This is it – the footage from SKYNEWS that everyone is talking about – showing the most insane visuals of the tragic March 2011 earthquake in Japan. Starting with a solid wall of water out in the ocean, crashing into land and destroying everything in its path; visuals include entire villages getting flattened, aerial views […]
News is depressing today, so let’s look at this. GM commissioned the construction of a life-size replica of their Chevrolet Orlando, soon to be launched in the UK; they used about 1000kg of clay to build it over a course of two weeks. It’ll be on display in Essex for a couple more days.
I think this might be the best excuse ever. No, really. A Canadian man claims that he only visited child porn websites in order to gather information to send to the authorities. He also downloaded 4 400 images in an attempt to prevent others from doing so – because, you know, once you download something from the internet no one else can.
A magnitude 8.9 earthquake off the coast of Japan has triggered an immensely destructive tsunami at 14h46 local time. Footage has been shown of cars, ships and buildings being swept away in Onahama city. Officials said a wave as high as 6m could strike the coast.
Saeed Yare is a dollar multi-millionaire and I am not. The difference between us: I am but a lowly writer and he is a pirate.
In a press conference in Dharamsala, India, His Holiness the Dalai Lama announced that he’d be stepping down as political leader of the Tibetan government in exile, to make way for an elected representative. He will be retaining his position as Tibet’s spiritual leader.
In typical Pakistani/ Bangladeshi style, the good people of Bangladesh have seen it fit to stone the house of their captain Shakib Al Hasan, after their humiliating defeat to the West Indies in the World Cup.
Have you ever walked on a road with your bare feet in summertime, and noticed how much heat the tar holds? That heat is an expression of solar energy, received from the sun, held in the conducive asphalt, and radiated back on to your toes. We’re wasting that energy, but hopefully for not much longer.
Well, I mean not totally – it’s the evidence found on Facebook as grounds for the dissolution of marriage which causes 20% of all divorce cases in the US, but still. Big number. Increasingly, social networking sites form the primary source of evidence in custody battles and divorce proceedings, so heads up.
After the earthquake that hit New-Zealand last month the Canterbury Crusaders have been left without a home venue, as it’s in pretty bad shape. So the Crusaders asked the Sharks if they’d be keen to play the game in London instead.
Aside from hunting, interbreeding and kicking back in caves, looks like our ancestors were totally into hallucinogenics. Researchers have been analysing cave paintings in Spain, and have come to the conclusion that our long lost relatives weren’t adverse to dabbling with ‘magic mushrooms’ from time to time.
Wow. Okay. So a Swedish company wants to make burials more eco-friendly by freezing dead people in liquid nitrogen, using sound waves to shatter the ice before drawing all the moisture out of the remains with a vacuum. Because the Swedish word for ‘eco-friendly’ also means ‘traumatic’ and ‘awesome.’
Fearing for his life, Mr. Timothy James Chapek locked himself in the bathroom of a house he’d broken into and dialed 911. He told the operator that he had broken into the house and that he was afraid that the owner may have a gun.
So hey, congrats to all you non-male, non-Chinese folks who were worried about looking average! Because according to a decade’s worth of research by the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing for National Geographic, a 28-year-old Han Chinese male is the mean. Numbers, explanation after the jump.
In support of Equal Payday, which seeks to address the disparity between male and female salaries around the world, Benny Benassi has remade the sexy-construction-outfits video for ‘Satisfaction’ to mark International Women’s Day. It’s a little bit amazing. Satisfaction came out in 2002, by the way.
To commemorate the occasion NASA held a competition to determine which two songs will be played during Discovery’s last mission.
The theme From Star Trek was chosen and William Shatner, who as you know played Captain James Tiberius Kirk in the original series, did a special voice-over.
This new footage, which has just been leaked, shows an NYPD helicopter’s perspective of the event. The video was obtained under the Freedom of Information Act as part of an investigation into 9/11. Interestingly, actual footage of either of the towers collapsing has been removed. Do I smell a conspiracy?
Due to the growing occurrence of ‘Facebook suicides’ a help system has been put in place, which allows users concerned about potentially suicidal friends to report the activity to Facebook, which will trigger a hotline response reaching out to the depressed party.
In what has got to be an all-time low for human nature, people in the township of Umlazi in KwaZulu Natal have to live in fear of being robbed of their anti-retroviral drugs. According to a BBC report, gangs in the settlement are mugging people for their ARVs, which they then use to lace joints, apparently to increase their high.
I mean don’t get me wrong, I’d want a robot clone too, it’s just not totally clear why Henrik Scharfe, professor at Aalborg University, actually got one assembled by the Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute in Japan. It’s ostensibly the first android with a beard, though, so yay science.
How is this for Monday awesomeness? That flying house from Up! has been recreated and all it took was three hundred weather balloons full of helium. The house floated about three kilometers into the air for about an hour. More pics inside.
Brazilian ad agency Loducca has put together a collection of geo-tagged street art from Google Street View for Red Bull. The site is sweetly designed, with decent Cape Town representation. How exactly this is going to sell Red Bell any caffeinated beverages is beyond me, but whatever.
Everyone knows that cricket players only play cricket to enable their true passion in life: the scoring of chicks. Cricket players are even better at scoring chicks than rugby players: Fact!
Just when you thought the institution of marriage couldn’t become more of a joke, now you can get out of one at the price of dinner and a movie. Thanks to the internet, you can now file for divorce without having to log out of your latest quest on World Of Warcraft. What a pleasure.
Yesterday,social cyclists taking part in a Critical Mass event in Sao Paulo, Brazil, we’re struck and injured by a vehicle accelerating through the crowd of cyclists. How no one was killed in the process is mystifying, and the only bright spot on this whole affair. Police have arrested a suspect.
They can do that now. By ‘they’ I mean ‘those with money and de facto power,’ obviously, not specifically the heads of the PRC – but I mean government scrutiny of human movement is being implemented on a huge, huge scale. It’s called the Information Platform of Real-time Citizen Movement – which sounds like a good and reasonable platform.
Most of us have been hounded by debt collectors at some point in our lives, but I doubt anyone has ever had their debt scrapped because of it. Yet a judge in Britain set aside a debt of over R200,000 in an effort to reprimand collectors for “torturing” their customer.
Long-time 2oceansvibe readers will be aware of our mild allergy to offensive cyclists – you know, the chaps who cruise in to cafes on Saturday morning, sweat gushing from their epidermis, balls cupped by spandex, which are at eye level as they walk in. But we never said anyone should drive at full speed into a crowd of cyclists.
In the age of information, nothing can be kept in the dark anymore. These are the so called controversial Google Earth photos that initially set off Bahraini protests of inequality back in 2006. And when you see them, you’ll know why.
Well, I’m pretty proud of that headline. Cornell University and the French Culinary Institute have developed a food printer that runs off puree and spits out sculptures – like rocketships made of gouda and scallions. And now we can have coconut sans awful coconut texture.