Mondaaaaaay bloody mondaaaaaay!

I know Ive said it before but it really is funny how things tend to work out. And whether it works out for the better or worse, its always in the most bizarre string of things you simply cant discredit as coincidence. This morning I found myself getting ready to head in to work, as one normally does on a Monday morning /:3, though, today I felt no compelling need to hurry or I might be late. I pulled out, drove down the road, decided to pull in at the local SPAR to pick up a cold drink and something to snack on, no hurry at all. Cruising down the highway I think to myself "Hey.... I wonder if my phone's GPS agrees the route I take is the quickest one to work." So, even though im quite familiar with the way, I fire it up and set it to good ol' TUT. Now, about 15 min from work it gives me this little message saying "New rout found! We've found a quicker route for you" and it began to re plot my course. Now, normally Id have just blown it off and continued on my usual route disregarding the little bugger, but just as I approached the corner of the street it suggested I though what the hell? And turned as instructed, stopped a little later on the right side of the road at the traffic light, and just as I was pulling off I hear a 'clank!' and my foot hits the floor. Super! My clutch cable snapped! Luckily Id just managed it into first gear, so the car had started moving, but it jumped out again, and I was losing momentum. Now, here's why I say someone was watching out for me, and its funny how things work out: The spot where I broke down was close enough to an open curb for me to climb onto with the little bit of momentum I had. I Had no air time to call with, and no cash on hand at the moment, but, surprise surprise, to my immediate left stood a cell phone shop selling air time, and to my right an ATM... now while I got out and got some cash to buy air time with someone was kind enough to offer to help me push the car off the curb, since its arse was still in the road, backwards through traffic which was held back by his friend, and into a side parking which 'happened' to be open. So I call the dude who usually services my car and explain the situation and wouldn't you know it.... his tow truck just 'happened' to be heading that same route, so picking me up wouldn't be a problem. Sitting in his truck on the way home I did some calculating.... had I gone the normal route, Id have broken down in the middle lane in front of....the...court house I think? One of the busiest areas on my usual route. I imagine the odds of not getting ploughed into there, not to mention getting someone in to tow you from there would have been slim. Sure the replacement cable, the towing and the service set me back more then Id liked, but given the circumstances? Id say it was well spent. Oh! There's a little epilogue as well. Having dropped the car off at the mechanic's, I was only about 2 blocks from home so decided to leg it. I stopped somewhere in the middle, contemplating if I should go back and wait, and as I turned around, I found myself staring smack into this:

Strange how things happen hmm? :3

Evil pussies....

Cats have many different ways of communicating, but the meow is every cat's go-to vocalization when it wants to tell us something; be it, "I'm hungry," "pay attention to me" or "I just took a dump, go clean it up." However, far from the one-dimensional barking sound that dogs use to communicate, cats are like living stereo equalizers that are able to fine tune the pitches and tones of their meows... so they can better manipulate you into doing what they want.

A recent study has shown that people subconsciously can tell the difference between a pleading or soliciting meow and a run of the mill, casual one just by listening to sound clips taken from different felines in different situations. The subjects said the soliciting sounds came across as more urgent and less pleasant than a normal meow, much like the cries a human baby makes when she's hungry.

In fact, further studies have proven that a cat's cry for food or attention shares a remarkable similarity in frequency to a baby's cry. It's not coincidence- it's pure, kitty evil genius.

Using their expertise in Soviet-style subliminal advertising, cats adjust their purrs and meows to include this frequency which then prompts their owners into responding to them more quickly. Like well trained animals ourselves, we respond because, not only is the sound annoying to us, but it also stimulates our natural instinct to immediately nurture anything that sounds like our offspring, even if it is covered in fur and named Mr. Bojangles.

Amount...Armoir..Armor funyon? Seriously what the hell are you going for here?

Traditional African healers believe that amafufunyana is a kind of spirit possession brought about by witchcraft, and is responsible for driving countless youths mad as well as exploding spellcheckers everywhere.

The perceived method for this bewitchment is weird on its own: it's accomplished by pounding ants that have been feeding from a grave into a poisonous paste that the victim must ingest. But the outcome is even weirder: once they've ingested the grave-ant pudding, the victim begins to hear voices... coming from their own stomach.

Often these voices actually speak a different language from the victim. Xhosa speakers in the Eastern Cape, for example, have reported hearing voices speak Zulu, and vice versa.

