Today I encountered a line of beauty products with the curious name of Voluspa.
Question: Was the name chosen at random, simply because it contains the three letters “spa?” Or is there a plan for a whole advertising campaign: “Pamper yourself like Freyja on the eve of Ragnarök?”
America just doesn’t take its elections seriously enough. Our last two elections, we got about 55% of the voting-age population going to the polls, and that was unusually high.
Now take a look at Iran. Why, in some towns, their voter turnout was as high as 141%. Now that’s a country that takes its democracy seriously.
Based on the current best measurements of the large-scale structure of the universe, 73% of the total mass-energy is cosmological constant, a.k.a. dark energy; of the remainder, 90% is dark matter of various sorts. The remainder is 90% intergalactic gas, and the rest luminous matter.
For short: 97% of the universe is poorly understood; 3% is hot air; and the rest is on fire.
Any resemblance to other projects is purely coincidental, I promise.
(Slightly NSFW, but this is a reputable newspaper)
Apparently HM Treasury really is run by a wunch of bankers. Who, it must be said, can treat their situation with good humor:
“It is true that it caused a few titters among some staff when viewed on its side, but on consideration we concluded that the effect was generic to the particular combination of the letters OGC – and it is not inappropriate to an organisation that’s looking to have a firm grip on Government spend.”
A lovely article in The Register describing a recent debate in the House of Lords about the airline liquids ban. To quote:
“We continuously monitor the effectiveness of, in particular, the liquid security measures…”
How, one might ask? But hold on:
“The fact that there has not been a serious incident involving liquid explosives indicates, I would have thought, that the measures that we have put in place so far have been very effective.”
Ah, that’s how. On which basis the measures against asteroid strike, alien invasion and unexplained nationwide floods of deadly boiling custard have also been remarkably effective.
So they think! Once my Automated Ovinator is complete, all the roads in England will be transformed into Lemon Custard! And then I’ll show them all! Wahahahaha!
Via gleemie, from “Jihad: The Musical!” — just closed at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival —
“I Wanna Be Like Osama”
From Reuters, a story about a fundraiser. Starts off innocently enough:
A planned Republican fundraiser in New Hampshire aims to promote gun ownership in America by letting supporters fire powerful military-style weapons — from Uzi submachine guns to M-16 rifles.
But:
Local Democrats say the event is in poor taste amid a spike in violent crime in Manchester and seeks to glorify the use of machine guns for political gain.
It took me a moment to parse that last sentence correctly.
(I know I should be writing about politics now, but that’s going to be an extremely involved post)
Media companies are getting antsy about Web companies, as you’ve probably heard. At a recent conference, various representatives of the media talked about this. The quote that caught my eye was:
“The Googles of the world, they are the Custer of the modern world. We are the Sioux nation,” Time Warner Inc. Chief Executive Richard Parsons said, referring to the Civil War American general George Custer who was defeated by Native Americans in a battle dubbed “Custer’s Last Stand”.
“They will lose this war if they go to war,” Parsons added, “The notion that the new kids on the block have taken over is a false notion.”
I wonder if Parsons is aware of how that war ultimately turned out for the Sioux?
Yonatan Zunger’s Blog 