Bob-a-job-alog-a-roonie

Long, lovely article, with DNA as evidence. In a nutshell:

* Anglo-Saxons did not wipe out the Celts of England

* The "Celts" were from Iberia (ie Basques), and to a lesser extent Normandy, Spain & Portugal , not from Germany

It seems that in all parts of the UK, the local blood has remained quite consistent, regardless of who invaded... So we of UK descent can call ourselves English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh with 80% accuracy, but need to accept that some of our very, very ancient blood is Basque. Better than German, I think personally.

You learn something new every day....

Until recently, magic mushrooms could be bought legally from over 400 stores in the UK. Although the government recently banned selling those containing the hallucinogens psilocybin and psilocin, you can still legally buy fly agaric (Amanita muscaria), which has a different active ingredient: muscimol.

BZP is legal in the UK & NZ (pending gov't reviews) - a cheap version of speed, with worse come-down effects and the high is not quite as good...but it is easy to obtain and LEGAL.

Also pending review, but legal in NZ & UK is Salvia divinorum, a powerful hallucinogenic herb. The journalist at New Scientist says the high is very wow.

The 32-year-old woman died in hospital Wednesday, a day after collapsing offstage during a Chubby Bunny competition.

The contest features people stuffing one marshmallow at a time into their mouth then saying "chubby bunny" until they can't say it anymore. The person who gags, chokes or spits out the marshmallows loses. More...

A potent reminder - do not do anything that God did not intend us to do.

Found this amazingly good idea at Half Bakery:

In addition to the regular PIN number (*), each bank card would have a second PIN number that would indicate the user was in some sort of distress (such as being forced to withdraw money at gunpoint). Use of this alternate PIN would summon the police and perhaps put the ATM's camera in a higher resolution and/or frame rate mode.

The panic PIN would otherwise function just like the regular PIN in that money could be gotten from the machine, so that the hostile party would not be able to tell that authorities had been called.

Quasimoto Quasicade - Officially added to my Xmas Wish List. Only $US3200 and 200kg, it will finalize my retro arcade fetish. I hardly play my plug-in-to-TV retro games, and I hardly play them on the PSP. If I don't play them on this, then I guess I've grown up... :(

Last week I forgot to put out our rubbish bins (aka garbage, trash, wheelie bins) - blame a big night out...

I did a lot of searching to find out where the nearest public tip is (Brooklyn) and did the right thing - drove there with the back of the car full of pooed-up nappies to taunt my hangover, paid $12 and dumped our week's rubbish.

I then emailed the council suggesting that they could link to the public tip, so people who err like me no where to take their trash.

A lady from the council phoned (!) to let me know that if I ever forget to put out the bins, just call them that day or the next morning, and they'll come back & pick it up!

So there you go, what a nice society we have here in the SouthEast of Australia :)

Hundreds expected to come to Masturbate-a-thon - Europe is so progressive!

I wrote about this in 1995 (see Greedy Rant), but it still makes sense to me, so here it is in a nutshell:

- Half the jobs we do in the western world are policing & accounting & sales
- In a small self-sufficient town, we mostly would have no need for those types of jobs
- If we stopped being so greedy, we'd each only need to work 20 hour weeks

Probably just a product of reading about a few artists who are dead/should be dead lately... Keef Richards, Warron Zevon, Johnny Cash.... combined with the reality of his recent near-demise... saw an ad for Bob Dylan's new album and the cover, and what I just said, lead me to believe he may pass from this world this coming weekend. (hopefully not!)