G U D A

I love single moms

2009-01-04T19:09:00.000+01:00

I love single moms

The Red Pyramid of Snofru

2008-12-23T19:45:00.000+01:00

The Red Pyramid at Dashur has the second largest base of any pyramid in Egypt (only slightly smaller then the Great Pyramid of Khufu at Giza); each side measures 220m (722 feet).
However, with it's sides sloping at 43°22', it is substantially shorter at 104 meters (343 feet). Nevertheless, it is the fourth highest pyramid ever built in Egypt, with almost 160 layers of stone.

Stripped from its limestone casing, this pyramid reveals the reddish sandstone used to build most of its core. This explains its modern-day name, the Red Pyramid.
Its Ancient Egyptian name was "The Shining One".

The severe structural problems encountered while building the Bent Pyramid South of Dashur, led Snofru (Sneferu) to build yet another pyramid, at a small distance to the North. Significantly, the Red Pyramid was the first successful, true, cased Pyramid built in Egypt, ushering in the era of the Giza style pyramids.

Built by Khufu's father, Snefru, what really makes this pyramid special today is the lack of crowds and circus atmosphere that plagues the Giza Plateau, along with the fact that it can currently be entered without limitation.

Tura limestone was used as casing stone to cover the pyramid. Though some casing still remains, most has been removed. However, about every twentieth casing stone discovered had inscriptions on the back sides. Some were inscribed with the cartouche of Snefru while others had inscriptions in red paint naming the various work crews, such as the "Green Gang" or the "Western Gang". Snefru's cartouche was an important discovery, particularly since there are no identifying inscriptions within the pyramid.

East of the pyramid is what remains of a mortuary temple, as well as the first capstone (Pyramidion) ever found belonging to an Old Kingdom Pyramid. It was recovered in fragments and reconstructed. The mortuary temple itself, though nothing much remains, is significant because Snefru pioneered the east west alignment of Egyptian temples to match the path of the sun.

The Red Pyramid History

The inscriptions found on the back of the casing stones gave us clues to how long the pyramid took to build and also revealed the sequence of work that took place.

An inscription found at the base of this pyramid has shown that work had started during the year of the 15th cattle count of Snofru's reign. Since the cattle counts were held at irregular intervals during this reign, this refers to somewhere between Snofru's 15th and 30th year. It is very likely that the pyramid construction was started at the time when structural problems encountered when building the Bent Pyramid forced the builders to temporarily abandon this project.

Interestingly, a second inscription found 30 courses of stones higher is dated 2 to 4 years later than the inscription found at the base. This gives an idea about the speed at which the Egyptians were able to build a monument like this pyramid.

Within four years, 30 percent of the pyramid had been completed, and the entire pyramid was finished in about seventeen years.

There is little doubt that Snofru was finally buried in this pyramid, although the fragments of human remains found inside the burial chamber are not certain to have been his.

Interestingly, during the reign of Pepi I of the 6th Dynasty, this pyramid along with its southern neighbor, the Bent Pyramid, was considered as one estate.

The Geometry of the Red Pyramid

The Red Pyramid was built with a slope of only 43°22'. Its base length is 220 meters, that is 32 meters more than the Bent Pyramid. Its height is the same as the Bent Pyramid.

Basic Dimensions:

* base length: 220 m
* slope: 43o 22'
* height: 104 m
* burial chamber: 4.18 x 8.55 m (height: 14.67 m)

The broader base and lower slope were intended to better spread the mass of this pyramid and thus avoid the structural problems that had temporarily halted works on the Bent Pyramid.

The internal structure of this pyramid is a further continuation of the pyramid at Meidum and the Bent Pyramid. Contrary to this latter monument, however, there is only one internal structure, making it a lot more simple.

The entrance is located 28 m high up in the Northern face of the pyramid.
A descending passage (at an angle of 27 degrees) leads down for 62.63 m to a short horizontal corridor 7.4m long. This is followed by two almost identical antechambers with corbelled roofs. Both antechambers measure 3.65 by 8.36 m and are 12.31 m high.

The burial chamber can only be reached via a short passage which opens high up in the wall of the second antechamber. The burial chamber measures 4.18 by 8.55 m. Its corbelled roof goes up to a height of 14.67 m. It is located well above ground level, in the core of the pyramid.

The chapel built against the Eastern face of the pyramid was finished hastily, probably after the death of Snofru. It is somewhat more elaborate than the eastern chapel of the Red Pyramid or the pyramid at Meidum in that it houses an inner sanctuary, flanked by two smaller chapels.

There is no trace of a causeway leading down to the Valley Temple, of which few remains were found at the end of the 19th century.

In fact, all three of the chambers in this pyramid have corbelled ceilings, with between eleven and fourteen layers. Even with some two million tones of stone above, this ceiling design is so strong that there are no cracks or structural problems even today.

A short passage on the south side of the first chamber leads to a second chamber. These first two chambers are at ground level, while a third chamber is higher, built within the masonry of the pyramid itself.

The second chamber is unusual in that it lies directly under the apex of the pyramid, or center point of the pyramid. It is one of the only pyramids in Egypt to have this design layout. The final chamber, with its entrance passageway about 25 feet above the floor of the second chamber, can be accessed by a staircase (of modern construction).

Egyptologists believe the final chamber was intended to be the actual burial chamber. The floor has been excavated in an unsuccessful attempt to find other passageways.

Moscow Air Pollution

2008-12-23T19:42:00.001+01:00

For the second year in a row Moscow has been the world's most expensive city. After calculating the cost of housing, transportation, food, clothing, household goods and entertainment Moscow is 34.4 percent more expensive than New York. The Russian capital is choked with luxury cars, upscale construction projects and a new financial self-esteem. If Lenin had ever been buried he'd be rolling in his grave now.

click on image to enlarge

But all of the economic progress is coming at what cost? Over the past two years escalating numbers of vehicles on the roads put a stifling strain on the environment. Today Moscow has nearly 3,000,000 cars. Gray-brown noxious haze of smog covers the streets filled with jam-packed traffic, which blows out tons of unhealthy exhaust fumes of carbon monoxide and other harmful chemicals. Additionally there are 12 huge heat power stations, 53 district heating stations and 3,000 industrial enterprises still operating within the city borders. As a result concentrations of harmful substances often exceed maximum allowable by 10-20 times.

The level of air pollution varies from one neighborhood of the city to another. This accounts for the variability of child health levels. In the most severely polluted areas the prevalence of childhood bronchial asthma is much higher, and the cases of disharmonious physical development among children are more frequent.

Several government programs were designed to combat air pollution with a target to bring Moscow back down to EU standards by 2010. But those are just optimistic plans considering the severe present conditions

Extraterrestrial Found in California Duck?

2008-12-23T19:41:00.001+01:00

O n Sunday, May 21, 2006 an adult male mallard was brought to the International Bird Rescue Research Center (IBRRC), with what appeared to be a broken wing. Since 1971, the IBRRC has been rescuing birds from the devastating effects of oil spills around the world. Marie Travers, assistant manager of the center, radiographed the mallard and was immediately shocked by what was revealed on the x-ray. A very clear image of what appeared to be the face, or head, of an extraterrestrial alien was in the bird’s stomach.

Blown up: Alien face?

Alien duck xray
– Help IBRRC and bid on this unusual x-ray image online via eBay.

The IBRRC staff discussed if an alien life form was either consumed by or trying to communicate with the people of Earth through the duck, because the center is located in an area of California known for its mysterious crop circles.
Karen Benzel, Public Affairs Director for IBRRC noted that the symmetry of the alien's face is perfect, with an intense grimace, as if it was in anguish after being eaten. “Since aliens are notoriously short, reports are they are usually no more then 3-feet tall, we initially thought the small proportions of the face meant the duck had consumed a juvenile extraterrestrial being,” Benzel quipped. “We immediately knew this was something we had never seen before in our 35 year history.”

Full x-ray – The radiograph measures 17" x 14" and is of a mallard duck.

But, is it the face or head of an alien? Regrettably, IBRRC reports the duck succumbed to its injuries and passed away quickly, quietly, and peacefully after the x-rays were taken, and not from the alien bursting through the duck’s chest in classic gory Hollywood style. Was it an alien channeling through the duck or an anomaly similar to the “Face on Mars,” discovered by the Viking Lander when it orbited the Red Planet in 1976? No one knows. What is known is the one-of-a-kind x-ray, which measures 17” x 14”, will be sold on eBay along with a certificate of authenticity. All of the proceeds will go towards funding IBRRC’s rehabilitation programs. The center is also selling t-shirts with the alien image.
Jay Holcomb, Director of IBRRC, states “IBRRC is a 501c3 non-profit and donations fund our wildlife rehabilitation programs. Our Alien in the Duck X-Ray will surely garner a significant amount of interest, just like the NunBun™, and the Madonna in the Cheese Toast, which sold on eBay for a staggering amount of money.” The auction ened on Sunday, June 4, 2006 at 3 p.m. PST.
Holcomb continues, “Proceeds from the sale of this one-of-a-kind x-ray will go towards funding our continuing efforts to rescue and rehabilitate oiled, orphaned and injured waterfowl and aquatic birds.”
A necropsy was done by UC Davis veterinarians and showed the stomach had some grain in it, but no alien.
Established in 1971, IBRRC is the world’s leading first responder bird rescue organization and has saved countless birds from the devastating effects of hundreds of oil spills, including the Exxon Valdez, Apex Houston and MV Treasure disasters.
The IBRRC manages two centers in California, one located in Cordelia/Fairfield next to Suisun Marsh along the San Francisco Bay and the other in San Pedro, near Los Angeles Harbor. IBRRC and the UC Davis Wildlife Health Center work cooperatively helping birds in need of special care.
For more information about IBRRC programs or to make a donation or to buy an Alien in the Duck t-shirt!

The World`s 10 Most Famous Uncracked Codes

2008-12-23T19:39:00.001+01:00

This is a list of the ten most famous ciphers and writing systems that are still unsolved.

1.Kryptos

Kryptos is a sculpture by American artist James Sanborn located on the grounds of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in Langley, Virginia, in the United States. Since its dedication on November 3, 1990, there has been much speculation about the meaning of the encrypted messages it bears. It continues to provide a diversion for employees of the CIA and other cryptanalysts attempting to decrypt the messages. The ciphertext on one half of the main sculpture contains 869 characters in total, however Sanborn released information in April of 2006 stating that an intended letter on the main half of Kryptos was missing. This would bring the total number of characters to 870 on the main portion. The other half of the sculpture comprises a Vigenère encryption tableau, comprised of 869 characters, if spaces are counted.

2.Linear A

Linear A is one of two linear scripts used in ancient Crete (a third script is Cretan Hieroglyphs). They were discovered and named by Arthur Evans. Linear B was deciphered in 1952 by Michael Ventris and was used to write Mycenaean Greek. Linear A is far from being totally deciphered but it is partially understood and it may be read through Linear B values. Though the two scripts share many of the same symbols, using the syllables associated with Linear B in Linear A writings produces words that are unrelated to any known language.

3.The Phaistos Disk

The disc of Phaistos is the most important example of hieroglyphic inscription from Crete and was discovered in 1903 in a small room near the depositories of the “archive chamber”, in the north - east apartments of the palace, together with a Linear A tablet and pottery dated to the beginning of the Neo-palatial period (1700- 1600 B.C.). Both surfaces of this clay disc are covered with hieroglyphs arranged in a spiral zone, impressed on the clay when it was damp. The signs make up groups divided from each other by vertical lines, and each of these groups should represent a word. Forty five different types of signs have been distinguished, of which a few can be identified with the hieroglyphs in use in the Proto- palatial period.

4.Shugborough Hall Enscription

The Shepherd’s Monument at Shugborough Hall carries a relief (pictured above) that shows a woman watching three shepherds pointing to a tomb. On the tomb is depicted the Latin text “Et in arcadia ego” (”I am also in Arcadia” or “I am even in Arcadia”). The relief is based on a painting by the French artist Nicholas Poussin, known itself as Et in Arcadia ego, but the relief has a number of modifications — most noticeably that it is reversed horizontally. Another difference is a change in which letter of the tomb a shepherd is pointing at. In the painting the letter R in ARCADIA is being pointed to. The finger in the sculpture is broken, but was pointing to the N in IN. The sculpture also adds an extra sarcophagus to the scene, placed on top of the one with the Latin phrase. Below the image of the monument are the following letters:

D O.U.O.S.V.A.V.V. M

For adherents of the modern Grail-conspiracy legend, the inscription is alleged to hold a clue to the location of the Holy Grail.

5.Chinese Gold Bar Cipher

In 1933, seven gold bars were allegedly issued to a General Wang in Shanghai, China. These gold bars appear to represent metal certificates related to a bank deposit with a U.S. Bank. The gold bars themselves have pictures, Chinese writing, some form of script writing, and cryptograms in latin letters. Not surprisingly, there is a dispute concerning the validity of the claim for the deposit. It may help to resolve the dispute if someone can decipher the cryptograms on the bars. Nobody has yet put for the a theory as to their meaning. The Chinese writing has been translated, and discusses a transaction in excess of $300,000,000.

6.Beale Ciphers

In 1885, a small pamphlet was published in Virginia containing a story and three encrypted messages. According to the pamphlet, around 1820 a man named Beale buried two wagons-full of treasure at a secret location in Bedford County, Virginia. He then left a small locked box with a local innkeeper, and left town, never to be seen again. The pamphlet went on to state that the innkeeper, after having not heard from Beale for many years, opened the box and discovered encrypted messages. Never able to read them, he eventually passed them along to a young friend shortly before the innkeeper’s death in 1863. According to the pamphlet, the friend spent the next 20 years trying to decrypt the messages, solving only one which detailed the tons of gold, silver and jewels that were buried, along with a general location. The still unsolved messages supposedly give exact directions, and a list of who the treasure belongs to.

7.Voynich Manuscript

At least 400 years old, this is a 232-page illuminated manuscript entirely written in a secret script. It is filled with copious drawings of unidentified plants, herbal recipes of some sort, astrological diagrams, and many small human figures in strange plumbing-like contraptions. The script is unlike anything else in existence, but is written in a confident style, seemingly by someone who was very comfortable with it. In 2004 there were some compelling arguments which described a technique that would seemingly prove that the manuscript was a hoax, but to date, none of the described techniques have been able to replicate a single section of the Manuscript, so speculations continue.

8.The Dorabella Cipher

Probably Elgar’s most popular work is his ‘Enigma’ Variations which, apart from its undoubted musical merit, still tantalises the musical detectives with the hidden ’secrets’ which Elgar cleverly wove into the fabric of the score. But Elgar, who was fascinated by codes, ciphers, riddles and other forms of puzzles, has left us another mystery - the ‘Dorabella’ cipher (pictured above). One hundred and ten years ago - to be precise, on the 14 July 1897 - Elgar sent a letter to a young friend, Miss Dora Penny, the 22 year-old daughter of the Rev. Alfred Penny, Rector of St Peter’s, Wolverhampton. The unusual feature of the letter was that it was in a cipher which, a century later, still presents a challenge. There have been a couple of attempts at solving it but neither of these seem entirely satisfactory.

9.Chaocipher

John F. Byrne invented Chaocipher in 1918 and tried unsuccessfully for almost 40 years to interest the U.S. government in his cipher system. He offered a reward to anyone who could break his cipher but the reward was never claimed. In 1989, John Byrne, son of John F. Byrne, demonstrated Chaocipher to two Cryptologia editors to determine if it had any commercial value. After making some improvements and providing additional information they jointly issue a new challenge to would-be solvers. In his autobiography, Silent Years, John F. Byrne, a lifelong friend of James Joyce, devoted the last chapter to Chaocipher which he had invented in 1918. Byrne described his attempts starting in 1920 to interest the State, War, and Navy Departments in his indecipherable cipher and his frustration with the disinterest shown by William F. Friedman and other cryptanalytic experts after he had demonstrated his machine.

10.D’agapeyeff Cipher

75628 28591 62916 48164 91748 58464 74748 28483 81638 18174
74826 26475 83828 49175 74658 37575 75936 36565 81638 17585
75756 46282 92857 46382 75748 38165 81848 56485 64858 56382
72628 36281 81728 16463 75828 16483 63828 58163 63630 47481
91918 46385 84656 48565 62946 26285 91859 17491 72756 46575
71658 36264 74818 28462 82649 18193 65626 48484 91838 57491
81657 27483 83858 28364 62726 26562 83759 27263 82827 27283
82858 47582 81837 28462 82837 58164 75748 58162 92000

The D’Agapeyeff cipher is an as-yet unbroken cipher that appears in the first edition of Codes and Ciphers, an elementary book on cryptography published by the Russian-born English cartographer Alexander D’Agapeyeff in 1939. Offered as a “challenge cipher” at the end of the book, it was not included in later editions, and D’Agapeyeff is said to have admitted later to having forgotten how he had encrypted it. It has been argued that the failure of all attempts at decryption is due to D’Agapeyeff incorrectly encrypting the original text. However, it has been argued that the cipher may still be successfully attacked using computational methods such as genetic algorithms.

7 Craziest Conspiracy Theories

2008-12-23T19:38:00.001+01:00

1. Israel makes palestinian schoolgirls sexually promiscuous by selling them aphrodisiac bubble-gum

"Palestinian authorities uncovered Israeli efforts to spread a special kind of gum that contains sexual hormone between Palestinians. The authorities requested laboratory tests on the gum which were conducted in Cairo. Those tests showed that the gum contains progesterone which is responsible for sexual arousal and also prevents pregnancies. Palestinian authorities confiscated 200 tonnes of gum in the city of al-Khalil alone. The Washington Post claimed in report that if it asked a chemistry professor in the Hebrew university to examine the gum. His tests were negative, however the paper also reported that the majority of Palestinians believe the conspiracy. It quoted one Palestinian saying that it was possible to send a space ship to Mars then it is possible to manufacture a 'sexual gum' it is after all a war." (report by Mohammad Dalbah mentioned by middle east analyst Daniel Pi on his book pes)

2. Alien Reptiles are dominating the World

According to BBC Reporter David Icke, reptilian humanoids are the force behind a worldwide conspiracy directed at manipulation and control of humanity. He contends that most of the world's leaders, from William Jefferson Clinton, Hillary Rodham Clinton, Barack Obama and George W. Bush to members of the British royal family, are in fact related to the 7-foot (2.1 m) tall, blood-drinking reptilians from the star system Alpha Draconis.

According to an interview with David Icke, Christine Fitzgerald, a confidante of the late Diana, Princess of Wales, claims that Diana told her that the Royal Family were reptilian aliens, and that they could shapeshift. David Icke and others have claimed that U.S. President George W. Bush and his family are part of this same bloodline.

Icke claims, based on his exploration of genealogical connections to European royalty, that many presidents of the United States have been and are reptilian humanoids. In his view, United States foreign policy after September 11 is the product of a reptilian conspiracy to enslave humanity, with George W. Bush as a servant of the reptilians. He also theorizes that the reptilians came to Earth from the constellation Draco.

3. Wingdings font has a secret message of approval to kill Jews

Wingdings is a font included in all versions of Microsoft Windows, with a history of controversy. In 1992, only days after the release of Windows 3.1, it was discovered that the character sequence "NYC" in Wingdings was rendered as a skull and crossbones symbol, Star of David, and thumbs up gesture. This could be interpreted as a message of approval of killing Jews, especially those from New York City. Microsoft strongly denied this was intentional, and insisted that the final arrangement of the glyphs in the font was largely random. (The character sequence "NYC" in the later-released Webdings font, in turn, is rendered as eye, heart, and city skyline, which could be interpreted as "I Love New York City". Microsoft has stated that this is intentional.)

An urban legend that spread after the September 11, 2001 attacks was that if the sequence "Q33NY" is typed in Wingdings, the Q becomes an aircraft, the threes become lined documents (which resemble skyscrapers), the N becomes a skull and crossbones, and the Y becomes the Star of David. The resulting graphics look like an aircraft preparing to impact the World Trade Center, with a message of death for those of Jewish faith. The "NY" stands for New York, and "Q33" allegedly was the designation of one of the aircraft. However, the theory that this has any valid non-accidental connection with the attacks falls apart under scrutiny: the terrorist attacks were not specifically directed at Jews, and none of the aircraft used on that day bore the designation of Q33. Another suggestion was that "Q33" was a reference to a bus route, typically alleged to be at the World Trade Center itself, or to one of the airports involved. In reality, bus route Q33 serves LaGuardia Airport, and none of the hijacked aircraft took off from or were heading there.

Various other combinations of Wingdings characters are alleged to have special significance by conspiracy theorists

4.Stephen King killed John Lennon

Steve Lightfoot's book "Lennon Murder Expose" suggest his theory with "strong" evidence from government codes in the bold print headlines of Time. His website's introduction reads: "Contrary to all reports about a lone drifter named Mark David Chapman who allegedly shot John Lennon in the back December 8, 1980 you'll find ample evidence in the back issues of Time, Newsweek, and US News and World Report magazines to suggest otherwise. Namely, that John Lennon was, not only politically assassinated, but that Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and, you'd better sit down, horror novelist Stephen King are the three people who can be proven guilty of the crime. King being the real murderer and Chapman but a look-alike, paid actor misleading you with an absolute hoax, the media in tow."

"The evidence, specifically, is government codes in the bold print headlines of Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News and World Report magazines that were printed shortly before, during, and after the night of December 8, 1980. Hints in the headlines that you won't find anywhere else that plug into John Lennon's assassination with up to 70% frequency at times. These government codes, which read like gallows humor; «Thinking About John Lennon...Johnny Comes Marching Home...Kiss, Kiss, Bang, Bang, Ouch, Ouch...The Job Richard Nixon Really Wanted...Blasting the Opposition...America Needs A Poet Laureate...Maybe...Heeding Those Subtle Signs...Magazine Maze...All the Presidents Magazines...». These codes include the killer's face and true identity printed three and two months before the crime replete with headlines describing the then yet to come crime scene: «One Great Big Zippo Lighter...Perils of Pyrokinesis». Pyrokinesis means fire and movement, and a man at night with a gun ablaze, crouched in a raincoat looks like a great big cigarette lighter. Subtle but dramatic codes."

5. The Early Middle Ages (614–911 AD) never occurred. Year 2007 is actually 1710

The Phantom time hypothesis is a theory developed by Heribert Illig (born 1947) in 1991, which suggests that the Early Middle Ages (more precisely, the period 614–911 AD) never occurred, meaning that all artifacts attributed to this period are from other times and that all historical figures from this period are outright fabrications. The vast majority of historians believe this theory to be wrong. The basis of Illig's claims is the paucity of archaeological evidence that can be reliably dated to this period; perceived inadequacies of radiometric and dendrochronological methods of dating this period, and the over-reliance of medieval historians on written sources. For Western Europe, Illig claims the presence of Romanesque architecture in the tenth century as evidence that less than half a millennium could have passed since the fall of the Roman Empire, and concludes that the entire Carolingian period, including the person of Charles the Great, is a forgery of medieval chroniclers, more precisely a conspiracy instigated by Otto III and Gerbert d'Aurillac.

The theory also stems from the belief that during the introduction of the Gregorian calendar in Europe (1582 AD), while compensating for a ten day discrepancy in the old Julian calendar, many dates were falsely (or ineptly) recalculated as the new system created a thirteen day discrepancy. The original mathematical blemish was attributed to the Julian year being 1.3 minutes too long (which is commonly agreed as factual).

6. Paul McCartney is dead. The current is just a lookalike

The supposed death of Paul McCartney, a member of the Beatles, was the subject of a rumour that began circulating in October 1969. Proponents of the theory, which is commonly referred to as the Paul is dead hoax, claim that McCartney died in a car crash in late 1966 and was replaced by a lookalike before the recording of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. The supposed "clues" are given throughout the post-1966 Beatles material in the form of peculiar album covers, possible symbolism in strange lyrics, and backmasking. The rumour started when radio DJ Russ Gibb received a call from a listener who claimed that McCartney had died and the Beatles (namely John Lennon) had sprinkled clues throughout the Beatles' albums for fans to pick up on. The rumour quickly died down in 1970 after McCartney revealed himself to be alive on the cover of Newsweek magazine. However, some theorists still maintain that Paul is dead and the Paul McCartney who played with Wings and in the Super Bowl is the same lookalike who played with the Beatles after Revolver.

