July 15, 2004
Video Tombstone
Inventors usually try to come up with things that will change people's lives. But Robert Barrows is hoping to make an impact after their death. He is patenting video-equipped tombstones to let cemetery visitors watch messages from the dead.
Barrows, of Burlingame, California, has filed a patent application for a hollow headstone fitted with a flat LCD touch screen (US 2004/85337). It also houses a computer with a hard disc or microchip memory that allows the deceased to speak from the grave through a video message.
Arrested for being against bush
You may recall, back on the 4th of July, Bush traveled to Charleston, West Virginia (swing state -- five electoral votes). The president shared a simple, patriotic message that few, in any, could disagree with:
"On this 4th of July, we confirm our love of freedom, the freedom for people to speak their minds, the freedom for people to worship as they so choose. Free thought, free expression, that's what we believe."
At the same event, shortly before Bush uttered these words, police arrested two Bush critics who were on hand for the speech. They hadn't caused a disturbance or even said a word -- they were taken out of the crowd in handcuffs by police because they were wearing anti-Bush t-shirts.
Land of The Dead
Variety reports that George Romero is set to direct "Land of the Dead," a horror film that picks up on the zombie saga he hatched with "Night of the Living Dead" and continued with "Dawn of the Dead" and "Day of the Dead."
Pic, from Romero's own script, is being co-financed by Atmosphere Entertainment and Paris-based Wild Bunch. Production will begin in October in Winnipeg or Pittsburgh. Latter was the site of shooting for Romero's original 1968 zombie trilogy.
In Romero's new pic, the zombies having taken over the world and those left alive are confined to a walled-in city that keeps out the corpse corps. Anarchy rules the streets, with the wealthy insulated and living in fortified skyscrapers. Drama revolves around a group of scavengers who must thwart an attempt to overthrow the city while the dead are evolving from brainless slow-moving creatures into more advanced creatures.
found at bloody-disgusting
July 14, 2004
British LSD Test
British LSD Test
Found at kontraband.com
July 13, 2004
Yale Nude Posture Photos
ONE AFTERNOON IN THE LATE 1970's, deep in the labyrinthine interior of a massive Gothic tower in New Haven, an unsuspecting employee of Yale University opened a long-locked room in the Payne Whitney Gymnasium and stumbled upon something shocking and disturbing.
Shocking, because what he found was an enormous cache of nude photographs, thousands and thousands of photographs of young men in front, side and rear poses. Disturbing, because on closer inspection the photos looked like the record of a bizarre body-piercing ritual: sticking out from the spine of each and every body was a row of sharp metal pins.
The employee who found them was mystified. The athletic director at the time, Frank Ryan, a former Cleveland Browns quarterback new to Yale, was mystified. But after making some discreet inquiries, he found out what they were -- and took swift action to burn them. He called in a professional, a document-disposal expert, who initiated a two-step torching procedure. First, every single one of the many thousands of photographs was fed into a shredder, and then each of the shreds was fed to the flames, thereby insuring that not a single intact or recognizable image of the nude Yale students -- some of whom had gone on to assume positions of importance in government and society -- would survive.
found at metafilter
July 11, 2004
Cat found 3 miles of shore in Gulf
A group of friends on a scalloping trip were cruising in Homosassa Bay more than 3 miles into the Gulf of Mexico when one of them spotted something the color of a plastic Publix shopping bag in the distance.
"There was a 9-inch-long kitten doing the paddle and screaming at the top of his lungs," said Rogers, the director of finances at the Clearwater Marine Aquarium. "We scooped him up and he sat on the boat with me for eight hours."