132 Foot Ice Sculpture

This is truely amazing.

To pass the time during the winter, these guys in alaska built a giant, giant tower of ice by putting a bunch of water spray nozzels on top of a pole going straight up:



every 10 ft of ice that build up, they scale it and add 10 ft more pipe:



they are fearless:



until it eventually reached 132 ft:

Related To Zombies

Aparently I'm related to zombies...

Limerick of the week

There was a composer named Glass
Phillip Glass Phillip Glass Phillip Glass
Phillip Glass Phillip Glass
Phillip Glass Phillip Glass
Phillip Glass Phillip Glass Phillip Glass.

Rummy is Scared of the Krauts

Rumsfeld is scared to go to Germany, where if he steps foot he might get indicted on war crimes charges having to do with his involvement in Abu Gharaib.

Wish you were locked up in Guantánamo?

Day-dreaming about being in Abu Ghraib? Feel like you missed out on all this hot torture action in the last few years? Here is your chance to get some, reality TV style!

Channel 4 is to broadcast what it is styling a Guantánamo Bay-style reality show that will examine the effects of mild torture on seven male volunteers.

The Guantánamo Guidebook will recreate some of the practices used at the US naval base where hundreds of so-called "enemy combatants" have been held without trial or access to lawyers for nearly three years.

Sign me up!

Now those are some good driving directions

Here is the "Quickest" setting:




Here is the "Shortest" setting:

Ras Tafari

Haile Salassie was known as "Ras Tafari" before he became emperor of Ethiopia. He was a master diplomat who managed to keep Ethiopia the only African nation free from colonization. Jamaicans got all mad obsessed with him, because keeping whitey out of your land was pretty rad when the rest of Africa was under European rule. So these Jamaicans started a religion (or a Christian cult really... with lots of pot smoking thrown in for good measure) based on him, basically elevating him to something more than human.

Apparently he was a prick to the Ethiopians though, as most dictators tend to be, so they deposed him in 1974 and someone murdered him a year later. Naturally, the Ethiopians are a little weary of the Rastafarians, who have a habit of making pilgrimages to Ethiopia, which they call their promised land.

Nope, I see NO parallels here...

Officials Cite 83% Turnout Despite Vietcong Terror

by Peter Grose, Special to the New York Times (9/4/1967: p. 2)

WASHINGTON, Sept. 3-- United States officials were surprised and heartened today at the size of turnout in South Vietnam's presidential election despite a Vietcong terrorist campaign to disrupt the voting.

According to reports from Saigon, 83 per cent of the 5.85 million registered voters cast their ballots yesterday. Many of them risked reprisals threatened by the Vietcong.

The size of the popular vote and the inability of the Vietcong to destroy the election machinery were the two salient facts in a preliminary assessment of the nation election based on the incomplete returns reaching here.

Pending more detailed reports, neither the State Department nor the White House would comment on the balloting or the victory of the military candidates, Lieut. Gen. Nguyen Van Thieu, who was running for president, and Premier Nguyen Cao Ky, the candidate for vice president.

A successful election has long been seen as the keystone in President Johnson's policy of encouraging the growth of constitutional processes in South Vietnam. The election was the culmination of a constitutional development that began in January, 1966, to which President Johnson gave his personal commitment when he met Premier Ky and General Thieu, the chief of state, in Honolulu in February.

The purpose of the voting was to give legitimacy to the Saigon Government, which has been founded only on coups and power plays since November, 1963, when President Ngo Dinh Deim was overthrown by a military junta.

Few members of that junta are still around, most having been ousted or exiled in subsequent shifts of power.