7. NASA Faked the Moon Landings

Apollo Moon Landing hoax accusations are claims that some or all elements of the Apollo Moon landings were faked by NASA and possibly members of other involved organizations. Some groups and individuals have advanced alternate historical narratives which tend, to varying degrees, to include the following common elements:

The Apollo Astronauts did not land on the Moon;

NASA and possibly others intentionally deceived the public into believing the landing(s) did occur by manufacturing, destroying, or tampering with evidence, including photos, telemetry tapes, transmissions, and rock samples;

NASA and possibly others continue to actively participate in the conspiracy to this day.

Enthusiasts of this theory claim that:

The astronauts could not have survived the trip because of exposure to radiation

The photos were altered: the Crosshairs on some photos appear to be behind objects, rather than in front of them where they should be

The quality of the photographs is implausibly high.

There are no stars in any of the photos, and astronauts never report seeing any stars from the capsule windows.

Identical backgrounds in photos that are listed as taken miles apart.

The moon's surface during the daytime is so hot that camera film would have melted.

No blast crater appeared from the landing

The launch rocket produced no visible flame.

The flag placed on the surface by the astronauts flapped despite there being no wind on the Moon.

Many commentators have published detailed rebuttals to the hoax claims. According to a 1999 poll conducted by the The Gallup Organization, what Gallup termed an "overwhelming majority" of the US public, some 89 percent, did not believe the landing was faked, while 6 percent did and 5 percent were undecided.

Secret Archives of the Vatican

2008-12-23T19:32:00.003+01:00

You would think that the Vatican's Secret Archives would be some dumb conspiracy theory. I mean, it sounds ridiculous. The Vatican's Secret Archives. Let it roll off your tongue. Surely, we're into serious conspiracy weirdness here.

Except, of course, that there really is such a thing. And it's pretty much exactly what you think it is.

There are a lot of reasons for an organization like the Catholic Church to have Secret Archives. After all, they've been in the conspiracy business for millennia longer than Majestic-12. They've been in the disinformation business for about 18 times as long as Donald Rumsfeld has been alive. They were taking secret vows when the Masons were just a bunch of architects. And they have more to hide that Richard M. Nixon on his worst day.

The Catholic Church first officially started keeping a library around the fourth century. Formed at the height of the first great heresy craze, the contents of this library included a lot of attacks on heretical branches of Christianity and the documents and scriptures used by these heretical branches (which the Church fathers admitted to having read).

The entire contents of the pre-eighth century archives, presumably including all these fascinating heresies, mysteriously disappeared, according to the Vatican's official account of the library's history, "for reasons not entirely known."

The library was strictly closed to the public until around the 15th century, when the church decided to open its contents for the masses. OK, not all of the contents. Starting in the fourth century, the Catholic Church, in a position of political power for the first time, had been ruthlessly suppressing what it saw as heresy:

"Theodosius is said to be the first (Roman emperor) who pronounced heresy a capital crime; this law was passed in 382 against the Encratites, the Saccophori, the Hydroparastatae, and the Manichaeans. Heretical teachers were forbidden to propagate their doctrines publicly or privately; to hold public disputations; to ordain bishops, presbyters, or any other clergy; to hold religious meetings; to build conventicles or to avail themselves of money bequeathed to them for that purpose. Slaves were allowed to inform against their heretical masters and to purchase their freedom by coming over to the Church. The children of heretical parents were denied their patrimony and inheritance unless they returned to the Catholic Church. The books of heretics were ordered to be burned."

Well, most of the books. After all, you would have to be pretty stupid to destroy valuable intelligence on your most hated enemies (read the Catholic Encyclopedia's entry on heresy for a sense of the magnitude of enmity we're talking about here). Around the time the library first opened to the public, Pope Paul IV issued the "index of prohibited books." Reading, possessing or distributing these books had a spiritual penalty of excommunication (i.e., condemnation to hell without appeal), and in Catholic countries, they often had civil penalties as well (of varying severity, depending on the nature of the books).

Ironically, the pope issued an order later that same year mitigating the penalties regarding violations of the Index's non-reading list, but the order was conveniently "lost" until 1909. Whoops! Guess they should've invented the Dewey decimal system while they were opening the library. This minor paperwork snafu justified 400 years of suppression and censorship, and when the modification of the order was discovered, it was ignored in favor of 400 years precedent, until the church finally lightened the order (slightly) in 1966.

While all this sounds pretty revolting to the American mindset, the church officially condones censorship even today: "Censorship of books is a supervision of the press in order to prevent any abuse of it. In this sense, every lawful authority, whose duty it is to protect its subjects from the ravages of a pernicious press, has the right of exercising censorship of books."

Starting in the third century, the Church had expressly ordered the destruction of heretical books, but their contents were clearly referenced by the main heresy-hunters of the day, such as Irenaeus, a Father of the Church who wrote extensively about the fallacies of heresy. His texts explicitly admit he had read some of the source materials, as well as showing a great familiarity with the various beliefs of the many different heretic sects in existence at the time. The church's official history of the archives confirms it contained such materials as a resource for those designated to fight against heresy.

Thus, the existence of a secret archive became inevitable for an organization obsessed with information control. Whatever form this archive took, it indisputably dates back to the fourth century at the latest. According to the Vatican, the early secret archive contained mainly the names of believers and wealthy patrons of the church, but as noted above, it almost assuredly contained copies of heretical and banned works, information deemed too "dangerous" for the public.

As the centuries wore on, the list of banned and dangerous books grew and grew, thanks to repeated expansions of the enemies list and aggressive attempts to snuff out the list's members. The Inquisitions rounded up hundreds of books on topics ranging from Protestantism to Witchcraft and ritual magic, to the libraries of groups like the Knights Templar and the Cathars.

The latter groups might have had some particularly explosive additions for the library. Modern Conspiracy theorists have speculated that the Templars and the Cathars could have been protecting secrets like the possibility that Jesus Christ didn't die on the cross as advertised, and that there might be hard evidence to support that claim, not to mention descendents of the allegedly sexless messiah.

Pope Pius IV is credited with first officially designating the existence of something which would formally be called the "Secret Archive." The actual building was completed early in the 17th century and remained an ironclad fortress of forbidden information until the end of the 19th century, when it was purportedly opened to select scholars.

A heavily edited index of the Archives contents was published, and a large set of rules were developed regarding who got access to what. An even more secret archive known as the "Apostolic Penitentiary" exists, containing papal documents and canon law, and a lot of other stuff which is super-classified. Absolutely no one is allowed access.

As the 20th century dawned, the increasingly free flow of information around the world (and the decreasing political power of the Catholic Church) made it more and more difficult for the Vatican to effectively control what people were reading.

Archaeological discoveries of ancient Gnostic texts spilled the beans on the original heretics, and a vast surge of interest in all things magical and occult just made things worse. It's difficult to justify banning access to the rituals of witchcraft, just for instance, when every major bookseller in American carries three or four flavors of "Teen Witch Spell Kits."

Another predictable problem arose when the Vatican admitted the secret archives existed. People very naturally began guessing what might be in there, sometimes very accurately.

Among the more recent good guesses were the contents of the Third Secret of Fatima, an allegedly devastating prophecy of doom delivered by the Virgin Mary in a series of appearances to illiterate peasant children which was allegedly revealed by the Church in 2000. Under intense pressure, the Church released a series of 20th century documents from the secret archives relating to papal complicity in the rise of the Nazis in Germany.

In addition to Nazi collaboration, the archives are generally thought to contain rather a lot of information about the Catholic Church's wrongdoings, such as the current scandal on priestly pedophilia. In fact, the archives contain miles of allegations concerning the sexual kinks and other vices enjoyed by priests and bishops, dating back to at least the 14th century, and possibly even earlier.

Realizing the danger of such disclosures, the Vatican structured access to the archives to allow a minimum of accidental disclosures and a maximum of secrecy. The most obvious way to do this is also the most effective. It's strictly prohibited to go browsing the shelves in the Vatican's secret archives. It's unclear whether even the archive's librarians are allowed to do so.

Scholars wishing to review information in the archives have to arrive at the gate knowing exactly what documents they want, which is a pretty crappy way to encourage scholarship but a great way to make sure no one stumbles onto the Explicit Erotic Diaries of Jesus and Mary. Scholars also have to present their research requests in writing in advance, allowing the librarians ample time to decide between their three options in responding — 1) bring out the requested document, 2) claim the document doesn't exist, or 3) admit the document exists but refuse to give the scholar access.

So if you were hoping poke around the archives looking for evidence that Jesus was an extraterrestrial, just forget it. You have a better chance of getting a guided tour of Area 51 than getting a glimpse of the Sacred Alien Rectal Probing Device.

Pentagram aka Pentangle, Pentacle

2008-12-23T19:32:00.001+01:00

Lately it's been besmirched as a sigil of Satanism, but the pentagram is a versatile totem, and it's been around since long before anyone got around to inventing Satan.

The design is an equidistant five-pointed star drawn with a single continuous motion of the pen. Sometimes the design is enclosed in a circle. The symbol goes back to 4,000 B.C. at least, where it surfaced in the earliest form of writing, pictographic languages used in ancient Mesopotamia, whose alphabet consisted of little pictures that represented whole words.

No one knows what the pentagram meant to the Sumerians (despite what you might hear to the contrary), but most of the stone tablets of this period consist of really simple, pragmatic lists -- such as tax records, inventories and gene

The odds are quite good that the original meaning of the pentagram was something extremely boring, like "cow". It might have meant "person", since the shape famously corresponds to a head, two outstretched arms, and two legs, or it might have meant "hand", with its five points representing five fingers. But all this is sheer guesswork.

Whatever its original context, it didn't take long for the shape to absorb a more elevated status. Pythagoras, a Greek philosopher who basically invented formal geometry, believed that the world was made of math and that everything in life could be numerically quantified and represented.

His premise isn't too far from what a physicist would tell you today, but some of his direct conclusions were naive (in a manner appropriate to the time). Pythagoras was fascinated with the pentagram, as well as the six-pointed hexagram, and spent a lot of energy analyzing its properties, as well as its relation to other shapes.

Pythagoras made several observations about the pentagram, such as that there's a pentagon inside it, and that if you draw a pentagon from the points of the star, it's inverted compared to the inside one, and that you can draw a pentagram with one continuous stroke. In other words, Pythagoras had little interesting to say about the topic, but he considered the design important enough that his followers used it as their insignia. They believed it symbolized health or perfection.

Pentagrams were also used by Jewish mystical artists dating back to an unknown period of antiquity. The oldest documented examples were in synagogues with a few centuries of the start of the Christian era, but later legend has it that the pentagram was also associated with King Solomon, as part of his seal and as a symbol prominently featured in his Temple.

Pentagrams were frequently used in pagan, Jewish, Eastern and even Christian mystical contexts as a symbol of just about anything that came in fives. Frequently, it was taken as a symbol of the four alchemical elements -- earth, air, fire and water -- plus a fifth point that meant different things to different people, most often either divine power or the human soul.

Because humans all over the world have five fingers, the number five carries significance in virtually every culture, and the pentagram was a convenient carrier of that number. There are examples of the pentagram being used in Taoism and other Chinese systems as a symbol of the five elements used in Eastern cosmology -- wood, metal, earth, fire and water. In some early Christian traditions, including Gnosticism, the five points of the star represented the five wounds of Christ. Eventually other traditions used pentagram-derived stars as a representation of a star from the sky, likely an effort to artistically represent the twinkling effect caused by atmospheric distortion.

During the middle ages, however, the pentagram underwent an major transformation, which would permanently shape its image for centuries to come. Probably the most important document in pentagramology is the Seal of Solomon, perhaps the most influential of the many medieval grimoires that offered believers a chance to grab the brass ring of cosmic superpowers.

The Seal of Solomon inspired a lot of derivative magickal texts, which spread the pentagram far and wide. The status of the symbol took a giant leap forward when it was adopted by the occult-influenced Freemasonry movement, and related sects like the Eastern Star, the Golden Dawn, and the O.T.O. The Masons may have taken their cue from the Knights Templar, who are perhaps posthumously the sect most responsible for the pentagram's association with Satanic beliefs.

When the Templars were destroyed in the early 1300s, they were accused of many Satanic atrocities, including the worship of an unspecified object that resembled a cat or a head, known as Baphomet.

While some have theorized that the object in question may have been the Shroud of Turin folded to display the head of the Christ figure on the cloth, the popular conception of the Baphomet was later influenced by occultist Eliphas Levi, and subsequently by Aleister Crowley and some of his cronies.

Levi put forward a Baphomet design that featured an image of a goat's head inside an inverted pentagram, with the horns extending up into the points of the star. The goat symbolizes Satan, and the symbol was later adopted by Satanists of the Anton LaVey school. The symbol was then retroactively "discovered" to have an extensive occultist history by revisionist New Age and occult historians, who claimed it was an ancient symbol in virtually every magic tradition, including traditional and Wiccan witchcraft, pseudo-Egyptian occultist, etc., etc.

By the time this association had been firmly established, the pentagram or its filled-in variant had been institutionalized all over the world in a whole lot of different contexts -- including religions, secret societies and many others -- for instance, in the flag of the United States and the crescent and star symbol of Islam.

The retroactive -- and largely inaccurate -- association of the pentagram with all things devilish has provided ample fodder for those loonies whose lives are devoted to seeking to chart the dark influence of Satan all over the world.

The pentagram has also become a mainstay of the New World Order conspiracy craze, where it is seen as a link between the lords of the military-industrial complex and the Masonic-Illuminati-whatever plot to rule the world. As if they needed more encouragement.

Mind Control

2008-12-23T19:31:00.003+01:00

Most of human history has been a series of efforts by some humans to control what other humans think. When this effort doesn't take the form of a dominant organized Religion, we call it "mind control" and officially designate it as "bad."

Cults and Secret Societies have used simple brainwashing techniques for as long as anyone can remember.

The word "assassin," for instance, is Arabic for "user of hashish." The original assassins were an 11th Century Islamic cult of killers called the Nizari, who were promised the glories of martydom (not unlike their modern equivalents). Their leader offered a preview of the paradise to come, visions allegedly delivered via large doses of hash. In India, highly secretive cults flourished for centuries in the names of some of the more violent deities such as Kali.

Hypnotism

In addition to practicing simple mind control techniques on their own, these robber and murderer cults also inspired others to adopt their techniques. The Knights Templar were founded to fight off just such bands of robbers and murderers, who had been targeting Christian pilgrims in the Holy Lands.

The Knights (and their brethren, the Freemasons) quickly discovered the power of cult techniques such as isolation, hypnagogic rituals, arcane initiations and oaths of secrecy, which they very successfully applied among their ranks. Despite being victimized by the skilled torturers of the Inquisition (themselves masters of "thought reform"), none of the loyal thousands of Knights ever spilled any of the group's deepest secrets.

In the 1700s, Franz Anton Mesmer was born, marking a turning point in the history of mind control. Mesmer developed a technique called "animal magnetism" as a medical technique for treating a number of illnesses (primarily psychosomatic) which were not well understood at the time. Animal magnetism was quickly dubbed "mesmerism" and later morphed into "hypnotism."

Mesmerism involved different techniques, including the placement or brandishment of literal magnets around the subjects, and the monotonous repetition of words and tones, which induced a trance-like state in its subjects.

In a hypnotic trance, the subject is prone to suggestibility. They tend to believe what they are told and their senses will malfunction to back up these suggestions. Mesmer primarily used the technique to cure various stress-related illnesses but it soon became clear that hypnotism could also be used to make people do things they wouldn't normally do.

Today, any respectable hypnotist will assure you that a person under hypnosis can't be induced to do anything they wouldn't normally be able to do. But then, it's not the respectable hypnotists that you have to worry about. Regardless of their protestations of harmlessness, the suggestibility of a hypnotized subject offers ample opportunity for the hypnotist to wreak havoc.

Aside from the possibility of just ordering the subject to become a killing machine, which is not a reliable technique, one can plant suggestions that allow the subject to justify all manner of wrongdoing (i.e., "Jim is planning to kill you. He will kill you unless you kill him first. You had better kill him in self-defense.").

Hypnotic techniques can also be used to plant "post-hypnotic" suggestions, in which a certain set of circumstances (such as the utterance of a "trigger phrase") cause the subject to act out a preprogrammed behavior. This is more popular as a Hollywood device than effective in the real world, but it can be done.

The main problem with hypnosis as a mind-control technique is that it's pretty difficult to hypnotize someone against their will. That's why insidious megalomaniacs returned to the techniques used by the first Assassins — drugs — while inventing new and exciting ways to manipulate the masses in an economical fashion.

Television and Subliminals

[ambiguous: ad2.jpg] Subliminal mind control also plays to the suggestibility of humankind (i.e., the presumption that we are not much more sophisticated than sheep). The technique, most famously used in advertising, involves embedding secret images into harmless-looking images in order to "sneak" a message directly into the viewers subconscious.

Subliminal advertising has existed for a long time in the form of subtle visual cues embedded in still pictures, but the technique first hit the big time in the 1950s, when marketer named James Vicary invented a method for inserting subliminal messages into films.

His technique would flash a simple text message for a single frame on a movie screen. While viewers were enjoying a nice movie, the words "Eat popcorn" or "Drink Coke" would flit by on the screen too quickly for the conscious mind to see. The results were anecdotally reported to be spectacular, with massive increases in theater concessions sales. The apparent success of the technique (which was never replicated in a controlled scientific setting) alarmed the hell out of most people and subliminal advertising was subsequently banned (although it still pops up in insidious ways, especially in liquor ads for some reason).

The use of subliminals in mind control of the "Big Brother-evil empire" variety has never been extensively documented (unlike the use of drugs, see below), but it stands to reason that if the technique is even marginally effective, someone is probably using it.

Subliminals and hypnotism have also been adopted by the "self-help" crowd, as a way to assist people in difficult tasks which they would prefer not to accomplish through self-discipline and hard work.

These include, most prominently, quitting smoking and losing weight. Retailers everywhere stock endless recordings of happy white-sound noises (such as ocean surf or New Age ambient music) which feature subliminal audio tracks running underneath, with messages such as "You don't want to smoke" or "You don't want to eat."

While scientific types are highly skeptical about the effectiveness of subliminals, science hardly matters to people who want to make a quick buck, or people who want to quit smoking without tears.

Behavioral Conditioning

The most effective form of mind control, often used in conjunction with drugs, involves behavioral conditioning. This is a pretty simple concept. You put someone in a controlled environment, then you punish them for "bad thoughts" and reward them for "good thoughts."

George Orwell presented one of the most thorough visions of a behaviorally controlled society in "1984," a nightmare vision of a world in which government uses heavy-handed techniques to keep people thinking the right kinds of thoughts at any given time. Sci-fi writer Philip K Dick also frequently delved into this territory, as did Patrick McGoohan's groundbreaking TV series, "The Prisoner."

In addition to such obvious techniques as torture and drugs, behavioral conditioning can be accomplished in more subtle ways, often reputedly employed by religious cults and top secret government prisons.

Known as "coercive persuasion," the technique involves breaking up an individual's usual routine, isolating them from contact with the outside world, Pavolovian rewards and punishment, and "non-violent" coercions such as sleep deprivation, humiliation and various kinds of noise disruptions.

Although religious cults took a lot of heat in the 1980s and 1990s for employing these techniques, that hasn't stopped the George W Bush Administration from openly and shamelessly using these methods against alleged terrorists such as Jose Padilla and Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, despite prohibitions against such treatment of prisoners in the Geneva Conventions. The rationale offered by the administration for these actions pretty much boils down to "The end justifies the means."

But then, Bush is hardly the first U.S. president to oversee mind control projects. He's just the first to bother offering a rationale. Which brings us, inevitably, to the subject of...

Drugs!

Although Ben Franklin is rumored to have investigated hypnotism on behalf of the government back in the early days of the nation, the institutionalization of mind control techniques by top-secret government conspiracies didn't become a growth industry until the onset of the Cold War.

Inspired in part by Nazi successes with propaganda and torture techniques, the Central Intelligence Agency and the KGB undertook massive research ventures designed to break human beings down into malleable robots, which was considered a useful technique in both intelligence practices and domestic governance.

In the 1950s, the CIA began experimenting with mind-control as part of an infamous program known as MKULTRA. The most famous outgrowth of this program was the popularization of LSD as a recreational drug, which had rather the opposite effect on society than was being sought.

Under MKULTRA, the CIA conducted hundreds of experiments on unwitting people in the San Francisco area and elsewhere. In some of these tests, the Agency hired hookers to dose their johns with LSD so CIA scientists could study the effects.

The agency shredded most of its documentation on the MKULTRA plan before it became public. What little is known suggest that the government was trying to create "supersoldiers" and sleeper agents who would feel no pain and who would be under the absolute control of their superiors.

The Soviets were engaged in similar experiments, which formed the basis of the movie "The Manchurian Candidate," in which Frank Sinatra played a mind-controlled former prisoner of war sent on a mission of assassination against the U.S.

A side-effect of these proven experiements is a whole host of unproven conspiracy theories regarding mind control and political assassinations. Virtually every major political assassination in the 20th Century has been attached to a mind-control conspiracy of lesser or greater credibility, including John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King and Malcolm X.

The Robert Kennedy case is particularly interesting to mind control aficionados. RFK was killed by a "lone gunman" named Sirhan Sirhan. According to Sirhan's defense team, the assassin was extremely susceptible to hypnosis. When a defense psychologist hypnotized him, the first thing Sirhan allegedly said was, "I don't know any people." Sirhan appeared to be in an altered state of consciousness when he was arrested and claimed to have no memory of shooting RFK.

Regardless of all these claims, one thing is pretty clear: LSD is remarkably ineffective as a mind control agent. Barbiturates and narcotics are useful for encouraging trance states, but they also diffuse the subject's focus, making hypnotism per se problematic. Highly addictive drugs are often used as the "poor man's mind control," by hooking the subject on coke or heroin and then making them do tricks to get their fix. This technique (most commonly used to obtain blow jobs) is notoriously unreliable, since hardcore addicts tend to be pretty unstable.

Relatively new drugs such as Ritalin and Prozac have been the subject of much speculation among conspiracy theorists, since they have a remarkable success rate in transforming rebellious or difficult children (and adults) into compliant conformist consumers without the need for such tedious old-school techniques as "parenting" and "discipline."

Ritalin is a central nervous system stimulant designed to treat a "disease" called "attention deficit hyperactivity disorder." Now, you may be wondering why a stimulant is used to treat hyperactivity, but you're not a doctor, so give up any hope of understanding. You're just going to have to trust The Man. (Even doctors don't have a good answer to this question. The National Institute of Mental Heatlh says "The answer to this question is not well established," and adds "more research is needed." Implied but not overtly stated are the credos: "Trust The Man" and "We Just Pump Your Kids Full Of Drugs Until Something Seems To Work.")

The current "thinking" is that 5 percent of U.S. children are suffering from this "disease," for which the NIMH lists such symptoms as inattentiveness in school, the inability to sit still, the desire to run around and play, fidgeting in a classroom chair, impulsiveness and impatience, or making inappropriate comments. If you remember doing any of these things as a child, then you really missed out on the super drug-induced behavior modification that kids today enjoy so well.

Upwards of 8 million American children are estimated to be using Ritalin or a related drug type, and that appears to be a lowball estimate based on old data. Ritalin use has increased nearly 1,000 percent in 10 years.

If all that isn't "Big Brother" enough for you, consider this tidbit from NIMH: "Physicians and parents should be aware that schools are federally mandated to perform an appropriate evaluation if a child is suspected of having a disability that impairs academic functioning (specifically including ADHD)." So don't worry! If you can't keep your kid in line, The Man will do it for you!

Sci-Fi Techniques

With all this ugly reality out there, you wouldn't think there would be a great need for nutty conspiracy theories about cornball sci-fi mind control techniques being secretly employed against the masses. But you'd be wrong.

