Oh sure, he's there now, but where the fuck was he back in 1986! Throwing spanners in the reactor, no doubt. And why wouldn't he, radioactive spew was too good for those Atheist Communist scum! The radioactive burns will compare nothing to the burns those secular heathens will suffer in the fires of hell. A thousand damnations upon souls of those non-believers. It's too late now for them to to try and create a "fusion" in their hearts with the Lord, the "fission" is too great...
Anyway, you get the idea.
Even Mother Mary is there. And look how lovely she looks, with all that smoke and radiation coming out of her. This religious picture does look very nice though, like it's part of some card game. You could stick a few "power" stats underneath it and viola: Chernobyl Christian pokemon!
Honestly though, I would definitely put that picture up on my wall if I got a print of it. It's "fire and brimstone" but in a sci-fi way, like the Church of the Alpha-Omega Bomb in Planet of the Apes.
Admittedly, I would probably worship such a device too...
And last but not least, let's take a closer look at that unusual tree in the first two graven paintings. It's a real tree found on the outskirts of Chernobyl and countrary to what you might think by looking at it, it's shape has nothing to do with the 1986 radiation leak, though it was subsequently killed off by the incident.
It's known as the Partisan Tree and it was used in World War 2 by the Germans to hang Russian Jews and resistance fighters.
If you like a more respectable descriptions, as well as higher resolutions of these images, then please check out the sources below.
I can't really explain it, but when I came across this image (whoever the poor woman is) I just felt the need to superimpose a skull on top of her face. I think it was a combination of the spectral highlights on her skin, her jaw line, and her wide-eye expression, that did it.
I took this drawing of a skull and altered it to roughly fit what I thought was a close approximation the person's own skull. All was going well until I had to decide how transparent I wanted the skull to be, so I decided to create a little Flash file and let the reader see what transparency level they prefer themselves.
This is interactive Flash content.
I have altered the skull even more so in this Flash version, to more closely match the the face. It's a little more feminine and less menacing :)
I was listening to Today with Pat Kenny on Radio 1 this morning, when the the 11am news came on. The first story was about the Household Charge. The very first line went like this: "83% of people have paid the household charge [pause] online. Minister Phil Hogan has said..." I had to do a double take on what I heard, and I am certain that was the point of the way the news was delivered. The government are so despondent by the level of steadfastness amongst non-payers that they are attempting to attack their confidence by making them feel as if they are actually in the minority. Why else would an irrelevant figure about how people have paid be the first thing to be mentioned.
And what did our supreme commander, Endy Kenna, say to us about the Household Charge, while he was in China this week: “The law is there, I expect that people will obey that law,”Obey, really Enda? You want us to just shut up and obey? Jim Corr might say all this is Irish psyops in action, and the troubling thing is, he might be right.
The two pie charts above show that not only is the Fine Gael/Labour coalition not representative of the Irish population, it's not even representative of the Irish electorate. In fact, their combined votes didn't even equal 50% of all possible votes. The figures for the 2011 General Election are as follows:
Irish Population (CSO 2006) : 4,239,848 Irish Electorate (fairocracy.com) : 3,198,765 Irish 2011 Turnout : 2,243,146 Fine Gael / Labour 1st Preference Votes : 1,233,585
1,233,585
----------- = 29.1% of Irish citizens voted for Fine Gael & Labour
4,239,848
1,233,585
----------- = 38.56% of the Irish electorate voted for Fine Gael & Labour
3,198,765
The ruling parties are the choice of a small minority, making decisions for the entire nation. But then again, they're not even making decisions; that's more of it. They are merely spokesholes for other external forces. They flounder about as commands come down to them from higher powers. Enda Kenny is a slime, so disgusting, that if it were found in the hallway of even the most badly managed HSE hospital, the building would be evacuated and burned to the ground. He has done nothing but betray Ireland abroad. When other countries are "sabre-rattling", Kenny has been describing us as the black sheep of Europe. Ireland under Kenny has no strength, no nationalism, no pride.
This unfairness of democracy is not just an Irish phenomenon. You will find the same trends in democracies, world wide. Having a right to vote does not constitute fairness. Fairness is dictated by those in charge, no matter what their process of gaining power was. As Enda Kenny himself would tell you: citizens do a lousy job of making decisions, be that with their health, or personal finances. It is no different when we make the choice of who we want to lead us. This is key to the insidious motives behind democracy; the notion of: "well, you made the bed, so sleep in it." This notion of choice deliberately undermines the confidence of the voter, and makes them powerless in argument.
