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Deborama's Wednesday Website of the Week is a railway company that has not started running yet. But it will - soon! No, really, they promise. And if you want to find out what Marilyn Monroe has to do with it, you'll have to read the link. But here's a little tidbit for free:
 All tables in First and Standard will have imprinted Monopoly®, Cluedo® and Chess Boards for those looking for some more traditional and inter-active entertainment on their journey. Pieces will be available to purchase from the buffet, or passengers are very welcome to bring their own.
Cool, eh?
I got this e-mail from a friend in Minneapolis about another friend. "Steve S** House Moving Celebration" it said in the subject line. Now, in the UK, when people move from one house to another it's called "moving house". But in Minneapolis, they mean moving the house. Here's the slightly edited body of the e-mail.
S**'s Follies is scheduled for next Monday evening, July 9, at 10:00 p.m., at the Avalon Theater,1500 East Lake Street. The event is to see and celebrate his house enroute to its new location just north of Lake Street on 17th Ave. The house is to travel (from Richfield) on several streets including Lake between the hours of midnight and 5:00 a.m., and Steve's rough estimate is that it will pass the Avalon about 3:00 a.m. At any rate, get there when you can and bring along some snack food for the potluck.
Obviously, this is a one-of-a-kind party not to be missed. A repeat isn't likely. Steve says if the house move is rained out he'll reschedule.
PS: I am sorry I missed this week's WWW. I have been in a low-energy mode and so has my computer. Maybe it's the rain. On the plus side, I joined a gym and went twice this week to work out.
Today a man was critically injured by a bull in Rugby town centre. The bull escaped from the cattle market in Rugby and after injuring the man, rampaged through the streets and at one point caused the train station to close down as it scattered passengers waiting on the platform. The injured man is still in critical condition with a head wound.
Just a little too late for Hallowe'en, I found this priceless article in City Pages, a sort of agony aunt for those in real agony - contemplating carnal relations with various species of the undead for example.
On the way home from work, we tend to listen to a particularly mindless radio show on BBC Radio 1. Today the DJ or host or whatever he is, Scott Mills, tried lamely to stir up a controversy that people, especially in Britain and especially "these days", don't "appreciate the true meaning of Hallowe'en". According to Mills, the true meaning of the holiday has something to do with devil worship, and therefore if you are going to dress up, it should be as a witch, warlock or Satan. What rubbish! This man knows absolutely nothing of his heritage, particularly given the fact that he is gay. The "Hallow" in Hallowe'en is hallowed as in holy or in this instance, saints. What has that to do with devil worship. And what has devil worship to do with witches and warlocks? And anyway, the minor Christian (not Satanic) holiday of Hallowe'en has been combined with the forbidden Celtic pagan one called Samhain. This is traditionally a time when the boundary between the mundane world and the world of faerie thins and vanishes. It is in the folk memory of the "the faerie court will ride" that people indulge in fancy dress and wild parties. To my mind, that is the true meaning of Hallowe'en.
Dave Simpson is trying to track down everyone who has ever been a member of Mark E Smith's band, The Fall. Although I am not personally very familiar with The Fall, I plan to get more familiar with them, because I like what little I have heard so far. The late John Peel liked the band so much that he said all other rock bands should be measured against them. This article attempts to give an insight into the surreal world of the band, which was a sort of despotism of anarchy, shaped by the cruelly creative whimsy of Smith. The 42 people who used to be in The Fall all have stories of being abandoned in bars, flown to Europe for a gig and then sent home before it started, or hit on the head with chairs when Smith thought their style was becoming too "slick". Sounds like fun, eh?
Excerpts from a follow-up story to the recent court decision (see previous post) knocking down a school district's policy of teaching ID as science:
Both sides are looking to Kansas as the most likely new battlefield in the culture war over education. Last month, the state's education board voted for new teaching standards, redefining science to include the supernatural [italics mine - because I am just dumbstruck] and encouraging Kansas science teachers to question the validity of evolution in their classrooms. If a local authority within the state accepts the board's recommendation and changes its school curriculum to play down evolution, it could trigger another legal battle.
Steve Abrams, the Kansas board chairperson, told The Associated Press that the Pennsylvania and Kansas cases were very different. In Dover, science teachers had been made to read out a statement in biology class pointing to holes in evolution theory and recommending pupils look into an intelligent-design library textbook called Of Pandas and People.
Abrams said the Kansas board was not specifically advocating intelligent design, only questioning evolution. . .
Meanwhile, a federal appeals court in Georgia is considering the case of an Atlanta suburb that had stickers put into biology textbooks, describing evolution as "a theory, not a fact".