One of the favorite modern theories about secret mind control has to do with satellites beaming microwaves or other forms of virulent radiation into the brains of a mostly unsuspecting public (as in the HAARP Project, among others). The suspecting public appears to be largely composed of schizophrenics, who for some reason are particularly fond of this theory. Hell, maybe it's true, who knows? There is no publicly available scientific research to support the idea that microwaves can be used for mind control, but then there wouldn't be, now would there?

Magnetism has also been a favored sci-fi approach to mind control since the days of Mesmer's animal variety. There's a sort of, kind of, general plausibility to this thinking that stems from the electrical nature of the brain, but again, you'd be hard pressed to find a working theory to explain how one goes from the general idea to a working prototype.

The lack of credible research is no obstacle to the determined inventor, however, as evidenced by the dozens of patents on file for various gadgets and gizmos intended to transform the Average Joe into an Empowered-Mind-Dominating-Superfreak.

One such device is an "apparatus for and method of sensing brain waves at a position remote from a subject (... which) also can be used to produce a compensating signal which is transmitted back to the brain to effect a desired change in electrical activity therein." This 1976 patent apparently never made it to mass production (or if it did, all memory of such a device has been eradicated from our brains using the device itself).

Not all approaches to mechanical mind control are so subtle. Since electroshock therapy came on the scene in the 1940s, numerous methods have been introduced to "help" people with behavioral conditioning, usually via electrical shock. The most innocuous of these involves a wristband designed to shock smokers when they lift a cigarette to their lips. Among the most lethal-looking is a device that appears to involve electrically charged spikes driven into one's skull. Now, THAT'S a good time!

Secret Societies

2008-12-23T19:31:00.001+01:00

For centuries, humans have been trying to keep information from other humans. Paradoxically, many have come to the conclusion that the best way to keep a secret is to tell it to a bunch of other people and then swear them all to secrecy.

When this effort is unsuccessful, we call the result a "secret society." When the effort is successful, we don't call the result anything, because we plebians never hear about the effort to begin with.

In short, the society part is easy. The secret part is hard.

Nevertheless, secret societies have become deeply embedded in the zeitgeist. In some cases, their secrets are so poorly kept that a quick run through Google will yield nearly anything you could possibly want to know. In other cases, the society manages to keep some of its secrets secret, but the group itself becomes known to a greater or lesser extent.

There are many different ways to structure a secret society, but there are a few specific models which recur fairly often. In order to qualify as a secret society, a group generally has to be based around initiation rituals, degrees of authority and dramatic oaths of silence.

Most groups can arguably be included in more than one of the categories which follow, and probably all of them can be included under the final heading:

* Political
* Religious
* Fraternal
* Fictional
* Insane

Political

Many people look at the state of the world and come to the understandable conclusion that they must be missing something. After all, no rational person would make the decisions some world leaders make... unless, of course, they have a hidden agenda that we don't know about.

So whose agenda is it, anyway? Some favorite contenders include:

* Freemasonry
* Skull and Bones
* Trilateral Commission
* Bilderberg Group
* Council on Foreign Relations
* Muslim Brotherhood

Some of the aforementioned examples are pretty dicey, others are very well documented. Throughout history, small groups of intelligentsia have banded together for the sake of instigating political change.

The Carbonari in Italy, a derivative of the Masons, helped forment revolution in the 19th century. Edelweiss, a European group, advanced a pro-Nordic racial agenda and produced such illustrious members as Herman Groerning. Thule Gelleschaft, an occultish group of the day, reputedly inspired Hitler to adopt the swastika as the Nazi emblem.

A Russian group, Land and Liberty, used terrorism and assatination to lay the groundwork for revolution. Formally known as the Fists of Righteous Harmony, the Boxers began as a small Chinese nationalist society toward the end of the 19th century before swelling to incredible size, embarking on a reign of terror against foreigners and subsequently getting slaughtered by the U.S. Navy.

There's plenty of evidence to show that secret societies have formed to accomplish specific political goals, but those groups that don't get killed in the process tend to fade away after the immediate political crisis is resolved.

The idea that a secret society might be running the world can be appealing. It offers the possibility that every stupid, pointless thing done by world leaders might actually be smart and pointful, part of some sort of plan. However, it doesn't take much live experience to realize that individual people are generally stupid and pointless, and Occam's Razor tells us the simplest explanation is most often correct.

Nevertheless, people will talk. If all the above secret societies aren't enough to satisfy your paranoid tendencies, you can always look into "The Octopus" -- an uber-secret society which purportedly links all of the other secret societies in one vast conspiracy to control the world.

The Octopus was first tenatively identified by a freelance investigative reporter named Danny Casolaro, who believed it linked such conspiracies as Iran-Contra, BCCI,INSLAW to such government agencies as the CIA, FBI and the NSA.

Casolaro turned up dead due to an extremely suspicious "Suicide" in 1991. His story (or rather, a wildly imaginative telling of his story) has made him a martyr to the conspiracy crowd.

Some political secret societies eventually metamorphose into criminal organizations, such as the Mafia, the Japanese Yakuza and the Chinese Triads. You can also make a case that race-based hate groups like the Ku Klux Klan were also working from a political mindset, at least in their formative years.

Religious

Many secret societies have a religious or occult component, but some are very explicitly devoted to advancing one form of religion or another. Religious secret societies are very real, and they have often had a tremendous impact on history, which explains why you've probably heard of a few:

# Knights Templar
# al Qaeda
# Al Takfir Wal Hijra
# The Assassins
# Sufism
# Knights of Malta
# Ordo Templi Orientis
# Scientology
# Cathars
# The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith

The Knights Templar were perhaps the ultimate Christian secret order, and to this day, no one is quite sure exactly what secrets they were keeping. Many Heterical beliefs have been forced underground during the history of the Christian church, which may account for the strong strain of Ghosticism hat runs through many secret societies. The Templars were rumored to have Gnostic tendencies, but it's difficult to prove that 1,000 years later.

In order to counter heretical groups, the Catolic Chruch has created its own secret orders from time to time, under auspices of the pope. The Templars originated as such an officially sanctioned group, but they fell out of favor when their wealth and power challenged the political status quo.

Envy and fear led to charges of witccraft and other wrongdoing, and the Church eventually exterminated the order... or did they? These days, you can't swing a dead cat without hitting some group that claims to be a continuation or an offshoot of the Templars.

The history of Islam is also riddled with secretive groups which have had an incalcuable effect on history, from the Assassins of the 11th Century to al Qaeda in the present day. One reason these groups are so effective is their embrace of violence, paired with a complete disregard for the personal safety of their members. The Assassins and the Templars were rumored to have shared trade secrets and engaged in other covert alliances.

The list of religious secret societies goes on and on. Buddichist got into the act, with organizations like the White Lotus Groups (of which the Boxers were technically a part), and variations sprouted among Hindus and Jews as well.

Africa has been rife with secret societies of all sorts, many of which are based in the rituals of scamanistic tribal religions. An outgrowth of African spiritual beliefs, Voudoun was intimately linked with Hatian secret societies, many of which are political in nature. An American variation on the theme, Santeria, is practically a secret society in itself.

You will be the hit of the cocktail party when you hold forth on the origins of the word "Mumbo Jumbo," which is a botched transliteration of the name of a Mandingo secret society. The account originated with the 18th century explorer of Africa Francis Moore, who wrote that the all-male society, bound by terrible oaths, existed primarily to adjudicate disputes between men and women... in favor of men. So how did Moore find out about this "secret" group?

About the year 1727, the king of Jagra having a very inquisitive woman to his wife, was so weak as to disclose to her this secret; and she being a gossip, revealed it to some other women of her acquaintance. This at last coming to the ears of some who were no friends to the king, they, dreading lest if the affair took vent, it should put a period to the subjection of their wives, took the coat, put a man into it, and going to the king's town, sent for him out, and taxed him with it: when he not denying it, they sent for his wife, and killed them both on the spot. Thus the poor king died for his complaisance to his wife, and she for her curiosity.

The first rule of Mumbo Jumbo is DON'T TALK ABOUT MUMBO JUMBO!

Fraternal

Some people are attracted to the bizarre rituals and self-important playtime of a secret organization without necessarily wanting the responsibility of ruling the world or protecting the arcane keys of occult power. For those who just want to play at global conspiracy, there are a number of options ranging from the ridiculous to the... well, also ridiculous.

* Elks
* Lions
* Moose
* Shriners
* Oddfellows
* College fraternities
* Beavers
* The Knights of Columbus

All of these groups are basically clubs for silly boys, to a greater or lesser extent.

They are based around "lodges," a word nicked from Masonic practice which means, in this context, a place you go to get drunk in the company of men. Most of these groups feature some sort of thinly veiled homoerotic bondage play as a form of initiation.

Generally, these groups are all male, all the time, though some have women's auxiliary groups and others have been forced by American law to open their doors to all comers. Most fraternal organizations require you to pay dues, which entitles you to use of the bar.

Fraternal clubs often perform charity work in a vain effort to justify their existence. They can also provide business networking opportunities for those who are insufficiently ambitious to hook up with the Masons, or even better, the Trilateral Commission.

Fictional

Most secret societies have a fictional history, concocted to make them look important. Some groups are more fictional than others, however.

* Illuminati
* Stonecutters
* The Invisibles

Many authors have discovered that once you create a secret society with a sufficiently intriguing premise, people will automatically assume it's based on something real. If the author tries to deny it later, well, that just means someone got to them.

The Illuminati are technically not fictional, but so many fictional things have been written about them that they might as well be. In addition to many earnest flights of fancy composed by the slightly deranged, the Illuminati got the most ink in the famous Illuminatus! trilogy written by Robert Anton Wilson. Illuminatus! was so successful that many of its yarns are now taken as gospel truth by such illustrious conspiratorial minds as David Icke.

H.P. Lovecraft created a fictional cult known as Cthulhu, which he shared with several other horror writers of the day. The cult was based around a series of shapeless, nameless, writhing monstrosities and an entirely mythical grimoire known as the Necronomicon. Lovecraft tried to explain that he had made the whole thing up, but people are frequently found to be stupid or insane, and you don't have to look very far to find some idiot trying to conjure up a Shoggoth.

There was an 18th century Italian secret society called The Invisibles, but the name was adopted by comic book auteur Grant Morrison for a 1994-2000 comic book series which set out with the goal of making The Invisibles real. If someone hands you a blank badge, you'll know Morrison's quest succeeded.

Other notable fictional secret societies include the Talamasca (a vampire-hunting group of scholars in Anne Rice's books), the Clandestine Watchers Council (a vampire-hunting group of scholars in Buffy the Vampire Slayer), the E-Branch (a vampire-hunting group of secret agents in Brian Lumley's Necroscope books), and the Millennium Group (an Apocaliptic organization inexplicably unconcerned with vampire hunting, and the brainchild of X-Files creator Chris Carter).

Insane

Between the paddling and the dreams of world domination, any given secret society is going to attract a certain element of the deranged. Some groups are way out there... even relative to other secret societies.

The Ku Klux Klanoriginated as a politcal white supremacy group in 1886. At the time, it was not that far out of the political mainsteam. Racism was rampant after the Civil War, and many people resented the North's exploitation of the South.

Nevertheless, the Klan was rooted in bizarre behavior. The original group dressed in white hoods and pretended to be ghosts in order to frighten freed slaves. Subsequent iterations were not much more sophisticated and today the Klan is populated with fringe personalities with too much time on their hands.

The Klan also had its sworn enemies, such as the memorably named Order of Anti-Poke-Noses, which formed to oppose "any organization that attends to everyone's business but their own." The bad guys outlived these intrepid crusaders, however.

Strange behavior hardly begins and ends with the Klan. A quick browse through the pages of The International Encyclopedia of Secret Societies and Fraternal Orders by Alan Axelrod yields up a smorgasbord of strangeness.

Fils d'Adam is an au courant French secret society devoted to the joys of similating necrophilia and performing actual bestiality on some extremely loosely contrived premise having to do with Original Sin.

The Abecadarians, also French, formed to battle the insidious evil of the printing press during the 15th century. The theory was that ignorance is divinely mandated and that everyone should strive to the pinnacle of ignorance of everything, including the letters of the alphabet -- thus their name comes from A-B-C-D... Clever, you might think, until you realize that anyone who knows the group's name now knows the first four letters of the alphabet and therefore can no longer be saved. (The doctrine was later supposedly adopted by the Illuminati.) (The real ones.)

The Society of Goats in 18th century Germany wore goat masks in order to frighten the local peasantry and accomplish various acts of crime. (And people think Batman is implausible.) Their initiation involved riding a wooden goat rigged up approximately in the manner of a mechanical bull. The goat itself may also have been a Baphomet-Style symbol of Satan. They were eventually exterminated by the local authorities, and bore no relation to the even stranger Order of Pink Goats, which arose in the 20th century.

The Hermanos Penitentes were originally a European order which enjoyed self-flagellation. They celebrated Good Friday each year by crysifuing one of the sect's members, though the lucky victim was removed from the cross before dying. Despite being the recipient of a papal censure, the group not only survived, but continues its tradition of crucifixion, much to the bemusement of the occasional newspaper feature writer who stumbles across the event.

The Concatenated Order of Hoo-Hoo... well, OK, the Hoo-Hoos were largely just kidding around. The members were lumberjacks and people whose jobs related in some vague manner related to lumber. Many of their titles and rituals were based on Lewiss Caroll's Jabberwocky. Amazingly, the organization continues to day under a different name, despite what Darwin's theories would suggest.

Kabbalah

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aka Qabala, Cabala, Kabala, Qabballa, etc.

Imagine you're Madonna. You're too smart for Scientology, but not calm enough for Taoism. You've pretty much burned your bridges with Catholicism. And Methodism was never really an option. So where do you go for your religious fulfillment?

If you're thinking Hinduism, well, actually she was over that back in the '90s after it failed to catch on as the Next Big Thing. Her current fixation, kabbalah, might have more potential.

Technically, kabbalah is not a religion, and it never was. It originated around the 11th century as an outgrowth of earlier Jewish esoteric-occult traditions. Kabbalah is mainly based on two texts, the Sepher Yetzirah ("the book of creation") and the Zohar ("the book of enlightenment").

Sepher Yetzirah is a collection of secret traditions supposedly passed down from Abraham. It describes the structure of the universe and the method of its creation, including an extremely convoluted series of planes of existence, based on geometry and key numerical sequences derived from the Hebrew alphabet. While probably not dating back to the time of Abraham, whenever that actually was, it is the older of the two texts and probably runs at least as far back as the second century B.C.

The Zohar was first seen in public during the 13th century, offered up by Moses de Leon, a Spanish Jew who claimed it was the work of a second-century miracle-working rabbi. After de Leon's death, there were numerous charges that the work was a forgery. There is quite a bit of legitimate controversy around the book, but the scholarly consensus is that the Zohar legitimately conveys a tradition that predates the 13th century, including several elements found in Jewish and Christian Gnosticism.

The Zohar is a commentary on the Pentateuch, the first five books of both the Jewish and Christian bibles. OK, maybe "commentary" isn't the right word. The Zohar claims that the words of the Torah are simply a smokescreen behind which the real meaning of the Jewish scriptures lurks, like an ancient stereogram: you can't see it unless you're looking past it.

Together, the books outline a sweeping vision of the structure of reality, including guidelines on how to alter it in nontraditional ways, which more or less amount to magic. Based on the two key texts, medieval occultists and Jewish mystics created a massive body of writings about metaphysics, alchemy and magic. Because it covers material related to the Old Testament, kabbalah was adopted by both Jews and Christians. Kabbalism also led to the development of Hasidism among Eastern European Jews.

The most readily identifiable concept in kabbalism is the Tree of Life, a diagram that is essentially a map of reality. The Tree of Life consists of three columns known as "pillars", and 10 sephiroth, or spheres, each of which represents an aspect of the process God used to create the world.

At the top of the diagram is Kether, "The Crown", which represents the divine intelligence of God, from which all of creation emanates. The three pillars emanate down from Kether all the way down to Malkuth at the bottom. (The word means "Kingdom"; the bottom sephira is also sometimes called Shekhinah.) Kether is the angle at which reality points toward the creator; Malkuth is the angle at which is points toward His creation -- the earthly world.

In traditional kabbalism, there are 10 sephiroth, although some schools teach of a "hidden" 11th in the middle of the diagram. Each sephira has different characteristics and is represented by a different Hebrew letter, which also corresponds to a number. The 10 sephiroth are connected by 22 lines, known as "paths," each of which carries a specific meaning. Some occult traditions teach that the paths correspond to the major arcana in the Tarot.

The chart comes to life as a result of emanations, a concept which covers the movement of will, force, divine spark, light, energy and reality from God to creation. Emanations are the manifestation of divine intelligence as a material or metaphysical thing, such as an angel or a soul.

Because the shape of emanations is outlined by the Tree of Life (supplemented by information contained in numerous other kabbalistic writings), the Tree and the Hebrew alphabet can be used to calculate the "true names" of things. If you know the true name of something, you can control it, which quickly led medieval kabbalists to become ritual magicians (as well as inspiring medieval ritual magicians to become kabbalists).

With kabbalistic secrets firmly in hand, the well-informed can construct magic words that presumably empower users to command the very forces of the universe. Angels and demons, in particular, are susceptible to this sort of control.

Truly ambitious sorcerers also sought the true name of God, the most powerful magic word imaginable. The search for God's true name took on epic proportions during the middle ages. The name was referred to as the Tetragrammaton, because it was believed to have four letters.

The Torah provides one version of this name, of course, which practicing Jews are forbidden to speak -- YHWH, pronounced as Yahweh (or JHVH, Jehovah) by those who are not especially worried about eternal damnation and a divine curse. YHWH is derived from the first letter of each Hebrew word God spoke to Moses from the burning bush story found in Exodus. The rough English translation of the statement is "I am who am", "I am who I am", or "I am that I am."

Finding the name in the Bible, of course, was far too easy. Obviously, recipients of secret knowledge would have a better name, a more powerful name. Unfortunately, no one could quite agree on what that name was, although a number of alternatives were proposed, such as AGLA or ADNI.

None of these names hold up to the obvious test: After pronouncing them, neither divine wrath nor infinite power arrives within any reasonable time frame.

Other esoteric concepts were covered in some depth by the kabbalists. Many kabbalists were also alchemists and scientists. As a result, some kabbalistic texts about the nature of emanations and the behavior of light (as a divine power) have a remarkable power even to this day. For instance, one Latin kabbalistic text from the Middle Ages discusses the properties of spirit and body in some detail. If you substitute "spirit" for "energy" and "matter" for "body", the text looks suspiciously like a sneak preview of Einstein's theory of relativity.

To a greater or lesser extent, kabbalism is the basis of nearly every tradition covered under the general heading of "occultism". Kabbalah is the basis for the rumored occult practices of the Freemasons, the Illuminati and the Knights Templar, the stylings of the O.T.O., the antichrist rituals of Jack Parsons, and the creation of mystical beings such as the Golem. Scientology is also roughly modeled on the kabbalah, albeit filtered through a Battlestar Galactica sensibility.

When it started, the study of kabbalah was secretive, especially among medieval Christians who feared the wrath of the Inquisition. After Aleister Crowley exposed the secrets of the Golden Dawn in the early 20th century, the cat was out of the bag, and kabbalah began to be talked about among the religious intellectuals of the day. Crowley himself wrote extensively about the kabbalah for the general public, as well as for his fellow students of esoterica.

The movie Pi (1998) was a cult hit featuring a gang of malevolent Hasidic Jews who are searching for a way to decipher the true name of God from the number codes in the Torah. The movie coincided with a revival of mainstream interest in kabbalah.

The latest iteration of kabbalism has more in common with the New Age than with traditional occultism. Kabbalah centers (both Jewish and non-Jewish versions) have popped up around the United States.

Perhaps partly as a result of widespread coverage of Scientology's quirks, a fair number of celebrities have embraced kabbalism as the spiritual flavor of the month. In addition to Madonna, celebrity kabbalists include Elizabeth Taylor, Demi Moore, Mick Jagger, Jeff Goldblum, Ivana Trump, and Roseanne Barr.

Although the new kabbalism downplays claims of exotic superpowers, the magical aspect of kabbalism is still an important part of the modern movement.

While the conceptual underpinnings of kabbalah are pretty sophisticated, you can still shout "Yahweh sucks" at the top of your lungs for hours on end without producing the slightest whiff of brimstone. You might get hoarse, but that's not exactly an impressive display of God's wrath.

On the other hand, you can do the same thing using "Allah," "Vishnu" or "Jesus" in the place of Yahweh. Kabbalism isn't any more disreputable than any other spiritual path, it's just more explicit in telling you how to get what you want. You could do worse.

Banned Cartoons

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If you squint your eyes long and hard enough, any fictional character on any animated cartoon begins to develop its own offensive, socially improper qualities. Even the dynamics inherent to seemingly innocent cartoon settings and situations can appear sinister when scrutinized by qualified armchair cynics.

Belgian cartoonist Pierre "Peyo" Culliford's Smurfs, for instance, copyright 1958. Two hundred tiny blue males harmonizing amongst themselves in a woodsy, European hamlet polka-dotted with mushroomy phallus cupcakes. The setup alone might be sufficient enough cause for concern - but the fact that there's only one female to pass around? That can't be right. Never mind the fact that Peyo also wrote and drew a short-lived comic called "Poussy".

And hey now, what about Inspector Gadget's bulbous, nodular profile? Doesn't that lead some people to believe he's ten times the Jew SpongeBob's Squidward Tentacles ever was? Even though we all know in our heart of hearts that Mr. Krabs is in fact Bikini Bottom's primary penny pincher?

Between 1928 and 1950, America's premiere animators across the Walt Disney Corporation, Warner Bros., Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Merrie Melodies, Looney Tunes and R.K.O. Radio Pictures painstakingly assembled brilliant and offensive animated vignettes requiring no undue stretchery of the imagination. Hundreds of reels, thousands of cartoons, millions of individual frames sketched and watercolored by hand - and more often than people care to admit, content which directly ridiculed the behavior and appearance of blacks, homosexuals, southerners, the mentally ill, Arabs, Candians, Eskimos, Italians, Hispanics, Asians, Jews, Germans, Russians, Australians, Indians, the Scottish, the French, the Irish - and yes, even Martians.

This was the golden age of animation, after all. Illustrators and comedy engineers were only too delighted to inject healthy doses of social tension into the public meme. Colorful, extended virtuoso sequences were married to Carl Stalling's sprawling, frenetic musical score and Mel Blanc's hyper-enthusiastic vocal characterizations. Together, this massive ensemble yielded some of the most respected entertainment products our planet has ever produced. The sheer output, the quantity alone staggers the imagination. These were people working in an exploding new field, individuals genuinely married to their work.

In the early days, cartoons were screened before feature films at fancy schmancy "moving picture" theaters - often social engagements where men and women were inspired to wear their Sunday best. Later, these same cartoons would cycle endlessly for decades on broadcast TV or cable syndication courtesy of modern inventions like the tel-o-vision.

And later still - after the innovation of the video cassette recorder - these priceless artifacts would be made available for home rental, so future generations (and their children, and their children's children) could bear witness to each and every blessed key frame.

Actually, no. Sorry. As the result of objections by parents, overly sensitive sponsors, timid corporate policy, and "changing" cultural niceties, a substantial portion of these classic cartoons has been lost forever, and some may never again see the light of day.

Animated features with even the slightest reference to alcohol (including rum cake), adultery, breasts, chewing tobacco, cross-dressing, gambling, marijuana, pornography, profanity, "rim jobs" (i.e. dogs licking each other), vaguely sexual or flirtatious situations, recreational sex toys (i.e. Tom from Tom and Jerry sticks a vacuum cleaner up Mammy Two-Shoes' skirt, producing giggles), smoking of any kind, suicides (i.e. a flusterated Daffy Duck blows his beak around in circles with a shotgun) - and even baby ducklings emerging from their shells in demure strip tease were deemed unacceptable. What's left to laugh at? Dora the Explorer? Rotten Dot Com is confident it speaks for all of us when we say screw that edumacational bullshit.