I have always been aware of this discrepancy in democracy, where it's intentions are usurped by it's implementation, but with the last Irish general election, I finally gave up on it completely. The one election where people shouldn't have voted for Fine Gael, basically because they were the ones promising to "fix the world", the universal bullshit warning, but the poor Irish buggers (those who bothered) voted them in with strength. And where are we now? Totally demoralised, with nowhere to turn to. We voted in the opposition, obliterated the then government parties, and as such, effectively turned our country into a totalitarian state. A state where Enda Kenny is the dictator. That wouldn't be so bad if the guy wasn't such a fucking useless worm.
I'm sick of this post now, and I didn't even have to resort to the old reliable: "Hitler was democratically elected". Let's finish by remembering some of Ireland's greatest democratic moments: Nice Treaty referendum 2, and Lisbon Treaty 2. That's how democracy works basically; you keep voting until you get it "right".
No, not really. I'm holding off on a Pi purchase until after all the hype dies down. This here above is instead the USB <-->SATA interface card taken from a bandjaxed 1GB WesternDigital external hard-drive. I originally intended it to be a Google+ post but I liked the image too much not to include it here.
I think the drive suffered from heat exhaustion. When it was showing signs of dying I took a look at the stats and saw it was running at >60° Celsius, and I had it running like this for months, so I'm not surprised it eventually died. Here's a tip: even though it seems pretty, and convenient, don't place external hard-drives directly beside each other, they will only end up racing towards unmerciful combined temperatures.
Anja Pärson announced her retirement from competitive World Cup alpine skiing on the 12th of this month, and while I wouldn't have thought myself a devoted fan of hers (in the strict sense) [!] I was nevertheless saddened at the news. Anja has been a very special skier for me in the last few years, as she has been someone whom I was familiar with before my skiing hiatus of 2002 to 2009. She tied together two era's that would have been otherwise alien to me. And as strange as it might seem, it was only December last year that I finally got to hear her speaking in Swedish, for an extended period anyway. Relevant video below.
It's understandable that she has decided to quit now. As she said herself in a recent interview "we all have to to die, you know. Skiers must eventually quit the World Cup." Following her thoughts on Twitter throughout the season, it was clear that her fight and ambition was beginning to leave her. Her fear of injury overcame her on one or two occasions, and who can blame her. She has done everything she could have hoped for. Why risk a life altering injury at this stage.
Anja training in November 2011 - Anja and Maria Riesch celebrating their Olympic medal wins in the 2010 Super Combined race
I missed her last race on Saturday last, which I would have liked to have seen, but circumstances were against me. My most memorable moment of Anja will be her bronze medal win for the Super Combined competition at the 2010 Vancover Olympics. Coming just one day after a horrific accident in the downhill event, it was a surprise that she even competed again in the Games', but that type of courage and strength is the definition of Pärson.
This is where you play the ABBA music and gently weep as you watch the earliest footage of Anja that I recorded on VHS tape (circa 1999/2000). Or maybe that's just for me to do. A chapter is ending, but the book remains open.
[ Bonus: video of 14 year old Anja in 1995 ]
[ Training picture via Jessica Lindel-Vikarby's blog post ]
I'm not one of Lindsey Vonn's biggest fans, but this time in Garmisch, when Vonn was continuously delayed in the start gate, while repairs to the course were being made, I did feel a bit sorry for her. When she finally got cleared to go, she (predictably) failed to finish her run. I'm not sure of the official rules on delays are, once you've made your way up to the start gate, but I think it should be allowable to step back and regain your focus. I see this all the time with ski jumpers, when delayed for wind reasons.
Vrooom! Riesch and Kirchgasser get a lift back to the top of the artificial ski run, in the Moscow city parallel slalom. Lots talk of about these kinds of events becoming more common in the World Cup. Not sure if that's such a good idea. One or two is enough in a season, for novelty reasons. They are good fun, but not very fair.
Viktoria "VIKI" Rebensburg's boots and Elena Curtoni in the start gate of the Super G in Cortina d'Ampezzo. Rebensburg failed to finish. While not strictly a World Cup 2012 image, I did come across this after searching for images of skiers in the Bundeswehr. It's a screen cap of the results given back by Google Image search. It made me laugh anyway. Posted on Google+ [scraping the barrel now]
After a season where the Germans were left obliterated by injuries, Vikitoria Rebensburg was by far the biggest winner for them of 2012. Not only winning the Giant Slalom globe, she has proven herself to be a possible winner of a future overall title as well. Positive performances from the first weekend, and a consistent quality throughout the season mean't that Viki landed herself 7th in the overall league. Her quality of skiing improving from previous years, in the speed disciplines also. And to think, some people mocked her gold medal win at the 2010 Olympic Games, suggesting that she was was a mere "flash in the pan", how silly their insults look now!
