The Weird, Random, and Interesting things that Fit Nowhere Else Thread

[Malcador]

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/07/20/the-really-big-one

 

Article on the Cascadia subduction zone

[ManifestedISO]

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/07/20/the-really-big-one

 

Article on the Cascadia subduction zone

 

I should move back to the mountains I guess. I know SF is capable of 9.0, LA has a big one underneath, and there's a Canary Island(?) with an imminent landslide that will inundate the East Coast. 

 

No, the mountains won't work. The Yellowstone caldera is also late for eruption, if I remember the average is 600k years and the last was 640K years ago. 

[PK htiw klaw eriF]

http://thugvirals.com/florida-man-arrested-for-having-sex-with-an-alligator/

 

Florida man arrested for having sex with alligator.

 

People have had sex with pit bulls, donkeys and even parrots, but this incident is on another level.

 

Rupert Darwin, 59, kept a 12 foot alligator tied and blindfold for the last month, sexually assaulting the reptile multiple times a day.

 

Darwin is a relatively unknown fisherman who lives in the outskirts of the remote town of 400. Residents say he sticks to himself and described him as “odd.”

 

Police responded after a man out of a nature hike happened to walk by Darwin’s house and saw Darwin having sex with the alligator in his backyard.

 

The witness heard Darwin say, “next time you try to kill a man, you best get the job done. Now you’re my bitch forever.”

 

“It was the damn strangest thing I’ve ever seen,” the witness told police. “The gator didn’t even move. It was like it didn’t give a s**t that man was having sex with it.”

 

Collier County Sheriffs responded and arrested Darwin on multiple counts of animal cruelty and one count of illegally keeping a wild animal.

 

Excerpt from Darwin’s police statement:

The gator tried to eat me and this was revenge, pure and simple. I don’t have no sexual attraction to gators, but I wanted to teach this bitch a lesson. I could have just killed her, but that would have been too easy. She was getting what she deserved.

 

Darwin also told police he had planned to chop off the alligator’s tail and pull her teeth as part of his revenge scheme and had even considered performing noise torture on the reptile by playing what Darwin described as “**** music” over and over.

 

Darwin claimed the alligator had gotten a hold of his pant leg when he was fishing in a swamp and tried to drag him into the water. Darwin was able to escape without injury, but that had set his resolve to get revenge.

 

The alligator is being treated for relatively minor injuries and is expected to be released back into the wild within a couple weeks.

[Gorgon]

I wanna see what comes out of those eggs

[Raithe]

I want to see what BDSM and 50 Shades of Gator jokes come out of the "tied and blindfolded" part of that story...

 

Edit:

But..sadly Story about man who had sex with alligator fake as crocodile tears

Edited July 16, 2015 by Raithe

[Raithe]

I have to say, really nicely done...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EAN-PwRfJcA&

[Darkpriest]

I am not sure where to post it, but I found it a nice vid.

 

Two models in their 19teens that earn some good buck showing the more entertaining part of their life. I have to admit I like the vid, and it made me want to go see those places :D

 

 

To think what good genes and workout can give you

Edited July 17, 2015 by Darkpriest

[Hurlshort]

Kind of weird and random, not really interesting or news.

[Malcador]

Florida is a hell of a place.

[Raithe]

Independent - School to take its inset days all at once to give parents a chance to take the kids on holiday

 

 

A primary school in South Wales is planning to put all its inset days together so parents can take their children on cheaper holidays.

Catherine Barnett, the headteacher of Eveswell Primary School in Newport, south Wales has announced to parents that they can take a week off in June next year as a result of the change.

 

The school will run five training days for staff back to back in the second week of June next year so that parents can book cheaper holidays and avoid taking their children out of school during term time, according to the Telegraph. It has been added on to the traditional Whitsun week half-term holiday.

 

The move has been welcomed by parents with one, Gemma Thomas telling the BBC:  “If every school did this but chose a different week to other council areas it would be completely fantastic for families.”

 

Mrs Barnett, who has worked at the school since 2002, said parents "seem really happy" about the move. She said it gave the staff the opportunity to have more indepth training over five days rather than one, according to the Mail Online. Parents could save up to £1,200 because of the move.

 

Schools in Wales are allowed to have up to five days devoted to staff training every academic year but it up to them when they are distributed and many choose to stagger them.

 

There has been growing criticism in recent years over holiday companies sometimes tripling their prices for family holidays in the holidays forcing parents to take their children out of school in term time.

 

Parents in Wales have been fined £60 per child for taking their children out of school without permission, Wales Online reports.

 

[Hurlshort]

Hmm, I'm not sure how schools handle vacations in the UK, but in the US each district has a different schedule and there are usually plenty of opportunities to take the kids on a vacation.  

 

As a teacher, 5 days of training sounds like absolute torture.  The nice thing about staggering them is you can put them near the end of grading quarters, or before a standardized test, in order to prep for those things.  When the district tries to schedule professional development, it usually involves us staring at a presenter blankly.  

