Where's Waldojustin?

Justin is in Michigan! Why? I don't know why! Who is Justin? Dear Reader, if you don't know my friend Justin, you don't know what you're missing! ...Well, obviously, because how could you know what you were missing, you don't even know who, uh, anyway, um, er...

He seems to be in Michigan, based on his IP address! Unless that's misleading. I don't know if it could be misleading, but I hope it would show if he were somewhere in Equador or Australia. Australia is the butt of the western hemisphere! Oops, I mean the eastern hemisphere. I guess French Polynesia is the butt of the western hemisphere.

All I'm really sure about is that Indianapolis is the armpit.

Sorry that this post is a gigantic ripoff, only worth one tenth of what you paid for it! I promise the next one will be A.) informative, 2.) funny, and c.) at least ten words long. Or at least one of those three things. (Hint, hint! Guess which one!)

Cursing Their Head and All the Hairs of Their Head

The Carlisle Curse Stone



In 1525, the Archbishop of blah blah cursed these people in this one bit of Scotland. (Okay, it was the Archbishop of Glasgow. Whatever, he's dead, he doesn't care now.) 1,069 words. "I curse their head and all the hairs of their head," said the archbishop. "I curse their face, their brain, their mouth, their nose, their tongue, their teeth. May the thunder and lightning which rained down upon Sodom and Gomorrah, rain down upon them."

Yeah, he must have been pissed! Oh, I see, they were running around pillaging. Well, nobody likes pillagers. You try it sometime, and see. Someone will curse you! (Or at you, at least.)

So, just for fun, in 2001, as part of millemium celebrating, the village had an artist carve part of the curse on a stone, and then they set that up in the village. It's pretty! See the picture!

And then people started suffering curse-like problems. Foot-and-mouth disease! Unemployment! A fire at a bakery! FLOODS! It must be the curse stone! It's got a CURSE on it! Um... Except other areas of Britain have been flooding and had foot-and-mouth disease and all that.

Anyway. People are up in arms. Not all the people... just the stupid ones, of course. One stupid one is the bishop of Carlisle, who has asked the Archbishop of Glasgow (the current one, not the one from 1525) to lift the curse. Not the boulder, I hope, it's 16 tons. Just the curse.

This is all very unfair... The people who live there aren't pillagers anymore. I mean, I assume they're not. Did the curse say anything about the descendants of the cursees? Huh, maybe there's some kind of inheritance clause in curse law. Or perhaps, since they didn't actually carve the curse into a pretty 16-ton boulder before, the curse got confused, and it thinks the current generation was the intended target.

But there's hope: Uri Geller has offered to save the village by exorcising the curse from the stone, removing it, and sequestering it in his "healing garden." Well, HE'S a real prince, isn't he?

I think I'll go down to my local bank, curse all the cash in the safe, and then offer to de-curse it, if they let me take it all home and sequester it in my "healing wallet."

Elves, Maybe, or Midgets

New Scientist article: 13 things that do not make sense

Scientists know there are some things we don't understand. Like the placebo effect. This is from the article:

"DON'T try this at home. Several times a day, for several days, you induce pain in someone. You control the pain with morphine until the final day of the experiment, when you replace the morphine with saline solution. Guess what? The saline takes the pain away.

This is the placebo effect: somehow, sometimes, a whole lot of nothing can be very powerful. Except it's not quite nothing. When Fabrizio Benedetti of the University of Turin in Italy carried out the above experiment, he added a final twist by adding naloxone, a drug that blocks the effects of morphine, to the saline. The shocking result? The pain-relieving power of saline solution disappeared."

This, very clearly, is MAGIC.

Or possibly elves. Elves might be administering morphine, secretly, to the subjects, in the mistaken assumption that the experimenters just, maybe, RAN OUT of it. Elves would know that the saline wouldn't work! Saline doesn't ease pain!

Martians Use Their Squeegees Again

Spirit Gets A Dust Devil Once-Over

The Spirit rover on Mars was losing most of the power it was getting from its solar panels. It was down by 40%. But fortunately, the martians have squeegees. Someone there dusted off the panels, and they're all clean again.

How many times can we count on the martians to wipe down our rovers? We didn't send any cash with them. Also, we don't know what martians use as cash, so we can't send it along on the next trip, either.

Maybe they're just being neighborly. Mars IS only 64 milliion miles from here. They probably figure that if they're nice, and show us how to be good neighbors, then we won't leave behind tons of our castoff junk, like we did on the moon.

Yelling at Kids to Get off Your Lawn is Just Not Enough of a Hobby

Mystery shoe saga stumps couple

Since December, an elderly couple has been regularly leaving pairs of shoes near a farmhouse in England. There have been more than 30 pairs so far.

The authorities think it's a case of people just discarding trash on the roadway. Clearly, the authorities are very stupid.

It's gotta be a hobby! What could be more fun? Have some old pairs of shoes? Leave them mysteriously on some stranger's property! Buy more, and leave them, too!

You know, it's hard to keep active when you're getting older, and your normal hobbies, like yelling at kids to get off your lawn, or falling asleep in front of the tv, get too strenuous.

Also. A couple hiking in the mountains in Sweden found 70 pairs of shoes... and they were all filled with butter. About a pound of butter in each pair. Or each shoe. I don't know. Either way, that's a hella lot of butter, you know, to put in your shoes. Or in any articles of clothing, really.

Link to shoe butter article, so you know I'm not making this stuff up, as if I had that much imagination.

Beaming Classified Ads to the Aliens

List in Space!
Well, this is just what it sounds like. Craigslist is beaming ten thousand ads into space, on the off chance that aliens will receive them and want to buy our used bicycles and lava lamps.

Why? Well, why the heck not. Craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster won an eBay auction for the first private communication transmission, light years into deep space. (I got that from their site.) It cost $1225! Cheap! Cheap, when you consider how many zillions of aliens could potentially, uh, never mind.

It's the aliens that answer the personal ads that I'd be worried about.

Who Tells Our Doggies When We Die?

I was watching 24 the other day. I had taped it, and I just got around to watching, and it's the one where Erin Driscoll's daughter has just "killed herself" in the CTU medical area. (I'm not buying it - I think someone did her in. It's too convenient!)

So, Erin is like, okay, I guess I will go home, when the DOD guy tells her she should. (I'm not sure she got that she's totally out on her ass, but either way. She's going home.) And she mentions that she needs to check on the dog.

The dog! The poor dog! What will the dog be thinking? The last thing the dog knew, the daughter was getting hauled away to CTU, in kind of a raving-freaked out way. What will the dog think, when she NEVER, EVER comes back? The poor dog won't figure out that she's dead! (Oh, yeah, right, fictional dog. Fictional dogs don't care.)

Discussion of funeral arrangements, a wake, large outpourings of sympathy food, oversized photos of the dead girl, and lots of flowers would clue US in, if we were living in the Driscoll house. But not the dog! Dogs just don't get it, because they're very stupid. They're not even careful or tactful about what they say after someone's died. They just go along begging at the table, pooping on the lawn, all of it, without regards to absent family members. Man, dogs are really insensitive.

But they might not be, if someone would have the consideration to tell them their loved ones have died. Like, take them to the funeral home or to the hospital. I can't imagine anyone having a problem with that, can you?

In any event... or, rather, in the event of MY death, which should never happen because I plan to not die, please inform my kitties that I am dead. Show them my body so they get it. Really. It's the least we can do.

This request applies to my Graceful Readers that actually know me, my home address, and know whether I'm dead or not. If you don't know me to talk on the phone, please don't worry that I'll die and you need to get a plane out here.

Morbidly yours, annekat.