SRF Heavy Industries

Click the pic for more historical entertainment. Please be warned: this one is not the funniest of the batch.

Thanks to Starchy for pointing this one out.

Further note: I’m horrible with names and titles and proper nouns of all sorts. Capitalize a word and it falls right through the holes in the sieve. The new titles on these old graphics fit right in with how my memory works anyway, as Mightywombat can attest.

12.3 out of 10.

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Taser shock triggers fire in man’s pants

The Hamilton Spectator
Apr 19, 2008 Paul Morse

A Hamilton man Tasered by police is in hospital after the stun gun ignited a “flammable object” in his pants, burning him.

The incident is under review by Ontario’s Special Investigations Unit, which probes all police-related deaths and serious injuries. According to the SIU, police were called to a Queenston Road apartment in Hamilton’s east end around 9 p.m. Thursday.

“Three officers went there in response to a disturbance call,” said SIU spokesman Frank Phillips yesterday. “During the interaction, an officer discharged his Taser. A flammable object the man had in the waistband of his pants ignited.”

The man, 31, was burned on his hand and thigh. He was taken to Hamilton General Hospital with non-life-threatening injuries.

Tasers are electrical discharge weapons that incapacitate a person by affecting the nervous system and muscle control. Hamilton police discharged their Tasers 50 times last year.

From here. You read it on the Internet so you know it must be true.

Rating: 2^e out of 10.

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Try this recipe for the Haitian Mudburger:

In Haiti, where three-quarters of the population earns less than $2 a day and one in five children is chronically malnourished, the one business booming amid all the gloom is the selling of patties made of mud, oil and sugar, typically consumed only by the most destitute.

“It’s salty and it has butter and you don’t know you’re eating dirt,” said Olwich Louis Jeune, 24, who has taken to eating them more often in recent months. “It makes your stomach quiet down.”

But the grumbling in Haiti these days is no longer confined to the stomach. It is now spray-painted on walls of the capital and shouted by demonstrators.

In recent days, Mr. Préval has patched together a response, using international aid money and price reductions by importers to cut the price of a sack of rice by about 15 percent. He has also trimmed the salaries of some top officials. But those are considered temporary measures.

Real solutions will take years. Haiti, its agriculture industry in shambles, needs to better feed itself. Outside investment is the key, although that requires stability, not the sort of widespread looting and violence that the Haitian food riots have fostered.

Meanwhile, most of the poorest of the poor suffer silently, too weak for activism or too busy raising the next generation of hungry. In the sprawling slum of Haiti’s Cité Soleil, Placide Simone, 29, offered one of her five offspring to a stranger. “Take one,” she said, cradling a listless baby and motioning toward four rail-thin toddlers, none of whom had eaten that day. “You pick. Just feed them.”

From the very bottom of page two of this NYT article.

I don’t know how familiar you all are with typical newspaper journalism, but the way articles are constructed is that everything is arranged in bite-sized paragraphs with the most critical at the top and less relevant/important stuff at the bottom, so that if space is limited the editor can just cut at a convenient paragraph break and send it on out the door. It still holds for online articles somewhat, because once people start seeing familiar info or less relevant detail, they’ll start skimming and pretty soon after hit the back button or pounce on another link.

I’m not going to give voice to the raging torrent of bitterness in my head at the moment. That’s too easy. I challenge you to think about why this snippet of text was all the way at the bottom of the second page of a two-page article, and, when you’ve decided you know why the editors chose to compose it this way, you give voice to how you feel about it.

It’s pretty bad out there already. And it’s a little early for this year’s bout of droughts, floods, superstorms, wildfires, and whatever else you can count on to ruin the odd crop here or there.

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—>Fold yourself a little friend to watch you masturbate.<— [Bonus points for installing a webcam.]

Somebody left the wings off this Cessna. That’s okay. It’ll taxi 600 miles on a 2-gallon tank of gas.

Beautiful anti-Hillary rant
Not that I’m tremendously anti-Hillary. But this argument against accidental fiction is spectacular:

Her response to being caught lying to a military audience, when she invented a story about being under sniper fire in Bosnia, was to say it wasn’t surprising she got some things wrong, seeing how she spoke millions of words every day. What a magnificent idea, that if you say lots of words some of them are bound to be fantastic lies. So if you listen carefully to horse-racing commentators they say things like “And it’s Teddy’s Boy still leading three furlongs out as they come up to the fourth last fence with Nip and Tuck two lengths behind by the way I fought a tiger once, punched it clean out and they’re all safely over.”

And auctioneers say, “Three-fifty, three-sixty, three-seventy, three-seventy man in the hat three-eighty here, my dad invented cornflakes, going once going twice, and magnets, he invented them straight up – gone.”

Jack Chick parody tract explaining good ol’ LSD for those of you who might be too young to remember.

Needs training wheels.

If you didn’t already think that Ticketbastards suck, now’s your chance to see how they’re abusing Facebook.

Not that this seems to be a reliable source, someone seems to think Cheney’s recent surprise whirlwind tour of the Middle East was to prepare the few allies we have left over there for an attack on Iran.

FREE DOWNLOAD in MULTIPLE FORMATS from SMALL BEER PRESS. I’ve heard nifty things about this one.

ANOTHER FREE DOWNLOAD: Unintentional fiction from General Dynamics | Astronautics division, written in 1963.

The new definitive book light.

And finally, for you sneeze fetishists. Thanks, ABC. It’s pollen season in Atlanta. We need to think about who’s outside in the shrubbery masturbating, listening to us sneeze through our windows.

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Click on the awesome XKCD strip to see the horror, as it was executed in Oklahoma.

Your security is only as good as the most negligent programmer on staff. Once it’s all integrated, you multiply the number of careless schmucks by, oh, about fifty. Nope, wait, sorry. That’s just the number of states. Lets try all the counties and municipalities, too. Maybe fifty THOUSAND is closer.

But hey, maybe you’ll eventually be able to remove YOURSELF from the No Fly™ list.

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I haven’t tried the antenna-biting technique myself, but I think the effect needs some work.

Four out of ten.

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This is Waitomo Glowworm Cave on the North island of New Zealand.

From here.

The hungrier they are, the brighter their asses light up.

Here’s a game for you:

The ____________ Vidicon is, the brighter his ____________ lights up.

Answers accepted in comments. Winner gets a photo of the glowing item in question.

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Farewell to the Birdmen of Bognor.

Ideas for alternate locations welcome. My idea? The International Space Station.

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Guh-nasty. Minus several million points for that Ronald McDonald smile right there at the end.

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Felted Wool Sculpture from Stephanie Metz

9.888887 out of ten.

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