For some, it may have been Maria Höfl-Riesch that proved to be the biggest disappointment of 2012, not for me though. I hadn't expected her to compete all that well after getting married in the previous summer. Marriage can sometimes be the death-knell for a profession, but it will nearly always prove to distract a person, as life's foci change for a period of time. So I think a third place in the Overall Cup is actually a very good finish for her, especially considering she failed to even finish so many races. She still showed she has what it takes to win, so perhaps she will come back next season with a greater focus.
My personal biggest disappointment of 2012 was Christina Geiger. Having seen her winning the Junior Slalom World Championships in 2010, I expected to see her on the podium more than once this World Cup season, but not only were her results not all that great, she again was a skier that had trouble finishing races. Most annoyingly, she would often be on her way to destroying the opposition but for it to all fall apart a few gates from home. Case in point with the image above, which I took from the end of her second run in the slalom in Courchevel this year. I'm probably not being fair, as it was a poor year for Germany in general, and she did show she was capable of great things, but consistent DNFs is a worrying trend.
Finally, a mention of Liechtensteiner skier, Tina Weirather, must be made. She had an amazing season in the speed events, finishing 2nd in the Downhill Cup, after missing all of last years races due to injury.
I neglected posting about Alpine Skiing during the World Cup season, so I'm going to make up for that now, but don't worry, I'll probably get lazy after two posts, which will make this warning superfluous.*
* Achtung! Superfluous warning posts, about high number of Alpine Skiing related posts, may now appear from time to time on this blog.
Unable to truly convey the excitement one felt at 7am in the morning, listening to The Flecktones and happening upon a humorous gif animation, I have had to make a video of it, for posterity's sake. I wanted to use this as an example of the Youtube / GIF mash-up website gifsound.com which I recently came across, but Youtube was unable to provide me with a copy of Off The Top (Line Dance) by The Flecktones. So here I am now, making a big deal out of nothing.
And for the sake of an example, here's one from [ gifsound.com ]
Fair City is great, isn't it. I must love it, because this isn't my first post about it. Oh it's super.
I had the opportunity to try out one of the SoreView boxes that Uncle Gaybo has been telling us all to get. Fantastic, so they are. The future is here etc. It has all the normal channels plus extra ones like RTE NewsLoop, RTE Child Porn, and RTE 1+1. I was very taken with the RTE One+1 channel. It's like a time machine, sending you one hour back in time, meaning that if you miss nightly gran-wank with Mary Kennedy, you can just hit a button and it's back to the future with you. Brilliant! So imagine my surprise when I'm watching and then all of a sudden, I get a media black out notice.
"Is this it?" I wonder. "Have we finally entered 'End Game'. Will Enda Kenny come on the screen to tell us the nukes are overhead, take your iodine tablets, find refuge under the stairs, and await for further notice". No, it turns out that one hour beforehand RTE were showing an episode of Fair City and because the actors guild owns the world, RTE are not allowed show it for a second time, one hour later. It's the same reason Fair City doesn't appear on RTE's Player' site. The actors don't like the idea of being seen, you see. They are very shy like that.
We must respect them though. When you have actors, the quality of Dave Duffy, you really can't complain about their demands. Wonderful actors, they are all very wonderful.
Instead of playing the real Kazakhstan national anthem, the organizers of this Kuwaiti sporting event decide (by accident?) to play the version created for the controversial Borat film, from a few years ago. While this is insulting enough, the fact that the video director decided to show the female athlete just as the lyric: "Kazakhstan prostitutes cleanest in the region..." surely can't be by accident. The woman obviously knows something has gone horribly wrong but appears not to know the relevance of the actual song being played.
I give this 7 on the Judge Judy scale out outrageousness.
Tidy, light, cheap... but woeful write-speeds keep me from fully endorsing these two 8GB SanDisk Cruzer Blade usb drives that I bought a few months back. An average of 2.3MB/s means it takes 30+ minutes to fill their 8GB capacity. No problems, so far, with data corruption though, or compatibility with computers and media devices.
Tweet's that never made it, for one reason or another. I may have deemed them too awesome to waste on Twitter, or perhaps too shit; too risky for the delicates that live on the Twitters, or just too fucking lame. Often just too long though...
Now that DNA paternity tests are cheap and common place, there really is no need for monogamy any more.