Chow Hound (1951) directed by Charles M. Jones was a real classic - the story of a muscular dog who exploits a cat and mouse, concluding with a vicious turn of the tables: the dog is planted belly-up on a countertop and force-fed gallons of gravy ("...And don't forget the gravy!") through a garden hose. Well, consider those childhood memories stricken from the record. These days it falls under the category of imitatable behavior, i.e. too masochistic for children and families with pets.

Merrie Melodies chose to portray Australia as a desolate, sparsely-treed landscape populated by bouncing kangaroos and portly aborigines who communicate with one another by chucking boomerangs or screaming UNGA BUNGA BUNGA. That's what critics had the good sense to label an unflattering portrayal, and it too was yanked from public shelves.

And pardoné moi, but has anyone heard from Speedy Gonzales lately? The Mexican rat? Yipa yipa, andele arriba? Nor have we. The Cartoon Network, which since 1999 has been the only television venue for vintage Looney Tunes, removed the Hispanic heretic from their day and nighttime schedules. Perhaps executives forgot Speedy actually won an Academy Award in 1955. Phone calls to Speedy's dimwitted cousin Slowpoke Rodriguez (the world's slowest mouse) went unanswered.

Today, the most popular racial phobery (and war-inspired propaganda) has a new impetus: South Park, with its remarkable and timely depictions of both Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. Swiping cultural cues from featurettes pioneered by Disney and Warner Bros., South Park manages to massage attitudes and manipulate the American agenda by unleashing brilliant leaflet campaigns of its own design.

Osama is illustrated wearing "farty pants," mincing and prancing about the stage like a young gazelle. Saddam is portrayed as- well, quite frankly a goddamn little faggot who refuses to keep his pants on. His voice is squeaky and ridiculous. His head flaps up and down like Canada's own Terence and Phillip. In South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut, Mr. Hussein is observed wiggling an oversized jelly dong in Satan's face.

When the film is fired up in a crowded movie house, there's no other word apart from refreshing when one observes how many people are actually sitting back and laughing like they're supposed to. It's a harmless cartoon after all. Primitive, faraway lands where bronze-toned townspeople have towels for top hats and cloth diapers for dungarees? Now that's just ridiculous! We'll be right back after these messages from 1961.

Hey Fred - how about a Winston break? Winston's the one filtered cigarette that delivers flavor twenty times a pack. Filtered blend makes the big taste difference - and only Winston has it!

Yeah, Barn - up front where it counts, in front of the pure white filter. Winston packs rich tobaccos specially selected and specially processed for good flavor and filtered smoking. Winston tastes good... like a cigarette should!

The list goes on and on. Coal Black and De Sebben Dwarves. Goldilocks and the Jivin' Bears. Ownership of Warner Bros. cartoons passed through United Artists in 1968. They created a "Censored 11" list of cartoons they'd refuse to air or make available for purchase on any media. When Time-Warner bought Turner Broadcasting in 1996, Cartoon Network turned over the Bugs Bunny rights to Warner Bros, and later sparred with them over an existing promise to sell material to Viacom's Nickelodeon and Walt Disney's ABC.

See, every June is June Bugs month at Cartoon Network, and it's a veritable Bugs Bunny marathon. Fearful of a potential backlash, AOL Time-Warner very nearly dropped a major anvil on Cartoon Network's proposed festival in 2001. Racially charged episodes were aired out of order, late at night with the following disclaimer:

"Cartoon Network does not endorse the use of racial slurs. These vintage cartoons are presented as representative of the time in which they were created and are presented for their historical value."

Historical value? Rock on. Which is Witch features Bugs Bunny in a classic Looney Tunes sequence of spear-chuckling, junglebunny slapstick. Broad-lipped, chocolate skinned natives populate a cannibalistic aborigine island of pure whimsy - and it would seem the young master Bugs is keen to participate! His first priority: blend in, through the ingenious use of a tightly coiled spring and tasteful table settings.

WHASSUP, doc?? Oh, that wascally wacist. How could America's best-loved wabbit be so blacktose intolerant?

Even more hare-raising skeletons dangle at the rear of Uncle Tom's Cabinet - another rich, tonal assault perpetranimated upon African Americans in 1949 and a spoof of Harriet Beecher Stowe's antislavery novel. And who could forget Bugs Bunny Nips the Nips in 1928?

"Japs!" screeches Bugs. "Hundreds of them!

He disguises himself as an ice cream vendor and doles out grenades on lollipop sticks. Here ya go, bowl-legs. Here's one for you, monkeyface. Here y'are, slanty-eyes. Everybody gets one.

In All This and Rabbit Stew, Bugs beats a black hunter at dice and wins his clothes. But it wasn't the implicit characterization of black people as listless gamblers which critics deemed offensive, it was merely the suggestion that black people were less intelligent than rabbits. Meanwhile, hillbilly rednecks with bushy moustaches have yet to twist their knickers whenever Bugs outwits Yosemite Sam.

When Spike Lee made Bamboozled (a film dealing extensively with black stereotypes in Hollywood) Warner Bros. denied his request to include images of Bugs in blackface. But whether it's Bugs Bunny tackling key issues of racism, or Popeye the Sailor Man binging on spinach while muttering to himself a private chorus of "you're a sap / sap / sap / mister Jap," or even

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Okay, never mind. But if you think words like banned or censored imply a degree of government intrusion which feels just a wee bit exaggeratory, consider this. In 1942, when the U.S. Treasury Department ran a whisper shy of funds during the war effort, they wisely sought financial counsel from the Looney Tunes division of Merrie Melodies. In theaters from coast to coast, Bugs Bunny showed up once again in full Al Jolson blackface, performing a musical number meant to peddle stamps and U.S. Savings bonds.

The cartoon archetype of American smart guy / foreign dumb guy is a time-honored crucible best served during a war, and the Walt Disney Corporation concocted a few classics as well.

The Swastika-dotted landscape of Der Fuehrer's Face (1942) was the perfect brass band musical vehicle for Donald Duck, a Nazi munitions worker who "alternates between screwing nose cones onto bombs and saluting framed portraits of Adolf Hitler". The Japanese make a cameo appearance too - and wouldn't you know it, they've got lime green skin, big bulbous eyeglasses, Tupperware haircuts and protruding, jaggedy-ass dentures rivaling those of Bugs Bunny.

The title song, performed by Spike Jones and his City Slickers, won an honest-to-gosh Oscar for Best Short, beating out veteran animator Leon Schlesinger's wheezing, preachy and pedantic Pigs in a Polka. Other big winners that year: honkabilly big mouth James Cagney for Best Actor in Yankee Doodle Dandy and Irving Berlin, who penned the music and libretto for White Christmas.

Donald T. Duck would later redeem himself as an air ranger in Commando Duck, a deftly animated farce combining traditional Disney magic with anti-Japanese tomfoolery. The premise: he parachutes into enemy territory during World War II. It's treacherous terrain, marked by snipers hiding inside myopic, bucktoothed tree trunks which speak in pigeon-toed English, alternately bowing respectfurry toward one another and offering endress aporogies.

A-prease and a-thank you! Time to shooting now prease I hope! Japanese custom say always to shooting a man in the back prease! Ah so! Ah so! And so on. Donald's target coordinates on his map are F-8. Fate, get it?

Donald's mission: contact the enemy, surround them single-handedly, and wash them out. After a series of slaphappy bumbling mishaps, he manages to direct an avalanche of tumbling boulders down a gushing waterfall toward a Japanese military facility. The airfield is flooded. Hundreds of Nipponese soldiers drown, and dozens of red-spotted planes hang like limp turkeys from dead, drooping trees. Sad, squawky trumpets wup-wahh across the horizon. But not in a hate crimey kinda way! This comical vignette, for all intents and purposes, eagerly delivers the very quintessence of merriment.

Witnessing the devastation, Donald quacks to himself with smug, self-satisfied laughter and pens a note to his superiors: "Enemy washed out." Fifty years later, in 1992, Disney would get busy irking the Arab-American community with sharp lyrics from Aladdin, "where they cut off your ear / if they don't like your face. It's barbaric / but hey / it's home."

But topping the eye-poppingly outrageous charts of historical cartoon propaganda is without a doubt Disney's regrettable vignette, Education For Death, which graphically details the life and times of Hitler youth. The narrator solemnly intones the distorted text of Gregor Ziemer's The Making of The Nazi.

German adults are portrayed in classic Disney "sinister bulldog" style: barrel chest, small rear end, bowed legs, and no neck. The bellowing, red-faced instructor's jowls flop around like coattails as he berates a kindergarten classroom full of Bambi-eyed waifs in lederhosen, whose pluckish heads are delightfully oversized. The military professor's singular goal: get these scatterbrained kids to appreciate Hitler's way of thinking.

The lesson plan is presented at the blackboard. Chalk drawings of a fox eating a rabbit illustrate nature's intended course: the weaker species (i.e. Jews and bunnies) are justly but inevitably devoured without mercy by superior forces.

As Education For Death descends toward its bloody climax, the animation is bathed in murky red tones. The viewer is urged to "listen closely to the fanatic cry" of the German people. What follows is a pounding orchestral soundtrack and a relentless montage punctuating all things fire and brimstone.

Classic hardbound volumes of literature and philosophy are piled high, fanned at the spine and set ablaze. Flaming torches cast violent, flickering shadows as the Holy Bible morphs into a limited first-edition Mein Kampf. Crucifixes hung by the chimney with care are zapped by swift arcs of lightening from the heavens, and transformed into unfurling Swastikian flags or bladed Iron Crosses.

Delicate, stained glass church windows are smashed out during drunken antisemetic protests - and endless squadrons of squat, pear-shaped children in silhouette are seen goosestepping in grids for miles across the globe, arms outstretched toward the sky as they Heil Hitler over and over. Today Germany - tomorrow the world!

Nine times out of ten, a person won't even notice racist or hateful overtones in a cartoon unless the idea is planted firmly in head. By refusing to unearth and revive historical artifacts, societies sustain immeasurably more damage than brief exposure to racial toxins from old-timey cartoon doodles. Novelist Kurt Andersen (Turn of the Century, 1999) muses, "If we don't know our history in all of its complicated detail, how are we supposed to understand the present?"
To allow ourselves only a bland, repackaged version of the past is - how do you say - kind of a Mickey Mouse approach.

"Marching and heiling, heiling and marching. In him is planted no seed of laughter, hope, tolerance or mercy. For him - only heiling and marching, marching and heiling. The grim years of regimentation have done their work. Now he's a good Nazi. He sees no more than the party wants him to. He says nothing but what the party wants him to say. And he does nothing than what the party wants him to do. And so he marches, with millions of comrades, trampling on the rights of others. For now, his education is complete. His education..

Hexes, aka Curse, Jinx, Whammy, Bad Juju, Original Sin

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Once upon a time, the word "hex" simply meant to practice magic or witchcraft, but those days are long gone. The strange and wonderful world of semantics has mutated the word into a darker form.

The art of the hex, as it is understood today, means putting the nasty on someone you hate. A hex is the supernatural equivalent of hitting someone over the head with a folding chair. There are different sorts of hexes, but they all basically boil down to making bad things happen to people you hate.

The basic curse is arguably the oldest form of magic, having been employed by God against three residents of Eden, Adam, Eve and the snake, for the inexcusable sin of seeking knowledge. Many religions feature variations on this Judeo-Christian-Muslim story of the first sin, which seeks to explain why life sucks so bad all the time.

God's curse on mankind is the simplest form of hex, in which the hexer makes a formal pronouncement of bad things he or she wishes upon the hexee:

And the LORD God said unto the serpent, Because thou hast done this, thou art cursed above all cattle, and above every beast of the field; upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life: And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel.

Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.

And unto Adam he said, Because thou hast hearkened unto the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree, of which I commanded thee, saying, Thou shalt not eat of it: cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life; Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee; and thou shalt eat the herb of the field; In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.

The story of an original curse on humanity occurs in most cultures and religious traditions, since life pretty much sucks no matter where you live, and people wanted explanations, dammit! The spread of human-on-human cursing can pretty much be attributed to the scientific syndrome known as "monkey see, monkey do."

Once in the hands of humankind, the art of the hex became more nasty and considerably more elaborate. There are as many ways to cast a hex as there are bitter, spiteful, and slightly irrational people in the world.

Hexes run from the very general to the very precise. The simplest hexes simply mess with the victim's mojo and cause a streak of bad luck. More sophisticated hexes can target a victim's wealth, health, even specific body parts.

The basic curse is a pretty straightforward concept. It is simply a verbalized exhortation to the fates, requesting that bad things happen to the victim. The minimum requirement for a hex involves speaking a brief description of what you want to happen to the victim, while invoking a magical name or word. For instance:

"May you wander over the face of the earth forever, never sleep twice in the same bed, never drink water twice from the same well, and never cross the same river twice in a year."

The above is allegedly a traditional Gypsy curse. Gypsy curses are the most famous kind of curse, but the vast majority of such curses occur in a historical context that ranges in credibility from Stephen King to Buffy the Vampire Slayer to The Simpsons. Presumably there is some sort of historical basis for the notion, likely deriving from the cottage industry of gypsy fortune-telling, but that nugget of fact has been buried under a mountain of shit from which it may never emerge.

The problem with a simple verbalized curse is that it rarely works (unless you're God or a Gypsy). That's a good thing, of course, or else the average lifespan would be 42. You'd live just long enough to ground your teenage child, who would respond, "I hate you! I wish you would die!"

Faced with this failure, many people simply abandon the notion of cursing at an early age. But some people aren't content to leave bad enough alone. Committed hexers were forced to develop ever more elaborate means to get the job done.

The exact means vary widely from culture to culture, but most of them are wildly entertaining. A quick trot around the globe finds techniques and beliefs that run from the pragmatic to the bizarre. The voodoo doll is a favorite of hexers and cursers everywhere. The hexer creates a small effigy of his or her victim, usually out of wax, and includes a small item connected to the victim, such as a lock of hair or fingernail clipping. The doll is then stuck with pins or otherwise tortured in order to produce a corresponding effect on the victim's body.

In China, a curse can be delivered by leaving a few grains of rice and a few pennies on the victim's door step, symbolizing a wish that the victim be stricken with poverty.

In 2004, a member of the Tanzanian parliament vowed to place an "Islamic death curse" on the members of Tanzania's executive branch if they didn't do a better job cleaning up corruption. There isn't much in the way of supporting literature for this practice, but odds are someone somewhere believes it well enough.

Surprisingly, the Catholic church not only believes in the efficacy of curses but allows that there may be appropriate times to use them. Based on the writings of St. Thomas Aquinas, the Vatican allows that believers may:

petition that calamity may be visited by God on persons or things in requital for wrongdoing. ... [If] the imprecation be directed towards irrational creatures not on account of their relation to God, but simply as they are in themselves, the guilt is no greater than that which attaches to vain and idle words, except where grave scandal is given, or the evil wished to the irrational creature cannot be separated from serious loss to a rational creature, as would be the case were one to wish the death of another's horse, or the destruction of his house by fire, for such wishes involved serious violation of charity.

In one U.S. case attributed to Santeria, a hexer adorned a victim's front step with a cow's tongue that had the names of several gods affixed to it using pins.

British witches allegedly cursed Adolf Hitler during World War II.

Aleister Crowley is reputed to have exchanged curses with MacGregor Mathers, a rival within the ranks of the occult secret society, Golden Dawn. By most accounts, Crowley was the decisive victor in this battle. Of course, most of the accounts were written by Crowley.

Aboriginal Australians believe that one can be hexed, or even killed, by pointing a kangaroo bone at them. Notable victims include non-aboriginal Australian Prime Minister John Howard (as punishment for cutting off an aboriginal self-governance program).

While the ancient Egyptians frequently used curses to protect grave sites, the legendary curse of young King Tutankhamun is apparently mythical. Various inscriptions have been reported in media and historical accounts of the tomb's discovery. None of them are real. That didn't keep six members of the archaeological team that discovered the tomb from early and unfortunate deaths, but it's worth noting that the man most responsible for the opening of the tomb, archaeologist Howard Carter, died of old age.

Hardly a week goes by without a new report about someone, somewhere, collecting human body parts for use either in casting a curse or removing a curse. Reports come in regularly from across Africa, from South America, from everywhere in Europe and occasionally from North America (where practitioners restrain themselves mainly due to fear of becoming the latest New York Post headline).

The Romans inscribed the names of hex victims onto thin metal sheets, which were then rolled up and pierced by nails. The archaeological records suggest these curse were mostly issued over penny-ante debts, which detracts from the romantic adventure of the whole thing.

Rasputin is said to have cursed the Romanovs, Russia's ruling monarchs, on his death bed. His angst may have had to do with the fact he had been shot, drowned and castrated by a Romanov prince. It was extraordinarily effective, as curses go. The entire family was dead within a year.

The infamous ancient Chinese curse "May you live in interesting times" is apparently neither Chinese nor ancient. Made popular when uttered by John F. Kennedy, the phrase doesn't appear to have a pedigree going further back than the 20th century, although the exact origin of the phrase is still under debate. Once we cure cancer, end world hunger, solve global terrorism and figure out whether there's a God, we'll get back to you with a definitive answer on this.

Hindus and Buddhists believe in karma, the self-correcting law of the universe that sooner or later forces you to accept the consequences of your evil deeds. This would seem to make curses superfluous, however you wouldn't know it on a tour of India's occultish hotspots.

The so-called "hex signs" of the Pennsylvania Dutch have nothing to do with hexes. Let us never speak of this again.

The Algonquin tribe of Native Americans famously cursed its enemies, including a famous hex that the president holding office every 20 years after 1820 would die in office. The only president to dodge that bullet so far was Ronald Reagan, who literally had to dodge a bullet to escape. We don't know if the curse keeps George W Bush up nights, but he's sitting right in the Algonquin curse's crosshairs at this hour.

With all this hexing and cursing going on, there is a booming worldwide industry in hex removal. Whether or not you actually believe in hexes, you must listen to the following statement and believe it with all your heart: ANYONE WHO IS CHARGING YOU MONEY TO REMOVE A HEX IS NOT YOUR FRIEND.

Outside of the West, you can at least rest easy in the notion you might only be gouged once in your lifetime. But Westerners, and particularly Americans, are extremely vulnerable to an ongoing scam in which you go to a psychic for a reading, the psychic tells you that you have been cursed, the psychic explains they can remove the curse for $500, you give the psychic the money, your life does not improve, the psychic explains the curse was more difficult that he or she thought, the psychic offers to remove the curse for $2,000, lather, rinse and repeat with ever-increasing dollar amounts.

If you are actually worried that you have somehow been cursed (excluding that original curse from God, which is non-revokable), the good news is that there are plenty of happy, good-hearted New Agers and witches out there who will attempt to help you for free.

The bad news is that these well-intentioned persons may not be much more effective than the scam artists. But the other good news is that, even if the Good Samaritans can't help you, you will still only be cursed -- as opposed to being cursed, broke and stupid.

Curse removal techniques can involve anything from burning sage incense, to keeping amber and hematite stones on your person, wearing a talisman, sprinkling yourself with holy water, or even engaging in a full-scale Exorcism. Or harvesting human body parts, but Rotten.com does not recommend this approach. (Not even if you take pictures.)

If you can't find someone to help you for free, odds are that you're an asshole who deserved to be cursed in the first place. You might as well ride it out, because your karma will catch up to you eventually. Think of it as a get out of Purgatory early card.

Exorcism

2008-12-23T19:27:00.002+01:00

In the olden days, primitive people laughably believed that mental illnesses and epileptic fits were caused by evil demons possessing the bodies of humans. They ridiculously treated these maladies with exorcism, a one-time process in which the demons were expelled, allowing the person to return to normal life.

In these enlightened times of course, there is no "cure" for mental illness, which is now humanely treated with neuron-destroying drugs, involuntary commitment, neverending codependency with psychoanalysts and intermittent lifelong bouts of hospitalization with other raving lunatics. Thank God for progress!

Exorcism is one of the most widespread practices in human history. Almost every known religion has some context in which possession is considered possible, although the interpretation of such possession can vary widely. Various religions, such the ancient Greeks and practitioners of Voudoun (or "voodoo," if you're a neanderthal, non-PC bastard), actually embrace possession as part of their religious rituals. The difference in voudoun, of course, is that the possessing spirit (known as a loa) politely and considerately leaves at the end of the ceremony, with the possessed person's body in pretty much the same shape as he or she left it.

When an invading spirit is not so polite and considerate as a loa, exorcism is called for.

By far the most famous form of exorcism is the Christian form of the practice, specifically the Roman Catholic ceremony famously depicted in the 1973 schlock horror fest, "The Exorcist." While the details of exorcism are generally not thought to be so Hollywood friendly, the general thrust of the movie gives a pretty good idea of the basic components. Exorcism generally involves a lot of telling the bad spirit to go away. When the bad spirit fails to comply, the exorcist might slap it around (or rather, slap around the body of the person unfortunate enough to be acting as host), splash holy water or other sanctified stuff, invoke ancient rituals and, as a last resort, fall down the stairs.

The Catholic exorcism ritual has been largely unchanged since the 17th century, with most of the revisions pertaining to raising the standard for determining when exorcism is a preferable treatment to Thorazine, but the Church rather stridently insists that exorcism remain a viable option, in light of the canonical absolute insistence on the existence of Satan. In fact, the Vatican's chief exorcist is on the record saying it is heretical to deny the reality of possession and exorcism, so disbelievers are just begging to have a Crusade land on their heads.

In the case of really tough possessions, the pope gets involved. The number and nature of these incidents are a closely guarded secret in the secret archives of the Vatican, but one can presume these cases are on a Hollywood scale, with victims floating over the bed, projectile vomiting and ominous statements about what the pope's mother might be getting up to in hell.

Which brings us, inevitably, to the movie. "The Exorcist" is based on a "true story" of a possession in Maryland in the 1940s. In the real-life case, a boy somewhere between 12 and 15 was allegedly the subject of a full-blown Hollywood-style exorcism, complete with special effects and plot twists. In reality, the details of the story are much contested and several versions of the tale are circulating. Highlights include the infamous "floating over the bed" routine and poltergeist activity of various sorts.

Author William Blatty took these sketchy stories and wove them into a novel, which then became a movie. His protagonist, a 12-year-old girl, performs a long string of various blasphemies, including masturbating with a crucifix, spitting blue and purple bile across the room and famously informing the attending exorcist that his mother "sucks cocks in hell." In addition to permanently scarring the young actress, Linda Blair, the movie's borderline snuff-pedophilia-religious-porn overtones warped a generation of viewers and spawned an unholy slew of inferior sequels.

Catholic icon Mother Teresa is perhaps the most famous victim of demonic possession (aside from baseless speculation regarding Wayne Newton). She requested the ritual after a visiting archbishop suggested her insomnia might be demonically inspired.

The ritual worked miracles, just like a half-tab of Halcion. When asked if the presence of dirty, filthy, unsanctified devil spunk in her frail body might be considered a negative for her posthumous sainthood campaign, the archbishop told the Associated Press, and I quote, "No way!" Right on, brother!

The ultimate uber-exorcist, of course, was Jesus Christ himself, who reputedly cast out bunches of demons on general principal, with the side benefit that it qualified him as the fulfillment of various biblical prophecies. One particularly colorful tale has Jesus casting out multiple demons from a single victim and banishing them to death in the bodies of pigs.

Catholics and movie-makers don't have a exclusive lock on exorcism, however. Evangelical Protestant have a thriving exorcism practice as well. The evangelicals have a less formal approach however, without the Latin pedigree and the chrism. Evangelical exorcism is a lot like evangelical healing — a lot of smacking people on the head and crying out the name of Jesus. Some evangelical preachers perform exorcisms over the radio, TV or telephone.

Then there's the Assemblies of God, which boasts as its most famous member U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft. The Assemblies are extremely concerned with possession, because of the "spread of oriental religions and the occult" in America — they literally believe that power yoga is a tool of the devil.

