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BBC News - German man 'marries' his dying cat
"Absurd" via Wallace Lockhart in Google Reader 8 May 2010, 10:00 am CEST
Shared by Wallace Lockhart And now, something from the realm of the absurd ...
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A German man has unofficially married his cat after the animal fell ill and vets told him it might not live much longer, Bild newspaper reports.
It says Uwe Mitzscherlich, 39, paid an actress 300 euros (£260,$395) to officiate at the ceremony, as marrying an animal is illegal in Germany.
Mr Mitzscherlich said he had wanted to tie the knot before his asthmatic cat Cecilia died.
The cat and groom have lived together for 10 years.
"Cecilia is such a trusting creature. We cuddle all the time and she has always slept in my bed," Mr Mitzscherlich, a postman from the eastern town of Possendorf, told Bild.
Actress Christin-Maria Lohri, who officiated the ceremony, was quoted as saying: "At first I thought it was a joke. But for Mr Mitzscherlich it's a dream come true".
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My Math Says This Is Three Times Faster
"Absurd" via Wallace Lockhart in Google Reader 18 Apr 2010, 7:00 pm CEST
Submitted by: dunno source via Submit a Kludge!
But we’re overlooking the important question. Why did he buy three lawnmowers instead of one ride-on? – Ms. Fix-It
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Grigory Perelman, the maths genius who said no to $1m | World news | The Guardian
"Absurd" via Wallace Lockhart in Google Reader 24 Mar 2010, 2:32 pm CET
Grigory Perelman . . . 'You are disturbing me. I am picking mushrooms,' he told a reporter. Photograph: AP
You are the world's cleverest man. You have solved one of maths' most intractable problems. Do you a) accept a $1m reward, or b) reject the money, barricade yourself inside your flat and refuse to answer the door? The answer, if you are the reclusive Russian genius Grigory Perelman, is b).
The Clay Mathematics Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, last week honoured Perelman for his solution to a problem posed almost a century ago by French mathematician Henri Poincaré. The theorem – known as Poincaré's conjecture – involves the deep structure of three-dimensional shapes. It is one of seven elusive challenges set by the institute, each carrying a $1m reward. It took the world's leading mathematicians several years to verify that Perelman had definitively solved the problem in a paper published in 2002.
Perelman, however, doesn't want the cash. This latest snub follows his refusal in 2006 to collect the maths equivalent of an Oscar, the Fields Medal. Perelman is currently jobless and lives with his mother and sister in a small flat in St Petersburg. (He has his own spartan one-bedroom flat, allegedly full of cockroaches, but rarely uses it.)
Perelman refuses to talk to the journalists camped outside his home. One who managed to reach him on his mobile was told: "You are disturbing me. I am picking mushrooms." The handful of neighbours who have seen him paint a picture of a scruffily dressed, unworldly eccentric. "He always wears the same tatty coat and trousers. He never cuts his nails or beard. When he walks he simply stares at the ground, rather than looking from side to side," one told a Moscow newspaper.
"He has rather strange moral principles. He feels tiny improper things very strongly," says Sergei Kisliakov, director of St Petersburg's Steklov Mathematics Institute, where the maths prodigy once worked as a researcher.
According to Kisliakov, Perelman quit the world of mathematics in disgust four years ago. His decision to spurn the Fields Medal may have been driven by a sense that his fellow mathematicians were not worthy to award it. "He severed all contact with the community, and wanted to find a job unrelated to maths," Kisliakov says. "I don't know whether he succeeded in that."
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sikhs
"Absurd" via Wallace Lockhart in Google Reader 9 Mar 2010, 6:18 pm CET
Big shout-out to the Sikhs: yo, Sikhs!
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Make sure you are not a computer
"Absurd" via Wallace Lockhart in Google Reader 7 Mar 2010, 9:36 pm CET
Shared by Wallace When in doubt, check it out!
Grammar says everything. The online signup process for Nimbuzz, one of the wifi telephone services, asks users:
“To make sure you are not a computer, please type in the characters you see in the text box below:”
In other words, you can find out if you are human or computer by taking their simple test. Imagine if such a test were available to the androids in BladeRunner.
