06 Jan 2010
Female toads inflate to avoid sex

Blowing them off?

Female cane toads inflate their bodies to prevent amorous males from maintaining their grasp, say scientists.

(link) [BBC News]

19:52 /Humor | 1 comment | permanent link

Police seek woman who trashes Mo. McDonald's

Big Mac Attack?

AP - Police in Kansas City, Mo., are looking for a woman who went on a rampage at a McDonald's because she didn't like her hamburger. Police said the woman caused thousands of dollars in damage on Dec. 27 when she became upset that the restaurant wouldn't refund her money.

(link) [Yahoo! News]

19:44 /Humor | 0 comments | permanent link

01 Jan 2010
Redneck Vampire Attacks Trailer Park

I couldn't find either of my personal favorites to illustrate this bit of insanity: "Vampires Sell Children for Blood Money" or "Sassy the Gassy Pachyderm". So I settled for the "Bigfoot Love Slave" issue...

Google Books has saved for future generations the inimitable Weekly World News, which from 1979 to 2007 entertained the US with front page headlines such as "Aliens Settle In San Francisco", "Redneck Vampire Attacks Trailer Park" and "Giant Polar Monster Attacks Cruise Ship!".

(link) [The Register]

23:03 /Humor | 0 comments | permanent link

15 Dec 2009
Cephalopod RV?

13:14 /Humor | 2 comments | permanent link

Critics aim to sink Titanic ice cubes

Poor taste? I didn't know water had a taste...

The UK press has mobilised to express its dismay at a ice cube-making kit which produces miniature Titanics and accompanying icebergs.

(link) [The Register]

13:11 /Humor | 0 comments | permanent link

08 Dec 2009
Police: Man dresses up as mom to withdraw cash

Paging Monty Python...

AP - Police said a Franklin man dressed up as his mother in an attempt to withdraw money from her bank account. Tita Nyambi, 25, was still at the Chase Bank in Franklin, in Somerset County, when police arrived Monday afternoon. Tellers called to report that a man wearing women's clothes and speaking in a high pitched voice was trying to withdraw money through the bank's drive-through window.

(link) [Yahoo! News: Top Stories]

22:58 /Humor | 0 comments | permanent link

04 Dec 2009
Scientists think 'killer petunias' should join the ranks of carnivorous plants

Well that explains it: our missing barn cats! I told Lorraine to stick to marigolds!

Scientists from the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, and the Natural History Museum believe that carnivorous behavior in plants is far more widespread than previously thought, with many commonly grown plants -- such as petunias -- at least part way to being "meat eaters." A review paper, Murderous plants: Victorian Gothic, Darwin and modern insights into vegetable carnivory, is published today, December 4, 2009, in the Botanical Journal of the Linnean Society.

(link) [EurekAlert!]

20:38 /Humor | 0 comments | permanent link

02 Dec 2009
Internet and journos fertilise scrotum-ripping drug panic

The headline alone demanded a post, but this may also be considered as indicative of the general silliness of modern civilization.

Google just returned me 4390 hits for mephedrone scrotum.

Durham police are finding out the hard way about the power of the internet to mislead, distort and amplify, as a relatively measured warning about a legal high gallops towards Snopesian urban myth status as the tale of a drug that makes you rip your bollocks off with your bare hands.

(link) [The Register]

20:57 /Humor | 0 comments | permanent link

23 Nov 2009
English Shell Code Could Make Security Harder

Ah, the resemblance of script to prose! Remember the Unix command line for sex?

gawk; grep; unzip; touch; strip; init, uncompress, gasp; finger; find, route, whereis, which, mount; fsck; nice, more; yes; gasp; umount; head, halt, renice, restore, touch, whereis, which, route, mount, more, yes, gasp, umount, expand, ping, make clean; sleep

An anonymous reader writes to tell us that finding malicious code might have just become a little harder. Last week at the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security, security researchers Joshua Mason, Sam Small, Fabian Monrose, and Greg MacManus presented a method they developed to generate English shell code. Using content from Wikipedia and other public works to train their engine, they convert arbitrary x86 shell code into sentences that read like spam, but are natively executable. "In this paper we revisit the assumption that shell code need be fundamentally different in structure than non-executable data. Specifically, we elucidate how one can use natural language generation techniques to produce shell code that is superficially similar to English prose. We argue that this new development poses significant challenges for in-line payload-based inspection (and emulation) as a defensive measure, and also highlights the need for designing more efficient techniques for preventing shell code injection attacks altogether."

(link) [Slashdot]

22:40 /Humor | 0 comments | permanent link

20 Nov 2009
Squatters Unite for World Toilet Day

Darn! I missed it! Here's some history.

Since 2001, November 19 has marked World Toilet Day as part of an effort to break the silence surrounding sanitation issues in both richer and poorer countries. The World Toilet Organisation's initiative for 2009 is The Big Squat, and participants have been getting down on their haunches for charity.

(link) [The Independent]

08:41 /Humor | 0 comments | permanent link

17 Nov 2009
V-22 Osprey, stealth jumpjet need refrigerated landing pads

Simply marvelous engineering ...

It's now official. The new generation of high-tech hovering aircraft - namely the famous V-22 "Osprey" tiltrotor and the upcoming F-35B supersonic stealth jump-jet - have an unforeseen flaw. Their exhaust downwash is so hot as to melt the flight decks of US warships, leading Pentagon boffins to look into refrigerated landing pads.

(link) [The Register]

18:13 /Humor | 0 comments | permanent link

11 Nov 2009
Stressed?

Here's a formula for a do it yourself mash up ... brownies, anyone?

The "chocolate cure" for emotional stress is getting new support from a clinical trial published online in ACS' Journal of Proteome Research. It found that eating about an ounce and a half of dark chocolate a day for two weeks reduced levels of stress hormones in the bodies of people feeling highly stressed.

(link)

Use of cannabinoids (marijuana) could assist in the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder patients. This is exposed in a new study carried out at the Learning and Memory Lab in the University of Haifa's Department of Psychology. The study, carried out by research student Eti Ganon-Elazar under the supervision of Dr. Irit Akirav, was published in the prestigious Journal of Neuroscience.

(link) [both stories via EurekAlert!]

19:19 /Humor | 0 comments | permanent link

01 Nov 2009
Sheep in the News - Flaming Edition

The lesson here: beer extinguishes flaming fake sheep.

Whew!

A 24-year-old football fan dressed as a sheep suffers burns to his arms and legs when he was set alight on a train in Fife.

(link) [BBC News]

20:56 /Humor | 0 comments | permanent link

28 Oct 2009
Snake-smuggler fails to slip past customs

Snakes alive! They only found him because of the tarantula! I wonder if Samuel L. Jackson was on that ferry?

A man has been arrested in Norway for attempting to smuggle snakes about his person in a case that has brought a very literal meaning to the term "trouser snake".

(link) [The Guardian]

21:27 /Humor | 0 comments | permanent link

Governator in acrostic 'f**k you' outrage

I'm not a fan of Conan the Republican but I have to admire the general cleverness of this veto message ...

Governator Arnold Schwarzenegger has told Democrat San Francisco assembly member Tom Ammiano just what he thinks of him and his "infrastructure financing districts" bill in a letter which explicity slams the latter, while firing a delicious acrostic broadside at its author.

(link) [The Register]

19:22 /Humor | 0 comments | permanent link

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