The Flamingo Of Infinite Beauty
"We need you to locate the fabled Flamingo Of Infinite Beauty." It wasn’t a job I’d normally take. The three Holy Grails? Yeah, I found them. The pair of crystal femurs rumoured lost in the Andean mountain collapse of 2115? I tracked that down too. You heard about the man who found Hitler’s moustache, of course? That was me too. I’m a finder. There’s a little archaeology thrown in there – well, you have to put something down on your universal visa or it’s endless questions in the customs oubliette – but history’s less important than cold, hard currency. But, as I said, this wasn’t the sort of job I’d usually take; these artefacts with odd-sounding names are always trouble. Then again, my clients were usually hypercorporations; you could say no to them safe in the knowledge that their anger or annoyance would be heavily diluted by fifteen meetings, fifty sub-meetings, and ninety analytical findings from the meetings and sub-meetings. Okay, you got me. I’ve no idea how hypercorporations operate. Yeah, but this client… this was the government. The government. And they’d been watching the old 2D shows on the Golden Olden Stream, just like me. Fedoras, long coats, shiny shoes, monotone instructions. "We need you to locate the fabled Flamingo Of Infinite Beauty. It’ll be easy for someone of your reputation." The government asks so the government gets; isn’t that what a government’s for? Anyway, I asked the usual suspects and read the usual information streams and drew an unusual blank. That’s when I mentioned the case to my tertiary summer husband and he pointed me in the direction of the virtual monks of the Grand Order of Things French. Brother-Sister Osama let spill the secret legend of the Flamingo of Infinite Beauty. Magical ability to cure eye twitches, can foretell the coming of alien ghost zombies, and all that. Okay, you got me. I wasn’t listening. You’ve heard one tale of mystical, religious object claptrap, you’ve heard them all. All I needed to know was where it was hidden and who had the hiders employed to build their protective traps. I got my answers. The government said it would be easy. It wasn’t. Ten kilocubes of ice couldn’t bribe my way into The Dune of Fire which turned out to be five clicks outside the South Pole. Stealing the nukie sub from the Samoan Marine Corps cost me three good brutes in the firefight. The blueprint I bartered my home in Tunisia for laid out the path through the Labyrinth of Eternal Night inside the frozen dune. Turned out those high-power torches with their own fuse-generators were...
More Vintage Slug Adverts
If I know you one tenth as well as I think I know you then I think I know you at least three times more than enough to know that if there’s one thing you can’t get enough of then that’s even more vintage slug-based advertising. Sure, you liked it when I showed you my collection of slug adverts from yesteryear before (Vintage Slug Advertising) but that just wasn’t quite enough for you. Oh no! You want more! More! More! What do you think I am? Made of slugs? Well… seeing as you’re you and I’m me… oh, go on!… I’ll treat...
Police Pathology
The sterling work of the pathologist assigned to determine the cause of death of Ian Tomlinson at the recent G20 demonstrations (the main demonstration being that of brutality, as it turns out) may have led some of you to now consider a career as a pathologist. Before you rush down any potentially life-changing career paths please check to see whether you can meet the police force’s requirements for competency and responsibility in this challenging...
What Are Tornadoes?
Reproduced with permission from the neOnbubble Know You Some Science series of student learning guides. What Are Tornadoes? A tornado is a rotating column of air that forms between a cloud and the surface of the Earth. The column rotates fast enough to compensate for the force of gravity allowing the cloud to lift objects from the ground and feed upon them. This allows clouds to line and protect their internal watery goodness with dirt, wood, vehicles, and people, and this permits the cloud to retain its form longer as it continues on its migration north or south. When Do Tornadoes Form? Tornadoes tend to form only during certain parts of the year: Tornado Season. In medieval times they also formed during Plague Season, Bathing Season, and New Pope Season but this has all but gone out of fashion. How Do Tornadoes Form? As the Earth’s weather patterns change on it’s year-long, figure-eight orbit around the Moon so the temperatures at the poles and the equator alters. In short: the cold bits gets colder and the warm bits get warmer, or vice versa (depending on when it is, obviously.) As with all flying, living organisms clouds too migrate. Warm clouds – Cumulonimbus – seek cooler climes during the Summer and so head away from their nesting grounds of the equatorial regions. At the same time the colder, Arctic or Antarctic clouds – Doubledeckerbus – make their way towards the Earth’s zero latitude point in order to take the chill off their cloudy fringes. When two members of a species that survive on the same food source – water, in this case – come together the result is not without conflict. In general, clouds are relatively harmless. While six of them could group together and smother you they rarely do as you’re often indoors and can’t hear their soggy knocking at the door. However, clouds will fight clouds of other types, hoping to absorb them or annoy them by sliding underneath and interfering with their own rain cycle (see also: Where Does Rain Come From?) With literally hundreds of years to evolve a set of fighting rules the two types of cloud enter into a complicated ritual whereby one cloud passes northwards while the other passes south as close as possible at the same altitude. The fast interaction starts in motion a vortex which both clouds use to weave a tunnel or column towards the ground. In this way they are able to suck up material and bolster their cloud linings. Protected in this way the clouds will subsequently charge at one another. The result is most often seen as...
Mayjah Movie Mayhem
This is Melissa a.k.a. Mayjah. I think it’s Japanese or something. These are also Melissa a.k.a. quick and crummy Photoshops. I think they’re what you do when you haven’t got anything else to do or...
FriendFeed Beta
FriendFeed just rolled out the new beta version of their aggregator and I like it. FriendFeed is an aggregator that takes all the things and people you’re interested in (and the things and people those people are interested in) and puts them in one place. You can categorise them, filter them, promote them, push content to them, discuss with them, and share them. FriendFeed has the best parts of Twitter – you can post messages and read messages and post links and click on links – but it improves on it with inline videos and pictures, the ability to mark posts as liked, and the ability to comment on posts too (implemented way before Facebook and then copied.) FriendFeed also has the best parts of Facebook – it starts with an ‘F’ – but it improves on it too by using another ‘F’ as well. FriendFeed’s new beta works in real-time. Messages appear, comments sparkle into life, posts become suddenly liked by people. If you’re following a lot of people and they’re all active then the interface whooshes, jumps, scrolls, and generally gives you a headache. Now you know what it would be like to be a Cylon Hybrid. However, filter lists are the way to coax order out of the streaming consciousness of chaos and once you start using them you’ll wonder how you ever made do with Twitter’s relatively simplistic searching or Facebook’s I don’t know how the hell you find anything in Facebook. Do you want to find all the times anybody has ever posted a message with the word "fruitbat" in the title, at least four people liked it, and one person commented mentioning your name? What the hell is wrong with you? Anyway, you can do that with FriendFeed. It’s not perfect – that’s why it’s called a beta – and it could do with: better design; the default beta look is ugly although a Greasemonkey script does improve things no end, the option to display service icons; the old FriendFeed showed where messages came from – Flickr, Twitter, Google Reader, RSS, etc. – in the form of icons but they’ve been removed and replaced with simple text which is cleaner but doesn’t make it so obvious to locate origins of messages (although you can create filters that do that), centralised settings; some settings are defined on your account, some are defined when you post messages, and some are on the services you subscribe to in your feeds, and, importantly, some are switched on by default when I don’t want them to be (auto-posting messages and likes to Twitter, for example) so it would...
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