Tastes Like Chicken |
everyone can use some TLC |
Links to articles too well written to miss, stuff you wish you knew, and resources you wish you knew about. |
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Saturday, March 03, 2001
_Giant fossilized oysters in the Peruvian Andes ![]() More than 500 fossilized giant oysters were found in the Peruvian Andes. The discovery reinforces the theory that 200 million years ago the Andes were covered by the ocean. Friday, March 02, 2001
_Those were real brains in Hannibal That and other delicious facts are waiting for you in The VFX of Hannibal, a strong article found on a site aimed at visual effects professionals.
_1,000 horspower of aisle-clearing power ![]() Paula Elstrek drives a "Super Trolly" through downtown Melbourne. Builder Bob Unnerstall says the 1,000-horsepower trolly can be rented for $35,000 a year.
_Flirting takes flight A voyeuristically engrossing article about hooking up when the airlines strand them. A husband and wife became irritable and began arguing, she says. The wife went to sleep, and what did her mate do? Chat up a woman across the aisle. "He eventually moved into the seat next to her and began kissing her and buying her drinks," Zepco reports. "His wife slept through the night."Isn't that special?
_You people are nuts! ![]() This picture only pulls a 6.1 on Am I Hot Or Not? What is wrong with you people?! Yes, I know the src link is with issues. Here's a question: can one use ftp for a src link? Thursday, March 01, 2001
_Taliban Begins Smashing All Afghan Statues In a happy little update to this news, the Taliban has begun destroying all the statues in Afghanistan. It's good to see someone picking up the torch from China after the waning of the cultural revolution and from Cambodia after the waning of the Khmer Rouge.
_Pipes Show Cocaine Smoked in Shakespeare's England [C]lay pipe fragments excavated from his Stratford-upon-Avon home and of the 17th century period show conclusively that cocaine and myristic acid -- a hallucinogenic derived from plants, including nutmeg -- were smoked in Shakespeare's England.And that dirty hippie wore an earing! Wednesday, February 28, 2001
_Drunk Finds Cigarettes And Gasoline Don't Mix The petrol exploded, his car burst into flames and the man was blown 15 feet through the air, crashing to earth on a nest of angry ants.
_A flying leap from the 51st floor The man... jumped just after 2:30 p.m. from an office at Hunter Keith on the 51st floor of the IDS Center on Eighth Street in downtown Minneapolis. He plunged more than 45 stories before crashing through the plexiglass ceiling of the Crystal Court, which is 121 feet above the ground. He landed several feet from a fountain in the middle of the atrium, just in front of the Ritz Camera store.Dramatic, and an improvement over suicide via auto traffic, but still too risky for other folks nearby. Was this another fat guy, too? Hmm: "McGrath said only that the man appeared to be of a large size."
_Insulting to Islam ![]() "This 2,000-year-old Buddha statue, the world`s tallest at 175 feet, was slated for destruction Monday in Bamyan by Afghanistan`s hard-line Taliban rulers. They say the statue is insulting to Islam." Tuesday, February 27, 2001
_Want to know what plutonium tastes like? According to this don't-miss read, it doesn't taste like chicken: [T]he material spewed out of the bottle and onto the wall in front of him. Some of the solution ricocheted back into his mouth, flooding his lips and tongue with a metallic taste.The guy that ingested the plutonium was in charge of recovering plutonium dispersed in experiments, meaning that he had to separate out the plutonium from the results of his own stomach pumping. This may have popped up at other places before, but it has moved since July 2000, so it seems worthwile to highlight it here.
_For hardcore geeks only Okay, you're That Guy: you built your own PC. You're overclocking the Hell out of it. You applied thermal compound between the cpu and cooler for maximum heat transfer. You are cooling your CPU with a pump-driven water system. Here's what you have to watch out for: ![]() Those are holes that have corroded all the way through the aluminum into the water cavity. Doesn't that sound like something wonderful to have sitting on top of your CPU? Read the page for the strange confluence of circumstances that led to this potentialy disastrous occurence. Bonus: like all those poor Brits, he's terribly conflicted about the word "aluminum," managing to work in three different spellings on this page alone.
_Sony the crybaby Played any Playstation 2 games yet? I have, and so far the best of them merely rise to "tolerable," and the public has noticed, giving Sony a thoroughly lackluster American dbut for it's newest game machine. Sony's strategy for addressing this: make great new games that win over the public. HAH! Try again: destroyed (ripped up) all of the X-Box ads that were displayed on the shelvesIt's good to see that they've got so much confidence in their product. Who would've thought that one day Sony would make me root for Microsoft?
_Driver Jailed for Dumping Speed Camera in Sea An "A" for effort, though. Frantic end of a round of interviews, not much time to blog... Monday, February 26, 2001
_The new slackers This is a decent but not particularly gripping piece from Salon, blogged more for it's topical relevance than innate quality. Read it if for some reason you find yourself with lots of free time...
_Pardons With a Precedent A lame-duck president grants a slew of controversial pardons, eleventh-hour Get Out of Jail Free cards for the politically well-connected.This informative article highlights eyebrow-raising pardons of the past and provides context for Clinton's actions, including the assertion that the pardon power of the American president is almost unparalleled in the rest of the democratic world.
_The Earl of Sandwich Indeed "Three centuries after his illustrious ancestor, the 4th earl, launched the fast-food revolution, the current Earl of Sandwich has begun a sandwich delivery business." Of course, this makes you wonder what the other famous lords and ladies are sitting on, doesn't it? To find out, see this Real video (ptui!) clip or this transcript of a classic Saturday Night Live skit. |