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Hooked On Hoff

Viscous Slave Army

Howard Dunbar’s Tanker Truck 6 rolled into the station one chilly night … and then proceeded to unload 7,723 gallons of gasoline and diesel into the station’s underground tanks. It took Dunbar 29 minutes to empty his swimming pool-size cargo … That particular night, according to one industry method of calculating the explosive energy locked away in crude oil, Dunbar dumped the liquid equivalent of 19.2 million hours of physical labor into the Marathon’s storage tanks–or the power of a slave army of 2,200 men working around the clock for a year. This bonanza would be sucked dry by customers in 24 hours.

Bog Man Mohawk Metrosexuals

Scientists … have been examining the latest preserved prehistoric bodies to emerge from Ireland’s peat bogs — the first to be found in Europe for 20 years. One of the bodies … had raised Mohawk-style hair, held in place with gel imported from abroad. The other … had perfectly manicured fingernails … The hair product … was a gel made of plant oil and pine resin imported from southwestern France or Spain, showing trade between Ireland and southern Europe was taking place almost two-and-a-half millennia ago.

Subterranean Qana Blues

Tragedy visited Qana again Sunday, a once-picturesque village of figs, grapevines and olive trees along rolling, rocky hills where Lebanese believe Jesus Christ turned water into wine for a wedding. It was here on April 18, 1996, that 106 people were killed when Israeli forces shelled a U.N. compound that had given refuge to 800 Lebanese. The Lebanese government said that at least 57 people were killed in an Israeli attack on the same village Sunday, 37 of them children, their bodies frozen in the angles that only death can bring.

Qana Bodies

Accelerating Shrinkage

Mountain glaciers … are in retreat around the Earth, taking with them vast stores of water that grow crops, generate electricity and sustain cities and rural areas … The steady supply of water [farmers] need to grow crops has become erratic. “There is less water now. If there is no water, this land becomes a desert,” said Benedicto Loayza, a 52-year-old farmer … Cuzco, a city of 400,000, has already resorted to periodic water rationing and started pumping from a river 15 miles away for its drinking supply. In Peru’s capital, Lima, engineers have urged successive governments to drill a tunnel through the Andes and build big lagoons to ensure that the city’s 8 million residents have water … Cities in China, India, Nepal and Bolivia also face drastic water shortages as the glaciers shrink.

The Incredibly Strange Titles That Started Growing and Became Mixed-Up Metaphors

Someone suggested the following as a possible sequel for that Snakes movie: A Sack Of Weasels On An Evil Clown Riding A Unicycle On Top Of A Combine Harvester Through A Nunnery

It’s no less strange than others that have gone beforee it. From here:

The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies!!?

My Lovely Burnt Brother and His Squashed Brain

Elvis Is Alive! I Swear I Saw Him Eating Ding Dongs Outside the Piggly Wiggly’s

Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines or How I Flew from London to Paris in 25 hours 11 minutes

The Lemon Grove Kids Meet the Green Grasshopper and the Vampire Lady from Outer Space

The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade

I Killed My Lesbian Wife, Hung Her on a Meat Hook, and Now I Have a Three-Picture Deal at Disney

Night of the Day of the Dawn of the Son of the Bride of the Return of the Revenge of the Terror of the Attack of the Evil, Mutant, Alien, Flesh Eating, Hellbound, Zombified Living Dead Part 2: In Shocking 2-D

The Man with the Smallest Penis in Existence and the Electron Microscope Technician Who Loved Him

Un Fatto Di Sangue Nel Commune Di Sculiana Fra Due Uomini Per Causa Di Una Vedova Si Sospetano Moventi Politici. Amore-Morte-Shimmy. Lugano Belle. Tarantelle. Tarallucci Vino.

Another Demonstration of the Cliff-Guibert Fire Horse Reel, Showing a Young Girl Coming from an Office, Detaching Hose, Running with It 60 Feet, and Playing a Stream, All Inside of 30 Seconds

and finally, short, but delivers exactly what it promises:

Zombie Ninja Gangbangers

Thinking About Emo

I was thinking about the current media fad for “Emo” when I read this (subsequently censored and deleted): people are tired of pretentious assholes telling them what to think and want to go back to something simpler, instinctive and genuine. emotion is beginning to matter more than intellectual analysis.

It’s all about whether we live in an era of increasing “authenticity”, or not. Postmodernism basically carried forward the Enlightenment project of “modernising” the human animal into a rational being after the mid-century revanchist diversion by several competing socially conservative ideologies that fought for supremacy during the Great European Civil War.

Modernism was not without its discontents. During the early part of the 20th Century these neo-Romantics were called various names: fascists, national socialists, and monarchists. They rejected the idea of a rational human being and instead agitated for the creation of a sensational being. These Vlkisch tendencies emerged quite strongly during the 1960s and 1970s in the guise of “New Age” spirituality, revelatory religion and ethnic politics and the increasing primacy of the rhetoric of body motion and gesture as discourse. The current US fad for “authentic” displays of public emotion and declarations of faith can be seen as a typical expression of a narrative strain within a culture more predisposed than many to Great Awakenings.

Iran, Uninterrupted

Four years and two years ago I noted that Iran seemed to have successfully duped the US into removing both of its main regional adversaries, the Taliban and Saddam Hussein, and in the process revealing the limited extent of US power and strengthening Iran into a regional co-superpower with Israel. Now Iran seems to have manoeuvred Israel into yet another tediously offensive war within and occupation of the morass of southern Lebanon.

The 135,000 overburdened U.S. troops are potential hostagesor targetsfor Iran should the United States take military action to destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities … By having terrorists nab the Israelis, the Iranians both upended the G8 summit discussions about their nuclear program and sent a clear reminder of the tools at their disposal should there be a confrontation.

Bt-Oblivious Bad Bug Blow Back

A detailed survey of 481 cotton growers in China found that, although they did use fewer pesticides in the first few years of adopting GM plants, after seven years they had to use just as much pesticide as they did with conventional crops.

The five million Chinese GM cotton farmers appear to have created a natural vacuum by growing cotton genetically engineered to kill the bollworm larvae which used to destroy their plants. With the bollworm larvae gone, other pests called mirids have taken over, forcing farmers to eradicate them with lashings of expensive insecticide that have all but destroyed the original economic benefits.

The study — the first to look at the longer-term economic impact of Bt cotton — found that by year three, farmers in the survey who had planted Bt cotton cut pesticide use by more than 70 percent and had earnings 36 percent higher than farmers planting conventional cotton. By 2004, however, they had to spray just as much as conventional farmers, which resulted in a net average income of 8 percent less than conventional cotton farmers because Bt seed is triple the cost of conventional seed.

Unhassled Hoff

David Hasselhoff’s superstar status as a singer in Europe hasn’t carried over to America but he says “if it happens, it happens.” “I’m a big punching bag … I just kind of go with the flow. I never really desperately tried to break this market” … Hasselhoff said his new single Jump in My Car is headed toward the top 10 on the British charts.

Jump In My Car.