faceinperil.com

From this story… 

An image of a mysterious human-like creature on Mars … blah, blah, blah … circulated the Internet … blah, blah, blah … alien prescence on Mars…blah, blah, blah…WAIT! Check this awesome hi-res picture the rover took of Martian landscape!

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On Aug. 11, 2001 MV Windoc had a road bridge drop on it in the Welland Canal. The bridge completely ripped off the freighter’s superstructure and smokestack. The ship caught fire and the accommodation was burned out. There were no injuries.

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Think back to 1999 for a second.

Picture the cover of Britney Spears’ debut disc, “…Baby one More Time.” It featured an 18-year old Spears’ in full barely-legal mode. She is sitting back on her knees with a short jean skirt on. It’s pulled up by her posture toward her hips and even rolls up just a bit. Beyond it is Spears’ shrouded womanhood. She has a teen-ager’s smile across her pretty face and the entire scene is set to straddle the fence between virginal and tawdry. There was enough shown for horny old men to make up the rest. There wasn’t enough for anyone to make substantial accusations. Everyone knew what it was saying but it just didn’t come close enough to be blatant exploitation.

That was the brilliance of her producers. They were selling sex and adults to kids but they weren’t so in our face about it. They set the “Baby One More Time” video in a school house but wardrobed and choreographed it with a more adult-oriented theme. The lyrics were sexual but they could interpreted to be about love or sex. It’s an old trick.

Britney did some interviews but was mostly portrayed as just a young girl coping with stardom. But in the interviews, to those who noticed, it seemed that this pop star, this international icon of America, might be a shade of crazy white trash. Perhaps it was the Louisiana accent that slipped through or perhaps the paparazzi photos of her on off days. But people knew.

Like her cooter on that first album cover, Britney’s soul was shrouded in shadows. But to those who could fill in the blanks, it was becoming more clear. Her handlers must have sensed it. They let her show some more skin, and when they did some more Kentwood-upbringing began to emerge. Her outfits were getting smaller and her personality was becoming more erratic.

Somewhere along the way she officially lost the veil of virginity and by 2002 she was smooching with Madonna on the VMAs and wearing slutwear and hooking up with trash deity Kevin Federline and squeezing out boys with glorious redneck names like Sean Preston and Jayden James.

Of course, by this time Spears had already posed naked or mostly naked for the several magazines but always coyly kept her breasts and vagina from view.

But like her cooter, her soul was getting closer and closer to revealing itself in full. She would be seen munching on junk food in a trucker cap and discussing time travel with a pure Mississippi Delta region Southern accent in a conversation in which Kevin Federline inexplicably become the voice of reason.

And then it happened, both Britney’s soul and her cooter popped out for all the world to see in November 2006 (NSFW). That cooter, which millions had fantasized about seven years earlier, was exposed in all its rode-hard-and-put-away-wet glory. And with its exposure came the end of any mystery. She was truly a white trash queen.

So intertwined are Britney’s soul and her cooter that shortly after its hairless folds were shown to America, Britney mimicked its baldness by shaving her own head in a Los Angeles hair salon. And it was in that one maniacal act that her entire facade came down and was exposed not unlike the cooter was exposed earlier. The soul and the cooter were united.

Since then Britney, her soul and her cooter have been through a lot. She’s lost custody of her kids. She’s been sleeping around in LA. The cooter made an encore. She may even be pregnant again.

There’s no going back now. It isn’t 1999 and the cooter has gone from the dark shadows to full illumination via flashbulbs. She can’t shroud that cooter any more. It’s the window to her soul and we’ve all seen it now.

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“The patient places his or her good limb into one side, and the stump into the other. The patient then looks into the mirror on the side with good limb and makes “mirror symmetric” movements, as a symphony conductor might, or as we do when we clap our hands. Because the subject is seeing the reflected image of the good hand moving, it appears as if the phantom limb is also moving.”
Mirror box

“When lock bumping, the key is initially placed one notch out along the keyway. Bumping the key inward forces it deeper into the keyway. The specially designed teeth of the bump key jiggle all of the pins in the lock. The key pins transmit this force to the driver pins. Because the pin movements are highly elastic, the driver pins separate from the key pins for a split second and are then pushed back by the spring. Even though this separation only lasts a split second, if a light force is applied to the key, the cylinder can be turned and the lock can be closed.”
Lock bumping

“Umami, which has been known by Eastern civilizations for years, was recently brought to the forefront of Western awareness by Drs. Stephen Roper and Nirupa Chaudhari, researchers at the University of Miami, when they identified the actual taste receptor responsible for the sense of umami, a modified form of mGluR4, in which the end of the molecule is missing. Roper and Chaudhari named it “taste-mGluR4.”
Umami

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Or something similar?

