Crowds roll up for a Banksy

Good old Banksy, he's released 1,000 prints for sale at £100 raising money for cataract operations for children in Bangladesh.

According to Sightsavers it costs on average £17 to perform cataract surgery on an adult and £27 on a child. It will give extra resonance to looking at the print in future

Keep your evil monopolistic nose out

I hate Microsoft. I hate the way they squeeze their sticky little tendrils into any market they so that they can increase their monopoly

Now they're doing it to the one laptop per child project

This was meant to be an open source project that would avoid anybody's licenses and would stymie Microsoft getting a toehold in emerging markets so they can squeeze them dry in the future

Thankfully the Green party has brought this matter to the public eye

The UK's Green Party has accused Microsoft of "unacceptable bribery" in trying to run Windows on the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project.

"Open source tools are a way to let the global south develop their own knowledge economies," Siân Berry, principal speaker for the Green Party, told vnunet.com in an email.

"Microsoft wants to restrict the greatest profits in the knowledge economy to already established software corporations like itself.

"By installing its programs on these laptops Microsoft hopes to create market domination and vendor lock in. That is unacceptable bribery.

What a lovely family

A 19 year old has been arrested for raping his mother to get back at his brother over a row - hmmmm how classy

what we understand the rape stemmed from an argument between him and his brother. And apparently they were arguing over a girlfriend. And the rape was some sort of retaliation towards his brother,' said Sgt. Jamie Smith of the Albertville Police Department.
It was unusual retaliation on an unsuspecting victim.
Authorities say Helms' mother was apparently passed out drunk on the couch when the rape started.
'During the attack she did come to and recognize her attacker. (Reporter: As her son?) As her son,' said Smith.

Wow

It looks like there may be another undiscovered tomb in the Valley of the Kings and speculation is mounting that it might contain one of the missing royal mummies from the Amarna Perios - Akhenaten or Nefertiti - how amazing woulod that be??

From its location this tomb could prove to be a find of the greatest possible significance. By inference from the neighbouring tombs KV62 (Tutankhamun) and KV63 I believe it is likely to represent yet another burial of immediate post-Amarna date - not impossibly home to one or more of the missing Amarna dead about whom I first speculated in 1997 and to whose actual existence KV63 now points. Situated in a part of the Valley which was out of bounds to earlier excavators, moreover, the new find is almost certain to be undisturbed.

What is America Like

Watch a video as a crazy American in a concrete armoured bulldozer destroys half a town before killing himself

How's this for a good idea

It's good to see that people are really starting to think laterally about maintaining our levels of power usage but with renewable sources

British engineers are converting street vibrations into electricity and predict a working prototype by Christmas capable of powering facility lights in the busiest areas of a city.
'We can harvest between 5 to 7 watts of energy per footstep that is currently being wasted into the ground,' says Claire Price, director of The Facility Architects, the British firm heading up the Pacesetters Project. 'And a passing train can generate very useful energy to run signaling or to power lights.

You know you're reading something bad ...

When it contains quotes like:

More than 60% of all processed food in Britain today contains soya in some form, according to food industry estimates. It is in breakfast cereals, cereal bars and biscuits, cheeses, cakes, dairy desserts, gravies, noodles, pastries, soups, sausage casings, sauces and sandwich spreads. Soya, crushed, separated and refined into its different parts, can appear on food labels as soya flour, hydrolysed vegetable protein, soy protein isolate, protein concentrate, textured vegetable protein, vegetable oil (simple, fully, or partially hydrogenated), plant sterols, or the emulsifier lecithin. Its many guises hint at its value to manufacturers.

The effort that has gone into creating the global soya market has indeed
been enormous. Today it is dominated by a handful of American trading companies. Three of them - Bunge, ADM and Cargill - control 80% of the European soya bean crushing industry. These three, together with allied companies, are also estimated to control up to 80% of European animal feed manufacturing. They dominate the US soya market, and also account for 60% of Brazil's soya exports.