I've been thinking about what Declan Ganley will say in 2016 when we as a nation, celebrate the "murderous rebels" of the 1916 uprising. #CheGuevara
Timing your orgasm to match that of another man's orgasm in a video you're watching. That's world peace right there. #Pornography
I know you are all complaining about Alison O'Connor but I just want to say that I'd still love for her to dress up in horse riding gear, stand over me, and beat me repeatedly... with her opinions. True story #vinb
Watching a married couple arguing over painting a Colt 45 handgun, pink. Yes, they are American. #Discovery
"We go [live] to the EU": The annoying new Lynx "rape ad" has that curious line in it. Odd that they say EU like it's an actual federal union.
Choosing to starve to death rather than changing to a different and slightly better religion #IrishThings
Declan Ganley has a very attractive daughter. Is that an inappropriate tweet? Im not sure anymore, since all that Sean Gallagher stuff #vinb
If life gives you lemons, why not take one and lace it with cyanoid. Then pop it in your mouth before you accidentally choke yourself to death in an auto-erotic asphyxiation accident in the closet.
When your GP hands you an anti-biotic for your child's common cold, he does far more damage than you reading a personal thesis in a newspaper #humphry
Jobs, jobs, jobs... There are plenty of jobs out there. I could give every single unemployed person a job today. Paying them is the problem.
All these Occuppy events with a handful of crusties banging bongos, do nothing but damage the chances of a real revolution.
"Some of the children have lost brothers and sisters, and of course some of them blame NATO..." you think!? 10 thousand bombing runs on your head will do that to you #Libya #BBC
When the Israelis don't like a house, they just drive one of these into it! Nicknamed Doobi (Hebrew for Teddy Bear), this heavily modified Caterpillar D9 can thing can take anything out, women and children included! Proper order too; too many houses in the world today... and children. It sit's a crew of two but there's also a remote drone version named Raam HaShachar (Hebrew for Thunder of Dawn). Raam HaShachar sounds oddly like ramshackle, doesn't it, which is all you'll be left with, after this thing runs through your kitchen.
Say what you like about the Jews, but they sure know how to pimp a ride. I think the Irish government should invest in a few and start knocking houses down, just to get that property bubble going in full swing again.
Sean Sherlock is a modern Irish hero. He's on a par with the martyrs of 1916. He will go down in the anals of Internet history. Some might say I mistyped annals just there, but I have my doubts. Have no doubts of your own though, Sean Sherlock is an hero! You see, dear foreign reader (and perhaps ignorent Irish reader) Sean has done this wonderful thing recently where he signed something into Irish law, one of those SOPA things. Unlike the proposed SOPA law in the USA, the Irish one is totally fair and honest and actually benefits you as an internet user.
A big worry for internet users in Ireland regards downloading copyrighted material, and the internet being an insidious place (by design), it can sometimes be hard to figure out if what you're doing is wrong. Man of brilliance, Sean Sherlock, now offers outstanding help for users. If a "copyright holder" decides that you are downloading the wrong file (they know better than you, idiots are incapable of holding copyright, after all) they can make your ISP turn off your ability to download that file. As an added bonus, and at no cost, they will also stop you from downloading any other files.
My sweet lord, surely if god had a second son, it would be Sean Sherlock. He has done the difficult task of wrangling copyright law on the internet and done it brilliantly. I am so impressed with Sean that I have made an animation of him chasing copyright through the internet, you can view it by clicking the button below. Sean puts the 33 in 1337.
I spent a week writing a blog post about today's Russian Presidential election, and after hours of wrangling with words and paragraphs, I decided to scrap most of it. I couldn't decide if I wanted to be serious or humerus, so I threw out most of the serious text, and threw in a few humorous images.
You can't talk about Russian presidencies without first mentioning Boris Yeltsin. I made that gif above last year, for something else, but since that something else will probably never be made, I stuck a version of it in here. Boris Yeltsin, what a man. The only politician ever to make Irish politicians look good. Do you remember when he flew into Ireland in 1994 for a big state visit, and was too drunk to even get off the plane. They apparently circled six times before landing, in the hope that he would sober up. Ironically, he made a better Soviet politician. In the early days of his career, he gained the respect of the public by weeding corruption out of the USSR, only to become hugely corrupt himself, in the Post-Communist era.
