Monthly archives: November 2011


Daily Blog 11/10/2011

  • The witching hour is a the time of day when supernatural creatures such as witches, demons and ghosts are thought to appear and be at their most powerful, and black magic at its most effective. This hour is typically past midnight or the “time in the middle of the night when magic things are said to happen.”

    tags: magic

  • A shoplifter donned a women’s swimming costume to steal booze from a supermarket.

    Aurel Matei, admitted ‘going equipped’ by wearing the one-piece outfit.

    Security guards spotted Matei and a friend behaving suspiciously. Police were called and Matei was found to be wearing the costume underneath his clothes, as well as carrying a pair of pliers.

    Claire Marsh, prosecuting, said the costumes had been specially adapted to help the men stash stolen items.

    She said: “Police found a swimsuit under his clothes, adapted with a hole in the front.”

    tags: crime

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.


Daily Blog 11/09/2011

  • A premature obituary is an obituary published whose subject is not actually deceased. Examples of premature obituaries range from that of arms manufacturer Alfred Nobel, whose premature obituary condemning him as a “merchant of death” may have caused him to create the Nobel Prize,[1] to black nationalist Marcus Garvey, whose actual death was apparently caused by reading his own obituary.[2]

    This article lists the recipients of incorrect death reports (not just formal obituaries) from publications, media organisations, official bodies, and widely-used information sources such as the Internet Movie Database; but not mere rumours of deaths. People who were presumed (though not categorically declared) to be dead, and joke death reports that were widely believed, are also included.

    tags: obituary

  • This is an incomplete list of unsolved murders in the UK. Victims believed to have been murdered by the same perpetrator(s) are grouped together. This does not include the 1,500 unsolved murders in Northern Ireland during the Troubles.

    tags: Murder

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.


The Professionals 2

I’m currently working my way through The Professionals on dvd, courtesy of Lovefilm. I’m surprised how many of the episodes I’ve already seen, I’m almost at the end of the second series and there’s only been one episode I’d never seen any part of before. This was the Klansmen episode, which never aired in the UK, supposedly because of some fairly racist language (as the story was about racism).

But the question that bugs me in every episode is- what’s that clip in the title sequence of the car smashing through a window from? So far it’s definitely not from any of the episodes. I have the weirdest feeling it’s from something Sweeney related.


Daily Blog 11/08/2011

  • The findings of the psychologist Daniel Kahneman, winner of a Nobel economics prize, are devastating to the beliefs that financial high-fliers entertain about themselves. He discovered that their apparent success is a cognitive illusion. For example, he studied the results achieved by 25 wealth advisers across eight years. He found that the consistency of their performance was zero. “The results resembled what you would expect from a dice-rolling contest, not a game of skill.” Those who received the biggest bonuses had simply got lucky.

    Such results have been widely replicated. They show that traders and fund managers throughout Wall Street receive their massive remuneration for doing no better than would a chimpanzee flipping a coin. When Kahneman tried to point this out, they blanked him. “The illusion of skill … is deeply ingrained in their culture.”

    tags: banks Economics

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.


The M-65 280mm Atomic Artillery Gun

A piece of pure 1950s early Cold War madness. The cannon was originally developed to fire conventional warheads but someone must have decided that the best way to halt, or at least slow, the hordes of Russian tanks that were expected to roll into West Germany was to toss low yield nukes at them. It wouldn’t matter how much the area was contaminated, at least it wouldn’t be Commie, dammit.

There’s a part of me that would like to write a technothriller style tale of a conflict involving some of the madder weapons from the Cold War era. These guns, Vulcan bombers, Ekranoplan etc. Of course, the hard part would be resisting the urge to romanticise all that awesome tech and ignore the rather horrible effects of its use.

via this review of a Revell reissue of a model of the gun.


Daily Blog 11/05/2011

  • Gold­man Sachs, which re­ceived more sub­si­dies and bailout-re­lated funds than any other in­vest­ment bank be­cause the Fed­eral Re­serve per­mit­ted it to be­come a bank hold­ing com­pany under its “emer­gency sit­u­a­tion,” has used bil­lions in tax­payer money to en­rich it­self and re­ward its top ex­ec­u­tives. It handed its se­nior em­ploy­ees a stag­ger­ing $18 bil­lion in 2009, $16 bil­lion in 2010 and $10 bil­lion in 2011 in mega-bonuses. This mas­sive trans­fer of wealth up­wards by the Bush and Obama ad­min­is­tra­tions, now es­ti­mated at $13 tril­lion to $14 tril­lion, went into the pock­ets of those who car­ried out fraud and crim­i­nal ac­tiv­ity rather than the vic­tims who lost their jobs, their sav­ings and often their homes.

    tags: banks OccupyWallStreet

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.


Daily Blog 11/04/2011

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Daily Blog 11/03/2011

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Daily Blog 11/02/2011

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.