- Just stop, world. You’re embarrassing yourself and it’s
clear by this point that there is a) not enough money being offered and b) the
involved egos are still far too large for the reported, alleged Oasis reunion
to happen. That hasn’t prevented
numerous reports of Oasis reuniting next year to mark the 20th anniversary of their
debut album “Definitely Maybe.” Clearly those behind the rumors have either
forgotten or chosen to ignore the band’s infamous and explosive breakup in 2009
following a fight between brothers Noel and Liam Gallagher before the Rock en
Seine festival in Paris. The brothers have barely stopped insulting, character
assassinating and accusing one another since, with the occasional threat of a
lawsuit mixed in. More dysfunctional bands have reunited for less and the draw
of a boatload of cash that can be earned merely by pretending to get along just
long enough to tour for a few months is immense, but both brothers continue to
insist that rumors of them getting the band back together are rubbish. Noel
Gallagher was the latest to deny any reunion was in the offing, saying that he
would never have any part in such an occasion. "Maybe people keep thinking
if that if they say it, it will eventually happen. It’s not going to happen,”
Gallagher said. “Unless they’re doing it without me, but without me it would be
rubbish.” Of course, he then tagged that denial by saying that there was a
small chance a reunion could happen some day, but only under the most dire of
circumstances. "One can never say never, because one might be skint. But
I’ve got no intention. I’m not interested,” he added. Those remarks stand in
contrast to those of Noel's brother Liam, who suggested last year that he would
be interested in "burying the hatchet for a lap of honor" for Oasis……..
- The untouched corners of the globe are becoming harder and
harder to protect from the cold, steely influence of technology. The remote
Mexican Zapotec
village of Talea de Castro, high in the mountains of southern Mexico, used to
be just such a place. It was a small town where making any sort of phone call
meant trudging to a community telephone line and paying what could amount to a
day's wages for a static-y five-minute conversation. That left Talea de Castro
largely isolated from the outside world, but it is isolated no longer thanks to
an innovative plan that backers hope can bring connections to thousands of
other small, isolated villages around the world. The village is now wired using
simple radio receivers, a laptop and relatively inexpensive Internet
technologies. Talea de Castro’s people have moved into the 21st century by effectively
creating their own mini-telecom company. Their operation is capable of handling
11 cellphone calls at a time at a small fraction of what they used to pay. "This
has been a project that has really worked in keeping people in touch. Before,
people couldn't talk much because it cost so much," said Keyla Ramirez
Cruz, a Talea resident who hosts a program on the community radio station and
coordinates the new phone system. With the advent of the new system, the town’s
old "caseta," a house or shop that has a land line and charges a
per-minute fee, is obsolete. The town’s 2,500 residents no longer need to make international
calls costing more than a dollar a minute or suffer through incoming calls that
require a runner to answer and tell townsfolk when someone was looking for
them. So far, 720 residents have signed up to use the new system, which
includes free local calls from off-the-shelf cellphones and calls to relatives
in California for as little as 1.5 cents per minute. Each subscriber has their
own number in the system, which uses a small antenna to capture calls with a
software-controlled base radio. The program the system runs on is designed to
easily interface with Internet-based services such as Skype and although it
battles common communication problems such as reception in some of the
community's outlying houses, occasional weather-related problems and momentary
losses of Internet service, it’s an amazing accomplishment. Talea de Castro
residents grew tired of waiting for Mexican telecom companies to install cell
service and being told they needed at least 5,000 residents to merit their own
system. Instead, they have their own cellphone version of Skype or magicJack
and the world is just a call away……..
- Cue the creepy midgets in green wigs doing bizarre dances,
the gravy-training grandfather who goes from bedridden to dancing in the
streets when his grandson wins a trip to the chocolate factory and the
über-weird factory owner who likes to invite strange children to his business
for some fun….because the 2013 Chicago Bears are just like “Willy Wonka and the
Chocolate Factory.” Or so says Bears tight
end Martellus Bennett, who believes his head coach has much in common with
Wonka. Bennett, in his first year with the team, drew a parallel between
first-year head coach Marc Trestman and the character Gene Wiler famously
played in the 1971 movie. "I think me and Coach Trestman are probably the
only two people who understand each other," Bennett said. "I always
say Coach Trestman reminds me of the first Willy Wonka. Not the Johnny Depp
one. The Johnny Depp one was really cool, but the first one before that, the
1943 version." Depp, of course, tried to reprise the role in 2005 as part
of his never-ending campaign to wear funny makeup and do weird voices in every
one of his roles. He failed miserably, which explains why Bennett is trying
really hard to link his new coach with the original Willie Wonka. "He's a
genius," Bennett said of Trestman. "A lot of times when you're around
really, really smart people, you don't really understand them. I thought Willy
Wonka was brilliant. He had all kinds of candy. Who doesn't like chocolate and
candies? Everybody wanted a Gobstopper. I just think he's brilliant." Even
if it’s absurd on many levels, it’s an awesome comparison and one that amused
Trestman even though he tried to pretend he doesn’t know who Wonka is. "I
wouldn't know who Willy Wonka is, quite frankly," Trestman said, laughing.