And the stomach voices don't just want to talk about the weather or last night's episode of Lost. No, they get very aggressive and begin issuing orders. They've been known to threaten seizures, demand tributes, request acts of violence and, if that's not crazy enough, there have even been a few situations where a case of the stomach-dickheads went viral: at a junior high school in Africa, one outbreak of amafufunyana had over 400 children reporting swollen stomachs and bizarre behavior.

The children ran out of control, rolling their eyes, babbling and striking out uncontrollably at anything around them. One teacher later reported that, upon squeezing the children's stomachs, she could clearly hear the Zulu voices claiming to possess said children.

Might be going out on a limb and suggest that the auditory hallucinations have something to do with eating huge portions of poison ants. As for the schoolchildren all joining in on the act, that sounds like good old-fashioned mass hysteria, since among humans, crazy is more contagious than any disease.

Also, at this point one might be starting to think there's a hidden part of the human brain that just wants an excuse to fuck shit up and blame it on ghosts.

To die for...

Remember when we said Aokigahara was the Niagara falls of suicide? Well, for centuries the abbot in the small Czech town of Sedlec has been the Niagara Falls for dead people, regardless of cause of death. Ever since someone sprinkled soil from the Holy Land on the local cemetery in the 13th century, people from all over Europe started demanding to be buried there and the Sedlec graveyard kept growing until 1870, when the priests decided to finally do something about all those surplus bones lying around. Something insane.

Today, the Sedlec Ossuary is a chapel famous for being decorated with tens of thousands of human bones. This macabre style of interior design was the work of Czech woodcarver Frantisek Rint who, for some reason, was hired to organize the church's extensive skeleton collection. The results were huge mounds of human remains in the four corners of the chapel, a terrifying chandelier built from every bone in the human body, and a massive skull coat of arms adorning the entrance.

We realize this is the Czech Republic and all, but it has been 27 years, surely Poltergeist was released out there already. Like, maybe last year or something? Why are they still playing with human bones as if they were Satan's Lego blocks and making them sit through Mass every single day for almost 140 years now? On the Tempting Fate scale, the only thing worse would be to start using some of the skulls as ceremonial mugs or chamber pots.


At this point, does it really surprise anyone that the church became the inspiration for Dr. Satan's lair in the Rob Zombie movie House of 1000 Corpses?

Happy rainbow fun-fun forrest.

Aokigahara is a woodland at the base of Mount Fuji in Japan that makes The Blair Witch Project forest look like Winnie the Pooh's Hundred Acre Wood. It probably has something to do with all the dead bodies scattered around.

What Niagara Falls is to weddings, Aokigahara is to suicide. How many suicides does it takes for a place to get that reputation? A dozen? Fifty?

More than 500 friggin' people have taken their own lives in Aokigahara since the 1950s.

The trend has supposedly started after Seicho Matsumoto published his novel Kuroi Kaiju (Black Sea of Trees) where two of his characters commit suicide there. After that-always eager to prove they are bizarrely susceptible to suggestion-hundreds of Japanese people have hanged themselves among the countless trees of the Aokigahara forest, which is reportedly so thick that even in high noon it's not hard to find places completely surrounded by darkness.

Besides bodies and homemade nooses, the area is littered with signs displaying such uplifting messages like "Life is a precious thing! Please reconsider!" or "Think of your family!"

In the 70s, the problem got national attention and the Japanese government began doing annual sweeps of the forest in search of bodies. In 2002, they found 78. But who knows how many they missed? In all likelihood there probably is a hanged person somewhere in Aokigahara on any given day. WARNING, NSFS (Not Safe For Soul).

By the way, if an entire dark forest full of hanged corpses wasn't bad enough, a few years ago some people noticed that a lot of the dead in Aokigahara probably had cash or jewelry on them. Thus began the proud Japanese tradition of Aokigahara Scavenging where people are running around the Death Forest, looking for dead guys to loot.

Are they out to friggin annoy me?

Ok Ive been meaning to comment on this for a long time now but somehow always forgot somehwere along the way.... Why is it, whenever I open a medicinal box, be it pills, syrup, capsules or powder, no matter which side I chose, when I open it, the first thing I see is.... the little info slip. You know, the one with all the useless info on it, how to use, what not to feed it to, what would happen if you got one stuck in your ear, that thing. And no matter WHAT, I WILL open the side that has this annoying little slip of suffering ready to grin up at me and say "Aha! Youll have to go through ME to get to th~ Hey! HEY! Put me down! Dont throw me away im important informatioooooo........" Because thats exactly what always happens, I end up mangling the box to rip out the litle sucker and toss it far from the sight of me..... am I alone here?