[Raithe]

Hmm, I'm not sure how schools handle vacations in the UK, but in the US each district has a different schedule and there are usually plenty of opportunities to take the kids on a vacation.  

 

As a teacher, 5 days of training sounds like absolute torture.  The nice thing about staggering them is you can put them near the end of grading quarters, or before a standardized test, in order to prep for those things.  When the district tries to schedule professional development, it usually involves us staring at a presenter blankly.  

 

Let's see, the rough explantion of UK schooling is if it's the 4-16 age school years, it breaks down to about 2-3 weeks off over Christmas, 6 week long half terms, a one week "half-term" break,  2-3 weeks off over easter, and 6 weeks for summer (usually consisting of the last week of july, the whole of august, and the first week of September).

 

Then throw in various Bank Holidays, a handful of teacher training days, may day, and a couple of national holidays scattered around the school year.

[Hurlshort]

Ok, sounds pretty similar to what we have in the states for the most part.  Only difference is the Easter break is shorter and the summer starts earlier and is a bit longer.  I think the state mandates 180 teaching days.

[Gromnir]

has always been our understanding that the lengthy summer break for US schools is a holdover from days o' yore when so very many families were involved in agriculture.  am not even certain where we heard such.  funny thing is that our experience growing up were that harvest times were busiest, and just before winter as we scrambled to prepare for the cold months.

 

we didn't do much schoolin previous to high school, but we did notice that particular with math, the approx 3 month summer break were enough to result in skill degradation.

 

individual school days seemed over-long to us, and we suspect the summer break woulda' been better shortened, and winter and spring breaks lengthened.  particular when we lived in a rural wasteland, the school day were excessive long.  took almost 2 hours to get to school.  similar to get home. school day itself were 6 hours. even our high school days were long, and that were with negligible transportation time.  typical had sports practice before and/or after school o' multiple hours. and as hard as it may be to believe, we were having a paper route in highschool, so... 'course we only genuine got 'bout 5ish total years o' formal primary/secondary education from which to base such impressions. 

 

HA! Good Fun!

[Hurlshort]

The 3 month break is pretty much gone.  Most districts take 2 months off in the summer.  Granted every district and every state is different, so I only really speak for California with authority.  But we are a pretty big agriculture state.  

[Raithe]

Jamie Lee Curtis Cosplayed As Vega

 

 

 

Jamie Lee Curtis, Hollywood actress, cosplayer, gamer, and apparently cool mom, went undercover at Evo 2015 with a classic Street Fighter costume.

 

The fighting game tournament that draws thousands of people annually wraps up today  in Las Vegas. Curtis, dressed as Vega, was there as part of a graduation trip for her son. In an interview from January dug up by Polygon, Curtis claims she's actually played quite a bit of Street Fighter.

 

The actress wasn't the only one in the fam to don a costume either. Her son appears to maybe be dressed as Dee Jay from Street Fighter, and her husband, comic actor Christopher Guest (This Is Spinal Tap, Best In Show), is cosplaying as Dr. Bosconovitch from Tekken. 

 

It all begs the question, do your parents love you enough to dress up like videogame characters in public?

 

 

[Raithe]

Spin - Live Aid And The Terrible Truth

 

 

 

 

One night at dinner in late 1985, a friend talked about Ethiopia being in a civil war. Neither I nor anyone else at the table had heard that. It hadn’t been covered in the American press. This was just six months after the Live Aid concerts in Philadelphia and London had directly and indirectly raised over $100 million dollars for famine relief in the African nation. The next day I asked my sister Nina, an assistant at SPIN then, to research this, because if the country was at war, it would surely be difficult to move aid around and get it to people who needed it.

 

In those days we didn’t have the Internet, so research was done by going to the library and trawling through endless spools of microfiche — film of newspaper pages from around the world. That evening she came into my office ashen faced — she had discovered it was clear, and very well evidenced, that this famine, the awful depictions of which had pulled on the world’s heartstrings, was man made, by government planes deliberately napalming rebel farms. 

 

Every year Ethiopia experiences some degree of drought, the worst ones bringing famine. But the country historically dealt with this. Some years were worse than others. In 1984 the famine that inspired first Band Aid’s “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” and then Live Aid, was very bad and people were dying of starvation. But the cause was less nature than cynical genocide. A fact apparently so easy to discover that an editorial assistant barely out of college did so in a matter of hours at the library. 

 

I asked Bob Keating, a superb young investigative reporter who had just started working with us, to look into this for a story. The assignment was simple — all this money had been raised, where was it going, was it actually doing good?

 

He discovered it was not doing good, but, horrifically, unimaginably, the exact opposite. The Ethiopian dictator, Mengistu, until then deadlocked in the war, was using the money the west gave him to buy sophisticated weapons from the Russians, and was now able to efficiently and viciously crush the opposition. Ethiopia, then the third poorest country in the world, suddenly had the largest, best equipped army on the African continent.

