"Enrodelphiaroncomco announces gigundo accounting scandal that no-one really understands" - confused about who did what to whom and when? Read this handy primer and all will be clear. Or maybe it'll just give you a big ole' ice-cream headache.

We have arrived

Go to Google. Search for "reprobates." Go to Lycos and repeat the process. Go to AllTheWeb and repeat the process. Who'da thunk that this little ol' blog of nasty things would get so popular? BTW, Reprobates censures Yahoo and Altavista for not recognizing our greatness.

Celine Dion stalker wannabes.

Seems obvious really. Monday died on Tuesday.

I am a Simpson's fan. One of my favorite espisodes a supposed encounter with an alien who claims: "I bring you love. I bring you peace." I can't help but think that the UFO that the Air Force scared off a few days ago was broadcasting something very similar only to get Goose and Maverick on their tail.

There are a lot of things wrong with this. First, even with someone being killed, they'll never know the answer to their disagreement. Second, the article does accurately prove that you should never debate religion after a bar crawl in Texas with a loaded shotgun. Third, this article also firmly proves that people are willing to give up their cheap lives for stupid things.

Hello Klitty

A while back, Ken and I were having a discussion about why our government seems to continue its strong support for Israel. Jews are certainly not a major voting block in the traditional sense since there are no more than 12 million or so of them in this country. I suggested the usual money-power connection, the whole Hollywood-DNC lovefest, and even mentioned at a later time that many Christian fundamentalists have strong beliefs about the conversion of Jews and the state of Israel. However, my assumption was simply that the Moral Majority still has influence on the Republican party, so the religious beliefs of its members would have some impact on the political landscape. Little did I know. This is quite an interesting and sobering read and further explanantion for why many of our current political leaders feel the way they do about the Land of Canaan.

A grape is repelled due to high water content by a neodymium magnet no matter the pole. Since humans also have a high water content, would something like this happen if I put my head in between two of them?

Thanks, Shaun. Thanks a lot. Now I'm not going to get anything done today, what with all this anti-gravity nonsense to follow up on.

First, I went to the BBC News link Shaun posted and follow some of the links on that page. One of those is to the page on Quantum Cavorite. Aside: the author's explanation makes clear his choice of the term cavorite for the page; for some strange reason I was thinking about phlogiston on the way to work this morning, and the mental meme collision brought on by the sudden juxtaposition of these putative explanations of natural phenomena coerced me into noting this occurrence.

Anyway.

So the QC page has a link to an article in which the author is amazed by a demonstration of what sounds to me like simple diamagnetism. Well, the article is from the "Science and Technology" of Business Week (or is that Bizniness Wizneek?) magazine - which I wouldn't normally quote on science matters for the same reason I don't turn to Scientific American for investment advice.

Remember what I was saying about flying cars? Well apparently Boeing bought it and have now set up a research division, Project Grasp, to investigate the possibility of anti-gravity. It's all based on the work of a Dr Podkletnov, who sounds like a refugee from the Journal of Irreproducible Results, and claims to have discovered a way to lessen the effect of gravity by suspending objects over a spinning superconductive disc. No one has yet been able to sucessfully reproduce his experiment, and he conveniently forgot to tell any of his coworkers the details of his apparatus.

Strangely, Boeing would not appear to be the first to take this work seriously. Notably BAe Systems (formerly British Aerospace and part of the Airbus Consortium) set up Project Greenglow, presumably named after the amount of management buy-in they got (i.e. not quite a green light) and NASA has the Breakthrough Propulsion Physics Program which appears to be in danger of having it's funding cut. Neither entity seems to have gotten very far with their research, but at least NASA has pictures of what it thinks it will be like to go really fast. One thing's for sure, neither of them were spending their budget on web design, and NASA had $1.7m

Apparently, part of NASA's problem was the vast amount of unsolicited "help" they received, some excerpts of which can be found here.

According to the Onion, fat people have already sued Hershey's and won.

I like this blog. I especially like this collection of rules of thumb.

What's on TV tonight? Now you know, courtesy of The Onion.

Aw, c'mon people. This is ridiculous.

So long suckers! I'm about to get whisked off to the future where I'll ride around in a flying car and shag green bitches all day! What? 10 bucks you say? Ah forget it.

"Attention shoppers: clean-up needed on aisle 6. Some idiot just poured sugar all over the place"

There's recently been a spate of blowgun dart shootings in DC [1, 2] - I have not yet seen the phrase "drive-by darting" in the media (*), but I'm hoping I will soon - so now I'm wondering whether police are going to be on the look-out for any pygmies seen acting suspiciously in the nation's capital.