You can just hear the ravening grind of cash machine driven ravening corporations as the dream up more despicable ways to fill our diet with processed food that in the long-term is against our health.

You have to ask yourself why!

Why on earth would you want to have a bicycle that you need to row?? - in the words of Eric Cartman "it just does not make sense!"

Poo Jellyfish, poo

Scientist have noticed that a species of tiny jellyfish no larger than your thumb may be able to save the planet from global warming.

They feast on phytoplankton, which are booming in our oceans due to the increase in the temperature. The phytoplankton use the Co2 to photosynthesise, taking it out of the atmosphere and then, once eaten, the CO2 gets deposited on the ocean floor in the jellyfish's poo.

Woods Hole biologists Laurence Madin and Patricia Kremer of the University of Connecticut and colleagues found that one swarm of these tiny jellyfish covered almost 40,000 square miles of the sea surface and consumed almost 74% percent of
phytoplankton every day, removing it from the ocean and preventing it from evaporating back into the atmosphere. Instead, it was contained in their fecal pellets, which sank down into deep water at the rate of up to 4,000 tons of carbon a day.

Let's just hope those little buggers multiply and scoff to their hearts content

Russian Researchers Develop Tomato Vaccine Against HIV and Hepatitis - NEWS - MOSNEWS.COM

soon people could be gaining the benefits of promising experiments of growing HIV vaccines in tomatoes. This offers the hope of cheap, sustainable vaccines for the poorest of countries

Rurik Salyaev at the Siberian Institute of Plant Physiology and Biochemistry in Irkutsk, Russia, and his colleagues used the soil bacterium
Agrobacterium tumefaciens to shuttle a synthetic combination of HIV and HBV DNA fragments into
tomato plants. These include fragments of genes for various HIV proteins and the gene for an HBV protein called HBV surface antigen.

The tomato plants then manufacture the proteins and, like the oral polio vaccine, when the tomatoes are eaten, these proteins prompt the body to create antibodies against the viruses

Ouch - bet that makes your eyes water

Fateh Mohammad, a prison inmate in Pakistan, says he woke up last weekend with a glass light bulb in his anus.
On Wednesday night, doctors brought Mohammad's misery to an end after a one-and-a-half hour operation to remove the object.
'Thanks Allah, now I feel comfort. Today, I had my breakfast. I was just drinking water, nothing else,' Mohammad, a grey-beared man in his mid-40s, told Reuters from a hospital bed in the southern central city of Multan.
'We had to take it out intact,' said Dr. Farrukh Aftab at Nishtar Hospital. 'Had it been broken inside, it would be a very very complicated situation.'
Mohammad, who is serving a four-year sentence for making liquor, prohibited for Muslims, said he was shocked when he was first told the cause of his discomfort. He swears he didn't know the bulb was there.
'When I woke up I felt a pain in my lower abdomen, but later in hospital, they told me this,' Mohammad said.
'I don't know who did this to me. Police or other prisoners.'
The doctor treating Mohammad said he'd never encountered anything like it before, and doubted the felon's story that someone had drugged him and inserted the bulb while he was comatose.

Hitler cats!

Just in case my last post was too creepy (remind me, why can't I buy lampshades like that in habitat???

Here's something a bit more light hearted - a blog dedicated cats who look like Hitler

Just what you need

Just think, you die, you're cremated (well not me, cos i don't like the thought of it) and then you grieving loved ones pack your ashes into a teddy bear shaped urn so they can hug you when your gone.

What's wrong with the Ed Gein approach - make a nice lampshade out of them - or if you're especially adventurous a coat and hand bag

And you thought Bush was the only dumbass

Lynn Westmoreland is a Congressman from Georgia who co-sponsored a bill to require the display of the Ten Commandments in the House of Representatives and the Senate. You'd think that if anyone should be able to recite them all it should be him.

Well apparently not, it's a case of 'do as I say, nopt as I do'
YouTube - Stephen Colbert and Congressman: ""

Win the argument by not saying a word - Lifehacker

If someone starts yelling to get their point across, don't respond -- just let them go on and on. Remain so silent that they eventually start wondering if you are even listening.

