Some news you may have missed.

A woman upset when police seized her three preserved snakes stormed into the Hamilton station and threw a jar of pickled kittens at the counter.

...

Hoskyn said the snakes, which she bought from an antique store, held special spiritual significance for her because she was born in the year of the snake and used them to help to celebrate Halloween.

She also kept the two kittens for Halloween celebrations, using them to give the house a scary look.

The kittens were still-born from the couple's cat.

Police communications manager Kris McGehan said that although the encounter sounded amusing, it had serious consequences.

"The jar shattered. It was full of formaldehyde, which is highly toxic. The public counter had to be closed, which caused police and the public a lot of inconvenience.

"Two phones had to be replaced and we had to monitor the health of staff who may have absorbed the chemical or its fumes."

...

Hoskyn said her trouble began on Sunday when she had an argument with her partner, Tony.

"I slipped over and cut my head, Tony panicked and called an ambulance, thinking he had caused my injury. He hadn't.

"Police were called, we think by the ambulance people. While outside they saw two cannabis plants and decided under the Misuse of Drugs Amendment Act they could search the house.

"I was taken away by ambulance and Tony was arrested. When they searched the house they came across my two snakes, preserved in jars."

The snakes were taken away by the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries.

Here's something fun - a multi-user interactive flash game for moving letters about. Futilely try to write greetings while others steal your letters! Have fun preventing adolescent half-wits spelling out racial slurs! Think outside the square - maybe you can use that pair of L's to do a little leg-puppet dance! But do something interesting and don't bogart the site- it's limited to 75 users at once and OTHER PEOPLE WANT THEIR BLOODY TURN!!!

Get happy! Here's a cut-up of George W. Bush singing Sunday Bloody Sunday, over at Audio Street; or go straight to the artists' site: The Party Party. Toe-tapping, soul-chilling fun.

The inevitable Apologies Accepted website.

Number Stations

Being strange short-wave radio frequencies on which lists of numbers are broadcasted - almost certainly espionage related. Now available on CD.

NPR Report

The Conet Project

Zoomquilt
Tres cool. Probably not dial-up friendly.

Part of America Apologises

This is what you are.

A collection of man-hole covers

Hey, it's what you wanted!

What is it with geeks and cats?

It all began innocently enough when a user on an Apple help forum posted a picture of his cat, Frankie, contemplating the beauty of a flower. Shortly afterwards another user posted a picture of his cat bristling at the image of Frankie on the monitor. I decided this was too much fun and advanced the concept as The Infinite Cat Project which is, simply, cats regarding cats regarding cats in an electronic melieu.

And a small compendium of backmasking.

Feeling poor? Hah! If you can read this, you're a rich bastard and here's your proof.

And here's a more comprehensive method of working out how quickly you are hastening our fair planet to its doom.

Enjoy!

Perhaps I'm easily amused

The Poor Man and their comments thread explore a meme

For those of you who never visit boingboing (or The Guardian)

Police in Paris have discovered a fully equipped cinema-cum-restaurant in a large and previously uncharted cavern underneath the capital's chic 16th arrondissement.

...

After entering the network through a drain next to the Trocadero, the officers came across a tarpaulin marked: Building site, No access.

Behind that, a tunnel held a desk and a closed-circuit TV camera set to automatically record images of anyone passing. The mechanism also triggered a tape of dogs barking, "clearly designed to frighten people off," the spokesman said.

Further along, the tunnel opened into a vast 400 sq metre cave some 18m underground, "like an underground amphitheatre, with terraces cut into the rock and chairs".

There the police found a full-sized cinema screen, projection equipment, and tapes of a wide variety of films, including 1950s film noir classics and more recent thrillers. None of the films were banned or even offensive, the spokesman said.

A smaller cave next door had been turned into an informal restaurant and bar. "There were bottles of whisky and other spirits behind a bar, tables and chairs, a pressure-cooker for making couscous," the spokesman said.

"The whole thing ran off a professionally installed electricity system and there were at least three phone lines down there."

The Guardian 8 September 2004

There are, at most, 15 of them. Their ages range from 19 to 42, their professions from nurse to window dresser, mason to film director. And in a cave beneath the streets of Paris, they built a subterranean cinema whose discovery this week sent the city's police into a frenzy.

"They freaked out completely," Lazar, their spokesman, said happily. "They called in the bomb squad, the sniffer dogs, army security, the anti-terrorist squad, the serious crimes unit. They said it was skinheads or subversives. They got it on to national TV news. They hadn't a clue."

To be fair, until recently very few people did have a clue about La Mexicaine de la Perforation, a clandestine cell of "urban explorers" which claims its mission is to "reclaim and transform disused city spaces for the creation of zones of expression for free and independent art".

...

The cinema, with restaurant and bar annexe, was open for a seven-week season this summer, showing a suitably subversive programme which included works by Chinese and Korean directors but also Alex Proyas' Dark City, Coppola's Rumble Fish, David Lynch's Eraserhead, and Terry Gilliam's Brazil.