 

By this time we had all seen the pictures and TV footage of Bob Geldof, the figurehead of Live Aid, bear hugging and playfully punching Mengistu in the arm as he literally handed over the funding for this slaughter. It was on TV now alright, but as an endless, relentless reel of heroic Bob Geldof highlights. He drenched himself in the adulation and no one begrudged him it, until our investigation exposed the holocaust that Live Aid’s collected donations had help perpetrate on the Eritrean independence fighters. 

Most damningly, Keating reported that Geldof was warned, repeatedly, from the outset by several relief agencies in the field about Mengistu, who was dismantling tribes, mercilessly conducting resettlement marches on which 100,000 people died, and butchering helpless people. According to Medicins Sans Frontiers, who begged Geldof to not release the money until there was a reliable infrastructure to get it to victims, he simply ignored them, instead famously saying: “I’ll shake hands with the Devil on my left and on my right to get to the people we are meant to help.”

 

In the course of preparing our story, we tried to interview Geldof, who in the beginning, perhaps expecting more of the same media worship, was apparently willing to talk, but as soon as he and Live Aid realized what we knew and were going to ask him about, he declined. For more than a month we kept calling and faxing requests for his comments. As we were nearing our deadline, we Fedex’ed him written questions and two cassettes, every day for two weeks. Two cassettes because I urged him to record his answers on two machines, send us one cassette and keep the other as a record, so there could be no dispute about quoting him out of context.

 

He never replied, and our report, in July 1986, shocked the world. That is not an overstatement. It comprehensively exposed the fraudulent use of the charitable money by unmistakably the world’s most brutal dictator, and the naive, hubris-drenched, unwitting complicity of Live Aid and Geldof. 

 

After the story broke, Geldof lied, claiming we published it to punish him because he wouldn’t grant us an interview. That sounded as ridiculous as it was, and, more crucially, was a pretty thin rebuttal for the serious issues revealed in the article. 

 

At first our story was met with a terrific backlash. We were vilified by a disbelieving media, who felt we sensationalized the situation in Ethiopia to sell magazines.  Our music industry advertisers pulled their ads. We went on the offensive and I personally did hundreds upon hundreds of interviews, with anyone who would talk to me. Every interview concluded with my saying, “You’re a news organization, look into it yourself!” Many did, and then more, and slowly the tide turned as they began to realize we were right. Live Aid had, through its missteps, exacerbated the already terrible humanitarian crisis.

 

Eventually, the Wall Street Journal ran an Op-Ed exonerating our reporting and commending us for being brave to uncover the real story, unpopular though it was.

This week, SPIN is republishing the stories that we ran then over a several-month period, starting with the first article today, which is the 30th Anniversary of the concerts in 1985, and continuing with our follow-up investigation published in September ’86, and the publication in the August ’86 issue of a statement Geldof distributed to the media (but not to us), which we then rebuffed, point by point.

 

Once again, 29 years later from the original publication of these articles, we have asked Bob Geldof to respond.

 

— Bob Guccione Jr., founder of SPIN, July 13, 2015

 

 

For the original publication, just follow the link.

Edited July 20, 2015 by Raithe

[Malcador]

http://arstechnica.co.uk/security/2015/07/ashley-madison-an-dating-website-for-cheaters-gets-hacked/

 

Ashley Madison hacked, apparently their data is being ransomed, heh. Interesting that the site doesn't delete profiles even if the users pay the fee to do it - allegedly.

[Gfted1]

That's why you should always go by "John Smith" when picking up internet ho's.

[Blarghagh]

I prefer Alan Smithee. Then they can google me and see how I'm a famous movie-director too.

[Amentep]

I prefer Alan Smithee. Then they can google me and see how I'm a famous movie-director too.

 

Yeah a director of a bunch of really bad movies.

 

Might as well call yourself Cordwainer Bird, Stephen Greene, Norman Ashby, Robin Bland, David Agnew or Thomas Lee.

[Malcador]

I use John Romero.

[Raithe]

Vin Diesel's birthday cake..

 

[Blarghagh]

 

I prefer Alan Smithee. Then they can google me and see how I'm a famous movie-director too.

 

Yeah a director of a bunch of really bad movies.

 

Might as well call yourself Cordwainer Bird, Stephen Greene, Norman Ashby, Robin Bland, David Agnew or Thomas Lee.

 

 

That's the joke.

[Amentep]

 

 

I prefer Alan Smithee. Then they can google me and see how I'm a famous movie-director too.

 

Yeah a director of a bunch of really bad movies.

 

Might as well call yourself Cordwainer Bird, Stephen Greene, Norman Ashby, Robin Bland, David Agnew or Thomas Lee.

 

 

That's the joke.

 

 

Well I guess you can attract women who appreciate humor that way, but it seems like you might also attract women who really have bad taste in movies.