Man Trying To Escape Police Killed By Gator.

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I read this post on luxury airships a while back on Advanced Nanotechnology and was thrilled. These are the dreams of our forefathers. Unfortunately, those dreams went down in flames right?

Then yesterday I came across this interesting video on the Internet. Perhaps they are testing it already?

Lockheed Martin Turbo Super Blimp

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The Onion’s AV Club created a good list of books that need to made into films:

If you film it…: 21 good books that need to be great films, like now

I was surprised not to see One Hundred Years of Solitude on the list. I don’t think it will ever be a good movie, and maybe that was the editor’s thoughts as well. There are really a few Gabrial Garcia Marquez books that would make great films. Love in the Time of Cholera and Chronicle of a Death Foretold come to mind.

At least the list was made by someone who put a little thought into it and it isn’t some revisionist shiat like we see so many times on the Web.

On the subject of movies being made into books. I may be actually leaving my house to go to a real theater (something I haven’t done in two years). Not only that, I may be doing it three times in one month. Here’s what I am looking forward to in November:

Beowulf - Nov. 16
It could very well suck but Crispin Glover is playing Grendel and Angelina Jolie is playing his mom so, gotta see it ya know?

No Country For Old Men - Nov. 21
It’s going to be interesting to see how Joel and Ethan adapt McCarthy’s moods and landscapes. the brothers have excelled in the past and creating complete moods for their work. I wonder if they will try to adapt the author’s sinister landscapes or create one of their own.

The Mist - Nov. 21
I haven’t read Stephen King for a long time but The Mist was one of my favorites growing up. when i rea dit, i played it out in my head much like a film.

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At present this page attempts to list all the living descendants of Frederick, Prince of Wales (great-grandson of Electress Sophia) who are in line of succession, as well as some of the living descendants of Frederick’s sister Anne. Those living descendants known not to be in the line of succession are included in italics as skipped, this is usually due to Catholicism of the persons or their spouses.
Line of succession to the British Throne

“The airframe is a Boeing 747-200 aircraft specially built to serve as a survivable mobile command post for the National Command Authorities (the President of the United States and the Secretary of Defense, and successors). Other support staff would board the aircraft such as members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The original primary purpose of the aircraft was to provide a survivable platform to conduct war operations in the event of a nuclear attack. Early in the operations of the E-4 series, the media dubbed the aircraft as ‘the doomsday planes.’ ”
Boeing_E-4

“For more than 1,000 years, the inhabitants of Oxyrhynchus dumped garbage at a series of sites out in the desert sands beyond the town limits. The fact that the town was built on a canal rather than on the Nile itself was important, because this meant that the area did not flood every year with the rising of the river, as did the districts along the riverbank. When the canals dried up, the water table fell and never rose again. The area west of the Nile has virtually no rain, so the garbage dumps of Oxyrhynchus were gradually covered with sand and were forgotten for another 1,000 years.”
Oxyrhynchus

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As a huge drinker and, ahem, connoisseur, of malt liquor in my younger years, I find this enthralling…
The ole 40 oz archive

From the Web master: ‘Yesterday at the flea market I picked up a small cosmetics case stuffed with photos almost all of which were of the same woman. The bulk of the photos were photobooths and portraits documenting her as she aged over the course of about 50 years or so.’
‘The Boat Lullabies’

A short description of a horrific suppressed episode of ‘Alfred Hitchcock Presents.’ Via Snopes.
The Sorcerer’s Apprentice

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When I first read the CNN headline (Bounty hunter ‘Dog’ taped spewing N-word” - video), I thought, hmm, let’s check this out. let’s see what the context was. Did he say it while talking about it’s use? Or did he say it to knowingly address black people in a derogatory manner?

Well, after listening to the audio in the link above. I can say without much doubt that he is indeed a raciist sumbitch! There’s no way to contextualize the words:

It’s not because she’s black. It’s because we sometimes use the word n—-r around here.

Pretty cut and dry there right? But wait!

I’m not going to take the chance of losing everything I’ve worked for 30 years because some f—–g n—–r, heard us say n—–r and turned us in to the Enquirer Magazine. Our career is over. I’m not going to take that chance at all.

A. You just ruined your career for being dumb enough to think that hearsay is some how going to do more damage than your VOICE ON TAPE.

B. I think it’s safe to say anytime someone uses the n-word followed by the f-word, in the manner in which Chapman did, it’s pretty damn racist.

Looks like Dog needs to get Jesse Jackson over to Hawaii so the Bounty Hunter can “apologize.”

Anyway, cheers to the Enquirer for making a comeback to relevance and making a huge splash in the Internet era. I hate tabloids, but I pull them over cheesy celeb blogs. Of course, Weekly World News was the bible.

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