me his.”

Conrad: “We giggled and laughed so much that people accused us of being drunk or having ‘space rapture.'”‘

How do you dispose of 20,000 pounds of war surplus sodium metal?

Looks like a fun job. 🙂

(10.3meg Google video)
see it here »

`For the most part Soviet architecture and design is remembered for its heavy block buildings and functionally Spartan designs. Its overpowering desire for conformity left little room for individual creative freedom. A notable exceptions to this is in the transportation sector. One can admire this creativity in the Metro stations of cities like Moscow and Tashkent where the coldness and sterility of typical soviet urban architecture is abandoned and costs are not spared as creative freedom is unleashed. While many of us are aware of the elaborate splendor of the Moscow underground, it is easy to overlook the phenomenon of the common roadside bus stop as an example of soviet art and design letting loose and becoming a little weird and crazy.’

`Some persons believe a mud pack is the answer to the search for a beautiful complexion, others think massage will do the trick, but Mrs. D. M. Ackerman, of Hollywood, Calif., has decided that reduced air pressure is a good treatment. So she has devised a “glamour bonnet” like a diver’s helmet with which the atmospheric pressure around the beauty seeker’s head can be lowered.’

`Auckland University scientists have revealed that eruptions of supervolcanoes powerful enough to change the climate and cause mass-extinction can be worse than previously thought. [..]

Such large eruptions of greater than 100 cubic kilometres of magma are generally rare and random events worldwide.

But geologist Darren Gravley of Auckland University and his colleagues have shown that one of the largest supervolcano eruptions on record, at Taupo 250,000 years ago, was twice as big as previously thought.’

Maybe I’m a bit stupid, but I don’t see how much worse than mass-extinction it could get. [shrug] It’s not like we’re going to be thinking “Oh, I’m glad it wasn’t any worse” once we’re already dead. 🙂

`There were many acid tests happening in the 1950s and 1960s. Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters dosed sometimes-unsuspecting proto-hippies. The CIA was dosing unsuspecting mainstreamers. Leary dosed fully cognizant artists, therapists and students. But meanwhile, over at Army Chemical Center at Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland, psychiatrist James S. Ketchum was testing LSD, BZ and other psychedelic and deliriant compounds on fully informed volunteers for the U.S. military. [..]

Now, Dr. Ketchum has released his fascinating self-published memoir, Chemical Warfare: Secrets Almost Forgotten, primarily detailing his times at Edgewood. The book boasts charts, graphs and experimental reports – a veritable goldmine of information for those who are interested in psychedelics, deliriants, or chemical warfare. It’s also a funny, observant, and reflective personal memoir, casting a light not only on Ketchum and his work, but on a decade that saw 60s counterculture and the military share an oddly intersecting obsession with mind-altering drugs.’

`The controversial Muslim leader Sheik Taj el-din al Hilaly has savaged Australia in an interview on Egyptian television, claiming there is no freedom or democracy for Muslims here and that English people are the most unjust and dishonest.

The senior cleric said Muslims were more Australian than Anglo-Saxons because they came here voluntarily, that Australians played the “fear card” to keep Muslims down, and that racial prejudice was the reason for the 55-year sentence given to the gang rapist Bilal Skaf.

“Anglo-Saxons came to Australia in chains, while we paid our way and came in freedom. We are more Australian than them. Australia is not an Anglo-Saxon country – Islam has deep roots in Australian soil that were there before the English arrived,” Sheik Hilaly said.’

`While it can be argued that a miniscule handful of professional wrestlers matched Andre�s in-ring achievements (Gorgeous George back in the �40s and �50s, perhaps; Dusty Rhodes in the �70s, and Hulk Hogan, without a doubt, in the �80s), no other wrestler ever matched his exploits as a drunkard. In fact, no other human has ever matched Andre as a drinker. He is the zenith. He is the Mount Everest of inebriation.

As far as great drunkards go, there is Andre the Giant, and then there is everyone else.

The big man loved two things: wrestling and booze�mostly booze�and his appetites were of mythic proportion.’

I remember once back in early high school we had an assignment for phys. ed. class where we had to write about something we’re recently achieved and were proud of. It was some self-esteem building thing, I assume.

This was back in the early 90’s, when the interwebs were nothing much more than shell accounts, lynx and telnet. At this point in time, at the tender age of 12 or 13, I was playing MUDs quite a bit, and had infact, after many months of effort, managed to become a wizard and was able to actually program my own little kingdom in the game that other players could run around and kill monsters in. [They were mostly killing hobbits. That’ll teach the hairy little bastards.]

So, I wrote my assignment about the months of work I’d put in to reaching the point where I could program my own part of the game, and I wrote about how I’d learnt the programming language [LpC, it was] and done good bit of coding in the time since, and all the various other things that had taken many months to do. [I didn’t write about just _how_ I was accessing the internet in the early 90’s, which was an achievement in itself. :)]

And I was reasonably proud of all the effort it had taken me to get there, and the effort I’d put into the coding. Bear in mind that all the other people playing/programming this game were university students, so I thought it was pretty good to be holding my own with people 10 years older than me, many of whom were actually studying for Bachelor degrees in computing at the time.

Anyways, I got the assignment back and was told by the teacher that it didn’t count as an achievement and I’d have to do the assignment again. Everyone else’s achievements counted, except mine, apparently.

And that is why PE teachers are PE teachers and not kings of the interwebs like me. Ha! 🙂

`Most people who know about the Hurricane Carter case only know the Hollywood version presented in the movie starring Denzel Washington. The Hurricane, released in 1999, features crooked, lying, racist cops and frightened witnesses who won�t come forward. Carter himself is brash but noble, persecuted his whole life by one obsessed detective who keeps sending him to jail.

The real Rubin Carter and the real Lafayette Grill murder case are nothing like the movie. This movie bills itself as being about hope and redemption. The movie, in terms of Carter and the actual murders at the Lafayette Grill, is a fraud from beginning to end, full of errors, distortions and fictions, large and small. [..]

”Rubin used to tell me time and time again, ‘You’ve met Rubin and you know Carter, but you’ve never met the Hurricane. The Hurricane’s bad. The Hurricane’s mean.'”‘

This is quite long, but interesting. Turns out this guy is some sorta sociopath and it’s very probable that he is infact guilty.

`Until recently, scholars thought only 8 or 10 of these important early telescopes _ made between 1608 and 1650 of tightly rolled paper and crudely ground lenses _ had survived to the present day.

Then two historians on a visit to a museum in Berlin last fall had an “aha!” moment. One of the oldest known surviving telescopes at the German museum gave them an idea of places to look for other, as yet undiscovered examples.

Their insight apparently was correct. According to Marvin Bolt of Chicago’s Adler Planetarium, he and his colleague found a previously unreported 1627 telescope in a Dresden museum storage room within 24 hours of their brainstorm. Less than a day later, they found a second, slightly earlier telescope that had lain unnoticed in the storage room of a museum in Kassel.’

‘Who is that mysterious, elegant man? And why is he sitting on a dead horse?

Such are the questions sparked by a black-and-white photograph taken in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, between 1876 and 1884 that has led to nationwide curiosity, speculation and jokes.

It’s a picture of a mustachioed man in a suit and top hat who sits rakishly on the side of an expired horse in the middle of a dusty street. [..]

Some of the ideas about what the picture depicts include the thoughtful — it was staged for a political campaign perhaps related to sanitation issues — to the bizarre — the horse is being helped to relieve “excess flatulence.”‘