* - OK, so they didn't say "drive-by darting", but they did say "drive-by blowgun assaults"

Looking for "the finest closed, non-orientable, boundary-free manifolds sold anywhere in our three spatial dimensions"? Look no further. And look who runs this interesting company ...

I think, deep in our hearts, we all knew this. What MSNBC studiously avoid saying though is that they (that is, we) are also better endowed, have better sex, more often, with more partners (and species of partners), and are better looking. But then, what else would you expect?

OK, it's rant time. Life imprisonment for hacking? A few keystrokes could bring down the U.S. economy? Who the hell are we fighting? Dr. Evil? Firstly, the U.S. (and global) economy seems to be doing a pretty damn good job on it's own - I doubt that someone DDoS'ing Yahoo could really make things that much worse and secondly, anyone who wants to (and even thinks it's possible to) bring it down over the internet isn't terribly likely to be that worried about life imprisonment in the U.S.

One interesting part of the bill is sure to bring down one of the internet's few success stories, the X10 camera, whose advertising recently outstripped porn for use of internet bandwidth. Apparently the law would:

Specify that an existing ban on the “advertisement” of any device that is used primarily for surreptitious electronic surveillance applies to online ads. The prohibition now covers only a “newspaper, magazine, handbill or other publication.”

Oh, and happy birthday air conditioning, 100 years old today. If the heat of global warming is bothering you, just crank it up.

Why exactly are you keeping that obsolete, ancient PC? For spare parts? What, you think NASA's gonna come looking for your old 8086 some day?

How about me putting my boot up your arse? Does that lead to self-esteem issues too?

"Whoa duuude! Try this, man, it's some serious shit!"

As I told Cameron today, "Goddamnit, sir, you're a goddamn fucking certified genius", and here's why: Cameron has identified the mystery sound clip that was in my head a couple of weeks back.

You people rock. Well, at least, Cameron does.

Accidental, my arse. Video games producers are all sickly perverts trying to corrupt our youth. Some stuff from the site (like this video from Metal Gear Solid 2) is large, but worth downloading.

Ever wondered how you actually run an Open Source project? Well, slashdot has an easy 7 step program.

Do you find colonoscopy photos erotic? Apparently some people do. Does that make this a porno site?

By the way, let me apologize in advance for the incredibly-annoying pop-ups that will flood your browser when you visit the "some people do" link. Now, get ready with those close-window mouseclicks, and go see what I mean.

Sam: Now Tobey, I want you to make like you're crawling up a wall

Tobey: But I just wanna dance!

Kickin' it greatest-living-cosmologist style with MC Hawking

I think we all saw this coming. David Hasselhoff wakes up one morning, discovers he is, in fact, David Hasselhoff, packs up, and heads to rehab.

I used to hear Don and Mike use the name to refer to any podunk town or out-of-the-way place, but now, through the wonder of the USGS Geographic Names Information System, I can definitively say that "Yes, Virginia, there is a Hooterville".

I am a little disappointed, though not terribly surprised, to report that there appear to be no place names beginning with "Fuck" or "Cunt", but that "Shit", or more specifically "Shite" is well-represented.

Punk Rock Lullabies. I'm disappointed there's no rendition of Jello Biafra's classic Nazi Punks Fuck Off. Perhaps the CD has one of those really annoying 20 minute silences at the end, followed by Napalm Death's rendition, just to keep you on your toes...

Apparently, the Office of Homeland Security is about as likely to fend off a terrorist attack as Buffy the Vampire Slayer...

The funniest thing I saw on my recent trip to England was this T shirt on some pimply-faced kid in a record shop in Guildford.

On the topic of music (which we weren't, but never mind), can someone help me figure out what piece of music I have stuck in my head? It's either late 80s or early 90s, probably a male lead singer, and the bit I have stuck in my head is about a one-second snippet where the female backing singers are singing (I think, the fidelity's not that great - maybe I should get some head cleaner) "Love shows no mercy". I think they sing it twice, but maybe the replay mechanism's jsut skipping. I think the second word is sung about a semitone below the first, the third is about the same pitch as the first, and the last word is drawn out over two or three tones - "me-err-cy" - sort of starting high and swooping down. If I could find the RCA jacks on the back of my head I'd digitize the snippet and post it here too. I've tried a lyrics seach on Google to no avail. That, by the way, is my way of saying it's not Seals and Crofts.

More proof, if any was needed, that photoshoppers can't be repressed. I'm surprised this took so long to surface - expect more and better. Still, the original image is condemned as morally reprehensible by Israel and the West alike, but now the kid's grandfather claims it was a joke. Poster child for reprobates everywhere?

Somebody let me know when they start the followup studies to this one.

"Mr Gallup said the findings may also apply to women who engage in unprotected oral sex and people who engage in anal sex. But he said further research was needed in these areas."