This Just In: God Smites Jesus
All bets are off now folks. Change is afoot.
An enormous 62 foot tall statue of Jesus that the Ohio locals called "Touchdown Jesus" for obvious reasons was smoten recently by lightning and burned entirely, revealing our new lord Clippy, the helpful wire character from MS Office 97.
It seems that the folks at the church are taking this fairly seriously, you might even go as far as to call this a "sign".
Also, perhaps I ought to be a tad more careful about mocking our new wireframe saviour. In God's defence, it does SORT of look like Jesus is waiting for something to come from the sky, maybe he just has a sense of humour.
Um, I'm done now.
Saw this tonight on Boing Boing.
from the ever awesomeSmoke your way through the recession
Yes, I'm just reposting Boing Boing content, but this is so ridiculous I just had to...
Government employees have been ordered to smoke 230 000 packs of locally produced cigarettes in order to boost the economy through taxation.
Um, what? We want you people to smoke these cigarettes, NOW! Get started, your lungs won't blacken themselves. The article mentions that about 1 million people die each year from smoking related illnesses in China, placing this effort squarely in the "short term solution" category. Not sure if they have done any rudimentary math on the inevitable increased health care costs of this strategy, but it seems like a net loss kind of a thing to me. They have actually imposed a smoking quota to make sure people smoke enough of these things.
Absolutely bat-shit insane.
Swedish Rock Robot of DOOOM
A robot technician with apparently a rather rock-shaped head was almost the most recent casualty in the (slow to start but terrifying in it's inevitability) human-robot war. It seems that a Swedish factory was using robots to move head-shaped rocks to and fro for some strange reason unclear in the article. A tech thought he had turned the power off to the robot to service it, but in a moment worthy of the climax of a movie, the robot moved (DUNH DUNH DUNH DUUUUNH! - that's how you type dramatic scary music sounds) and grabbed Rocky the Technician's head, apparently thinking that it was a rock, and wouldn't let go. Since he didn't have a gun, grenade, or any other weapon of glamorized movie violence he just managed to escape from the homicidal robot with his life, if not his ribs (why did he break his ribs if the robot had him by the head?), intact. Whoa, Dude. It seems that the thing to do when you are hurt at work when you aren't following any kind of common sense or safety procedures is to sue your employer, and that's just what Rocky's doing.
If there was any movie justice in the real world, a much more satisfying conclusion would be for Rocky and the Robot to go a few rounds and settle the matter once and for all, ending only with the utter destruction of one or the other. That would be awesome. Instead, we all know that the robot was returned to service and life at the plant went back to normal, humans and Robot working side by side. Or is Robot just patiently biding it's time, waiting with inhuman patience for the next victim with rocks in his head to get a little too close.... DUNH DUNH DUNH DUUUUNH!
P.S. No robots were harmed during the writing of this post.
P.P.S. By the way, Swedish Rock Robot of DOOOM is the very best band name I have come up with since Rubber Truck Nut Lover.
Holy Mismanagement of Public Funds, Batman!
Incredibly, GM lost another $9.6 billion dollars in the last quarter. Apparently it also set fire to $6 billion in cash, while it was negotiating for that $9 billion in government money.
What in the heck is going on here? Does this seem insane to anyone else? How do you spend $6 billion in three months, while at the same time begging with your hat in hand for $9 billion? Thank god they kept the lights on, churning out crappy vehicles one after another. They have been dealing with this for months now, and they still have only 6 vehicles out of 54 models available (54!) that even have hybrid as an option, and 4 of those are hybrid SUVs, like we need those somehow. If this isn't just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, I don't know what it is.
Bravo, you guys are really burning up the carpet on this one. I can't wait to see how this all turns out, but the sad part is the folks that will suffer because this company can't seem to pull it's head out of it's own butt.
Recommended Reading – Why America Hasn’t Been Attacked Since 9/11
I caught the first of a seven-day run of articles on terrorism on Slate, I highly recommend you read it too. It's going to start off at the "don't worry" level and scale right up to the "pants-sh@!$ing terror" level by the end. The article quotes Bruce Schneier, who I have mentioned here before as being an entirely sensible voice to listen to in this crazy world.
Stay tuned for the rest of the articles, I know I will be.
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- I just ousted @scootermcgee as the mayor of Subway on @foursquare! http://4sq.com/9rMJHS
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