It doesn't matter what the issue was, you will have won the argument.

Isn't that the truth - it happened to me quite recently while cycling to work - some agressive idiot in a car threatened to run me over because he felt I had obstructed him from running a red light - He screamed and screamed, effing and blinding about how he was gonna kill me (not a very nice experience at 8 in the morning). But he was left looking like an idiot because I completely blanked him and opther passers by told him to shut up and stop acting like an idiot

King Tut is all man!

You have to wonder at the prurience of journalists that report thngs like this - apparently Tutankamun's penis has been found, attached to his body, presumably where it's been for the last several thousand years or so. Presumably it shrank during the dessication process that is part of mummification

Eric Schlosser on the fast food industry

From the Guardian - no surprise the depths the food industry will sink to to grab children as early as possible to turn them into obese junk food junkies

Famous last words

A list of the last sayings of famous dead people

Am I dying or is this my birthday?
When she woke briefly during her last illness and found all her family around her bedside.
~~ Lady Nancy Astor, d. 1964

What a fantastic woman

It is nice to see that some sanity prevails in Dakota

When Governor Mike Rounds signed HB 1215 into law it effectively banned all abortions in the state with the exception that it did allow saving the mother's life. There were, however, no exceptions for victims of rape or incest. His actions, and the comments of State Senators like Bill Napoli of Rapid City, SD, set of a maelstrom of protests within the state.
Napoli suggested that if it was a case of 'simple rape,' there should be no thoughts of ending a pregnancy. Letters by the hundreds appeared in local newspapers, mostly written by women, challenging Napoli's description of rape as 'simple.' He has yet to explain satisfactorily what he meant by 'simple rape.'
The President of the Oglala Sioux Tribe on the Pine Ridge Reservation, Cecilia Fire Thunder, was incensed. A former nurse and healthcare giver she was very angry that a state body made up mostly of white males, would make such a stupid law against women.
'To me, it is now a question of sovereignty,' she said to me last week. 'I will personally establish a Planned Parenthood clinic on my own land which is within the boundaries of the Pine Ridge Reservation where the State of South Dakota has absolutely no jurisdiction.'

What a fantastic woman

It is nice to see that some sanity prevails in Dakota

When Governor Mike Rounds signed HB 1215 into law it effectively banned all abortions in the state with the exception that it did allow saving the mother's life. There were, however, no exceptions for victims of rape or incest. His actions, and the comments of State Senators like Bill Napoli of Rapid City, SD, set of a maelstrom of protests within the state.
Napoli suggested that if it was a case of 'simple rape,' there should be no thoughts of ending a pregnancy. Letters by the hundreds appeared in local newspapers, mostly written by women, challenging Napoli's description of rape as 'simple.' He has yet to explain satisfactorily what he meant by 'simple rape.'
The President of the Oglala Sioux Tribe on the Pine Ridge Reservation, Cecilia Fire Thunder, was incensed. A former nurse and healthcare giver she was very angry that a state body made up mostly of white males, would make such a stupid law against women.
'To me, it is now a question of sovereignty,' she said to me last week. 'I will personally establish a Planned Parenthood clinic on my own land which is within the boundaries of the Pine Ridge Reservation where the State of South Dakota has absolutely no jurisdiction.'

Tomato juice keeps emphysema at bay in new model | Science Blog

This sounds very interesting - perhaps everyone that's scared of passive smoking should get drining bloody marys

Now this is bound to cause offense

Someone has made a page just like the hamster dance which was so popular a few years back except this time it's the cartoons of the prophet Mohammed which have caused so much offense dancing.

It never fails to surprise me how quickly people will say that people shouldn't be offended by things precisely because they don't share the same faith and cannot see why offense might be given. Unfortunately though these people most often have the thinnest skins when it comes to anyone insulting anything that they hold sacred.

More on the Thornbororugh henges

One wonders whether Tarmac has thought through its attitude to their planned destruction of the landscape around the Thornborough Henges - can they not see they might be embarking on a massive PR own-goal??

