nitroglycol

This is a personal blog, and a lot of it is friends only. My political blog is entirely public and may be found here. If you don't have an LJ account, just sign up for a dummy one and leave a comment here to be put on my list (assuming, of course, that I know who you are and don't hate you).

Every year around this time, the business press feels the need to declare the latest "must-have" toy so that people will know what to trample each other to death over tomorrow. Well, this year the pundits have selected Zhu Zhu pets:

"Honestly, I don't really get it," said BMO Capital Markets analyst Gerrick Johnson. "But I don't need to get it for a toy to be hot."

The toys do have several factors that make them compelling, Johnson said: fun accessories and scarcity - sometimes when something is hard to obtain it makes people want it more. And they have one big thing going for them in tough economic times: They're cheap.

"The last couple of years the robotic pet has been very popular, but those have been very expensive," like Hasbro's $US250 robotic dinosaur Kota the Triceratops, he said. "But here's a version of a robotic pet that only costs $US10."

Hmm. That's cheap all right, but I wonder how long before the novelty wears off?

Some context: In Australia, there's a tradition known as "Schoolies week" in which graduating high school students get a week off between their exams and graduation. Usually they spend it in some tourist trap like the Gold Coast, with plenty of fighting, fucking, and consumption of copious amounts of alcohol and other drugs. So far so good. That's where our hero enters the picture:

A 16-year-old boy has been arrested in Surfers Paradise after trying to pass off his mother's hormone medication as ecstasy pills to sell to Schoolies, police say.

While Gold Coast Superintendent Jim Keogh praised the behaviour of the majority of the 7,500 Schoolies in the party zone last night, he said he had been taken aback by the Logan teenager, who allegedly saw a "business opportunity" too good to miss.

Schoolies initially dobbed in the boy, who was arrested in Cavill Avenue.

When police questioned him further, he admitted the pills he was trying to sell were prescription "ovary medication" belonging to his mother, Superintendent Keogh said.

From the Brisbane Times. Gotta admire his entrepreneurial spirit, if nothing else.

... turns out he found something he might have preferred not to know:


From the London, UK Sun.

For instance, don't pose with stolen goods and post the pics:

A woman who displayed stolen booty from a break-in on Facebook was ordered to perform community service Friday.

Michele Nolan, 22, had pleaded guilty earlier to breaking into the home of four university students on Lester Street in Waterloo on Sept. 20, 2008.

Kitchener’s Ontario Court heard at the time that she, and a second woman who also pleaded guilty, later posed on the social networking site, Facebook, with some of the stolen items.

Nolan and Sarah Lakhan broke in through a ground-floor window. The home’s five occupants — four students at Wilfrid Laurier University — were at the Homecoming football game.

Source.

It seems that recycling is now so advanced that they're recycling people:

LIMA (Reuters) - Peruvian police said on Thursday they had broken up a gang that allegedly killed dozens of people and sold their fat to buyers who used it to make cosmetics.

Four Peruvians were arrested on suspicion of kidnapping, murder and trafficking in human fat.

The group stored the fat it collected in used soda and water bottles, which police showed reporters.

"We have people detained who have declared and stated how they murdered people with the aim being to extract their fat in rudimentary labs and sell it," said Police Commander Angel Toldeo.

New York Times

Oops:
Hamilton Spectator

Fanny, circa 1972:

Yeah, I usually put the political stories on the other blog, but this story really fits in better here. Presumably you've heard by now of the death of Thatcher and the confusion on the part of Conservative MPs. Amusing, though I do offer John Baird my sincere condolences on the death of his kitty.

Actually, though, as someone who's fond of cats, it kind of bothers me to find out that Baird is as well. Actually it's even worse than that; apparently Stephen Harper himself likes them. Krikey. But then, Harper also seems to like the Beatles (as does a certain Charles Manson), and I'm not going to let that interfere with my enjoyment of their music.

Ixion has found this gem:



After uttering all that profanity, isn't the mum going to have to say a few Hail Marys?

A US man dressed as a breathalyzer test for Halloween found himself blowing into one after police stopped him for allegedly driving the wrong way without headlights on a one-way street.

Oxford police in Ohio said they stopped 20-year-old James P. Miller on Halloween night and found beer in his front seat and in the trunk.

Source.
 

This time it's Throwing Muses, from their album The Real Ramona (the last one before Tanya left). Enjoy.

I recently borrowed Juliana Hatfield's memoir, When I Grow Up, from the library. An interesting read. At one point she describes how, when her dealings with Atlantic Records went sour, she decided to try to get out of her contract. In preparing for a meeting with Val Azzoli, the president of the company, she figured that the best approach would be to create the impression that she was crazy:

I stopped bathing about a week before the scheduled meeting. And stopped brushing my hair. I stayed out of the sun and put a halt to my normal everyday exercise routine in order to eliminate any traces of a healthful facial glow, and replace it with a sickly pallor.

That's pretty hardcore! Effective, too; they dropped her like a hot potato.

While clicking around the CBC website today I came across a link to this:

... I have a thing for Susanna Hoffs, so sue me.

Those of you who watched Saturday morning cartoons back in the day might recall the "Schoolhouse Rock!" series of educational shorts. They covered various subjects, from science and math to grammar and history. The thing is, some of the history pieces in particular are, well, a bit dated. Have a look at this one from 1976, entitled "Elbow Room" (music and lyrics by Lynn Ahrens, performed by Sue Manchester):



Got it kids? Colonialism is fun. As some of the comments on the video point out, other societies use different words for "elbow room".

Interesting:

Now, this is very funny, but I think that over pigeon-traversable distances in which latency isn't an issue, the pigeon will always win. A random web-page promises that a carrier pigeon can bear loads of up to 1.7 oz or about 48.2g. My postal scale says that my 64GB SD card weighs 2.05g. Which means that a pigeon could carry 23 64GB SD cards, or 1.472 terabytes. In the Telkom race, the pigeon traversed 40km in 2 hours.

I think that even the best commercial ISP in the world would be hard-pressed to deliver 736GB/h between two customer DSL end-points. Likewise, I think that even the greatest pigeon on the world would be hard-pressed to deliver even one bit of information from Cape Town to New York.

From BoingBoing.
 

Pretty impressive, actually. Check it out.