RSS Nirvana
Wormwood
This photoessay is written by a woman who grew up in the USSR and now rides her motorcycle around the Russian countryside. Her destination? The area around Chernobyl, where a nuclear reactor’s accident in the mid-80s killed hundreds of thousands of people. The radiation levels have subsided enough to make travel possible, although you have to go through radiation checkpoints where they will give you a chemical shower if you are above the redline. She has pictures of someone’s house with items sitting there as they were left – medication, some child’s doll. A large city, totally abandoned. The tourists who take excursions to the area quite often complain that they can’t stand the silence.
Haunting. Desperately sad. Some of the old people are moving back into their deadly homes. They don’t care if they die, as long as they do it at home.
Not a dream
I thought that stuff like this was just what Moral Majority members used as liberal boogeymen to scare poor Timmy to sleep at night. Turns out I was wrong.
Take the Gender Aptitude Test. Know that state universities are using it in class. Be prepared not to get a “good” score unless you’re bisexual and feisty, transgendered, or asexual. If that’s not enough, you can buy the book. The blurb says:
Bornstein also takes aim at the recent flurry of books that attempt to naturalize gender difference, and puts books like Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus squarely where they belong:on Uranus. If you don’t think you are transgendered when you sit down to read this book, you will be by the time you finish it!
…yeah.
Toys
Bunch of cool toys:
Typeface art set to music.
Worth1000.com has a “Recreate the Far Side” Photoshop contest.
Original Psycho footage is available with a web gadget that lets you edit the shower scene.
A passive robot which walks like a human being.
Scale subway maps of different cities around the globe.
If you have any spare 3D glasses lying around, check out videos and pictures from Disneyland.
Question
Does John Kerry have acromegaly, a condition that causes growth of extremities? Abraham Lincoln was said to have had it. Consider these pictures, and look at the size of his hands:
Creepy
From today’s Sun newspaper:
Pet spider kills its owner
A MAN who lived in his own “zoo” of lizards and insects was fatally bitten by a pet black widow spider — then eaten by the other creepy-crawlies.
Police broke in to Mark Voegel’s apartment to find spider Bettina along with 200 others, several snakes, a gecko lizard called Helmut and several thousand termites had gorged on his body.
Neighbours alerted police after becoming alarmed by the stink.
And horrified officers were met by a nightmare scene.
A police spokesman said: “It was like a horror movie. His corpse was over the sofa.
“Giant webs draped him, spiders were all over him. They were coming out of his nose and his mouth.
“There was everything there one could imagine in the world of reptiles.
“Larger pieces of flesh torn off by the lizards were scooped up and taken back to the webs of tarantulas and other bird-eating spiders.”
Loner Voegel, 30, never invited people back to his “jungle” home, a small apartment in the German city of Dortmund.
Police described it as a cross between a botanical garden and the butterfly breeding ground in the serial killer movie The Silence Of The Lambs.
One tarantula had built a nest the size of a swallow’s in a corner of the ceiling.
Voegel also had a boa constrictor and several poisonous frogs from South America.
Spider expert and animal cruelty officer Gabi Bayer said he kept creatures “that should never be allowed in a private home”.
She said: “He had spiders so aggressive they are the equivalent of a pit-bull in the animal world.”
The reptiles were allowed to roam free in the flat.
The heating elements on two tanks containing spiders and their termite snacks had exploded and dislodged the metal tops allowing them to escape.
Voegel is thought to have been dead for between seven and 14 days.
A post-mortem will be carried out in the next few days. But authorities believe Bettina alone was responsible for Voegel’s death.
Slow on the uptake
I’m pretty sure that was him at the mall the other night, but not 100% sure. It was just a brief encounter; a passing by in a department store. Not enough time for me to kick him in the nuts and tell him he’s an asshole, like I’ve been wanting to do for the last 10 years. Next time I’ll be quicker.
A little romance
For Valentine’s Day, hub and I are going shooting. Then the next day we’re going to get up at 6 o’freaking clock in the A. of M. and go take our concealed handgun class together. This, laddies and ladies, is real romance and don’t you forget it.
Kid #1 got her shots last week so we can put her into preschool and they made her feel bloody awful. She had a 103 fever for a few days and was generally miserable. She and kid #2 have been thumping each other at least once hourly, then they both come to tattle on the other. hub has decreed that in the event of any tattling, they’re both getting sent to their rooms, tattler and tattlee. This has cut down on the tattling, but not the thumping. It wouldn’t be so bad except for the occasional wails of pain.
It’s cold. And rainy. And rainy and cold. Rainy, too. Hub and I almost talked ourselves into going to Las Vegas this weekend but I had an attack of acute sanity at the last minute (seriously, I mean we were just about to book a flight) and nixed the idea. It was insane, is what it was. Not saying I don’t want to go, but I think it needs more than 2 days of planning.
Been pretty boring around here. Next weekend we’re going to the rodeo. Woo!