At least we all now have a place to turn if we are afraid we might be computers.
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Epic Beard Man -- Why It's the Fastest Public Fight Meme Yet - Urlesque
"Absurd" via Wallace Lockhart in Google Reader 20 Feb 2010, 11:36 pm CET
On February 16, 2010, two guys got in a fight on a bus in Oakland. Another passenger caught it on video. Results: One bloody nose, and instant internet history.
The video, shown after the break, is officially titled AC TRANSIT BUS FIGHT I AM A MOTHERF***ER (named for the words on the fight winner's shirt), but the meme has also spread under the names "Amber Lamps" (for the loser's slurred request for an amulance) and "Epic Beard Man" (out of support for the winner).
Fight videos attract crowds. A San Francisco bus fight last October earned nearly a million views on YouTube (and a couple million for copies). A 2007 fight on the NYC subway got 441 thousand views. Fifty-five thousand views for this train fight, nearly 800 thousand for this one. Even a camcorder pointed at TV footage of a fight in India racked up 73 thousand views.
But in three days, the Oakland bus fight has logged over two million views, again not counting hundreds of thousands of views for the multiple exact copies on other accounts (a stupefying if sometimes useful YouTube phenomenon) and followups. It also inspired video remixes, mashups, YouTube replies, spinoffs (there's a cult around a hipster girl silently watching the fight), and surprisingly talented drawings like the one above. Why all the attention over just another public fight?
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Is Paul McCartney Barack Obama's Actual Mother?
"Absurd" via Wallace Lockhart in Google Reader 12 Feb 2010, 5:34 pm CET
Did Paul McCartney, in the summer of 1961, take a break from his life of near-constant gigs in Hamburg, Germany to sneak away to Hawaii and give birth to a young African student's son?
Why won't Barack Obama simply release his birth certificate and clear up this heinous rumor?
(via Buzzfeed)
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Ex Men
"Absurd" via Wallace Lockhart in Google Reader 12 Feb 2010, 12:06 am CET
Our pal Dan Piraro is auctioning the original Bizarro Sunday Comic strip above on eBay. It’s for a good cause (National Cartoonists Society Foundation – who knew there’s such a thing?) and it’s currently going for way below market price.
Link: eBay Auction | Bizarro Official Website | Bizarro Blog
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Russia celebrates 20 years of Golden Arches
"Absurd" via Wallace Lockhart in Google Reader 2 Feb 2010, 8:41 pm CET
Yes, this post is largely an excuse to feature the above photo of Comrade Stalin munching on his McFries, but this week marks the 20th anniversary of the opening of the first Russian McDonalds. Lines famously stretched around the block at Moscow's Pushkin Square with curious Russian consumers anxious for the greasy, salty taste of Western capitalism. In the years since then, Russians have not lost their taste for the Golden Arches:
Our Russian division is doing so well that we chose Russia as the top country for reinvestment in 2010," said Jim Skinner, vice chairman and CEO of McDonald's Corporation.
Skinner offered no figures for 2009, saying only that Russia's McDonald's came through with a "terrific" performance, and suggested that 2010 investment would reach at least $135 million.
"If we assume that it costs $3 million to open a new McDonald's restaurant and you multiply it by 45, you may get an idea of how much we want to spend," he said....
The company does not disclose its earnings by country, but its turnover in Russia last year was more than $800 million, said Khamzat Khazbulatov, McDonald's president for Russia and Eastern Europe who started his career with the company as a manager at the Pushkin Square restaurant in 1990, Vedomosti reported Monday.
On a personal note, I'm not much of a McDonalds eater here at home, but during the summer I spent in Moscow I developed an unusual (and unhealthy) affection for the MakZavtrak.
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This Is God's Computer - God's Computer - Gizmodo
"Absurd" via Wallace Lockhart in Google Reader 19 Jan 2010, 6:55 pm CET
He doesn't believe in touchscreens or tablets, and maybe He is right. It's all old school buttons and switches for The Dude in the Heavens. [Maneggs]
Send an email to Jesus Diaz, the author of this post, at jesus@gizmodo.com.