Trust Georgia to take the lazy way out. Stickers in textbooks! When I was in the Georgia schools, they would have suspended you for doing that, and now the administration is doing it, and smirking behind their hands at the heathens in the "fed'ral gummint".
First, a jab to the nose! Then a hook to the temple! Next, knight takes bishop on D5! Testing both brains and brawn, it is supposedly the ultimate alpha-male sport. Yes, it's . . . chess boxing! Deborama is absolutely fascinated by this new international sport that started out life as a very subtle performance art piece and now nets its artist-founder a tidy little income.
This is a story I would think was a hoax, except who could make up such a thing? And I must ask, how many mayors, whether controversial or not, love their city so much that they want to import poisonous snakes within its boundaries?
From the Guardian:
One of the strongest arguments against time travel is that we are not overrun with curious tourists from the future. A university student in Boston plans to change that, by inviting budding Doctor Whos to the world's first time traveller convention this weekend.
The organiser, Amal Dorai - a masters student in electrical engineering and computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology - aims to test the theory of time travel by inviting people from the future to the event. Dorai says: "Of course, no time travellers doesn't rule out the possibility of time travel, they could have just decided not to come to our convention." Hmm - yeah. But it gets better. Physicists believe some kind of time travel is theoretically possible, but it will take hundreds or even thousands of years to work out the technical details.
Concerned that people will have forgotten his convention by then, Mr Dorai is urging volunteers to publicise the event to future generations by carving the details into clay tablets and burying notices in time capsules. He has slipped invitations on long-lasting paper inside dozens of obscure books in the MIT and Harvard University libraries.
Factivism has an article about a guy who agreed to eat nothing but McDonalds, three times a day every day, for one month, while being monitored by health professionals. The results were nothing short of shocking.
Am I the only person weird enough to see this connection? (Yeah, probably.) One story in the news is about the Voyager One which has just reached the outer edge of the solar system. (Opinions vary as to whether it has actually "crossed" a boundary or not, but in any case it is in the zone.) Another major story concerns the ever-increasing intensity of a phenomenal bout of solar storms. These are surpassing records for intensity every day. As one scientist said: "This is an R-5 extreme event; they dont get much bigger than this."
Well, look, you have an object crossing a boundary of the Sun's own system - something that has not happened before. It's possible that natural space junk of some kind "passes through" the solar system, but after reading this. . .
"One team reported Wednesday that the craft apparently crossed a turbulent boundary near the edge of the solar system, where supersonic "winds" of charged particles from the sun collide with matter from interstellar space. No spacecraft has ever come close to the boundary, known as the termination shock" . . . I sort of think that an object would have to be propelled somehow to get through the boundary. And then at the same time, you have activity on the surface of the sun, that, while admittedly cyclical, is exceeding all previously recorded activity.
So, it makes me think that Sol is angry and throwing a little hissie fit. Of course, it (or should I say he?) probably doesn't know that Voyager is anything to do with Earth and indeed the solar storms shower everything in their path with the same magnetic bombardment; as the sunspots where these originate "turn away" from Earth, we will be spared their effects for a couple of weeks. But it could be back with the rotation of the sun, and scientists don't know how long it will last or how intense it can get.
It's just a thought.
 This art student has been pushing a monkey nut with his nose through the streets of London for several days. He is shown arriving outside No. 10 Downing Street.
Another story in the same link (see below) is about Sylvester Stallone's psychic mother's psychic dogs and their prediction for the California governor recall race. (I think Stallone's ma is more of an oracle, with the dogs being the actual psychics. They can only answer yes-or-no questions, she says, but they are never wrong.) So, are you surprised to hear that they favour Schwarznegger to win? I'm not.
. . . could you have this story. Bookies lose shirts as record tumbles, says the Guardian (and in a special report, no less!) What record is this that has such an enormous impact? Why, the weather, the temperature! And the really British thing about it is that, even though temperatures have officially been measured in Celsius for decades, it was the "magic" numbers of 99 and 100 on the F scale that the punters bet on. This so wonderfully combines the British impulse for silly vices (they will bet on literally anything) and the obsession with the weather (which outstrips even Minnesota's, though I would not have thought that possible.)
Does the fact that I am blogging about it mean I have gone native at last? God, I hope not.
From Guardian Unlimited a summary of silly stories, from the surprisingly cheap toilet study to the sheepdog that tries to pee on the Prince of Wales, along with kangaroo crashes, nude hiking and the failure of London pavements to fry eggs.
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