A Swedish couple hunting on a remote mountain in Sweden’s far northern region of Jaemtland this week found 70 pairs of shoes, all filled with butter. It’s not going to be pretty when the butter starts to rot and the authorities have to wait for the snow so they can get up there with a snowmobile
Jerry Sadowitz explains how moron-in-a-box David Blaine — affectionately called a megalomaniacal, attention-seeking, time-wasting, Jesus-fixated American tit — rigged the system to sneak away at night, presumably to a nice warm hotel room with a comfy bed, bathroom facilities and a fully stocked mini-bar
ACME is a worldwide leader of many manufactured goods. From its humble beginnings providing corks and flypaper to bug collectors to its heyday in the American Southwest supplying a certain coyote, from Ultimatum Dispatchers to Batman outfits, ACME has set the standard for excellence.
Also of note is the lawsuit of Wile E Coyote v ACME.
The Ig Nobel awards for 2003 were presented at Harvard University.
In the tradition of the Rosetta Project, is an example of many translations of the incredibly useful phrase: Oh my god! There’s an axe in my head
.
French: Mon dieu! Il y a une hache dans ma tete.
Visigothic: Meina guth, Ikgastaldan aqizi-wunds meina haubida
Latin: Deus Meus! Securis in capite meo est.
German: Oh mein Gott! Ich habe eine Axt im Kopf!
Japanese: ahh, kamisama! watashi no atama ni ono ga arimasu.
Maori: Ave Te Ariki! He toki ki roto taku mahuna!
Italian: Dio mio! C’e’ un’ ascia nella mia testa!
Or you could try I can eat glass, it doesn’t hurt me
.
In the best use of a hideous Elmo toy I’ve seen, Kelly Heaton purchased 64 previously-owned Tickle Me Elmos on eBay and turned them into fur coats and wall-mounted game trophies
A county fair in the US state of West Virginia has an unusual tourist draw card — a cooking competition featuring road kill. The idea was brainstormed by the Pocahontas County Visitors Bureau to spice up their Autumn Harvest Festival
A highway in Saskatchewan has won the dubious honour of worst highway in Canada, according to the Canadian Taxpayers Federation. The bloke who entered the highway in the competition won a free wheel alignment
With Hurricane Isabel churning in the west Atlantic on Sunday, a 70-year-old woman hurled a knife at her husband because he chose to watch football instead of preparing for the storm
Had a brief encounter with the state of mental health this week. Or, more appropriately, it had an encounter with me.
I’d dropped in to pick up my comics for the week and was the only customer in the store, when the escapee from the mad house arrived. Complete with little plastic hospital bracelet and a white gown that laced up the bag, the new arrival muttered something neither of us could understand. Jase just said; Nah, mate. Can’t help you.
And he happily toddled off again.
You’d think that someone somewhere would be missing this guy, but as we didn’t see anyone with large butterfly nuts, perhaps it was just an exercise in integrating the patients back into the community.
Just one more bloke doomed to wander the public transport system, eternally pestering passengers who are trying to read in peace.
After hours of travelling, Charles McKinley, 25, of New York City, pried open the crate with a crowbar Saturday morning. He popped up outside his parents’ doorstep in the south Dallas suburb of DeSoto, shook the hand of a shocked deliveryman and walked away
Aquada have just tested a fully amphibious car on the Thames. It can travel at up to 100 miles an hour on land, and its wheels fold up to allow it to speed across water at 30mph, propelled by a jet
I quite often play with translation software and have enough of a rudimentary grasp of languages to know that machine translations will only give you the gist of the text and not the original feel and depth that the author conveyed in their native tongue.
The authors of the Systran translation software probably never intended their program to be subject to an electronic version of ‘Chinese Whispers’. But Carl Tashian had other ideas, and created a bridging application with Babelfish that will translate an English phrase back and forth between multiple different languages. The resulting half-English, half-foreign, and totally non sequitur response bears almost no resemblance to the original.
I ran a paragraph of text through Lost in Translation which shunted it from English to Japanese to English to Chinese to English to Korean to English to French to English to German and back to English. The result is a surreal chunk of prose that looks alarmingly like William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch:
Regarding one this danger of the evil of the method of time vainly, which sleeps her, and moving of the situation of the momentary condition, which wakes up inward inward, it is at the same time broad and it had the difficulty, which hoped it. Regarding its thing the saw of this, but the merry direction of the situation was it it. It followed this hotel in the danger and all the same which the degree, which eat is, that those surpasses a warranty, inward multi of London, which is that, of this place and of the method is, which is not probably everything, for which profit and the loss, it to write which everything is not it did not criticise. But of this place however of it was believed and he was not.
Original text before babelisation:
The man’s dreams were troubled as he floated in that transition state between sleeping and waking. He had the feeling that he was being watched, but that was ridiculous. Nobody knew he was in London, the security in this hotel was beyond reproach and there was no way that anybody could have gotten in without him knowing. But the feeling was still there none the less.
A lot of people have discovered that they can make a little extra money by auctioning off on the internet those extra knick-knacks they have lying around. After all, as the saying goes, one person’s trash is another’s treasure.
But sometimes, trash is just trash.
Disturbing Auctions is dedicated to the research and study of the most bizarre items found for sale on internet auction sites. Not the obviously fake auctions, like the infamous human kidney, but truly tacky stuff that people really, honestly, believed that someone would (and in some cases did) buy.
It’s always interesting to read through the search logs for the site to discover what loons have been attracted like moths to a flame.
This week’s offerings include: vampire
, were wolf
[it’s one word, mate], aligator man
[misspelt], bambi
, chimera twins
and come cabra
[another misspelling], which strange as it may seem are all actually site content.
The odder searches were: custom guns
[wanker], eardrum
[huh?] and the bizarre dog hair dye
[run, Fido, run].
These people are out there. They are your friends and neighbours, they are the annoying people who read over your shoulder on public transport, they are the people walking brightly coloured dogs, they can’t spell, are searching for weapons and are capable of entering random characters into a search engine. Be afraid.
From William Gibson’s blog. A burglar breaks into a house but is terrified by a mask made of bacon and calls the cops. Awesome.
Neil Gaiman writes about the shortcomings of a kitten that waits until you’re asleep, then climbs onto your bed, and tries to insert himself into your nose.
Makes my dogs wake-up tactics look tame by comparison.
In an action scene during the filming of a low-budget movie, The Scorpion’s Vengeance, Flavio Peniche was apparently handed a gun with real bullets rather than blanks, causing him to shoot and kill another actor, Antonio Velasco. The film’s producer, Eduardo Martinez Sanchez, and the props manager have scarpered for parts unknown
Railway officials in Wakayama, a largely rural prefecture in western Japan, racked their brains for months for a way to keep wild deer from running onto train tracks and getting killed. Finally, inspiration struck: scare them off by spreading lion dung along the tracks
Mike Todd, the Chief Constable of Greater Manchester Police, has claimed that some police officers are so inept at interviewing suspects that viewers of television dramas such as Inspector Morse and The Bill would have a better chance of solving crimes
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