The Attorney General's religion teaches that the main danger related to demon possession is directly related to a preoccupation with the "sexy" side of demonic activity, such as projectile vomiting. According to the A.G. (the Assemblies, not Ashcroft necessarily): "There seems to be no basis in Scripture for the accompanying preoccupation with external phenomena, such as vomiting up various substances in connection with the casting out of demons (forgetting that demons are spirit beings). In the one instance in which foaming is mandated, Scripture makes it clear that this was a consistent pattern prior to the time the demon was cast out and not a phenomenon occurring only at the time of exorcism."

Now that we've cleared that up, the position of the Assemblies is that demonic possession is a very real phenomenon, but "true Christians" are immune by virtue of their... well, virtuousness. So if you're possessed, you have a legit problem, but you probably deserve it.

After the Space Shuttle, What?

2008-12-23T19:27:00.001+01:00

The U.S. space program is veering toward an ominous black hole with the shuttle era set to end in 2010 and a replacement system still about seven years from being ready for launch. The gap will make NASA more vulnerable to funding cuts as federal budget woes mount in the years after the shuttles' exit.

But NASA's pain will be the private sector's gain as the agency seeks to share its cost burden by investing more in private industry space efforts. Helping private companies develop rockets and crew capsules for missions that the shuttles currently perform will help free NASA to concentrate more fully on its goals of returning men to the moon and eventually sending a manned mission to Mars.

A first glimpse into how successful NASA's public-private partnership -- known as Commercial Orbital Transportation Services, or COTS -- will come in 2010. At that point, two competing firms will receive word on whether they've passed initial muster on NASA's tests of their ability to develop technology for practical space transportation services. The two companies -- Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (SpaceX) of El Segundo, Calif., and Rocketplane Kistler of Oklahoma City -- will make about $500 million if they meet set milestones. NASA then plans a second round of bidding, seeking firms that can actually supply transportation services for the space agency.
If successful, the COTS program will help make low-Earth-orbit missions cheaper, safer and more frequent, a boon to communications and other companies that now find themselves on long waiting lists to put new satellites into orbit, Moreover, it will reduce U.S. reliance on other countries' rockets and reinvigorate the U.S. launch service industry, which has become less and less competitive globally in recent years, thanks to strict U.S. export controls.

NASA's planned replacement for the remaining three space shuttles -- Discovery, Atlantis and Endeavour -- is going to look familiar to those who grew up watching the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo missions. Borrowing from the past, the next generation of NASA-run spaceflights -- dubbed the Constellation program -- will have a crew capsule atop a rocket, though the capsule design known as Orion will have more-advanced communications, navigation and other technology than its 1960s forerunners. The rocket that will put Orion into orbit is called Ares I. Although much of the work is being done in-house at NASA's research centers, private firms Boeing Co., Alliant Techsystems subsidiary ATK Thiokol of Brigham City, Utah, and Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne of Canoga Park, Calif., are the major contractors for Ares I. Lockheed Martin Corp. is the prime contractor for the crew vehicle.
But the Ares I rocket and the Orion module won't be ready for launch until 2014. Even meeting that deadline will depend on the space agency's being able to preserve its budget in the face of competing demands from defense (both during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and in rebuilding the military afterward), health care, Social Security and other pressing concerns. Until then, NASA will have to rely on Russian rockets to send its astronauts into orbit. "It's going to be an embarrassing time for the U.S.," says J.P. Stevens, vice president for space systems at the Aerospace Industries Association.
The next phase of Constellation will be the design and construction of a much larger launch vehicle known as the Ares V. As envisioned, the Ares V would carry with it all the additional supplies a manned lunar mission might require. Once both are in orbit, the Orion capsule would rendezvous and dock with the Ares V, and the joint spacecraft would proceed to the moon. Under the effort outlined by President Bush, resuming lunar missions would be the first step toward envisioned manned missions to Mars.
The earliest the new lunar missions could conceivably take place would be in 2020. But again, competing budget pressures are likely to push back that timetable. And politics is also intruding into the mix. "Now that Democrats have recaptured Congress, no one is interested in finding funding for Bush's initiative," says Alex Roland, professor of history at Duke University and a former chief historian of NASA. The odds are that, long before another American sets foot on the moon, China's "taikonauts" will get there first. The China National Space Administration is already on track to send an unmanned mission to the moon by 2010.

Real Story about Lucifer

2008-12-23T19:26:00.002+01:00

Story of Lucifer – His OriginTo find the origin of Lucifer, we turn to the Old Testament. In the Hebrew, the name Lucifer is translated from the Hebrew word "helel," which means brightness. This designation, referring to Lucifer, is the rendering of the "morning star" or "star of the morning" or "bright star" which is presented in Isaiah. "How you are fallen from heaven, O Day Star, son of Dawn! How you are cut down to the ground, you who laid the nations low! You said in your heart, ‘I will ascend to heaven; I will raise my throne above the stars of God; I will sit on the mount of assembly on the heights of Zaphon; I will ascend to the tops of the clouds, I will make myself like the Most High’" (Isaiah 14:12-14, NIV). The context of this passage is a referral to the king of Babylon as presented in his pride, splendor and fall. However, it is to the power behind the evil Babylonian king that this is actually addressed. No mortal king would claim that his throne was above that of God or that he was like the Most High. The power behind the evil Babylonian king is Lucifer, Son of the Morning.

Story of Lucifer – His HistoryLucifer is just another name for Satan, who as head of the evil world-system is the real, though invisible, power behind the successive rulers of Tyre, Babylon, Persia, Greece, Rome, and all of those evil rulers that we have seen come and go in the history of the world. This passage goes beyond human history and marks the beginning of sin in the universe and the very fall of Satan in the pristine, sinless spheres before the creation of man. We also see this same motif in Ezekial: "Moreover the word of the LORD came to me: Mortal, raise a lamentation over the king of Tyre, and say to him, Thus says the Lord GOD: You were the signet of perfection, full of wisdom and perfect in beauty. You were in Eden, the garden of God; every precious stone was your covering, carnelian, chrysolite, and moonstone, beryl, onyx, and jasper, sapphire, turquoise, and emerald; and worked in gold were your settings and your engravings. On the day that you were created they were prepared. With an anointed cherub as guardian I placed you; you were on the holy mountain of God; you walked among the stones of fire. You were blameless in your ways from the day that you were created, until iniquity was found in you. In the abundance of your trade you were filled with violence, and you sinned; so I cast you as a profane thing from the mountain of God, and the guardian cherub drove you out from among the stones of fire. Your heart was proud because of your beauty; you corrupted your wisdom for the sake of your splendor. I cast you to the ground; I exposed you before kings, to feast their eyes on you. By the multitude of your iniquities, in the unrighteousness of your trade, you profaned your sanctuaries. So I brought out fire from within you; it consumed you, and I turned you to ashes on the earth in the sight of all who saw you. All who know you among the peoples are appalled at you; you have come to a dreadful end and shall be no more forever" (Ezekiel 28:11-19, NIV). This passage seems to be addressed to the "king of Tyre." In reality, it goes beyond the king to the one who is behind the evil king of Tyre. This passage also has near and far prophecy about Lucifer/Satan because although his final end is already sure, it has not happened yet and it occurs after the final judgment (Revelation 20:7-10). In both the Isaiah passage and the Ezekiel passage, the representation is not of Lucifer/Satan as confined to his own person but his working in and the consummating of his plans through earthly kings and rulers who take to themselves divine honors and who, whether they actually know this or not, rule in the spirit and under the aims of Satan. "For our struggle is not against enemies of blood and flesh, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places" (Ephesians 6:12, NIV). Satan is the principality behind the powers of this corrupt world system. Notice the statement that is given in the passage in Ezekiel, "the anointed cherub." These statements could never apply to a human king but, they do apply to Lucifer/Satan who is behind the human king. This angel is the highest creature the LORD ever created. The LORD says of him, "You were the seal of perfection, full of wisdom, and perfect in beauty." Satan was the wisest creature God ever created. No other angel, no other being was created with the intelligence that God gave to this creature. God says that this creation is "perfect in beauty." Apart from the Holy Trinity; Father, Son and Holy Spirit, this creature is today the highest being. In verse Ezekiel 28:14 it says, "You were the anointed Cherub." This tells us we are not talking about a human king. The word cherub is singular for cherubim. The cherubim are symbolic of God's Holy presence and His unapproachable majesty. These cherubim occupy a unique position. The "anointed cherub who covers" is the picture given to us in the Garden of Eden after Adam and Eve had been sent out and God had placed cherubim to guard the way of the tree of life. Also, when Moses made the mercy seat and placed it into the tabernacle's Holy of Holies, God's glory came and dwelt between the cherubim. They "covered" the mercy seat with their wings. So we now see that Satan was a cherub and his position was to guard the very throne of God. His position was that of protecting the holiness of God. Satan had the highest of all positions, a position which he despised and lost. We have here in Ezekiel a picture of the highest of God's creatures, perfect in wisdom, beautiful beyond description, a musician and on top of all that, he was given this high, exalted position. But, this creation, with all of these wonderful attributes also had a free will. One day, God says to this marvelous creature, "Iniquity was found in you."

Story of Lucifer – His StatusWhat kind of iniquity was found of him? In the book of Ezekiel, God has let us stand with Him at the very beginning, to see the origin and the creation of Satan. But, why does God say this? What is this iniquity? We must look back to Isaiah 14:12, which tells us of Lucifer/Satan's choice. "I will ascend to heaven; I will raise my throne above the stars of God; I will sit on the mount of assembly on the heights of Zaphon; I will ascend to the tops of the clouds, I will make myself like the Most High." Did you notice in this passage all of the "I wills. " He said he would exalt his throne above the stars of God. The word "stars" here does not refer to what we see in the night sky. It refers to the angels of God. In other words, "I will take over heaven, I will be God." That is Lucifer/Satan's sin and that is the iniquity that was found in him. He does not want to be God's servant. He does not want to do what he was created to do. He wants to be served and there are millions who have chosen to do just that; serve him. They have listened to his lies and chosen to follow him. Eve believed the lie that she would be like God. The reason Lucifer/Satan tempted her with that was because it is the very thing that he wants -- to be God.

Nikola Tesla

2008-12-23T19:26:00.001+01:00

Don't ever say Serbia and Croatia never did anything for you. If it wasn't for Nikola Tesla, you might not be reading this now. Your cell phone would be little more than a paperweight, and the government wouldn't have lethal orbiting death ray satellites with which to ensure your safety.

The young Serbian discovered the principle that drives almost every practical use of electricity today, the rotating magnetic field. The field is what powers generators and all forms of electrical motors. Although the generator had already been discovered, it was Tesla who figured out why it worked.

Tesla's understanding of the rotating magnetic field led him to develop groundbreaking ideas about how to use alternating current, and one of his first inventions was the induction motor, a powerful device powered by AC. Tesla had big dreams of the mad scientist variety, including flying machines and other more sinister deals. As everyone knows, there's only so far a mad scientist can go in Croatia, so in 1884, it was off to America!

Tesla worked for Thomas Edison briefly, but mad scientists aren't widely known as team players, and the relationship was a bust. He was bought out by Westinghouse in 1885, when the titan of industry bought his patents for AC-driven motors. The first thing Westinghouse did with the technology was put Edison's DC-powered gadgets out of business. That's gratitude for you.

Tesla set up shop on his own and began inventing things, such as specialized lighting and a precursor to the X-ray machine. He liked to wow the marks by running electrical current through his body to light lamps. He was that kind of guy. This sort of behavior made him popular at high school assemblies and Masonic lodges.

In 1891, Tesla became a U.S. citizen, which as we all know is a free ticket to megalomania. He started to dream bigger. Within a few years, he was building massive hydroelectric generators powered by Niagara Falls. He invented the first remote control, and began researching wireless communications.

Around the turn of the century, Telsa made he considered his most important discovery even though no one has ever heard about it, it isn't discussed in classrooms, and it doesn't appear to have any practical applications except for James Bond villains.

They were called terrestrial stationary waves, and what that basically means is that you can a) transmit electrical current using the Earth as a conductor, and b) you can cause the Earth to vibrate on a frequency, much like a tuning fork. I'm sure you can see where this is going. Try to name five non-mad-scientist uses for such a discovery. Powering streetlights without wires? Yeah, OK, that's pretty cool. Beaming lethal destruction around the globe? Whoops! Manipulating the weather? Controlling earthquakes?

Tesla saw great possibilities for his TS waves, including creating a worldwide integrated system of centralized control and distribution electronics, stock tickers and all manner of not-yet-invented communications technology, with provisions for secretly encrypted point-to-point transmissions. It was around this time that the government began to really take an interest in Nikola Tesla.

In his quest to test the limits of the terrestrial waves, Tesla began a period of extensive experimentation. during which he developed the Tesla Coil, a method for delivering high-voltage current which is still used in many TVs and other applications today.

Using the coil, Tesla asked himself: If the Earth can conduct electricity, and the electricity vibrates around the world in waves through the planet, just how much electricity can the Earth hold? A reasonable question! He could think of no better way to answer that question than by dumping as much electricity as he could generate into the ground, just to see what would happen.

Many a bad science fiction movie has opened with this sort of premise. Fortunately, the outcome of Tesla's tests were more of an inconvenience than a cataclysmic world-ending event. Well, depending on your perspective anyway.

The area around his experiement became electrified, but not enough to kill anyone, and there were some very impressive bolts of man-made lightning which stopped when he blew up the town's generator and caused a blackout over several miles.

There might have been one other small side effect. At almost exactly the same time that this experiment was taking place, a mysterious explosion rocked a remote section of Siberia, to the tune of about a 15-megaton blast (40 years before the first Atomic Bomb test). The explosion has never been satisfactorily explained, although it is commonly dismissed as a meteor or comet impact (a claim which doesn't quite add up with the measured damage on the scene). Interestingly, Tesla had claimed he was trying to use to wave to send a communication to an Arctic expedition that can supposedly be located along a straight line path between Tesla's lab and the site of the explosion.

During all this, Tesla was also pushing ahead with his investigation of the uses of radio waves, particularly to remotely control robotic devices, an area in which the Serbian made great breakthroughs. His research into radio either ran parallel to Guglielmo Marconi, or Marconi ripped him off. The outcome was that Tesla was gipped out of the Nobel Prize in favor of Marconi, who won the official title of "inventor of radio" in the history books. Tesla's inventions and discoveries also formed the basis of modern robotics, radar, most forms of wireless communications, loudspeakers and more. Few of these breakthroughs are credited to the inventor, even today.

As lousy in business as he was talented in science, Tesla sank into bankruptcy and many of his projects went down with him. For years, he struggled to get by and bring his ideas to fruition, but his ideas had taken a turn toward the decidedly strange. He became obsessed with interplanetary communication, for which he was derided (even though, years later, his work is now integral to space exploration and the search for intelligent life in the universe).

He also began to make some interesting claims about his abilities and the power of his inventions. He told people he possessed the scientific wherewithal to split the Earth in two, and he told the New York Times he had invented a death ray which he called the "teleforce," which could melt an airplane's engine from a range of 250 miles. The Times, noting the massive spending on defense and military issues in the build-up toward World War II, pointed out that on a cost-benefit basis (and based on Tesla's track record), it was well worth the risk of failure to fund the project. Nevertheless, the "teleforce" was never adopted... publicly.

The "teleforce" claim would haunt the United States for decades to come. According to Tesla, he had designed a system through which a series of beam transmitters could create an impenetrable energy shield around the country. Starting to sound familiar? It was the first "Star Wars" proposal, and Tesla's claims (never verified publicly) formed the blueprint for almost all future discussions of the "Strategic Defense Initiative."

Tesla was clearly ahead of his time, a problem which would haunt his entire career. His inventions and patents for remote operation of robotic devices, for instance, were stunningly advanced but largely ignored at the time. The military inexplicably failed to understand the usefulness of remote-controlled attack vehicles and torpedoes until after Tesla's patents had expired. Even then, they began researching it over from scratch, rather than working with his established techniques.

The end result was military technology nearly identical to Tesla's inventions, but developed literally decades later and at many times the cost. Tesla never made a dime off of the discovery of the radio-controlled automation that today is the basis of a multibillion dollar aerospace specialty, responsible for the CIA drone assassin planes used in the War on Terrorism, and in every generation of the Mars lander probes.

After his death in 1943, the FBI raided Tesla's home and seized all of his scientific notes, to the tune of hundreds of pages. While a pretty fascist act, it's kind of understandable in light of his claims. Tesla's heirs eventually won the release of some of the material, but it's unknown how much is still classified or "lost." Conspiracy theorists are enamored of Tesla for obvious reasons, and there is a lot of speculation about that "death ray" and other aspects of his research.

One of the most popular theories is that Tesla's terrestrial stationary waves and "death ray" research form the basis of the HAARP Project, an alleged top-secret U.S. government experiment to control the weather and beam fiery death from the skies against enemies of the state.

Tesla's work is still of broad interest to people who are interested in death and destruction on a large scale. Members of Japan's Aum cult (notorious for a sarin gas attack in Tokyo) visited the Tesla Museum looking for ideas, and members of al Qaeda have allegedly taken an interest as well, although it appears fertilizer bombs and box cutters are about as much technology as Osama bin Laden cares about since the incarceration of his own personal mad scientist, Ramzi Yousef.

Hell - The Ultimate Deterrent

2008-12-23T19:25:00.000+01:00

Once upon a time, there was the world, and it was good. Then people got all pissed off about everything, and there was violence and sin, and that was bad. Then people decided they needed a device to stop people from doing so much violence and sin, and there was Hell, and it was good.

Hell is the ultimate deterrent — an eternity of pain and suffering. You can't come up with a much more brutal retribution than that. The only catch is that the deterrent only works when people a) believe in it, and b) fear it so much that they lay off the violence and sin.

There are a number of problems selling Hell to the public at large. For one thing, eternity is a difficult concept to get your head around. For another, everyone has a different idea about how the cosmos works morally. For Hell to succeed, it has to be horrific beyond belief, and ideally it needs to be drilled into the heads of children at a very early age, so that the fear will stick even after the intellect has grown past the concept.

The earliest concepts of Hell were less punitive than nihilistic. Early humans had to come to terms with the concept of death, and a number of ideas were developed along these lines.

The most optimistic viewpoint was reincarnation, present in many cultures around the world, but the ancient Jews were not the most optimistic lot, so they added a layer of unpleasantness to the Great Wheel of Life.

Before being reincarnated, they believed, the soul made a pit stop in Sheol, a depressing underground place where every day is Monday, and it always looks like it's just about to rain but it never quite does. No eternal pit of fire, but the good times are definitely over. Some Jewish sects believed that reincarnation came after a spell in Sheol, others just kind of left souls there to rot (or whatever souls do).

Other early religions had various concepts of a bad place where dead people hang out. The ancient Hindus believed in Hell before switching over to reincarnation. Egyptians believed in an underworld, where souls traveled through trials before returning to their bodies. The Romans and Greeks shared a version of Hell called Hades, which heavily influenced later renditions. But the Judeo-Christian Hell was the one that really stuck.

The Jewish Sheol eventually evolved into Gehenna, which roughly equates to purgatory — a place where souls are punished or cleansed of their sins — but the concept was never "proven" as an established teaching, leaving the matter of an afterlife largely to individual believers.

The coming of the Christians changed all that. When Jesus Christ arrived on the scene, a new set of contradictions arose. On the one hand, Jesus taught of God as a loving father figure, in sharp contrast to the vengeful God of the Old Testament. But love and hate are a double-edged sword. Although the Christian God had a whole lotta love on hand for believers, sinners were condemned to the fiery pit.

As the Christian church became more complicated, so too did the vision of Hell. By the middle ages, Hell was a rather well-defined place. The ultimate map of Hell was drafted by Dante in his epic poem Inferno, part of his inappropriately named "Divine Comedy."

Dante famously divided Hell into nine concentric circles of increasing nastiness, behind a gate with the logo "Abandon Hope, All Ye Who Enter Here":

Circle One: Almost every student struggling through a Catholic school education inevitably arrives at the theological question: What happens to innocent people who are not baptized through no fault of their own? The Church invented "limbo" for this concept; Dante made it the first circle of Hell, a sort of Hell Lite. The first circle of Hell offers a kinder, gentler repose for noble pagans born before Christ and other generally cool historical figures who happen not to be Christians, such as Homer, Ovid, Socrates and presumably figures like Ghandi and maybe Malcolm X. Captives in the First Circle of Hell were subjected mostly to the ravages of generalized anxiety disorder without the benefit of Paxil but with all the side effects (nausea, asthenia, constipation, infection, dry mouth, yawn, diarrhea, sweating, decreased appetite, sleepiness, dizziness, insomnia, tremor, nervousness, and sexual side effects).
Circle Two: Lust! As the most understandable of the major sins, lust only makes circle two of Hell, where lustful lovers are tossed about by stormy winds and forbidden from making wild monkey love. It's unclear whether they're allowed to jerk off. Home to Cleopatra, Tristan and Isolde, the Marquis de Sade and eventually Larry Flynt.
Circle Three: Gluttons live here, and are punished for their gluttony by being subjected to bad weather. Seasonal affective disorder is a bitch! There's also a big dog. Captives include Chris Farley and Divine.
Circle Four: You don't hear a lot about avarice these days, but the medieval mindset classified it as a major sin. The greedy are condemned here to working for the man every night and day, doing pointless and menial tasks. Future residents include Bill Gates and Martha Stewart.
Circle Five: The angry spend eternity duking it out here, naked in a vast river of jello (or possibly water, my Italian is a bit rusty). Look for Sean Penn, Dick Cheney and Jerry Falwell.
Circle Six: This circle of Hell is filled with "heretics," by which Dante mostly means Muslims (though to be fair, Hell has several Popes in residence as well). This circle would technically also include figures like Aleister Crowley, Jack Parsons, Martin Luther and Rael. Rumor has it John Ashcroft is planning random sweeps through the Sixth Circle in search of Terrorists. Everyone in the Sixth Circle is just an ordinary guy, BURNING DOWN THE HOUSE.
Circle Seven: Ah, violence! You gotta love violence! Dante classified three kinds of violence — against self, against others and against God. Inhabitants spotted by Dante included Attila the Hun and Alexander the Great. Since this category includes warmongers, George W Bush is a potential future inmate. Dante's definition of "violence against God" inexplicably includes sodomy, which he classes as a more serious crime than murder, so the Seventh Circle could potentially host Robert Mapplethorpe and Oscar Wilde, who would be flayed on burning sands, while Adolf Hitler would merely be turned into a tree for the crime of Suicide. There is no justice.
Circle Eight: If the Seventh Circle offended your sensibilities, the Eighth is simply baffling. In the next worst circle of Hell, the sufferings of the damned would be inflicted on those who have committed the following sins (all of which are deemed more evil than murder and warmongering). In order of increasing severity: Pandering, flattery, hypocrisy, fortune telling, theft, giving bad advice, instigating trouble, alchemy, impersonation, counterfeiting, lying, and being a giant.
Circle Nine: The Ninth Circle is for betrayers of every stripe, with all the big names in betraying thoroughly represented. Judas, Brutus, Cassius, Benedict Arnold, John Wayne Bobbit, Big Pussy from the Sopranos, Cain, Lando Calrissian, Jim Bakker, Richard M. Nixon, the Rosenbergs, Randy Savage, and finally, frozen in hell's center, Satan himself. Judas, Cassius and Brutus are actually being eternally chewed by Satan, who has an intense dislike for Shakespearean characters.

In his play "No Exit," Jean Paul Sartre said simply that "hell is other people," while Pat Benatar claims "hell is for children." This no doubt provides a meaningful highlight to some of the major differences between Americans, Italians and the French. Just don't ask what.

Marilyn came to the perfect with chops and cakes

2008-12-23T18:35:00.001+01:00

Ex “Playboy” Bunny eated a lot of salads, meat, a variety of jams and cakes …

Sexypile film diva with lush figure Marilyn Monroe did not taking any modern diet, she has enjoyed in salads, lamb chops and mufine jam.