It was constructed in a series of interconnected caves totalling some 400 square metres beneath the Palais de Chaillot, across the Seine from the Eiffel tower. Former quarries, they were partly refurbished during the 1900 Universal Exposition when one of the galleries was clad with concrete to represent a future Channel tunnel and a wall was artfully terraced.

But the caves were sealed off for the last time at least 20 years ago and subsequently "ceased to exist officially", Lazar said. "We knew them well because we used them to get into the Palais de Chaillot every Bastille Day. The roof is the perfect place from which to watch the fireworks."

Indeed most of the LMDP's underground happenings are organised in places the city authorities are not aware of, he added. "There are so many underground networks - the quarries, the metro, the collective heating, the electricity, the sewers - and each is the responsibility of a different bureaucracy," he said.

"Urban explorers are the only people who, between us, know it all. We move between each network. We know where they link up - often, it's us who made the link. The authorities, the police, town hall, they don't know a hundredth, a thousandth, of what's down there."

Building a fully functioning subterranean cinema was, the LMDP admits, a more than usually stiff challenge. The project took some 18 months to complete, though most of the hard work - including shifting a large pile of rubble off the terraces, and shoring up a couple of walls - was done in three or four weekends.

With their long experience of such matters, the group's technicians had little difficulty piping in electricity and phone lines.

The Guardian 11 September 2004

Apropos of the above: some urban exploration related sites

Zone Tour

Spelunking the Empire of Death

Berlin Underground

Infiltration.org

Action Squad - Minneapolis

Cave Clan - Australia

Jinx Magazine

Sleepy City Photos

The Fabulous Ruins of Detroit

A bunch more sites at the Urban Exploration Ring

And apropos of sod-all:

The Internet is Psychic

Have Some Π

Sorry, those two were the lamest I could find.

The Budgie Research Group

One of the real problems with the Internet is you can never be entirely sure if someone's taking the piss even when it's hard to believe a sane person couldn't be doing anything else.

That's only one of the problems, though. Vaya con dios!

Some games:

The Skeleton Shop's A Murder of Scarecrows

A selection of games from TONYPA "Bars", "Pixelfield" & "Spots" are most diverting

Build-Your-Own Slot-car Racetrack and Race 'Em

Orisinal Games Gloriously designed, uberkawaii games from Ferry Halim

Have I mentioned Sodaplay before?

NationStates An on-line text based "strategy" game from Jennifer Government author Max Barry

An unnecessarily groovy version of the old memory game

The Crimson Room
The Viridian Room
The Blue Chamber
Seeing you got to these late, you should be able to google up some tips on how to solve the bloody things

Other ould shite:

Toogle Uses Google Image Search to create text mosaics (careful - the image search is unfiltered, so steel yourself for potential anomalous results produced by seemingly innocuous words like "bear" or "pork")

Archive of US Presidential Election TV Ads All your favourites: "Vote for Goldwater and He'll Nuke This Little Girl", "Vote for Dukakis and He'll Let This Scary Black Man Rape Your Family" and More!

Pax vobiscum.

Sorry, went out on June 30th for a bottle of raspberry schnapps to go with a Kirk Cameron video marathon and after that July was a bit of a blur. Although, I do dimly recall hanging from the awning of the Bondi Masonic Centre chanting "There is no goat but Ally Sheedy and Moe Szyslak is her small orange time-travelling friend!"

OK, that's a lie. My life isn't that interesting. And neither is yours what with this paltrey selection on offer:

One Minute Vacations A collection of soundscapes from around the world

Dale Chihuly Glassworks Just very beautiful

How Much of An Earth-Destroying Bastard Are You? One of them global-footprint calculators, as provided by the Victorian Department of the Environment, who clearly feel you don't have enough guilt in your life

English Dialects By 'eck, yarr, a goodly selection of Brit accents, guvnor

Artist on Acid Trip Notes from a U.S. government experiment

All Those Moody FoxNews Memos As saved by Wonkette

All Those My Pet Goat Reviews As saved by S.Z. at Sadly, No!

Oh, and here's something you don't see every day - Will Ferrell Being Funny

And life goes on.

Things that really annoy me lately:

George Brandis
Piers Akermann

The ABC for giving both of these repellent idiots airtime on Insiders.

The boiling blood wakes me up of a Sunday morning, though.

I bother so you don't have to.

Cthulhu for President "Why settle for a lesser evil?"

How to Dance Properly My colleague found this. He has the right priorities.

Rumsfeld Fighting Technique "You may have defeated my Southern Hook Palm technique, but can you defeat the 1000 styles of Rumsfeld?"

The Exorcist as performed by Bunnies Ah, the internet. The guys at DARPA must be so proud.

Men Who Look Like Kenny Rogers So very proud.

Baby Got Back in Latin "Domina mea exstat a tergo! My mistress stands out behind!"

The Melonheads The site of these Francophone web-designers features many pleasing animations but not their now famous version of the Beatles' Come Together which you should be able to find at this site until it gets slashdotted like all the others did. Don't bother clicking if your broadband ain't ticking. OK, I'm copyrighting that - hands off!

Mummy, Mummy, I Want A Fetus! I wonder if these plush-toy makers started this whole enterprise just so they could name one Cletus.

