flickering pictures

United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon seems to have finally convinced Burma’s government to allow aid workers into the country, three full weeks after Cyclone Nargis killed at least 134,000 people and made 2.4 million people destitute. From the Guardian: The junta will accept relief flights into Yangon from many countries, including the United States, [...]

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Remember those ads for Lifelock, an identity theft prevention company, where the firm’s CEO plasters his social security number on the sides of buses to illustrate the effectiveness of his protection services? Enter the inevitable: From the New York Times: Attorney David Paris said he found records of other people applying for or receiving driver’s [...]

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I see a lot of neat stuff on the Web, but this really hit me. The brilliant gang at Mental Floss somehow discovered an anonymous beta site featuring 6,000 scanned polaroids — one taken each day from March 31, 1979 to October 25, 1997. Some impressive detective work by the Mental Floss crew turned up [...]

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The good people at [RE]ENCODED DOT COM have compiled a collection of 40 business cards, from the do-it-yourself card above to the handy-dandy 2-in-1 divorce lawyer card below. Other “cards” include everything from balloons to bottle openers, clothespins to pop-up art.

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Are you a whiz at building popsicle-stick bridges that can support three tonnes of weight, but completely incapable of feeding yourself with anything that doesn’t come with fries and a soda? Lucky for you there’s Cooking for Engineers, a quirky recipe site designed for people with “an analytical mind.” From the site: Michael selected the [...]

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Someone has dug up a very trippy poem by a 20-year-old Barack Obama, penned back in 1981: Under water grottos, caverns Filled with apes That eat figs Stepping on the figs That the apes Eat, they crunch The apes howl, bare Their fangs, dance, Tumble in the Rushing water Musty, wet pelts Glistening in the [...]

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Houston, Texas has apparently been invaded by red hairy “rasberry ants,” named for the exterminator who tried in vain to wipe them out. They’ve also been crawling into sewage pumps, computers, gas meters and other electrical equipment, causing short circuits. A Fox News clip shows Tom Rasberry himself, who says “you can kill ‘em by [...]

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The 40,000 residents of Muskogee, Oklahoma have elected 19-year-old John Tyler Hammons as mayor. A crossover candidate if there ever was one, Hammons heads both the Young Republicans and the Young Democrats at his college. He garnered 69 per cent of the vote, beating three-time mayor Herschel McBride. And for all you eligible young ladies [...]

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Wow, there’s just really no way to say that concisely, is there? I always said that when I finally put together my very own blog, I’d never apologize if I didn’t have a chance to post for a couple of days. Then again, I never expected that there would be hundreds of you to apologize [...]

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To put things into perspective, the nuclear strikes on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in World War II killed about 220,000 people. The world continues to criticize the Myanmar government for stalling aid supplies while it stamps its leaders’ names on the crates, and for refusing to allow foreign aid workers to distribute food, medicine and other [...]

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