Festive Friday Roundup!

– Those wacky Brits! I was all excited by the headline “British royalty dined on human flesh“, only to find that the actual article talks about how various human body parts were used as medicine. Mummies were ground up as powder to cure… something or the other, moss taken from dead soldier’s skulls was used to treat nosebleeds, that sort of thing. It’s an interesting article, but wasn’t quite the “Charles I feasting on leg of peasant” I’d imagined.

– You know who is pretty enough to eat? Yasmin Le Bon, who’s still got it at 46.

– Hey look! Scientists in Canada have apparently cured cancer, but no one cares! [insert “Big Pharma can’t make money off this so they’ll suppress it” conspiracy theory here.]

– And look! Farmers in China applied a “growth accelerator” called forchlorfenuron to their watermelons. Only they applied it much too late, so now much of China’s watermelon crop is exploding.

– Guess what, Americans? The Supreme Court ruled that cops don’t need a warrant to search your house! And the Indiana Supreme Court recently ruled that citizens do not have a right to resist illegal entry by the police into their homes. Wonderful. Way to overturn 800 years worth of common law, Indiana!

– Perhaps the folks in Indiana will begin pay homage to their Fearless Leaders, like Saparmurat Niyazov, president of Turkmenistan. Niyazov “had his parliament officially name him Turkmenbashi, ‘father of all Turkmens’, named streets, schools, airports, farms, and people after himself, as well as vodka, a meteorite, the country’s second largest city, and a television channel, banned the Hippocratic oath and demanded that doctors swear allegiance to him” and had a 40-foot gold statue built of himself. Nice!

– A dog in British Columbia survived a fall after being dropped from a considerable height by an eagle or some other bird of prey. It all worked out well for”Miracle May”, as she’s being called: the stray was apparently in poor health when the bird attacked her. She fell to the ground near a nursing home, and the residents took her to a shelter. When news of her story hit the media, donations poured in, and now May’s making a full recovery.

– Work in a dingy office? Use an Altoids tin to create a mini garden!

– Check out Christian Schallert’s crazy, 258 SQUARE FOOT apartment in Barcelona! It’s a bit too cramped for me, but I’ve gotta admire the guy’s ingenuity in getting that much stuff crammed in to such a small space:

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