World's Smallest Website That's it's name, don't wear it out.

Having some kind of fun at bash.org, a collection of amusing quotes from the IRC forums.

<tag> Ouroboros: lets play Pong
<Ouroboros> Ok.
<tag> |    .
<Ouroboros> .    |
<tag> | .
<Ouroboros>    . |
<tag> | .
<Ouroboros>      | .
<Ouroboros> Whoops

With luck, my next find will be even more old-hat.

The Datadoctor (Some Swedish Geek Humour)

How to Defraggle your Motherdisc

...

Now we will the discs inside of the mother disc. Very often they'll need some force to come off, but if you pry gently with some datachisels, it'll will work out for the best.

...

Now it's time for the main event, the data defraggling. As You know, all "1's" and "0's" are small moveable magnetic figures placed in the disc. As our problem is that there is some kind of a traffic jam on the disc, we will now place them small pieces in order again. The ultimate way to go is to use an ordinary speaker ... Put the disc carefully on top of the speaker. Be sure not do any violent moves, we don't want the magnetic pieces to go beezerk.

Give, you f*cker!

The Children's Hospital at Westmead has been accused of an inadequate response by a woman who received an obscene and abusive letter after declining to make a donation to its charity.

The letter, which gave the incorrect impression it had been signed by the chairman of the Oncology Children's Foundation, Col Reynolds, OAM, was sent to Jillian Blake a month ago.

It was addressed to Mrs "J. F---face", a term which was repeated twice more in the letter.

...

Dated April 13, 2004, it read: "Dear Mrs F---face. Ten years ago, specialists at The Children's Hospital at Westmead pleaded with me to help raise funds for medical research."

It went on to invite her to support the charity and "double your chances of winning one of our fabulous prizes".

The Completely Pointless Personality Quiz - a joke

Bow Man - a game

Mandala - a doodling thingy

How empty your life would be.

Without me.

Yeah, I'm still breathing. Apropos of nothing, here's a report about Anton Chekov's book-signing appearance at Barnes and Noble.

“Hello, my friends. I am so happy to be here with you in New York City. I arrived in this country only last Sunday and your dynamic, young president welcomed me to America by inviting me to the White House and presenting me a gift. In Russia we have a custom of exchanging gifts. If someone gives you a gift you should have something to give them. I had no suspicion that the president of the United States would give me a gift and so I had nothing to give him. When I opened the box and found this cowboy hat, I cleverly realized that if I had a new hat I would not need my old fedora, which, as everyone knows is synonymous with Chekov. My trademark hat. I removed my fedora, signed it with my autograph and presented it to the president. He accepted in most graciously. I was feeling very clever. He then turned to his aid and said, ‘Put this on the shelf next to Putin’s signed hat’. Putin… Putin… Putin is an idiot, a nincompoop. I actually did the same thing that idiot did, and the other nincompoop did it first. ”

And a link to the Jesus Action Figure site. Have your fun, benighted infidels!

When people recognise me, I am struck with fear. Have I attracted the attention of the equally mediocre? Only genius is unrecognised.

Alcohol can make life seem interesting, and others seem fascinating. This is why it is associated so heavily with delusional disorders.

The scenario: I recently attended a dinner function wherein I was reintroduced to at least four people whom I had met before. I had spent at least 6 hours in each of their company at one time or another in groups of 6 or less. One of them actually remembered seeing me before and another almost remembered my name. A chap who I had met half an hour earlier when we were the only people in the room, and whose name I now knew as a result of said meeting, came up to me and said 'Have we met?'.
The question: Is my very essence that of unremarkableness? Am I a mere kernel in the silo, unnoticed as an individual and yet part of the whole? Is it the lack of the shared group experience? Or is it the alcohol?

I have noticed that people, once they have had one or two drinks start to find almost anything interesting. In this I am clearly at a social disadvantage, as I rarely drink. Perhaps this is why I have great difficulty with 'small talk'. I suspect that a blood alcohol level as low as 0.03 makes the most inane and limp jape, jest or jibe into comedy gold. I shall have to investigate this phenomenon at length

Ooh flamey!

The usual paltry selection:

A wacky business site - do we really need to go to this much trouble to sell paper bags?

Imaginary Girlfriends - all the self-validation of a real girlfriend without ... a real girlfriend

Foreign Leaders for Kerry - a site which once again demonstrates why "right-wing satire" is a contradiction in terms. Or a tautology.

R. Robot - the world's first self-writing weblog

Precious Moments Chapel - the Lord giveth in spades

The Architecture of Roger Dean - if I've only one life, let me live it as a gnome

Russian Nesting Dolls - a wide variety on offer. Apparently these were actually invented by the Japanese; yet more internet-provided disillusionment for yours truly.

Synonyms for Wanking - reasonably safe for work, but be careful what links you click

Video Arcade Rip-offs - more geek history

And, via Wonkette and those wonderful people at Republican headquarters:

The Best of the Sloganator

Once again, the broadband-challenged should probably avoid wasting their time.

Oh, and in keeping with our "motif" - here's some backmasking exposed:

Satan Has A Toolshed

That oughta hold the SOBs.