Dietary habits of legendary Monro, whose death is mysterious after 46 years, have come out to light when they recently found her bills from Butcher’s shop and shops with food.

Seven bills from May 1962. year - the month in which Merilyn singed “Happy Birthday Mr. President” to the John Kennedy, and only three months before she was found dead in bed - showed what the film diva kept in her fridge.

According to bills founded, Merilyn was bought artichokes, cucumbers, radish, corn, fresh strawberries, and lamb chops, chicken, milk, Cheddar cheese, but also strawberry and mufine jam.

According to the list of bought food, nutritionist conclude that the Merilyn meals are mostly salads, fruits and meat, which means that her received enough vitamins and proteins. But equally obvious that she had small and sweet satisfactions like mufine jam.

Bills at the auction

Bills of Merilyn Monroe will be putted for sale at the auction in Los Angeles 21 December. With them there will be incomplet letter to her ex husband , and two tickets from 1960. for her and her husband at that time, writer Arthur Miller.

He learned to read and write in 101 year

2008-12-23T18:34:00.001+01:00

It is never too late for man to learn reading and writing, which testifies the case of Brazilian Sebastijao Oliveira, 101 years old, who will next week be given a confirmation of literacy, says Brazilian daily Estado de Sao Paulo. In recent months, Oliveira is, despite his age, each day crossed 800 meters from his home to school in the town of Ampereu, in southern Brazil, where he monitored the literacy rate for adults with other students whose average age was 20 years. “There are still small difficulties in complex words, but it is normally given to the problem of vision. He is a real example for all, “said to newspapers by his teacher. Oliveira, who has decided to rapidly complete primary school, said that his very satisfied because his a more independent and that his life is much more improved.

“To buy something, before I always had to ask for someone’s help, I didn’t know even to sign,” he said. As a child he could not training, because in the end there was no school, and later had to work up for children. There are a total of 12, but they are unlike him, all attended.

Oliveira has more than 80 grandchildren and grand-grandchildren which says that they are all happy to learn. He said to newspapers that he reading regularlywith his wife Karmelinda which is 74 years old.

Japanese -Robot Woman

2008-12-23T18:33:00.002+01:00

She know to say 13,000 sentences in English and Japanese,she is very patiently, and never murmur against …

Inventor Le Trung, 33-year old from Ontario in Canada, is constructed Aiko, a woman in the twenties, with perfect ratio, great hair and sophisticated features.She’s even remembered his favorite drink and she also cleaning and doing housework.

Building a female robot for now costed 1.600 euros.He had to raise a loan, sell the car, and he even experienced slight heart attack due to stress, but, he says,that his very pleased with this work. He had no time to find an ideal partner for himself, so he constructed one that helps him even in computable. Although Aiko was not designed to be his sexual partner, software can be adapted.

His aim for her is to feel, looks and behaves like a woman. He regularly leads her for a walk in the countryside, and even at dinners in restaurants, but Aiko never ordered anything.

She know to say 13,000 sentences in English and Japanese, and Li says that is extremely patient and never murmur against. Her entire body and face are sensitive to touch.

- Like every woman, Aiko reacts to the touch. If you excessively click or grab her,she will try to slap you.She have all senses except smell - says proud Li, who is on Aiko began work two years ago.

Peoples on the street to act differently Aiko. Or love or hate. Women always want to talk with her, and men to touch her.

- She do not need food or rest, can work almost 24 hours a day. The perfect woman - said Li.

Japanese - produced the first extraterrestrial beer

2008-12-23T18:33:00.001+01:00

Japanese beer-lovers can anticipate an out-of-this-world brew: suds made with barley descended from grains that traveled in outer space.

The “space beer,” to be test-brewed by Sapporo Breweries Ltd., will come in a pilot edition of 100 bottles to be ready in November, said company spokeswoman Momoko Matsumura.

The beer will be made with barley — to be harvested this weekend — descended from seeds that spent five months in 2006 aboard the International Space Station.

“We’re really looking forward to tasting it when it’s ready,” Matsumura said.

The barley project started when Sapporo teamed up with Okayama University biologists working with the Russian space team. The team took 0.9 ounce of barley into space for storage inside the space station from April to September 2006.

The project is part of biological studies of the adaptability of plants to environmental changes and the impact from stresses such as space travel.

Sapporo planted 0.14 ounce of the barley grains that returned from space at its research farm northeast of Tokyo in March 2007.

The seedlings were harvested last November. The company expects to harvest 100 pounds of the third-generation grains on Saturday for use in the space beer.

Sapporo isn’t planning to sell the special brew, at least for now, and hasn’t decided how it will distribute the planned 100 bottles, Matsumura said.

So far, scientists have not found any difference between space barley and the Earth-confined version, she said.

Bizarre Deaths

2008-12-23T18:32:00.003+01:00

FBI each year after investigation of the killings, bringing to the public most bizarre cases of the year.

Here are 12 most bizarrely deaths:

1. 36-year old Alexa Mijtust was killed by his wife armed with a chopper long 50 centimeters. Mrs. Mijtust was bored with bizarre sexual desires of her husband, and she putted this half metric tool entire in his buttocks, thus causing deadly internal injuries…

2. 99-year old Debby Mills-Newbroughton lost her life crossing the street. This older Mrs. following day is supposed to fill one hundred years of life, was on its way to her celebration, in the carriage in the company of his daughter, when it struck a truck that was driving her birthday cake ..

3. Death of Peter Stone (42) caused the 8-year daughter, which is without a dinner because of punishment sent in her room. Young Samantha Stone thought that to her, no one can do with impunity, than she putted in father’s coffee immediately 72 tablets of rats-bane. The victim was later after first draft fell from the chair and died. Girl has received conditional sentence, because according to the opinion of judge, was not aware of her act. Judge was later probably seen a mistake, when a month after Samantha in the same way tried to poison her mother.

4. 17-year old David Danilt killed his girlfriend when the boy after date sought something more. On his proposal answered a double-barreled gun for hunting. Carla (girlfriend) got a gun from her father: “For every case” …

5. End of Javier Halos (27) caused by his land-lord. Kirk Weston was so angry because of the fact that he’s a subtenant already eight years does not pay rent, he beated subtenant to death with board for toilet …

6. 44-year Megan Fry shooted by 14 policemen, when unfortunate woman stray in a shooting range for police training. When she noticed that on the street several policemen, she jumped out and yelled “Bu!”. Policemen, thought that is a target, immediately opened fire on it, and 67 of the 40 bullets hit ” the targeted target.” According to the policeman opinion, women functioned very real.

7. The 20-year Julia Smeeth killed by her elder brother with one mobile phone, because the girl talked too much. The death of the victims was caused by broken antenna.

8. Well-known U.S. atomic scientist Harold Simms killed his wife because she cheated him with neighbor. He replaced woman’s sun visor for the eyes with uranium mixture, which is within three months killed Helena Simms. Although the victim had all signs of radiation sickness (her hair fallen, her vision dimmed), was never gone to see a doctor.

9. Sergeant John Joe Winter installed in woman’s car Trintynitrate explosive (similar to C4), and detonated it. Her Ford Taurus contained 750 kg of explosives, which is almost double the amount from the one which was used in a terrorist attack in Oklahoma with 168 victims. An explosion could be heard and to the distance of 14 kilometers. Car parts and the remains of the victims are never found, but they found a 55-meter crater. Of the road is missing about 500 meters.

10. 35-years-old Patty Winter killed by neighbor. Hame (neighbor) has for years built winded F6 Phantom aircraft in his garden, which is why the neighbor was very angry, because of huge noise and danger of fire. After report to police by woman, one Sunday morning Hame called neighbor to the cup of coffee, to debate the issue. The woman did not know that her neighbor has changed the status of the facility. When she went home, Hame launched air facility, which was immediately killed neighbor, and its outlines remain stamped in concrete.

11. Gay Michael Lewis was boosted by film “Die Hard-Life is always a set of” decided to get rid of his lover. He stunted Tony Berry, bring on on a bilateral advertising billboard, which was written, on the one hand, “Death to Niggers!”, On the other, “God loves Klu clux clan!”. Lewis made driven in Harlem with the victim and left him in misery on the street. Berry was within two minutes dead.

12. 26-year old Conrad Middleton killed his twin brother, after the issue that they couldn’t agree on ownership of the house, which they inherited after the death of their father …

10 Things Never to Say to a Taller Woman

2008-12-23T18:32:00.001+01:00

Writer Laura Gilbert asked a WNBA team’s worth of willowy women what clichéd lines turn them off most.you might be constantly faced with the problem of the right strategy when approaching that tall-leggy and beautiful chick across the bar. Not everyone may face this problem, but if you are, well, vertically-challenged,

10. “You must be a model!” (This line shows that you’re not trying very hard, even if you clarify up front that you’re only asking because she’s really rilly pretty.)

9. “You can’t be 5′ 10″. I’m 5′10″!” (It’s one thing to lie about your height while you’re sitting down or on an Internet profile. When you say this to someone who has to lean down to hear it, you’re busted.)

8. “Is it hard for you to meet people taller than you?” (If she has to explain the bell curve to you, you might not be an intellectual match.)

7. “Now there’s a tree I’d like to climb.” (Yummeh.)

6. “How do you kiss?” ( Or the skin-crawling subset: “Wow, I feel like I’m the girl!” You do realize that kissing doesn’t require her to use her legs, right?)

5. “I could eat my way to the top.” (Stop. Just stop.)

4. “How tall are you, anyway?” (Think about it: Whatever she answers won’t make much difference, except that you’ll look sorta insecure for having asked. Use some deductive reasoning and you should be able to guess within an inch or two.)

3. “How do you wear heels?” (Like everyone else: one foot at a time. She looks even better when she does it, short stack.)

2. “It won’t matter much when we’re lying down.” (Only a fool would invite commentary on the inches that do make a difference during horizontal integration.)

1. “Do you play basketball?” (People don’t ask “Do you play professional baseball?” just because you’re paunchy and chew tobacco. Pay it forward by giving tall women the same courtesy.)

Tattoo on your heart - for real !!!

2008-12-23T18:30:00.000+01:00

True Love Tattoos offers you a brand new way to really express your love for that special someone. Don’t ink your skin like everyone else, ink your heart. Or as they refer to it, your soul-canvas. So, do you really love your partner as much as you say?
Here’s your chance to prove it.

A true love Tattoo is a relatively safe procedure thanks to years of uncompromising research. The operation takes less than 3 hours from choice of tattoo until you have a polaroid proof in hand, however, they strongly sugest that you bring someone to escort you home after surgery.

The team is highly professional and fully educated, so far, they have performed over 500 successful operations without any major complications. They provide a wide range of styles from old school to Japanese. You choose the art, they put it on your heart.

Some questions and answers of this:
Q: Does the ink fade with time?
A: There are case studies indicating that falling out of love may have a slight fading effect on the ink, apart from that, this baby is for life.

Q: Can i still be a heart donor?
A: Yes, you can. However, be aware that research suggest that the new owner of your heart tend to get an unexplainable crush on the person whose name is tattooed on the heart.

Q: How will i prove to my loved one that i hounered him or her with a true love tattoo?

A: You will recieve one polaroid picture of your tattoo on place, and also a video recording of the whole procedure. By the way, this video comes with a great soundtrack from new amazing rock band “Vikunja”.

Q: Is it dangerous?
A: It’s not totally safe, but remember, it can be even more dangerous not to express true love.

Q: How long does it take?
A: It depends on the art work. big hearted patients tend to take longer.

Q: Is it dangerous if i have a high blood pressure?
A: On the contrary, it make the colours shine brighter.

Do not get a tattoo if you have a weak heart, are ink intollerant or if you’re not sure you’re really in love. avoid getting a tattoo if you have a newly broken heart. Let it heal for at least 3 months. Laser erase surgery is available but not recommended. They also supply a special divorce discount if you can prove your partner cheated on you. In some cases they recomend you to cover up your old tattoo with a new one, they are especially skilled in making football team crests. This satisfaction cost about 9 000$ to 12 000$ depending on difficulity of tattoo.

10 Homemade Pizza Secrets

2008-12-23T18:29:00.002+01:00

Ever looked at the pizza on supermarket frozen shelves and wondered why your pizza doesn’t look like that? Or maybe it does look like that, but the taste bores your family stiff. Now the pizza genie comes to your rescue. Secrets to a better tasting homemade pizza are below.

1. The secret’s in the sauce.

Go to the grocery store and look at the variety of tomato sauce. Then look at the variety of pasta sauce. Italian tastes can go “high” or “low”, ranging from kid’s-lunch quality to company dinner level flavor. Sneaky pizza chefs dress up the sauce.

Don’t skimp on sauce unless you have a real balanced savory adventure happening on top of the pie. Pizza tops are made up of sweet and sour. Peppers can be sweet and cured Italian meats can bring sourness. The sauce can bring up whatever else is on top of the pie, even plain mushrooms.

Keeping tomato paste on the shelf is fine, but cut in some fresh tomatoes or peppers when using it on pizza at home. Heating up pizza sauce and adding in spices can really enrich the taste of the pizza. Think about the last pizza you had. Do you remember the meat, the cheese, the sauce, or the crust??

2. It’s not about more dough

Budget frozen pizzas in the market have a secret built in. They just provide more dough. Pound for pound more bread is a simple starch that overbalances flavor and is very heavy to eat. It makes shoppers think they are getting more value than they are. Thin crusts have a much finer finish and toast properly.

Many home pizza chefs go mad trying to make a pizza that cooks the dough properly while not burning the top ingredients. Fatty cheese if the only thing a chef can apply on top to stop the overcooking. Unless you are making a super pizza with no stops, skip the self rising or extra deep dish crust. it’s just bread.

3. Experiment with cheesiness

Work with your ingredients and sauce to get the most from the tomato layer. Milder sauce goes with tangier cheese. Put more garlic based tomato sauce on a “thinner” pizza top. Most frozen pizzas skimp on this step and rely on spiced meats and additives to hoist the flavor. This sets up the cheese.

If you have American or cheddar, think about a cheeseburger pizza. Even a few shakes of parmesan gets the job done in a hurry. If you have a good quality mozzarella, don’t bury it under 5 other ingredients. Make a country style pie with tomatoes and sauce and concentrated blobs of cheeses to really wow the diners.

4. Make courses of pizza, not all the same kind

Not every topping is best represented by every crust. Thin crispy crusts show off highly spiced combinations like chicken with red onions and barbeque sauce, or pecorino romano cheese sprinkled with fresh tomatoes sitting in blobs of cheese. Five cheese pizza should have a heftier crust to support the goo.

5. Use lower salt, less sugar ingredients

Grocery stores offer all kinds of less salt, lower sugar products. If you and yours love family pizza night from the takeout place, work on making the same result with healthier ingredients. Half and half cheese, no salt tomato sauce, and natural Italian sausage cuts down on additives.

6. Fresh trumps frozen any time of day or night.

Getting in the hang of home pizza making means being comfortable with the steps. Having tomato sauce, mozzarella cheese, sausage or pepperoni, and tomatoes and mushrooms is just a start. Invest the same time in preparing pizza you would a gourmet salad.

7. Cut with scissors

Cutting pizza with a bad knife can ruin the toppings and disappoint diners. Weird or unattractive slice shapes make recipients either very happy or depressed because of too-denuded pizza slices. Cut very soon after pizza comes out of the oven with clean sharp scissors. The crust will be the toughest part to cut through as the pie cools off.

Cutting with scissors means all the cheese stays where it’s supposed to. Make smaller pieces for smaller appetites and snackers. Some people like more crust, some only want the middle. Serving up can happen in the kitchen when table room won’t accommodate a huge pie pan.

8. The magic phrase is “bite-size”

Pizza can be easy to overeat because human teeth can’t puncture two inch round pepperoni slices, knuckle-duster broccoli florets, and gummy cheese mesas. Use scissors to cut tomatoes smaller and pepperoni into flavor dots. When’s the last time you saw someone snacking on a huge slice of pepperoni in one gulp?

Make an edible pie. Cut chicken and green onions small when using them. Chop mushrooms and onions as if for a salad. Keep cheese layers somewhat even across the entire pie. Press down crust overages. Distribute the ingredients all over the pie, so it won’t sink or slide to the middle while cooking.

9. Steal ideas from frozen pizzas

Shop for gourmet home pizza ideas by reading the ingredients on the back of frozen pizza boxes. See what you have and what you need. Home pizza making has more leverage over frozen in that you can sprinkle more cheese or anchovies or whatever on one of the pie, so everyone is happy. Or start with a budget frozen pizza and add the things your family like, with less of a cooking burden.

10. Serve with complimentary drinks & sides

Ah, the secret to a really successful pizza meal at home is what’s served on the side. Smart chefs will not serve cola or kid’s fizz to distract from the taste of the pizzas. Overly sweetened coffee drinks and sugary punch will rob your meal of the impact and reduce the payoff for your effort.

Think about what Italians drink while dining. Limoncello is a smart lemon liqueur whose citric power refreshes and emphasizes strong garlic and spices. Even beer is good with some Italian dishes.

Wildfire rips through celebrity enclave in California

2008-12-23T18:29:00.001+01:00

A wildfire in Santa Barbara County, Calif., has destroyed about 70 multimillion-dollar homes and ripped over about 320 hectares of land.

The fire was moving toward the city of Santa Barbara on Friday morning after tearing through the upscale coastal community of Montecito the night before, destroying about 70 mansions, officials said.

The brush fire started at about 6 p.m. on Thursday, said Terri Nisich, spokeswoman for the San Barbara County executive office.

The fire has since been fanned by 110 km/h winds, which were continuing on Friday morning, making it difficult for firefighters to tackle the blaze, Nisich said.

The flames were within 10 kilometres of Santa Barbara by Friday morning and about 20 homes within Santa Barbara city limits have already been destroyed, according to officials.

Southern California is experiencing unseasonably hot weather, drought conditions and forecasts of strong Santa Ana winds blowing in from the desert over the weekend, putting the region on high forest fire alert.

About 70 houses were destroyed overnight in Montecito, a popular area for celebrities to keep property about 150 kilometres northwest of Los Angeles.

Officials said that the flames ripped through entire blocks of mansions in the community of 10,000 that has been dubbed “America’s Riviera.”

“It looked like lava coming down a volcano,” said area resident Leslie Hollis, who was preparing to leave her home on Thursday night.

College residence destroyed

Homeowners in the area include actors John Cleese, Christopher Lloyd and Rob Lowe as well as talk-show host Oprah Winfrey and Google Inc. chief executive Eric Schmidt. Officials are not releasing the names of owners of the destroyed properties.

A residence building and several classrooms at the private Westmont College were also destroyed by the fire.

Montecito last suffered a major fire in 1977, when more than 200 homes burned.

Thick plumes of smoke were in the sky in the area on Friday morning.

About 2,500 residents were forced to leave the area because of the flames and officials were reporting on Friday that about 20,000 people had lost power because of the fire.

Minor injuries, including smoke inhalation and burns, were being reported.

Fire crews, including 125 engines, from neighbouring counties are coming to the area to help battle the fire, Nisich said.

Three water-dropping helicopters were being dispatched to the area on Thursday night.

The 10 movies you shouldn’t watch online

2008-12-23T18:28:00.000+01:00

Movies are increasingly creeping online, as video sites like YouTube and Hulu are adding feature films to their extensive libraries.

At the Google-owned YouTube, there is the YouTube Screening Room, which every two weeks, adds four new films — mostly independent works — to the site. Hulu, the joint creation of NBC Universal and News Corp., has hundreds of films available for stream, from “Basic Instinct” to “Wuthering Heights.”

Of course, many people download films illegally on BitTorrent sites, but movies are nevertheless becoming more populated — legally — online.

Hulu recently added 1962’s “Lawrence of Arabia,” which begs the question: Should anyone watch a nearly four-hour-long epic of sweeping grandeur on their laptop? Or, heaven forbid, their cell phone?

Here are the top ten films that should never be brought down to size:

1. “Lawrence of Arabia“: David Lean’s film, which won seven Oscars including best picture, was made for the big screen — particularly as projected in all of its 70 millimeter glory. Though Hulu (like YouTube) streams films in high quality, the enormity of the Arabian desert loses something when dwarfed to a 4-inch by 6-inch screen.

2. “Last of the Mohicans“: Michael Mann’s 1992 adaptation of James Fenimore Cooper’s novel pulses with the raw nature of early America so much that film critic David Thomson has written that he expects William Wordsworth to pop up at any moment. You won’t get that rugged feeling on a computer.

3. “Jaws“: Really, how scary can that shark be if he’s two inches tall?

4. “North By Northwest”: Alfred Hitchcock’s 1959 classic is just too big for your computer. It’s almost too big for a movie screen. The film, after all, includes a chase seen with an airplane, Bernard Herrmann’s robust score, Mount Rushmore and, well, Cary Grant in sunglasses.

5. “Star Wars“: It’s true, a hologram of Princess Leia on your computer is just about as fitting as one of Will.i.am on CNN. But do you really want to see (spoiler alert!) the Death Star explode next to your e-mail?

6. “WarGames”: There isn’t anything so cinematic about this 1983 thriller starring Matthew Broderick. But watching a movie about Cold War-era paranoia in which a computer threatens to bomb the world might cause you to panic out of distrust for all things computerized and throw your laptop out the window.

7. “Barry Lyndon“: The same computer rebellion of “WarGames” might also apply to Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey,” but the Kubrick film that deserves the absolute best presentation is his 1975 period piece. The cinematography by John Alcott — including a candlelit scene shot with NASA-developed camera lenses — is best seen projected in the dark.

8. “Raiders of the Lost Ark“: You have to worry that a story about an adverture-seeking archaeologist with a whip fetish who gets chased by boulders might seem a tad unrealistic when shrunk down from the big screen. (But feel free to be disappointed by the latest “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” on whatever platform you like.)

9. “The Third Man“: Carol Reed’s 1949 film is one of the most exquisitely shot films ever and meant for the movie theater. Also, a Web junky might take the wrong lesson from “The Third Man.” The Internet has a way of depersonalizing people, much in the way Orson Welles famously looks down at far below humans from atop a Ferris wheel in “The Third Man,” caring nothing if the “little dots” stopped moving.

10. “You’ve Got Mail“: It’s just a little too cutesy to watch this romantic comedy on your computer, don’t you think?

Interesting Facts part 3

2008-12-23T18:27:00.003+01:00

1. California has issued at least 6 drivers licenses to people named Jesus Christ.

2. Kangaroos can not walk backwards.

3. 'Jedi' is an official religion, with over 70,000 followers, in Australia.

4. According to a recent survey, more than half of British adults have had sex in a public place!

5. Most alcoholic beverages contain all 13 minerals necessary to sustain human life.

6. Nachos is the food most craved by pregnant women.

7. Each year, 24,000 Americans are bitten by rats!

8. Most dreams last only 5 to 20 minutes.

9. The hair of an adult man or woman can stretch 25 percent of its length without breaking.

10. On average, the life span of an American dollar bill is eighteen months.

11. Non-dairy creamer is flammable.

12. The first domain name ever registered was Symbolics.com.

13. Americans collectively eat one hundred pounds of chocolate every second.

14. U.S. President Calvin Coolidge liked to eat breakfast while having his head rubbed with Vaseline.

15. When a giraffe's baby is born it falls from a height of six feet, normally without being hurt.

16. Venus is the only planet that rotates clockwise.

17. The creator of the NIKE Swoosh symbol was paid only $35 for the design.

18. How does a shark find fish? It can hear their hearts beating.

19. Penguins can convert salt water into fresh water.

20. In ten minutes, a hurricane releases more energy than all the world's nuclear weapons combined!

21. The IRS employees tax manual has instructions for collecting taxes after a nuclear war.

22. During WWII, because a lot of players were called to duty, the Pittsburgh Steelers and Philadelphia Eagles combined to become The Steagles.

