In Sanity We Trust

Sep 2005 Nov 2005 Broken News Diversions Forum Gallery Index

...Broken News...
October 2005

Disaster Zone

The hidden truth in the media?
We'll leave you to draw your own conclusions on this one.

The Ancient Art of Not Getting Anything Done

Procrastination is never doing today what you can put off until tomorrow.....and then the next day.....and then the next.....until all the cows have got lost on the way home. So.....ummm.....I didn't get around to much this week so I'll just have to rabbit on about nothing to fill up some space. How about some synonyms for procrastination? Here we go then, Synonym.com gave me: cunctation, shillyshally -- (the act of procrastinating) dilatoriness. From Dictionary.com we get: dalliance, dawdling, dabbling, delay, delaying, frittering, frivolling, idling, loafing, loitering, playing, poking, pottering, puttering, toying, trifling. The online dictionaries seem however to have omitted the obvious ones such as: pissing around, farting about and not having your shit together. In any case it all applies to me this week as nothing much has come together.

In other news some more hobbits were found on the Indonesian island of Flores though some anthropologists think they were just short people and in Britain some teeneage delinquents were arrested for stealing rabbits from a zoo enclosure and feeding them to the crocodiles.

It's a bit sad this week, but normal transmission will resume next week.....bzzzt.....bzzzt.....

Time Machine For Sale

Some odd things come up for sale from time to time on the web classifieds. Apparently some bloke in New Zealand was trying to flog off a Time Machine on trademe though the item has since been withdrawn.

It does seem to have generated a bit of interest however as the final bid was up to $300,000,000,001,999.00. It also generated some interesting queries regarding the machine such as whether or not it uses a flux capacitor to reduce the time dilation effect and if it runs on mains power.

Left: The Time Machine, though possibly not quite as H.G.Wells had imagined it.

In other news a man in Sweden was rendered unconscious for two days after the goose shot by his son landed on his head. He made a full recovery but the unfortunate goose was well and truly cooked.

More Little Green Men

In the last few years an increasing number of little green men have been spotted in the streets of Taiwan. Not extra-terrestrials from Rael or Chinese leprechauns, but animated stick figures gracing the nation's pedestrian traffic lights. The little green man walks as a timer counts down. As the timer approaches zero the little green man begins to run. He has gone from being a traffic light innovation to becoming a pop icon.

Early rumours that on occasion the little green man stumbles and falls down, fueled considerable discussion in internet chat rooms and on notice boards.

It also inspired a short story by local writer Jiu Jiu, entitled "The Little Green Man Who Falls Down", a take-off of Samuel Beckett's absurdist play "Waiting For Godot", in which the two main characters mount a vigil to catch the little green man falling down thereby somehow, validating their mundane existences.

Lin Li-yu, deputy director of the Taipei City Department of Transportation and "mother" of the little green man, says that she heard those rumours and while it wasn't intended for him to fall down, that if the lights are out of order it is possible for him to fall half-way.

Now it appears a custody battle is looming with Chang Ming-shin, a Taipei city engineer claiming to be the little green man's "father". On Tuesday he made a statement: "As a father, I must establish my credibility with my little child, so I decided to stand up and speak out."

While Chang wants recognition as the inventor of the little green man, Taipei's transportation department have said that the design doesn't belong to any one person. Lin Li-yu added that Chang's original design was not ideal and had subsequently been modified by a team of experts. Clearly Mum and Dad don't quite agree on this one.

The little green man falls down!

In the process of collecting images to suppliment this report I thought I had managed to catch the wee fellow doing a face plant, and thus verifying the rumours. Alas it was merely the hapless chap's midriff inexplicably (but only momentarily) vanishing.