Welcome to the World Wide Weird

It seems everyone with internet access is watching Hurricane Rita tear down on the U.S. Gulf states. Just in case you find that a little tedious, the swell fellows at Kuro5hin (pronounced “corrosion”) have have put together a New Orleans: Choose Your Own Adventure Story.

What fun! You get to play the part of an African-American living in a crack house in a New Orleans slum. You decided to stay and weather out Hurricane Katrina since you were not sure if you could score crack at any of the evacuation centers.

Well OBVIOUSLY as an African-American in the midst of one of the worst storms in living memory, it is only natural that your foremost priority is your crack supply.

The windows of the crack house were already boarded up, you had a couple days worth of rocks and some Fiddy Cent CDs to listen to on a portable boom box. In addition, most of your fellow crack heads had abandoned the house, leaving you to rummage through their stuff for stray crack rocks.

You hear choppers overhead. You look out the attic window and see some Coast Guard choppers lifting a family down the street off their roof and to safety. Do you…
-Grab a piece of wood drifting down the street and try and float to higher ground?
-Get on the roof and try and wave down a Coast Guard chopper?

And of course you just take it from there. What a great way to while away the hours without having to worry about negative things like death counts. Great game this.

I have an idea for another Choose Your Own Adventure Story….

You are a rich WASP American who has connections to big business and follow your father’s cue by getting into politics. You steal the 2000 election by making sure your people control the vital recounts…….

Bee Dogs sells bee costumes for dogs, all types of dogs. Sweet Jesus why would anyone do this to a dog?

Now all I need is a way to keep the junk mail out of the letterbox.

But the B.S.O.D. is already here

Two local stories to show you just how careful you have to be.

Man dies after apparent laughing gas experiment
One man is dead and three people were last night critically ill in hospital following an apparent bungled experiment with laughing gas in a car in Sydney’s west.

Somebody notify the Darwin’s Awards Judges!

The Daily Telegraph newspaper reports the group had been inhaling nitrous oxide — also known as laughing gas — before falling unconscious.

One man, believed to live in the home where the Hyundai was parked, was taken to Blacktown Hospital, but later died.

Police say two other men and a woman remain in a serious condition in hospital.

A one metre-long gas tank was removed from the car for testing. A post-mortem examination was carried out on the body of the dead man yesterday.

Power-dressing Aussie leaves trail of destruction
SATURDAY , 17 SEPTEMBER 2005
(Salutes to the iPod, PSP man for this story)

SYDNEY: An Australian man built up a 40,000-volt charge of static electricity in his clothes as he walked, leaving a trail of scorched carpet and molten plastic and forcing firefighters to evacuate a building.

Frank Clewer, who was wearing a woollen shirt and a synthetic nylon jacket, was oblivious to the growing electrical current that was building up as his clothes rubbed together.

Oblivious hell! Who the hell expects 40,000 volts up the wazoo from rubbing their socks along the carpet? Though if he’d glanced in the mirror his hair would have looked like Don King – surely the best static electricity warning sign there is!

When he walked into a building in the country town of Warrnambool in the southern state of Victoria on Thursday, the electrical charge ignited the carpet.

“It sounded almost like a firecracker”, Clewer told Australian radio on Friday.

“Within about five minutes, the carpet started to erupt.” Employees, unsure of the cause of the mysterious burning smell, telephoned firefighters who evacuated the building.

“There were several scorch marks in the carpet, and we could hear a cracking noise – a bit like a whip – both inside and outside the building”, said fire official Henry Barton.

What about the scorch marks in his undies?

Firefighters cut electricity to the building thinking the burns might have been caused by a power surge.

Clewer, who after leaving the building discovered he had scorched a piece of plastic on the floor of his car, returned to seek help from the firefighters.

“We tested his clothes with a static electricity field meter and measured a current of 40,000 volts, which is one step shy of spontaneous combustion, where his clothes would have self-ignited,” Barton said.

“I’ve been firefighting for over 35 years and I’ve never come across anything like this,” he said.
Firefighters took possession of Clewer’s jacket and stored it in the courtyard of the fire station, where it continued to give off a strong electrical current.

David Gosden, a senior lecturer in electrical engineering at Sydney University, said that for a static electricity charge to ignite a carpet, conditions had to be perfect.

“Static electricity is a similar mechanism to lightning, where you have clouds rubbing together and then a spark generated by very dry air above them,” said Gosden.

The burglars thought they had hit the jackpot when the saw the pale-coloured powder marked “Charlie” — slang for cocaine — in a pot on pet-lover Dee’s mantelpiece. But they were unaware the pot was an urn and the “drugs” really the remains of her beloved Newfoundland Charlie, who died in 1997.

And it’s only this big!