23. Nearly 22,000 checks will be deducted from the wrong account over the next hour.

24. More than 50% of the people in the world have never made or received a telephone call.

25. There are more fatal car accidents in July than any other month.

26. There are more bacteria in your mouth than there are people in the world.

27. More than 2 million documents will be lost by the IRS this year.

28. Bats always turn left when exiting a cave.

29. Washington, D.C. has one lawyer for every 19 residents!

30. Avocados have more protein than any other fruit.

31. The average car produces a pound of pollution every 25 miles!

32. Cranberries are sorted for ripeness by bouncing them; a fully ripened cranberry can be dribbled like a basketball.

33. In 1980, a Las Vegas hospital suspended workers for betting on when patients would die!

34. The most powerful electric eel is found in the rivers of Brazil, Columbia, Venezuela, and Peru, and produces a shock of 400-650 volts.

35. If the population of China walked past you in single file, the line would never end because of the rate of reproduction.

36. Antarctica is the only land on our planet that is not owned by any country.

37. In India, people are legally allowed to marry a dog!

38. You are more likely to get attacked by a cow than a shark.

39. Half of all identity thieves are either relatives, friends, or neighbors of their victims.

40. One in three male motorists picks their nose while driving.

Interesting facts part 2

2008-12-23T18:27:00.001+01:00

INTERESTING FACTS

1. If you yelled for 8 years, 7 months and 6 days, you would have produced enough sound energy to heat one cup of coffee.

(Hardly seems worth it)

2. If you fart consistently for 6 years and 9 months, enough gas is produced to create the energy of an atomic bomb.

(Now that's more like it)

3. A pig's orgasm lasts for 30 minutes.

(In my next life I want to be a pig)

(How'd they figure this out, and why?)

4. Banging your head against a wall uses 150 calories an hour.

(Still can't get over that pig thing)

(Don't try this at home...maybe at work?)

5. Humans and dolphins are the only species that have sex for pleasure.

(Is that why Flipper was always smiling?)

(And pigs get 30-minute orgasms? Doesn't seem fair)

6. The strongest muscle in the body is the tongue.

(Hmmmmmmmmm........)

7. Right-handed people live, on average, nine years longer than left-handed people do.

(If you're ambidextrous do you split the difference?)

8. The ant can lift 50 times its own weight, can pull 30 times its own weight and always falls over on its right side when intoxicated.

(From drinking little bottles of...?)

(Did taxpayers pay for this research??)

9. Polar bears are left handed.

(Who knew....? Who cares? How'd they find out, did they ask them?)

10. The catfish has over 27,000 taste buds.

(What can be so tasty on the bottom of the pond?)

11. The flea can jump 350 times its body length.

It's like a human jumping the length of a football field.

(30 minutes...can you imagine?? And why pigs?)

12. A cockroach will live nine days without it's head, before it starves to death.

(Creepy)

13. The male praying mantis cannot copulate while its head is attached to its body. The female initiates sex by ripping the male's head off.

(Honey, I'm home. What the....)

(Well, at least pigs get a break there...)

14. Some lions mate over 50 times a day.

(In my next life I still want to be a pig ... quality over quantity)

15. Butterflies taste with their feet.

(Oh, Geez) (That's almost as bad as catfish)

16. An ostrich's eye is bigger than it's brain.

(I know some people like that.)

17. Starfish don't have brains.

(I know some people like that too.)

Interesting Facts II

1. Mosquito repellents don't repel. They hide you. The spray blocks the mosquito's sensors so they don't know you're there.

2. Dentists have recommended that a toothbrush be kept at least 6 feet away from a toilet to avoid airborne particles resulting from the flush.

3. The liquid inside young coconuts can be used as substitute for blood plasma.

4. No piece of paper can be folded in half more than 7 times.

5. Donkeys kill more people annually than plane crashes.

6. You burn more calories sleeping than you do watching television.

7. Oak trees do not produce acorns until they are fifty years of age or older.

8. The first product to have a bar code was Wrigley's gum.

9. The king of hearts is the only king without a mustache.

10. A Boeing 747s wingspan is longer than the Wright brother's first flight.

11. American Airlines saved $40,000 in 1987 by eliminating 1 olive from each salad served in first-class.

12. Venus is the only planet that rotates clockwise.

13. Apples, not caffeine, are more efficient at waking you up in the morning.

14. The plastic things on the end of shoelaces are called aglets.

15. Most dust particles in your house are made from dead skin.

16. The first owner of the Marlboro Company died of lung cancer.

17. Michael Jordan makes more money from Nike annually than all of the Nike factory workers in Malaysia combined.

18. Marilyn Monroe had six toes. (rumor)

19. All US Presidents have worn glasses. Some just didn't like being seen wearing them in public.

20. Walt Disney was afraid of mice.

21. Pearls melt in vinegar.

22. Thirty-five percent of the people who use personal ads for dating are already married.

23. The three most valuable brand names on earth: Marlboro, Coca-Cola, and Budweiser, in that order.

24. It is possible to lead a cow upstairs...but not downstairs.

25. A duck's quack doesn't echo and no one knows why. (Or does it? http://www.acoustics.salford.ac.uk/acoustics_world/duck/duck.htm)

26. The reason firehouses have circular stairways is from the days when the engines were pulled by horses. The horses were stabled on the ground floor and figured out how to walk up straight staircases.

27. Richard Millhouse Nixon was the first US president whose name contains all the letters from the word 'criminal.' The second was William Jefferson Clinton.

28. Turtles can breathe through their butts.

29. Butterflies taste with their feet.

30. In 10 minutes, a hurricane releases more energy than all of the world's nuclear weapons combined.

31. On average, 100 people choke to death on ball-point pens every year.

32. On average people fear spiders more than they do death.

33. Ninety percent of New York City cabbies are recently arrived immigrants.

34. Elephants are the only animals that can't jump.

35. Only one person in two billion will live to be 116 or older.

36. Women blink nearly twice as much as men.

37. It's physically impossible for you to lick your elbow. (or can you? http://www.uvm.edu/~dfisher1/random/elbow.jpg http://www.uvm.edu/~dfisher1/random/elbow2.jpg)

38. The Main Library at Indiana University sinks over an inch every year because when it was built, engineers failed to take into account the weight of all the books that would occupy the building.

39. A snail can sleep for three years.

40. No word in the English language rhymes with 'MONTH.'

41. Average life span of a major league baseball: 7 pitches.

42. Our eyes are always the same size from birth, but our nose and ears never stop growing. SCARY!!!

43. The electric chair was invented by a dentist.

44. All polar bears are left handed.

45. In ancient Egypt, priests plucked EVERY hair from their bodies,

including their eyebrows and eyelashes.

46. An ostrich's eye is bigger than its brain.

47. TYPEWRITER is the longest word that can be made using the letters only on one row of the keyboard.

48. 'Go', is the shortest complete sentence in the English language.

49. If Barbie were life-size, her measurements would be 39-23-33. She would stand seven feet, two inches tall. Barbie's full name is Barbara Millicent Roberts.

50. A crocodile cannot stick its tongue out.

51. The cigarette lighter was invented before the match.

52. Almost everyone who reads this will try to lick their elbow.

Interesting Facts part 1

2008-12-23T18:26:00.001+01:00

1. If you are right handed, you will tend to chew your food on your right side. If you are left handed, you will tend to chew your food on your left side.

2. If you stop getting thirsty, you need to drink more water. For when a human body

is dehydrated, its thirst mechanism shuts off.

3. Chewing gum while peeling onions will keep you from crying.

4. Your tongue is germ free only if it is pink. If it is white there is a thin film of bacteria on it.

5. The Mercedes-Benz motto is “Das Beste oder Nichts” meaning “the best or nothing”.

6. The Titanic was the first ship to use the SOS signal.

7. The pupil of the eye expands as much as 45 percent when a person looks at something pleasing.

8. The average person who stops smoking requires one hour less sleep a night.

9. Laughing lowers levels of stress hormones and strengthens the immune system

. Six-year-olds laugh an average of 300 times a day. Adults only laugh 15 to 100 times a day.

10. The roar that we hear when we place a seashell next to our ear is not the ocean, but rather the sound of blood surging through the veins in the ear.

11. Dalmatians are born without spots.

12. Bats always turn left when exiting a cave.

13. The ‘v’ in the name of a court case does not stand for ‘versus’, but for ‘and’ (in civil proceedings) or ‘against’ (in criminal proceedings).

14. Men’s shirts have the buttons on the right, but women’s shirts have the buttons on the left.

15. The owl is the only bird to drop its upper eyelid to wink. All other birds raise their lower eyelids.

16. The reason honey is so easy to digest is that it’s already been digested by a bee.

17. Roosters cannot crow if they cannot extend their necks.

18. The color blue has a calming effect. It causes the brain to release calming hormones.

19. Every time you sneeze some of your brain cells die.

20. Your left lung is smaller than your right lung to make room for your heart.

21. The verb “cleave” is the only English word with two synonyms which are antonyms of each other: adhere and separate.

22. When you blush, the lining of your stomach also turns red.

23. When hippos are upset, their sweat turns red.

24. The first Harley Davidson motorcycle was built in 1903, and used a tomato can for a carburetor.

25. The lion that roars in the MGM logo is named Volney.

26. Google is actually the common name for a number with a million zeros.

27. Switching letters is called spoonerism. For example, saying jag of Flapan, instead of flag of Japan.

28. It cost 7 million dollars to build the Titanic and 200 million to make a film about it.

29. The attachment of the human skin to muscles is what causes dimples.

30. There are 1,792 steps to the top of the Eiffel Tower.

31. The sound you hear when you crack your knuckles is actually the sound of nitrogen gas bubbles bursting.

32. Human hair and fingernails continue to grow after death.

33. It takes about 20 seconds for a red blood cell to circle the whole body.

34. The plastic things on the end of shoelaces are called aglets.

35. Most soccer players run 7 miles in a game.

36. The only part of the body that has no blood supply is the cornea in the eye. It takes in oxygen directly from the air.

37. Every day 200 million couples make love, 400,000 babies are born, and 140,000 people die.

38. In most watch advertisements the time displayed on the watch is 10:10 because then the arms frame the brand of the watch (and make it look like it
is smiling).

39. Colgate faced big obstacle marketing toothpaste in Spanish speaking countries. Colgate translates into the command “go hang yourself.”

40. The only 2 animals that can see behind itself without turning its head are the rabbit and the parrot.

41. Intelligent people have more zinc and copper in their hair.

42. The average person laughs 13 times a day.

43. Do you know the names of the three wise monkeys? They are:Mizaru(See no evil), Mikazaru(Hear no evil), and Mazaru(Speak no evil)

44. Women blink nearly twice as much as men.

45. German Shepherds bite humans more than any other breed of dog.

46. Large kangaroos cover more than 30 feet with each jump.

47. Whip makes a cracking sound because its tip moves faster than the speed of sound.

48. Two animal rights protesters were protesting at the cruelty of sending pigs to a slaughterhouse in Bonn. Suddenly the pigs, all two thousand of them, escaped through a broken fence and stampeded, trampling the two hapless protesters to death.

49. If a statue in the park of a person on a horse has both front legs in the air, the person died in battle; if the horse has one front leg in the air, the person died as a result of wounds received in battle; if the horse has all four legs on the ground, the person died of natural cause.

50. The human heart creates enough pressure while pumping to squirt blood 30 feet!!

What Colors Mean

2008-07-27T15:43:00.007+02:00

Red

Red Ribbon Wrapped Around an Orange Race Car

For the ancient Romans, a red flag was a signal for battle.

Because of its visibility, stop signs, stoplights, brake lights, and fire equipment are all painted red.

The ancient Egyptians considered themselves a red race and painted their bodies with red dye for emphasis.

In Russia, red means beautiful. The Bolsheviks used a red flag as their symbol when they overthrew the tsar in 1917. That is how red became the color of communism.

In India, red is the symbol for a soldier.

In South Africa, red is the color of mourning.

It's considered good luck to tie a red bow on a new car.

In China, red is the color of good luck and is used as a holiday and wedding color. Chinese babies are given their names at a red-egg ceremony.

Superstitious people think red frightens the devil.

A “red-letter day” is one of special importance and good fortune.

In Greece, eggs are dyed red for good luck at Easter time.

To “paint the town red” is to celebrate.

Red is the color most commonly found in national flags.

In the English War of the Roses, red was the color of the House of Lancaster, which defeated the House of York, symbolized by the color white.

The “Redshirts” were the soldiers of the Italian leader Garibaldi, who unified modern Italy in the nineteenth century.

To “see red” is to be angry.

A “red herring” is a distraction, something that takes attention away from the real issue.

A “red eye” is an overnight airplane flight.

If a business is “in the red,” it is losing money.

Green

Only one national flag is a solid color: the green flag of Libya.

Ancient Egyptians colored the floors of their temples green.

In ancient Greece, green symbolized victory.

In the highlands of Scotland, people wore green as a mark of honor.

Green is the national color of Ireland.

A “greenback” is slang for a U.S. dollar bill.

Green means “go.” When “all systems are green,” it means everything is in order.

The green room of a concert hall or theater is where performers relax before going onstage.

The “green-eyed monster” is jealousy.

A greenhorn is a newcomer or unsophisticated person.

Green is youthful.

Being “green around the gills” is looking pale and sickly.

“Green with envy” means full of envy or jealousy.

A person with a “green thumb” is good at making plants grow.

A green, or common, is a town park.

Green is a healing color, the color of nature.

Blue

In ancient Rome, public servants wore blue. Today, police and other public servants wear blue.

In Iran, blue is the color of mourning.

Blue was used as protection against witches, who supposedly dislike the color.

If you are “true blue,” you are loyal and faithful.

Blue stands for love, which is why a bride carries or wears something blue on her wedding day.

A room painted blue is said to be relaxing.

“Feeling blue” is feeling sad. “Blue devils” are feelings of depression.

Something “out of the blue” is from an unknown source at an unexpected time.

A bluebook is a list of socially prominent people.

The first prize gets a blue ribbon.

A blue blood is a person of noble descent. This is probably from the blue veins of the fair-complexioned aristocrats who first used this term.

“Into the blue” means into the unknown.

A “bluenose” is a strict, puritanical person.

A “bluestocking” used to be a scholarly or highly knowledgeable woman.

The pharaohs of ancient Egypt wore blue for protection against evil.

The “blues” is a style of music derived from southern African-American secular songs. It influenced the development of rock, R&B, and country music.

“Blue laws” are used to enforce moral standards.

A blue ribbon panel is a group of especially qualified people.

Purple, Violet

The Egyptian queen Cleopatra loved purple. To obtain one ounce of Tyrian purple dye, she had her servants soak 20,000 Purpura snails for 10 days.

In Thailand, purple is worn by a widow mourning her husband's death.

A “purple heart” is a U.S. military decoration for soldiers wounded or killed in battle.

Purple is a royal color.

Purple robes are an emblem of authority and rank.

“Purple speech” is profane talk.

“Purple prose” is writing that is full of exaggerated literary effects and ornamentation.

Leonardo da Vinci believed that the power of meditation increases 10 times when done in a purple light, as in the purple light of stained glass.

Purple in a child's room is said to help develop the imagination according to color theory.

Richard Wagner composed his operas in a room with shades of violet, his color of inspiration.

Yellow

In Egypt and Burma, yellow signifies mourning.

In Spain, executioners once wore yellow.

In India, yellow is the symbol for a merchant or farmer.

In tenth-century France, the doors of traitors and criminals were painted yellow.

Hindus in India wear yellow to celebrate the festival of spring.

If someone is said to have a “yellow streak,” that person is considered a coward.

In Japan during the War of Dynasty in 1357, each warrior wore a yellow chrysanthemum as a pledge of courage.

A yellow ribbon is a sign of support for soldiers at the front.

Yellow is a symbol of jealousy and deceit.

In the Middle Ages, actors portraying the dead in a play wore yellow.

To holistic healers, yellow is the color of peace.

Yellow has good visibility and is often used as a color of warning. It is also a symbol for quarantine, an area marked off because of danger.

“Yellow journalism” refers to irresponsible and alarmist reporting.

White

A white flag is the universal symbol for truce.

White means mourning in China and Japan.

Angels are usually depicted wearing white robes.

The ancient Greeks wore white to bed to ensure pleasant dreams.

The Egyptian pharaohs wore white crowns.

The ancient Persians believed all gods wore white.

A “white elephant” is a rare, pale elephant considered sacred to the people of India, Thailand, Burma, and Sri Lanka; in this country, it is either a possession that costs more than it is worth to keep or an item that the owner doesn't want but can't get rid of.

It's considered good luck to be married in a white garment.

White heat is a state of intense enthusiasm, anger, devotion, or passion.

To whitewash is to gloss over defects or make something seem presentable that isn't.

A “white knight” is a rescuer.

A white list contains favored items (as opposed to a blacklist).

A “whiteout” occurs when there is zero visibility during a blizzard.

A “white sale” is a sale of sheets, towels, and other bed and bath items.

A “whited sepulcher” is a person who is evil inside but appears good on the outside, a hypocrite.

“White lightning” is slang for moonshine, a homebrewed alcohol.

A white room is a clean room as well as a temperature-controlled, dust-free room for precision instruments.

White water is the foamy, frothy water in rapids and waterfalls.

Black

The ancient Egyptians and Romans used black for mourning, as do most Europeans and Americans today.

The “Blackshirts” were the security troops in Hitler's German army, also known as the S.S.

Black often stands for secrecy.

Black humor is morbid or unhealthy and gloomy humor.

A “blackhearted” person is evil.

If a business is “in the black,” it is making money.

A “blacklist” is a list of persons or organizations to be boycotted or punished.

Black is associated with sophistication and elegance. A “black tie” event is formal.

A black belt in karate identifies an expert.

A black flag in a car race is the signal for a driver to go to the pits.

A blackguard is a scoundrel.

The ancient Egyptians believed that black cats had divine powers.

Black lung is a coal miner's disease caused by the frequent inhaling of coal dust.

Blackmail is getting things by threat.

Black market is illegal trade in goods or money.

A black sheep is an outcast.

“Blackwash” (as opposed to “whitewash”) is to uncover or bring out in the light.

A blackout is a period of darkness from the loss of electricity, for protection against nighttime air raids, or, in the theater, to separate scenes in a play.

When you “black out,” you temporarily lose consciousness.

Top 10 Most Overlooked Mysteries in History

2008-06-29T19:32:00.004+02:00

Over the last few months we have gone through 30 of the worlds greatest mysteries but what we haven’t covered are ancient mysteries. This list aims to put that right! Here are ten great unsolved mysteries of science. Do you have a theory that might solve one of these mysteries? If so, tell us in the comments!

10. Rongorongo

While many people know of the Moai of Easter Island, not that many people know of the other mystery associated with Easter Island. ‘Rongorongo’ is the hieroglyphic written language of the region’s earlier inhabitants. Rongorongo is strange in that no other neighbouring oceanic people used a written language. It appeared around the 1700s, though was unfortunately lost after the early European colonizers banned it because of its ties to the native islanders’ pagan roots.

9. Lost City of Helike

In the late 2nd century AD, the Greek writer Pausanias wrote an account of how (4-500 years earlier?) in one night a powerful earthquake destroyed the great city of Helike, with a Tsunami washing away what remained of the once-flourishing metropolis. The city, capital of the Achaean League, was a worship centre devoted to the ancient god Poseidon, god of the sea. There was no trace of the legendary society mentioned outside of the ancient Greek writings until 1861, when an archeologist found some loot thought to have come from Helike - a bronze coin with the unmistakable head of Poseidon. In 2001, a pair of archeologists managed to locate the ruins of Helike beneath the mud and gravel of the coast, and are currently trying to peice together the rise and sudden fall of what has been called the “real” Atlantis.

8. The Bog Bodies

This mystery may even be a problem for those legendary investigators from CSI and the like! The bog bodies are hundreds of ancient corpses found buried around the northern bogs and wetlands of Northern Europe. These bodies are remarkably well preserved, some dating back 2,000 years. Many of these bodies have tell-tale signs of torture and other medieval “fun”, which have made some researchers postulating that these unfortunate victims were the result of ritual sacrifices.

7. Fall of the Minoans

The Minoans are best known for the legend of Theseus and the Minotaur, but it is in fact the demise of this once-great civilisation that is more interesting. While many historians concentrate on the fall of the Roman Empire, the fall of the Minoans, who resided on the island of Crete, is an equal, if not greater mystery. Three and a half thousand years ago the island was shaken by a huge volcanic eruption on the neighbouring Thera Island. Archeologists unearthed tablets which have shown that the Minoans carried on for another 50 years after the eruption, before finally folding. Theories of what finally ended them have ranged from volcanic ash covering the island and devastating harvests to the weakened society eventually getting taken over by invading Greeks.

6. The Carnac Stones

Everyone has heard of Stonehenge, but few know the Carnac Stones. These are 3,000 megalithic stones arranged in perfect lines over a distance of 12 kilometers on the coast of Brittany in the North-West of France. Mythology surrounding the stones says that each stone is a soldier in a Roman legion that Merlin the Wizard turned in to stone. Scientific attempts at an explanation suggests that the stones are most likely an elaborate earthquake detector. The identity of the Neolithic people who built them is unknown.

5. Who Was Robin Hood?

The historical search for the legendary thief Robin Hood has turned up masses of possible names. One candidate includes the Yorkshire fugitive Robert Hod, also known as Hobbehod or Robert Hood of Wakefield. The large number of suspects is complicated further as the name Robin Hood became a common term for an outlaw. As literature began to add new characters to the tale such as Prince John and Richard the Lionheart the trail became more obscure. To this day no one knows who this criminal really was.

4. The Lost Roman Legion

After the Parthians defeated underachieving Roman General Crassus’ army, legend has it that a small band of the POWs wandered through the desert and were eventually rounded up by the Han military 17 years later. First century Chinese historian Ban Gu wrote an account of a confrontation with a strange army of about a hundred men fighting in a “fish-scale formation” unique to Roman forces. An Oxford historian who compared ancient records claims that the lost roman legion founded a small town near the Gobi desert named Liqian, which in Chinese translates to Rome. DNA tests are being conducted to answer that claim and hopefully explain some of the residents’ green eyes, blonde hair, and fondness of bullfighting.

3. The Voynich Manuscript

The Voynich Manuscript is a medieval document written in an unknown script and in an unknown language. For over one hundred years people have tried to break the code to no avail. The overall impression given by the surviving leaves of the manuscript suggests that it was meant to serve as a pharmacopoeia or to address topics in medieval or early modern medicine. However, the puzzling details of illustrations have fueled many theories about the book’s origins, the contents of its text, and the purpose for which it was intended. The document contains illustrations that suggest the book is in six parts: Herbal, Astronomical, Biological, Cosmological, Pharmaceutical, and recipes.

2. The Tarim Mummies

An amazing discovery of 2,000 year old mummies in the Tarim basin of Western China occurred in the early 90s. But more amazing than the discovery itself was the astonishing fact that the mummies were blond haired and long nosed. In 1993, Victor Mayer a college professor collected DNA from the mummies and his tests verified that the bodies were all of European genetic stock. Ancient Chinese texts from as early as the first millennium BC do mention groups of far-east dwelling caucasian people referred to as the Bai, Yeuzhi, and Tocharians. None, though, fully reveal how or why these people ended up there.

1. Disappearance of the Indus Valley Civilization

The ancient Indus Valley people, India’s oldest known civilization had a culture that stretched from Western India to Afghanistan and a populace of over 5 million. le—India’s oldest known civilization—were an impressive and apparently sanitary bronze-age bunch. The scale of their baffling and abrupt collapse rivals that of the great Mayan decline. They were a hygienically advanced culture with a highly sophisticated sewage drainage system, and immaculately constructed baths. There is to date no archaeological evidence of armies, slaves, conflicts, or other aspects of ancient societies. No one knows where this civilization went.

Full Arm Clolurfull Tattoos

2008-06-21T22:48:00.006+02:00

Dual wielding AK-47s open zipper cool

2008-06-21T20:01:00.001+02:00

DEVIL'S POOL

2008-06-19T16:21:00.001+02:00

Located in Zimbabwe, Africa, Devil's Pool is a natural pool that overlooks Victoria Falls. The pool's unique location allows those visitors that are brave enough a spectacular look at the 103 meter drop.