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3504654421_388527cc18.jpg
"Absurd" via Wallace Lockhart in Google Reader 10 Jan 2010, 1:56 am CET
Shared by Wallace FAIL
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Attempt to Break New Irish Blasphemy Law - The Lede Blog - NYTimes.com
"Absurd" via Wallace Lockhart in Google Reader 5 Jan 2010, 9:24 am CET
Shared by Wallace Calling someone a Blasphemer is a hate crime.January 4, 2010, 7:59 pm
Attempt to Break New Irish Blasphemy Law
By ROBERT MACKEYLast Friday morning in Ireland, about 30 minutes after a new law took effect with the new year that makes blasphemy a crime punishable by a fine of up to $35,000, a group of Irish atheists invited the government to prosecute them by publishing 25 blasphemous statements on an Irish Web site.
As The Lede explained last July — when the bill was signed by Ireland’s president, Mary McAleese — even though Ireland’s Constitution calls blasphemy a criminal act, the police force had no legal means to prosecute blasphemers.
According to the updated Irish Statute Book, the criminal blasphemer is defined as someone who “publishes or utters matter that is grossly abusive or insulting in relation to matters held sacred by any religion, thereby causing outrage among a substantial number of the adherents of that religion, and … intends, by the publication or utterance of the matter concerned, to cause such outrage.”
On the Web site Blasphemy.ie, Michael Nugent, a writer and co-founder of Atheist Ireland, wrote that his group was trying hard to break the new law because it is “both silly and dangerous.” Mr. Nugent explained:
It is silly because medieval religious laws have no place in a modern secular republic, where the criminal law should protect people and not ideas. And it is dangerous because it incentives religious outrage, and because Islamic states led by Pakistan are already using the wording of this Irish law to promote new blasphemy laws at U.N. level.
Given that the law explicitly states that the intention of the blasphemer has to be to cause outrage, it is not clear if the Irish atheists have really succeeded in breaking it. The 25 statements published on Blasphemy.ie are largely inoffensive quotes from people like Jesus, Mark Twain and a fictional character in Monty Python’s “Life of Brian” that are unlikely to ever fill the streets of Dublin with enraged protesters.
What makes the Irish group’s attempt to break the law seem particularly tame is that it came on the same day last week that an axe-wielding man in Denmark tried to attack a cartoonist who offended millions of Muslims by publishing a drawing thought to show the Prophet Muhammad with a bomb in his turban. Say what you will about the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten, which intentionally published 12 cartoons mocking Islam in 2005, but that publication certainly showed how to cause the kind of outrage described in Ireland’s new law.
Indeed, some observers in Ireland, noting that the country’s Christian leaders made no public request for the legal prohibition on blasphemy to be made enforceable, have guessed that the government may have been acting mainly to restrain any Irish publisher from following the lead of the conservative Danish paper in offending Muslim sensibilities. David Quinn, a former editor of a Catholic newspaper in Ireland, told NPR that the new Irish law may have been introduced not to placate Ireland’s Christian majority, but because “there was a fear that we might get a Danish cartoon-style controversy in Ireland — that some newspaper might publish something that Muslims found highly offensive — and it might have repercussions for Irish trade in the Muslim world.”
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3quarksdaily - Perceptions
"Absurd" via Wallace Lockhart in Google Reader 21 Dec 2009, 4:09 pm CET
Perceptions
Gilbert Garcin. Le moulin de l’oubli - Mill of oblivion. 1999.
"Gilbert Garcin spent most of his life managing a lamp factory in France. At 65, he retired and took up a trick photography workshop. For the past ten years he has been creating comical, surrealistic photographs which warmly highlight sometimes cold, existential questions. Garcin inhabits this strange world and ponders it together with the viewer; with Garcin you have a dedicated, but perplexed, guide."
In February, (2009) Gilbert's work was celebrated at the Festival at Rennes.
Posted by Sughra Raza at 12:30 AM Permalink
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idiotfangirl:[gammasquad.] Nice one…
"Absurd" via Wallace Lockhart in Google Reader 1 Jan 1970, 1:00 am CET
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