Amesj's Odditorium

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http://www.dangerousminds.net/commen..._and_mushrooms

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Zombie musician rises from the dead in South Africa

In December 2009, South African maskandi singer Khulekani Kwakhe "Mgqumeni" Mseleku died after consuming a poisonous potion brewed by a healer. But last week, the singer returned from the dead in the town of Mquthu, much to delight of his fans, who descended upon the village in cheering throngs.

Where had Mgqumeni been for the past two years? According to the resurrected singer, he had been held in a mystical storage container with zombies (who had a penchant for identity fraud).

The folk troubadour claimed that he had been trapped in a cave outside of Johannesburg, where zombies changed his physical attributes ("My facial and body appearance has changed," he said, sporting a new gold tooth) and forged an identity card with a false name (his undead moniker is "Sphamanda Gcabashe"). Said the singer of his harrowing imprisonment:

I have been suffering a lot at the place where I was kept with zombies. It was hell there and I am so grateful that I was able to free myself and return to my family and you, my supporters. I promise to continue singing once I gather enough strength.

To make matters even more problematic for Mgqumeni, the zombies tried to perform a painful ritual to transform him into a Tokoloshe, or a genus of evil water sprite:

I have been living a painful life over the past two years. The people who captured me shaved my dreadlocks because they wanted to put a nail in my head.

After gaining the approval of several not-zombified relatives, everyone got riled up over exhuming Mgqumeni's grave to prove that he's back from the dead. Some more dubious relations notified the police, who arrested the faux-Mgqumeni before he could spin more yarns about necrotic hairdressers. Remember, if someone comes back from the dead, always, always ask for a DNA test. Also, it's a perfectly reasonable assumption that zombies are not trained in the more delicate aspects of oral surgery, so be suspicious of any undead-installed mouth jewelry.

Via Times Live — big ups to 99TelepodProblems. Top image of noted undead musician Lord Raptor via Enerjak.

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http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/181347

Merlin
By Henry Carlile
And once out walking at night
I stumbled across the speckled body
of a small hawk,
the hasp of its wings closed.

One note, one note.

It sings in the rills between words,
between hopes.
It sleeps between leaves in a book,
gathers like dust on the piano.

I heard it once on a green hill
in Aberdeen in short puffs of wind
stirring the new grass among stones.
Prayer could not alter it

nor clods breaking upon bronze.

Henry Carlile, "Merlin" from Rain (Pittsburgh: Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1994). Copyright © 1994 by Henry Carlile. Used by permission of the author.

Source: Rain (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1994)

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The SFist writes:

So, Jack in the Box created a Bacon Milkshake. Why? Because you secretly want one, that's why. Shame on you. The noted fast food chain, it seems, wanted to create bacon-tinged buzz. This will probably do the trick. It's all part of a new ad campaign that asks: If you like bacon so much, why don't you marry it? SFist called our local Jack to ask more about the porky dessert. When we asked if it had real bacon in it, the store manger explained, "Real bacon? Ugh no. It's just a flavored shake, flavored with syrup, I think."

http://www.neatorama.com/2012/02/04/...on-milk-shake/

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http://fiverr.com/cathy01/be-your-gi...ok-for-10-days

I will be your girlfriend at facebook for 10 days for $5

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Interesting site...and is this the employment model we're going to?

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http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-02-1...mutiny/3821906

Secret documents lift lid on WWII mutiny by US troops in north Queensland

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http://thenextweb.com/media/2012/02/...rm-tv-forever/

The BBC is experimenting with Perceptive Media, and it could transform TV forever

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http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/...8172E920120208

The judge also granted Halliburton's request to exclude an email from a BP geologist to a colleague in February 2010, offering "thanks for the ****ty cement job."

Halliburton contended that the email was no more than a casual, tasteless joke made by one friend to another. Shushan concluded that there was no showing that the email was a "business record" of the cement work that could be introduced into evidence.