"I would bet it's ... umm ... Martellus is from a different place."
Maybe Trestman isn't wearing a purple suit, top hat and white man’s ‘fro, but
he does have Bennett off to a good start with 10 catches for 125 yards and
three touchdowns, so maybe he really is a genius………
- Zoo animals live an incredibly sad life. They are forced
into captivity, shoehorned into artificial living spaces and subjected to
nonstop scrutiny from total strangers who stare and point at them all day long.
As such, it’s nice to see a zoo animal finding a way to rise above its
unenviable situation and do something worthwhile beyond poop in front of
strangers. For Ajabu the rhinoceros at the River’s Edge Zoo in St. Louis, this
idea is more than a pipe dream. Ajabu uses the gifts God gave him to make
abstract art and that art could aid some of his fellow rhinos. His creative
campaign began one day when he was munching on some fruit. “Of course they
get honeydew melon which is a favorite of Ajabu’s,” Becky Heisler, senior
zookeeper for the River’s Edge, said of her prized pupil. “You could see he was
so mellow he was falling asleep as he was eating it. They’re grousers so they
eat the leaves and branches out of the trees and they use that lip to pull the
branches down.” Once he finishes eating his melons, Ajabu uses his prehensile
lips to spread non-toxic paint onto canvases. Because his sense of realism is a
bit skewed, abstract art seemed to be the most logical option and once it
became clear that he had some real chops, the zoo began selling his 8x10 in.
works of art to raise rhino awareness for conservation projects. For those who
say that Ajabu would rather not be forced into slave labor as an artist, his
caretakers point out that if he didn’t want to interact, he could walk away and
go eat hay or do something else.” Raising rhino awareness is an important issue
because the animals are critically endangered and illegally poached for their
horns in many countries. Ground-up horns are used for medicinal purposes and
even as a party drug in some places. By spending $50 to order one of
Ajabu’s paintings through the zoo’s website, you can help fight this
problem.…….
- Is Africa breaking up with Africa? If a team of scientists
led by Kathy
Whaler, a geophysicist at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, is correct
then the answer may be yes. Whaler and his crew have discovered enormous gashes
in the Afar Rift in Ethiopia, gashes they believe signal the breakup of the
African continent and the beginnings of a new ocean basin. According to their
findings, the fractures are similar to seafloor spreading centers,
the volcanic ridges that mark the boundaries between two pieces of oceanic
crust. These fractures expand as lava bubbles up along the ridges and new crust
is created, slowly widening the ocean basin. It is still to early to tell for
sure and Whaler cautioned against jumping to any definitive conclusions. "It's
not as close to fully formed seafloor spreading as we thought," Whaler
said. What her team discovered was 120 cubic miles of magma sitting in the
mantle under the Afar Rift. Because hot liquids such as magma tend to rise, the
discovery is a conundrum. "We didn't expect this, because magma wants to
pop up like a cork in water; it's too buoyant compared to the surrounding
medium in the mantle," Whaler admitted. Most scientific models predict
that at spreading ridges, magma should sit just under the rifts, in the crust.
The opposite is true in ocean locations such as the Juan de Fuca Ridge and the Mid-Atlantic
Ridge. The massive pool at afar is both deep and situated mostly below the
sleeping Badi volcano, many miles west of the scene of a 2005 series of
underground magma intrusions. It’s an unexpected place for a sh*t load of
magma and no one is quite sure why the magma is there. What Whaler’s team knows
is that the Afar region sits at the junction of three tectonic plates, all of
which are spreading apart. That may or may not portend a continent destined to
split in two………
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