Top 10: Horniest Countries

2008-06-19T15:09:00.012+02:00

Think you get it on as much as a porn star? It may depend on where you live. According to a 2008 Durex sex survey, only 53% of Americans have sex once a week, while 55% of British and 59% of Canadians admit the same. Ouch. So, who is rocking the most beds in the world? Check out our top 10 list of the horniest countries to find out.

We’ve ranked these top 10 horniest countries in line with the same Durex survey rankings. So, the higher a country appears on the list, the more of its citizens are having sex -- which means at least once a week. Just to make it on this list of top 10 horniest countries, three-quarters of a country has to be going at it regularly. Embarrassingly, Canada and the U.S. don’t make the cut. The good news: If you want to flee your sex-starved nation for these horny ones, we’ve given you pickup spots where you can start to improve your country’s rank.

No.10 - Mexico

Want to take a sexy siesta? Meet people of the sun and fun in our No. 10 horniest country. Mexicans kick off our list of boot-knocking peoples, and they start from an early age. In fact, in May of 2008 Mexico City's government distributed 700,000 copies of sex-ed textbooks to deliver to the city's student population, well aware that the kids would be doing the horizontal tango one way or another. And when it comes to sex south of the border, there's always a way. While prostitution is generally illegal in Mexico, it is legal in select cities like Tijuana where sex worker zones are set up for your benefit.

Horny hangouts: A huge spring break getaway, Mexico’s resorts often melt into one giant pickup place. Here are some of the more notable places to go in this horny country: In Cancun, check out the popular bars -- Senor Frogs, Daddy ‘O and Coco Bongo. In Acapulco try Palladium, a huge disco that overlooks several other bars, there's also Baby Lobster Bar and Thai Bar, both of which have a reputation for hot girls. Visiting Cabo San Lucas? Then you definitely need to check out Squid Roe, a popular dance bar flowing with tequila. A few other Cabo San Lucas pickup options include The Zoo and Mango deck. If you're in Puerto Vallarta check out The Zoo (another one) and El Hilo for hot Mexican nights. In Tijuana? Hit up Senor Frogs, Mundo Cafe or Safaris.

No.9 - Switzerland

Sure, they’re politically neutral, but the Swiss definitely have an opinion about sex. That opinion roughly translates to: "Gimme more." Apart from their regular bedroom feats, prostitution is also legal in this horny country. Every year 350,000 Swiss pay their own way for pleasure. With this level of commitment it's no wonder they made our list of top 10 horniest countries.

Horny hangouts: If you're traveling in Zurich, you'll want to check out this popular spot, the Hive Bar or even Ba Ba Lu for loud music and a lively crowd that's sure to make your night one to remember.

No.8 - Spain

In the land of Latin love, sex is a foregone conclusion. Its traditional, sexually charged culture has even gone through a modern update. Recently, it's been reported that Spanish men have turned to our modern-day Spanish fly, Viagra, to please their ladies longer -- even if they are fully capable of the act without the pill. Of course, this little enhancement makes sure they meet their own expectations as well, proving that this is definitely one of the horniest countries around.

Horny hangouts: In Barcelona, visit the seaside club Baja Beach where plenty of women come to see and be seen. Your other bet for hot Spanish nights is Razzmatazz, which is a single club with five different clubs attached to it. Here to party? Ibiza’s got the answer: Just pick a bar, any bar, and you’ll do fine.

No.7 - Malaysia

In public, this country definitely appears conservative. For example, there was a recent controversy over whether sex education should be taught in high school or not -- not exactly sexually liberated. However, behind closed doors lies (pun totally intended) the real story: Malaysians are swinging from the bedposts, and loving every minute of it. Occasionally we'll get a glimpse of it - like when Malaysia's Minister of Health was forced to step down after his homemade sex tapes made the rounds in January of 2008.

Horny hangouts: In Kuala Lumpur, check out these bars and clubs for a straightforward party: Aloha, Poppy Bar or the Rum Jungle. To “choose your own adventure” visit the Beach Club where there’s a good chance a girl comes at a price, but she'll be worth every penny.

No.6 - Italy

Many Italians live la dolce vita with sex high on their list of things to do on a daily basis. A poll found that 32% of Italians over 60 years old have sex regularly. It's unclear if this means seniors are schtupping around the clock or once a week. However, one thing’s clear; their frequency in the sack helped give this country a spot on our list of top 10 horniest countries.

Horny hangouts: Visiting Florence? Check out the Red Garter, a classic American-style bar with an international reputation as a pickup joint. Your second choice should be Moyo, a laid-back club whose volume lets you have a conversation. In Milan, good bets for passionate encounters are Propaganda, a huge nightclub, plus The Shocking Club, a club known for its crazier theme nights. And when in Rome, visit the Drunken Ship, a popular party bar, and don't forget to do it as the Romans do it.

No. 5 - Poland

For a fairly conservative culture, Poland has earned a steamy reputation as one of the horniest countries out there. Poland has an annual Eroticon festival that showcases the latest and greatest sex toys and mechanisms in the adult industry. Even one of Poland's politicians was caught in a sex scandal. However, the most obvious evidence of Poland's hound-dog ways has to be the two Polish women who once held the world gangbang record, which they completed in their home country. Need we explain?

Horny hangouts: If you're going to Warsaw, you'll want to visit Organza, a club with a good share of women. Or for variety check out the two-floor bar Zoo; this bar features plenty of space to party or chat up women. Now Krakow: While you're there go to Cien Klub, described as an institution it’s a big club with lots of girls. Krakow also features Frantic, another two-floor bar and the Goraczka Freak Club, not that kind of “freak,” but a good party place filled with ladies nonetheless.

No.4 - China

The more China’s Cultural Revolution thaws, the more its sexual revolution heats up. Want proof? Just in the past eight years, 5,000 sex shops have opened in Beijing alone. Plus, China even has a SEXPO, where Chinese residents come to check out sex paraphernalia. And with 70% of the world’s sex toys made in China, its horniest country status means that a good deal of their hard work won't have to go very far.

Horny hangouts: If you're visiting Shanghai, you need to check out these better-known spots: Bar Rouge, Zapata’s and Windows. If you're in Beijing, you’ve got a few options: Visit the Sanlitun Lu District, often dubbed “bar street” for all its action. For the tried-and-true joints check out Bar Blu, Suzie Wong and Brown’s, all renowned meat markets. And for your seedier pick you need to head to Maggie’s, a popular nightclub known for its working girls.

No.3 - Russia

Was the Cold War’s biggest secret that the Russians were having more sex than we were? Since the fall of Communism it looks a lot more likely that it actually was. Russian's libidos are inspiring them to fill tons of new Moscow clubs and bars where hookups are a nightly pastime in this horny country.

Horny hangouts: In Moscow, go to The Hungry Duck, a crazy bar that runs ladies' nights with male strippers three times a week, then lets men in the door once the strippers are off stage. Sure, nothing is set in stone, but you’d have to try hard to miss this softball pickup pitch. Other Russian hot spots include Night Flight, where you can pick up Russian girls, and Propaganda, which is better-known for housing tourists rather than locals.

No.2 - Brazil

Considering this is the birthplace of the thong, it makes sense that sex is as essential as breathing in Brazil. This horny country's beaches are filled with gorgeous women and during its annual Carnaval even the most stubborn inhibitions disappear and this destination proves its spot on our top 10 horniest countries list.

Horny hangouts: In Rio, definitely visit the Lapa district. It's a huge party spot, filled with clubs and gyrating women. Other Rio options include the Nuth Bar, a two-story nightclub notorious as a pickup bar, plus Baronetti or Club Six. Up for more adventure? You can negotiate your price openly at Help.

No. 1 - Greece
This country has a long tradition of sex that dates back to ancient times -- these are the guys that brought us pederasty and Sapphic love. With its temperate Mediterranean weather, beaches and tons of islands, Greece’s ingredients make it the No. 1 horniest country in the world.

Horny hangouts: Set aside some time, and plenty of protection, because there are a number of pickup spots throughout the islands and on the mainland. First, in Athens, try out Hoxton in the Gazi district, it's a trendy bar where backpackers are known to hang out. For the islands, Corfu is renowned for its infamous pickup spot, The Pink Palace. And while on the island of Los, check out these bars: Kahlua, Slammer Bar or the Red Bull Bar. Finally, make sure to check out Mykonos, an island known for its partying. While in Mykonos, visit Paradise Beach club that’s set right on, you guessed it, a beach. Paradise Beach is a big hangout, where clothing has been known to occasionally disappear.

The best video game wedding cake ever

2008-06-18T17:25:00.003+02:00

I’ve seen plenty of video game cakes in my time - but they pale in comparison to this amazingly detailed piece of 100% edible art. I think I’d feel guilty eating a piece. Click through for close-ups.

Interesting Fountains From Around The World

2008-06-17T16:42:00.001+02:00

World's highest Fountain: King Fahd's Fountain located in the city Jeddah, Saudi Arabia is the world's highest fountain. 165 gallons of water per second is pumped by 3 huge pumps each through a 126 mm nozzle at an incredible speed of 233 mph & reaching the maximum height of 312m (1023ft) higher than the Eiffel tower (excluding its antenna).

These are few from Archibase which has a collection of some of the most unusual fountains in the world.

World's Largest Chocolate Fountain - At 27-feet tall, this chocolate fountain created by Jean-Philippe Maury is the world's largest. The fountain is filled with 2100 lb of dark, milk & white chocolate.

Water Vortex Sculpture: This water sculpture is the creation of by William Pye is called Charybdis, and it's located in Seaham Hall, Sunderland, UK.

CHINA IS BEAUTIFUL, PART THREE

2008-06-15T09:20:00.002+02:00

Forget everything you think you know about China and take a couple minutes to ponder these images.

Few people in the Western world know about the hidden beauty of China. Well..... of course it helps to have an ace photographer who can capture this land of enchantment as no other has. But these are some truly inspiring photos.

CHINA IS BEAUTIFUL, PART TWO

2008-06-15T09:15:00.003+02:00

CHINA IS BEAUTIFUL, PART ONE

2008-06-15T09:09:00.002+02:00

10 Weird Things We All Wonder About

2008-05-27T17:57:00.001+02:00

95% of you reading this will think to yourself, “I have thought about that before… It is kind of weird.” Not saying we think about these things often, but they sometimes DO cross our mind!

1.
What do people think of me?
You know you sometimes wonder what people think about you.. Does my hair look good today? How about my clothes? Does my breath smell good? Face it, no matter how much you say you don’t care about what people think of you, you know you care. Even if it is just a little bit…
2.
Why is the word “abbreviation” so flippin’ long?
You’d think a word that means to shorten something… would be short, right? Wrong. The genius that um.. I guess, made this word? Well, he wanted to make things hard for everyone. I think about this everyday, it gets under my skin.
3.
Why do they put round pizza in square boxes?
I’ve pondered this ever since I was a little kid. Really, I don’t understand. If someone has an answer to this, please let me know. Circular boxes would be pretty damn cool if you ask me.
4.
If the whole, “i after e, except before c” really applied to the English language, wouldn’t “science” be spelled wrong?
I always went by that rule in grammar school. One day I had a spelling test and spelled the word “science” like “sceince”. When I got my test back and saw it was incorrect I was all like, “YOU CAN’T SPELL. I’M RIGHT” and went on a rampage. I asked my teacher why it was wrong and how come the rule didn’t apply to that word… She had no answer for me. The English language is so confusing.
5.
Why do men have nipples?
I never understood this. We all know the purpose of the nipples on a female, but what about a male? They’re just kind of hanging out there.. no purpose in life. They’re probably really depressed.
6.
If you ate pasta and antipasti, would you still be hungry?
Hahaha. Someone asked me this a while ago and I’ve thought about it ever since. It’s a silly thing to think about, but it actually had me thinking. I get bored, can you tell? Oh well.
7.
Why do people count sheep when they can’t sleep?
What’s so special about sheep? Why can’t we count dogs? Why not cats? How about dinosaurs? Or aardvarks… The world will never know.
8.
Why do banks charge you a “non-sufficient funds fee”?
If you have no money… Why do they charge you for the money that you don’t even have? I think it sucks that you have to have 5 dollars, or whatever the amount is, in your bank account at all times. Dumbest rule ever. Banks suck.
9.
What happens when we die?
Is it just like sleeping? Except we don’t wake up.. Is there an afterlife? Does your soul live on? Does your life really flash before your eyes like it’s said to? It’s something everyone wonders about but doesn’t really want to find out. No one will ever really know for sure, but it’s fun to wonder about it, I guess.
10.
What is the average air speed velocity of an unladen swallow?
Classic. If you don’t know what that means, you need to go watch Monty Python and the Holy Grail because you definitely missed out.

10 Weird Things We All Wonder About

2008-05-27T17:57:00.000+02:00

95% of you reading this will think to yourself, “I have thought about that before… It is kind of weird.” Not saying we think about these things often, but they sometimes DO cross our mind!

10 must see electron micrograph images

2008-05-18T16:17:00.001+02:00

An electron micrograph is an image taken using electrons to illuminate a specimen and create an enlarged picture of it. Some of these photos can magnify specimens up to 2 million times.
Here are 10 awesome electron micrograph images.

Soybean Cyst Nematode

The Picture shows Pollen of the Common Ragweed. It is the most widespread plant of the genus Ambrosia in North America. Pollen is a fine to coarse powder consisting of microgametophytes, which produce the sperm cells of seed plants. The pollen grain with its hard coat protects the sperm cells during the process of their movement between the stamens of the flower to the pistil of the next flower.

Crab Spider
Head of a Crab Spider. They are also commonly called “flower spiders” because they are most often found on flowers, lying in ambush for prey. Crab spiders do not build webs to trap prey, but are active hunters much like the jumping spiders.

Butterfly egg
Butterfly eggs consist of a hard-ridged outer layer of shell, called the chorion. It is the lined structure with a thin coating of wax which prevents the egg from drying out before the larva has had time to fully develop.

Bacteria: E. coli
These rod-shaped bacteria are enterobacters, which are part of the normal content of human and animal digestive systems. However, under certain conditions they can cause gastroenteritis and urinary tract infections.

Flea
The head of a flea, an external parasite living by hematophagy off the blood of mammals and birds.

Skin, lateral cut
A section through human skin. The skin layers, from top to bottom, are the stratum corneum, composed of flattened, dead skin cells that form the surface of the skin. The dead cells from this layer are continuously being shed and replaced by cells from the living epidermal layer below (red). The lowest layer seen here is the dermis. In the middle, a sweat gland can be seen.

Soybean Cyst
Soybean cyst nematode and its egg. It is a small plant-parasitic roundworm that attacks the roots of soybeans.

Immune system: Macrophage, defense against microfilarie
A Microfilariae (larval worms) of a parasitic nematode roundworm being attacked by cells of the immune system. Numerous nematodes cause disease in humans, living as parasites of the intestines, blood, lymph, subcutaneous & connective tissues.

Salmonella
Color-enhanced scanning showing Salmonella typhimurium (red) invading cultured human cells.

Shark skin
Scales from the skin of a shark. These sharply pointed placoid scales are also known as dermal teeth or denticles. They give the shark’s skin the feel of sandpaper. The tip of each scale is made of dentine overlayed with dental enamel. The lower part of each scale is made of bone. The scales disrupt turbulence over the skin, considerably reducing the drag on the shark as it swims. This design has been investigated by engineers for use on the surfaces of aircraft and boats.

Source: THEBIZZARE.COM

25 Dirtiest Cities In The World

2008-04-15T14:34:00.002+02:00

No. 25: Port Harcourt, Nigeria

Mercer Health and Sanitation Index Score: 46.8

Problems with waste disposal continue to contaminate the rivers of Nigeria, especially affecting residents in Port Harcourt. The area lacks strategies for preventing oil spills and contamination, and the clean-up methods after disasters require significant improvement.

No. 24: New Delhi, India

Mercer Health and Sanitation Index Score: 46.6

You’ll find just about everything except marine life in New Delhi’s Yamuna River. Garbage and sewage flow freely, creating a rich environment for the growth of water-borne diseases contributing to extremely high rates of infant morbidity.

No. 23: Maputo, Mozambique

Mercer Health and Sanitation Index Score: 46.3

Located on the Indian Ocean, the Eastern African country of Mozambique suffers from lack of sanitation processes–specifically the lack of a solid waste removal system as well as sewage treatment. The capital city of Maputo feels the worst of these consequences. Piles of garbage line the streets, and the sewage in the river is visibly thick.

No. 22: Luanda, Angola

Mercer Health and Sanitation Index Score: 45.2

Located on Angola’s coast with the Atlantic Ocean to its west, Luanda is the city’s largest port. Studies from several agencies, including UNICEF and Oxfam, suggest that a large portion of the population in Luanda drink water of poor and in some cases dangerous quality. Much of this portion of the population lives in settlements called musseques built on hardened waste. Water arrives to these settlements in private tanks, which consistently show concerning levels of chlorine. Water conditions such as this only served to intensify a cholera epidemic in 2006.

No. 21: Niamey, Niger

Mercer Health and Sanitation Index Score: 45

The Niger River Basin, home to Niger’s capital city, Niamey, is a cesspool of pollution and waste. In a country with a total population just under 14 million, the healthy life expectancy at birth is 35 for males and 36 for females, thanks in part to poor sanitation and drinkable water. About one in four children raised here will die before age 5, the World Health Organization says.

No. 20: Nouakchott, Mauritania

Mercer Health and Sanitation Index Score: 44.7

Located in northern Africa, Mauritania sits on the North Atlantic Ocean between Senegal and the western Sahara. Nouakchott, the country’s capital, is located on the western coast. Due to the desert-like climate, droughts and water management are critical issues for the country. Oil deposits off the coast and iron ore serve as the country’s main industrial opportunities, but the majority of the population depends on farming.

No. 19: Conakry, Guinea Republic

Mercer Health and Sanitation Index Score: 44.2

Life expectancy, infant morbidity, and the percentage of the population that has access to safe water are shockingly low for Conakry, the capital city of Guinea Republic. Previous World Bank initiatives in Conakry focused on water supply and sanitation have not proved very successful.

No. 18: Lome, Togo

Mercer Health and Sanitation Index Score: 44.1

Lomé, the capital city of Togo, sits in the southwest near the country’s border with Ghana. Water and waste management has become one of the country’s main problems as a large percentage of the population continues to live without access to improved water or sanitation. Extensive flooding in Togo only magnifies the problem.

No. 17: Pointe Noire, Congo

Mercer Health and Sanitation Index Score: 43.8

The second Congolese city on the list suffers from many of the same pollutants as its neighboring city, Brazzaville–air pollution from vehicle emissions and unbridled water contamination from the mass unloading of raw sewage in the city’s water supply. According to the CIA WorldFactBook, about 70% of the Congolese population live either in Brazzaville or Pointe Noire or along the railroad track, which connects the two.

No. 16: Bamako, Mali

Mercer Health and Sanitation Index Score: 43.7

Bamako, the capital of Mali, and the country’s largest city is situated on the Niger River. Rapid population growth, coupled with unbridled urban pollution, are among the many health and sanitation challenges facing the capital. Several droughts have caused migration from rural areas to the urban environment of the capital, which has only led to more water management issues.

No. 15: Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso

Mercer Health and Sanitation Index Score: 43.4

A recent World Bank study shows that cancer and respiratory disease rates are up due to increased air pollution in Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso. Increased levels of benzene, from motorbike petrol, and increased dust particles, amounting on average to nearly three times the WHO-stated healthy limit, contribute to these rising numbers. In a city characterized by a rainy season, waste management and sanitation also face challenges.

No. 14: Moscow, Russia

Mercer Health and Sanitation Index Score: 43.2

In a city where you can pay $3,000 a month for an apartment that doesn’t even have clean running water, Moscow also has troubling levels of air pollution, which present a daily strain on lung health.

No. 13: Bangui, Central African Republic

Mercer Health and Sanitation Index Score: 42.1

Bangui, the capital of Central African Republic, faces water and sanitation challenges similar to its neighboring countries’ capitals. A rapidly increasing population, coupled with a lack of adequate waste and water management, places stresses on the capital city.

No. 12: Dar es Salaam, Tanzania

Mercer Health and Sanitation Index Score: 40.4

The capital of this east African country continues to grow populationwise, putting a stress on the city’s sanitation programs. Solid waste, entering the Msimbazi River, contributes to widely spread infectious diseases among the population..

No. 11: Ndjamena, Chad

Mercer Health and Sanitation Index Score: 39.7

Ndjamena, the capital city of Chad, faces multi-faceted water management challenges. A main site for concern here is the Conventional Basin of Lake Chad, upon which the country’s main fisheries greatly depend. Also noteworthy–the continual influx of population growth, accelerated by the migration of neighboring Sudanese refugees from Darfur, which places an unexpected strain on water management

No. 10: Brazzaville, Congo

Mercer Health and Sanitation Index Score: 39.1

Air pollution from emissions, lack of potable water and the contamination of the city’s water from raw sewage contribute to the laundry list of health and sanitation concerns for Brazzaville, the capital of Congo. Each of these press upon the life expectancy of the local population.

No. 9: Almaty, Kazakhstan

Mercer Health and Sanitation Index Score: 39.1

The marriage of petroleum-based industry and insufficient safeguards against pollution sets the stage for an environmental crisis in this city. Toxic waste dumps require a huge price tag for improvement and an even larger price for neglect.

No. 8: Baghdad, Iraq

Mercer Health and Sanitation Index Score: 39

Poor water quality in Baghdad threatens to exacerbate the the transmission of water-borne diseases in the city. Fatal outbreaks of cholera struck several provinces of the country, including Baghdad from August 2007 to December 2007. The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) also says air pollution, resulting from burning oil and aggravated by war, is cause for concern.

No. 7: Mumbai, India

Mercer Health and Sanitation Index Score: 38.2

India’s government hopes to transform Mumbai back into a burgeoning metropolis after recent economic decline. A recent private-sector report, Vision Mumbai, proposed changes in infrastructure, pollution control and economic growth strategy, which contributed to the seeking of approximately $1 billion of aid from Indian government.

No. 6: Addis Ababa, Ethiopia

Mercer Health and Sanitation Index Score: 37.9

Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia, faces one of the worst sanitation problems on both the continent of Africa as well as in the world. The lack of adequate sanitation programs results in infant mortality, low life expectancy and the transmission of water-borne diseases.

No. 5: Mexico City, Mexico

Mercer Health and Sanitation Index Score: 37.7

Mexico City, the capital of Mexico, and the capital of North American air pollution, estimates unhealthy ozone emissions nearly 85% of the year. Mexico’s geographical location–in the center of a volcanic crater and surrounded by mountains–only serves to lock in the air pollution, causing smog to sit above the city.

No. 4: Port au Prince, Haiti

Mercer Health and Sanitation Index Score: 34

The country’s politically inspired violence and corruption are well documented. Equally dangerous: its air and water. Serving as one of the main ports on the island of Hispaniola, Port au Prince is central to Haiti’s economic development. A lack of pollution controls, however, contributes to the widespread environmental problems confronting the Haitian city.

No. 3: Antananarivo, Madagascar

Mercer Health and Sanitation Index Score: 30.1

Madagascar, located off of the southeastern coast of Africa in the Indian Ocean, makes this year’s list with its capital city, Antananarivo. Well known for its variety of unique flora and fauna, Madagascar has often been referred to as the world’s eighth continent, but the effects of the human population are quickly leaving their footprint.

No. 2: Dhaka, Bangladesh

Mercer Health and Sanitation Index Score: 29.6

Located in southern Asia, between Burma and India, Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh battles with the constant threat of water pollution. Surface water is often thick with disease and pollutants from the use of commercial pesticides. With an estimated 150 million people living in a relatively small area, cleaning up the problem won’t be easy.

No. 1: Baku, Azerbaijan

Mercer Health and Sanitation Index Score: 27.6

Surrounded by Iran, Georgia, Russia and Armenia on the Caspian Sea, Azerbaijan has long been an oil hub. As a consequence, Baku, the capital, suffers from life-threatening levels of air pollution emitted from oil drilling and shipping.

Source: TheBizzzare.com