Some Russians decided to stage protests in the lead up to this election. Unsettled by what they saw as vote rigging during the 2011 legislative elections. Much like the "Occupy" protests that we've seen world wide, there was no unifying voice to the opposition; no consistency to their message: "We want things to change, but we don't know for what or why." Nothing gives a clearer example of this confusion, than how Putin was portrayed in these gatherings. On one side, you see mocked-up posters, where Putin is dressed as an old moribund Communist leader, but right beside that you see the red flags of Russia's current Communist party. In other posters, Putin is given the crown of a Tsar, and beside that are masses of opponents waving the old imperial flag of Russia. Everyone just wants a piece of the action it seems. And don't get me started on the "White Power" freaks...
I laugh when watching media coverage on Putin. Stuff like: "He's attempting to nationalise oil reserves, a clear sign that Russia is in the hands of the Mafia." But of course! Because we all know that the fire-sale of these reserves after the collapse of the Soviet Union really helped Russia recover. (We'll see how strong Ireland becomes, when every square inch of it is sold off and privatised). Putin is constantly demonised, but never is any proof offered. Much was made of the case of the poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko. At the time, media plastered pictures, statements and video of Litvinenko's father saying that "Putin killed my son." Now, only a few weeks ago, Litvinenko's father has publicly asked for Putin's forgivness, saying it was wrong for him to slander Putin with murder. He said he was preyed upon and used by the media, while in a weakened state over the loss of his son. This hatred in the media is not just left for Putin, Russia itself has always been seen as "evil" in the West. If it wasn't Hitler saying they were Jew loving Bolshevik rat scum, it was Ronald Regan calling the USSR an "evil empire". That was a serious paragraph, so let's have a video of Putin doing some ballet.
Fair elections... what is a fair election. Does America have fair elections. A two party system where it's hard to tell who is the Republican and who is the Democrat. Oh that's right, the Republican is the one who drops bombs on other countries, whereas the Democrat is the one who offers subsidised health care, while dropping bombs on other countries. And let's look at Ireland. We have a lovely open and "fair" democracy, and we used it in force last time around. We voted for the rebellious sounding opposition parties, who promised that glorious notion of "change". Surprise, surprise, what did we get? Even more of the same. Is this democracy? Democracy is just a nice way for crypto-hegemony to trick citizens into thinking their views actually count. That said, here's a picture of Putin hugging Kim Jong-Il.
What Russia the world needs right now, is a strong Russian government. No weakened flim-flam, to bow to America's self-interest approach to "world peace". No one should own a monopoly on what only they deem freedom and democracy. It's no lame NWO conspiracy to say that the US are deliberately encroaching on Russian boundaries to gain a stronger hand in world influence. Russia needs a leader to deflect these advances. For all the talk of Mutually Assured Destruction during the Cold War, some of humanities greatest achievements happened during this period. A power play between two giants can offer up positives for the globe. And look, Putin feeds a baby moose!
Maybe his face is full of botox, maybe he can't sing as well as Obama or play the piano with more than three fingers, maybe he's an ex-KGB hard liner, maybe his wife has magically vanished, but he's good for Russia, and he's good for the world. He tells the Americans to go fuck themselves and that's good enough for me. Europe has destroyed itself in the pursuit of gold and bureaucracy, Russia is now the best chance the world has at keeping an equilibrium.
Is there even a human capable of replacing Putin...
When the time comes, and the opposition finds a unified voice, and can show why they are better than Putin, then perhaps will be their time to rise up and smash Putin's "Commie-Imperialist-Oligarch-Mafia-Fascist" rule, but I'm not seeing another "Ulyanov" amongst the raggle-taggle bunch of confused protesters that are currently on offer though. Choice for the sake of it, is worthless.
A hospital is facing a £20,000 bill to repair damage caused by a wheelchair which was flung across a room by powerful magnets in an MRI machine. It is thought a nurse had pushed the metal chair into the room to collect a patient despite warning signs not to enter. It was instantly picked up and sent crashing into the scanner - where a patient had been lying moments before. "The nurse was shouted at to get out but they still continued into the room and the wheelchair just shot across the room. It slammed into the scanner and was bent round into the part where the patient lies.
A supposedly ambulatory patient told a technologist that she was feeling rather tired and weak. She asked if she could sit down while the tech was entering data into the computer. So the tech let her sit in one of the console chairs. Since the woman was rather tired, the technologist pushed the patient into the room on the chair. Since this was an actively shielded magnet, she thought it would be OK. The patient got off the chair, sat on the table and gave the chair a little push with her feet. The chair rolled away and just kept right on rolling on a curved path to the magnet bore and flew right in. Fortunately, no one was hurt but it took almost a full day to ramp the magnet down, pull the chair out, ramp back up and check out the system.
Originally posted over at Church of Death
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I give this 7 on the Judge Judy scale out outrageousness.