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http://news.bbc.co.uk/panorama/hi/fr...00/9694094.stm

America's homeless resort to tent cities

Panorama's Hilary Andersson comes face to face with the reality of poverty in America and finds that, for some, the last resort has become life in a tented encampment.

Just off the side of a motorway on the fringes of the picturesque town of Ann Arbor, Michigan, a mismatched collection of 30 tents tucked in the woods has become home - home to those who are either unemployed, or whose wages are so low that they can no longer afford to pay rent.

Conditions are unhygienic. There are no toilets and electricity is only available in the one communal tent where the campers huddle around a wood stove for warmth in the heart of winter.

Ice weighs down the roofs of tents, and rain regularly drips onto the sleeping campers' faces.

Tent cities have sprung up in and around at least 55 American cities - they represent the bleak reality of America's poverty crisis.

Black mould

According to census data, 47 million Americans now live below the poverty line - the most in half a century - fuelled by several years of high unemployment.

One of the largest tented camps is in Florida and is now home to around 300 people. Others have sprung up in New Jersey and Portland.

Find out more
Michigan poverty
Hilary Andersson presents Panorama: Poor America
BBC One, Monday, 13 February at 8.30pm
Then available in the UK on the BBC iPlayer.

In the Ann Arbor camp, Alana Gehringer, 23, has had a hacking cough for the last four months.

"The black mould - it was on our pillows, it was on our blankets, we were literally rubbing our faces in it sleeping every night," she said of wintering in a tent.

The camp is run by the residents themselves, with the help of a local charity group. Calls have come in from the hospital emergency room, the local police and the local homeless shelter to see if they can send in more.

"Last night, for example, we got a call saying they had six that couldn't make it into the shelter and... they were hoping that we could place them... So we usually get calls, around nine or 10 a night," said Brian Durance, a camp organiser.

Michigan's Republican-controlled state government has been locked into a programme of severe budget cuts in an attempt to balance its books.

The cuts have included benefits for many of the state's poorest residents.

Between the cuts and the economic conditions pinching, there is increased pressure on homeless shelters.

Michigan's Lieutenant Governor, Brian Calley, was asked about the reality of public agencies in his state suggesting the homeless live in tents.

"That is absolutely not acceptable, and we have to take steps and policies in order to make sure that those people have the skills they need to be independent, and it won't happen overnight," he said.

Depression-type poverty

There are an estimated 5,000 people living in the dozens of camps that have sprung up across America.

The largest camp, Pinella's Hope in central Florida - a region better known for the glamour of Disneyworld - is made up of neat rows of tents spread out across a 13-acre plot.


In Steinbeck's Footsteps
Dorothea Lange is best known for her photos taken during the Great Depression
America's middle under-class once again searches for work

The Catholic charity that runs it has made laundry available, as well as computers and phones.

Many of the camps are organised and hold regular meetings to divide up camp chores and agree on community rules. They have become semi-permanent homes for some residents, who see little prospect of getting jobs soon.

These tent cities - and this level of poverty - are images that many Americans associate with the Great Depression.

Unemployment in America today has not reached the astronomical levels of the 1930s, but barring a short spike in 1982, it has not been this high since the Depression era.

There are now 13 million unemployed Americans, which is three million more than when President Barack Obama was first elected.

The stark reality is that many of them are people who very recently lived comfortable middle-class lives.

For them, the economic downturn came too fast and many have been forced to trade their middle-class homes for lives in shelters, motels and at the far extreme, tented encampments.

Panorama: Poor America, BBC One, Monday, 13 February at 20:30 GMT then available in the UK on the BBC iPlayer.

