who listens to goth? sheep.

Farmer pays Goth band to play to sheep twice a week

An East Yorkshire farmer hires a Goth band to play to his sheep twice a week to improve the health of his herd.

Richard Towse says the 200 sheep at his Bridlington farm have produced better wool and more lambs since their musical interludes started.

The 44-year-old has been getting teenage Goth band Torsohorse to play to the sheep in their barn.

He told the Sunday People: "I read somewhere that music helps produce healthier sheep so decided to give a local rock band a chance.

"I have been astonished by the response. My ewes have produced nearly double the number of lambs this year. And all the animals' wool coats are a lot fuller and healthier."

Sixteen-year-old singer Lianne McGuire said: "It was really weird playing to a load of sheep, but it's incredible how much they seem to like it."



I just don't know what to do. There's this store in town that has a pair of old science-museum "visible people" mannequins: a life-sized man and woman with transparent skin and a full complement of internal organs, skeleton, veins, and nerves. And yes, they light up from the inside, too. They are. So. Fucking. Cool. I want them bad. I want them in my house, or in my club. But they're asking more than $5k for the pair. And I have a really hard time justifying that to myself. That's so much money to spend on something just to have the savages we call "customers" try and come up with creative ways to destroy them. We'd have to build a solid display case, which would itself get regularly mangled.

But it's not like I'll ever find anything like this for sale again: I can't even find pictures of them on the web. The picture to the right is what they look like, but that's of a pair of 16" model kits, like ones I had when I was little. These are life-sized!

Someone buy them for me, ok?

By the way, if you ever wanted to find some of those wacky high school science class learning aids, like giant disassembleable eyeballs, ear canals, and braaaaaaains, The Anatomical Chart Company is the place to go. The Neuroanatomy Head Model is pretty sweet (it should be at $1,100!) but you can always settle for the Budget Transparent Skull at $35. And of course they would be fools not to have a Halloween Crypt, wouldn't they?

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I rate XXX at 1.2 Scorpion Kings. That should be enough to make you go see it right away, or never see it at all, depending on whether you understand the finer points of blowing up real good. The nightclubs in this movie are full of tesla coils and giant gas jets. My club sucks by comparison. Clearly my level of arch-villainy is totally bush-league.
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Iron Into Fish

Apparently if you dump powdered iron into the ocean, it turns into fish food over night:

    Iron Into Fish

    In July they spread the iron additions over a week's time. The result was described by Kenneth Coale, one of the scientists, as "like driving through the Mojave Desert and coming on a rain forest." It turned the ocean into green soup! "The oceanographers watched in awe as the R. V. Melville plied Pacific waves dyed a soupy green by a bumper crop of tiny ocean plants. ... Only a day before, this patch of water near the Galapagos Islands had sparkled with electric blue clarity, a quality owed to the general absence of ... phytoplankton."

    [...] A rough and ready calculation suggests that catching 10 tonnes of fish removes about a pound of iron from the ocean. Have fishermen been "mining" the oceans for iron all these centuries, as farmers mined their soil of minerals before widespread use of fertilizer? Would supplying iron restore historical levels of fishery productivity? Would it boost productivity far beyond anything in history?

    If a normally cruising boat can fertilize one-half square kilometer per hour (say an area 50 meters wide by 10 kilometers long), the application rate would only have to be about a pound of iron per hour. It would add only trivially to the cost of running a boat. If iron fertilization became routine practice among fishermen, lesser rates might be needed.

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"Beagle Irritant? Aren't they from DC?"

Ten Thousand Statistically Grammar-Average Fake Band Names

[...] I made a quick script to part-of-speech tag the original list of 6,500 artist names that we were considering. This left us with a set of common band name grammars (popular ones were NNP NNP and NNP #.) We then fed terms from our already collected music text set ('Klepmit') through the grammars again (at the natural probabilities) to make some believable names.

If you start a band with one of these and get famous, I only ask that you don't use "Caldera Catnip," as it is already taken.

Here's 0.4% of the names on that page:

Deviate Porcelain
Hangar Ascendent
Cruises Criers
Dock Suction
Rhino Mamma
Administrator Strychnine Bellboy
Harrier Penance
Killer Thinkers
Windmill Interrelationships
Darkroom Kink
Forensic Roller
Crewcut Residential
Plains Evaporation
Pumps Moonlight
No Jog Houses
Bright Bagels
Identification Slugs
Nary Brews
Reconstruction Dungeon
Every Dormitory Cottonmouth
Institutionalized Styler
Bedside Florin
Directrix Supercomputer
Steamboat Disillusion Rosette Supervision
Crematory Booksellers
Northwest Devotion
Feline Business
Bitch Browns
Transpose Pinnacles
Perimeter Cyclotron
Cheese Council
Chewers Shopping
Rockabye Skyline
Fabulous Dismount

glowing (maybe) bunny dead (maybe)

R.I.P. Alba, the Glowing Bunny

Alba, the glowing rabbit that made headlines two years ago for being, well, a glowing rabbit, has met an untimely death, according to the French researcher who genetically engineered her. [...]

Houdebine and his director were opposed to the now-famous, brilliantly glowing photograph of Alba. They and other researchers say the rabbit doesn't actually glow so brightly and uniformly.

"Kac fabricated data for his personal use," Houdebine said. "This is why we totally stopped any contact with him."

"The scientific fact is that the rabbit is not green," he said. "He should have never published that. This was very disagreeable for me."

The eyes and ears of the rabbit are green under ultraviolet light, Houdebine said, but the fur does not glow, because it's dead tissue that doesn't express the gene. Only if the rabbit were shaved would the body glow, he said. [...]

"It's almost impossible to duplicate," he said. "Photographs always do lie in some way or another whether you intend to or not."

"Art misrepresents reality all the time -- and he's an artist, not a scientist," said Stuart Newman, a member of the Council for Responsible Genetics and a cell biologist at New York Medical College, "but I think people are beholden to tell the truth."

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Clearing the Skies

Clearing the Skies

Pretty interesting account of the attacks from the point of view of air traffic control.

Current Music: Wench -- Jewel ♬

Bill Biggart's Final Exposures

Bill Biggart's Final Exposures

By Dirck Halstead

"photojournalist Bill Biggart's body had been recovered from the rubble. His personal effects, including his cameras had been released by authorities to his widow, Wendy.

"When Chip East was handed the bag containing Biggart's gear by his widow, Wendy, he was convinced that no pictures had survived. The avalanche of falling debris had blown off the backs of the two film cameras. There were several rolls of film in Biggart's bag; however, the lids of the film canisters had been peeled back, allowing light to fall into the cassettes. Finally, East turned his attention to the digital camera. It was covered by ash. The lens had been sheared off at the flange. But when he opened the chamber that held the compact flash card, it was pristine."

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Current Music: Wench -- Jewel ♬