Tarmac has said it plans to appeal the decision, claiming that much of the history conservationists have cited in Thornborough's protection amounts to nothing more than myth.
However, the problem for the company is that any appeal would mean a public inquiry - and it is in the public arena, rather than in the offices of developers and planners, that the case has been most persuasively put for preserving the henges.
Tarmac raised concerns over local unemployment if its application failed. But any loss in quarrying work will be regained through the guides, meals and beds that come with increased visitors, as nearby York and Harrogate know very well.

I hope their share price plummets through the floor for this - advice to anyone who owns shares in Tarmac - dump them and then tell them why

Thornborough henges are saved for the nation

Tarmac was defeated in its bid to destroy the landscape around the Thornborough Henges, three large-scale earthworks which have survived since 5,000BCE in the Vale of York.

Of course, they played the usual corporate trick of saying jobs were threatened as well as the fate of the building industry

Tarmac's estates manager Bob Nicholson said the firm was deeply disappointed by a decision which could put 50 jobs at risk. He also warned of serious implications for the supply of sand and gravel to the construction industry and said the company would appeal against the decision. The quarrying did not threaten the actual henges which are scheduled national monuments.

Amazing - when he says the henges would not have been threatened, he failed to mention that many of the neaolithic burial sites would have been destroyed, along with the landscape which puts the monuments into context.

Evil evil corporate bastards

Archaeologists uncover first Valley of the Kings tomb since 1922 Tutankhamun find

How exciting, archaeologist have just uncovered the first tomb in the valley of the kings since the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun

wonder how many more there are still waiting to be discovered

The War of the Worlds - Book Cover Collection

Look, lots of variations on a theme of HG Wells' War of the Worlds

The War of the Worlds - Book Cover Collection

Look, lots of variations on a theme of HG Wells' War of the Worlds

The Empire State Building

Some fantastic photographs of the construction of the Empire State Building

Hadrian's Villa unveils new secrets

Hadrian's Villa has unveiled its latest secret, a monumental staircase complete with huge columns and a giant sphinx .

Archaeologists said the stairway, found in an area known as the Gymnasium, was probably the original entrance to the sprawling complex .

A statue of an athlete and a huge theatrical mask, both in marble, were also found at the site

Foul, stinking evil man should keep his mouth shut and his nose out fo British broadcasting

Evil media tycoon, Rupert Murdoch has once again stuck the knife into the BBC saying he doesn't think they should have a license fee increase

'Take News 24, it's fine but it's free. We struggled for years and made a small charge and we've also had to go free. In any other country, that is predatory competition.
But when asked whether he feared a fully-funded BBC was a threat to News Corporation he said: "No, but I don't know where it stops..,

But former BBC director general Greg Dyke told Five Live Mr Murdoch would never understand the concept of a state-funded broadcaster.

"Australians and Americans have difficulty understanding the BBC, that we should collect two and a half-billion pounds in a sort of poll tax to fund a broadcasting system," he said.

"They don't understand it and Murdoch will never get it in a million years. He'll never concede that actually what it's produced is a better broadcasting system here that you get in the United States or in Australia."

Actually, he pulled his punch, the truth is that murdoch hates anyone and anything that get in the way of his monopolistic money grabbing ventures.

So Rupert if you're so against the poor British public paying a tax to watch telly, why don't you give away sky for free instead of charging everyone who watches sky for the sports channels even if theydon't like sport

Blogthings - What Does Your Birth Date Mean?

Your Birthdate: September 20

You are a virtual roller coaster of emotions, and most people enjoy the ride. Your mood tends to set the tone of the room, and when you're happy, this is a good thing. When you get in a dark mood, watch out - it's very hard to get you out of it. It's sometimes hard for you to cheer up, and your gloom can be contagious. Your strength: Your warm heart Your weakness: Trouble controlling your emotions Your power color: Black Your power symbol: Musical note Your power month: February

What Does Your Birth Date Mean?