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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/0...n_1272286.html

Mystery Disease In Central America Kills Thousands

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http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/arti...ng-cancer.html

German health experts left baffled by village where almost every household has resident suffering cancer

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/arti...#ixzz1mMW3Db73

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisf...th-their-paper

The true value of money – or why you can't fart a crashing plane back into the sky

Banknotes aren't worth the paper they're printed on. The entire economy relies on the suspension of disbelief

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http://www.spacedaily.com/reports/Pl..._Haze_999.html

Planck All-Sky Images Show Cold Gas and Strange Haze

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http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/arti...s-hear-it.html

Pitched directly at dogs, the advert that whistles: Frequency is far too high for pet owners to hear it

Advert contains noises which can only be heard by man's best friend
Whistling, barking and bell ringing in one minute clip also attracts canines


Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/arti...#ixzz1mMYQyzbB

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http://www.cambridge-news.co.uk/Home...e-02022012.htm

The mysterious case of village with its own Bermuda Triangle

The following day the group returned and used sophisticated equipment, including a spectrum analyser, and direction-finding techniques, to determine the problem.

Mr Piotrowski said: “A strong electrical interference source was radiating radio signals in one of the ultra high frequency bands at the southern end of the Green.

“The primary user of this band is the military. However, by Sunday, the problem seemed to have gone.”

He said it could have affected other wireless devices such as thermostats, remote light dimmers and switches and energy meters. He added sometimes this high-level frequency can be caused by a faulty electrical component, so residents should check devices for faults.

The group reported its findings to the communications watchdog, Ofcom, and an engineer was set to begin investigating the problem today.

An Army spokeswoman said she had contacted the nearby Waterbeach barracks and told the News: “They are not aware of anything happening at Waterbeach that would have caused anything remotely like that.”.

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http://www.disinfo.com/2012/02/why-a...ans-in-prison/

Why Are So Many Americans In Prison?

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http://www.stanfordlawreview.org/onl...o-be-forgotten

At the end of January, the European Commissioner for Justice, Fundamental Rights, and Citizenship, Viviane Reding, announced the European Commission’s proposal to create a sweeping new privacy right—the “right to be forgotten.” The right, which has been hotly debated in Europe for the past few years, has finally been codified as part of a broad new proposed data protection regulation. Although Reding depicted the new right as a modest expansion of existing data privacy rights, in fact it represents the biggest threat to free speech on the Internet in the coming decade. The right to be forgotten could make Facebook and Google, for example, liable for up to two percent of their global income if they fail to remove photos that people post about themselves and later regret, even if the photos have been widely distributed already. Unless the right is defined more precisely when it is promulgated over the next year or so, it could precipitate a dramatic clash between European and American conceptions of the proper balance between privacy and free speech, leading to a far less open Internet.

In theory, the right to be forgotten addresses an urgent problem in the digital age: it is very hard to escape your past on the Internet now that every photo, status update, and tweet lives forever in the cloud. But Europeans and Americans have diametrically opposed approaches to the problem. In Europe, the intellectual roots of the right to be forgotten can be found in French law, which recognizes le droit à l’oubli—or the “right of oblivion”—a right that allows a convicted criminal who has served his time and been rehabilitated to object to the publication of the facts of his conviction and incarceration. In America, by contrast, publication of someone’s criminal history is protected by the First Amendment, leading Wikipedia to resist the efforts by two Germans convicted of murdering a famous actor to remove their criminal history from the actor’s Wikipedia page.[1]

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http://www.itworld.com/security/2490...ay-cash-coffee

How to avoid being tagged as a terrorist: Don't pay cash for coffee
Barista on Watch: FBI program distributes generic criteria as 'terrorist warning signs'

The CAT/SLATT criteria aren't quite as precise. They differ for each industry, and some are actually useful (e.g. "requests large quantities of hydrogen peroxide or acetone" and "travels illogical distance to store").

Most of the "warning signs" could apply to almost anyone, any time, making the whole effort less credible both to trainees and the currently-not-alert-enough baristas and clerks the feds evidently count on to foil the next major terrorist attack.

Using Google Maps to find your way around a strange city, to view photos of sports stadium or the cities themselves or installing software on your PC designed to protect your privacy online are all solid indications not that you're a terrorist, rather than a web-savvy traveler.

The latest revelation from the FBI files? Paying in cash for coffee.

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I don't post on this thread much but I wanted to say it's my favorite thread on the OM by far.

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Josh has a knack for finding great shiit.