Mass...err.....i mean Quantum Zeno Effect...

For years, scientists have been scouring the cosmos for some kind of bizarre hypothetical anti-gravity bits they're calling "dark energy". And they've had some success with it ... perhaps at the expense of our mortal souls.
To grossly simplify it, on a scale smaller than atoms, the quantum level, everything suddenly turns into a friggin circus. Quantum physics is to regular everyday physics as a David Lynch film is to a mainstream blockbuster. We're talking particles popping in and out of existence, being in two places at the same time, and generally acting like assholes.
No doubt the strangest part is the Quantum Zeno effect, which points out that simply observing and measuring particles changes them (specifically, changing the rate at which they decay). How? No one knows. It appears to be the closest science has ever come to proving black magic exists.
What Could Possibly Go Wrong?
One prominent scientist theorized that the changes caused by simply observing dark energy could cause it to collapse, taking the universe with it.
Scientists, eager to see if this is true, are furiously observing dark energy whenever they get the chance.
So, Basically It's Like...
It's like crossing the streams in Ghostbusters, apparently.
How Long Have We Got?
That scientist, Professor Lawrence Krauss, thinks it may already be underway. Apparently, in the late 90s, scientists were looking at a bunch of things exploding in space when they caught their first glimpse of some dark energy. This may have put the universe into a state where it may or may not pop like a soap bubble at any given instant. Just because we looked at it. Holy balls.
This ... this can't be right, can it? Surely the guy's just nuts. Then again, he appears to be one of the most prominent physicists in the country and has published a huge list of papers and books on the subject.
Then again, one of them was The Physics of Star Trek and, now that we think about it, we're pretty sure he stole this whole scenario from an episode of The Next Generation. :3

Man Dies from Breathing Own Farts

This one was sent to me by a colligue, had to share xD

A terrible diet and room with no ventilation are being blamed for the death of a man who was killed by his own gas. There was no mark on his body but an autopsy showed large amounts of methane gas in his system. His diet had consisted primarily of beans and cabbage (and a couple of other things). It was just the right combination of foods. It appears that the man died in his sleep from breathing the poisonous cloud that was hanging over his bed. Had he been outside or had his windows been opened, it wouldn't have been fatal, but the man was shut up in his near airtight bedroom. According to the article, "He was a big man with a huge capacity for creating 'this deadly gas.'" Three of the rescuers got sick and one was hospitalized."

Moral of the story is: if yer gonna eat beans, keep the bedroom window open at night.

Taip-ooooooh

Just a short post during work, but this was too good to pass up. A student popped in just now, and in a thick african accent wished me a "Happy Violence Day". Now I know what he MEANT but what the hell? :3 To all my fellow single people out there or if you just think V-day is a waste of time, lets make this our own official "Violence Day" instead! >:D

Bleeeeeep....

So here's a thought: Is society over saturating the young with the facts, laws and norms it has become comfortable with and now wants to push down on as many as possible? Just seems to me like almost everywhere you go, people, particularly young'ns stick to a somewhat sterile, cold, hard, factual [even though most cases the facts in question are simply an oppinion /:3] you know, almost like they're being turned into single minded organic machines no longer thinking for themselves, discovering new things and deducing their own way of thinking around it.

Fill them full of logic,
and bring them to the floor,
and make them dance,
a dance of death.

I R Important?

Ok.... so Im cruising down the street on my way to work,having worked out my time to such fine detail that I would JUST arrive on time [Yeah i know most of you know what im talking about!] and from behind I see the familiar blinking lights of an ambulance. Now, im thinking to myself "well he seems to be cruising, no siren, so no worries right?" Then just as everyone's settled in all cosy like in front of the red glow if the stop signal, in comes the ambulance wailing and creeping up everyone's @$$ like a friggin' guerrilla limpet. Now, it had been raining and there tends to be accidents in weather like this so I thought ok, someone fell down and went boom, and myself and those around me make space as much as we can for the fine example of humanity to come through. Only, RIGHT after crossing over the intersection, off go the sirens and its cruising again. And not once but twice did this happen, later with a police patrol car. this is not an isolated incident by any means, many a time have I witnessed this lightweight abuse of power. Now I could go off on a tangent like "Whats the world come to?" but what good would it do? Ever read the story about the boy that cried wolf guys? One of these days people are going to get fed up with you abusing your position and simply not heed the siren's call. Youll NOT get through or get hit by a passing car, and who will get blamed? Us, the general public, the ACTUAL responsible driver.

I can haz apocalypse now plz?