Category: In the News

Occupy Denver elected dog as leader

If he could wield a lightsaber, maybe...

For a while the “occupy” movement was getting a lot of attention, with people camping out in city parks and such.  I figure there are valid points to be made, but some of them are hard to take seriously.  For example, the Occupy Denver movement elected a Border Collie to be its leader.  The dog’s owner was inspired to do this by a speech from Michael Moore.

That’s all I know about the story, and I’m not sure it’s worth the effort to know more.  I don’t know that more details would make it more intelligible…

I just don’t get it.  Is that supposed to make some statement?  What kind of message are they giving?  Are they begging for handouts / treats?

taking your pet to church

I heard there’s a church that lets you bring your pets to service now.  Apparently it’s been good for their attendance, but I have to wonder if they ever asked themselves: WHAT COULD POSSIBLY GO WRONG?  Seems like there’s quite a few potential issues, and by “potential” I mean likely will happen.  Let’s look at a couple of scenarios.

1) Animals like to explore and smell things.  So they’re going to want to wander around.  Not only would that be a distraction, but it would lead to #2.

2) Fighting.  Are cats and dogs going to suddenly get along because they’re in church?  I doubt it.  It’ll end up like a Looney Tunes episode where the dog is chasing Sylvester, who is chasing Tweety Bird.  It makes for a funny cartoon, but not so great in real life, especially during something as important as a church service.

3) Animals poop.  Well, to be fair, humans do too, but we usually go to a bathroom for such things.  It would be a huge distraction to have animals urinating and pooping all over the place.  Even if you had litter boxes, some indoor pets aren’t housebroken.  (I know, that seems inconceivable, but I know someone who keeps a dog inside who isn’t housebroken. I just don’t understand.)  Either way, poop is distracting, as well as unsanitary.

I could go on, but I figure that’s enough reasons why you wouldn’t allow people to bring their pets to church with them.  What do you think?

a motorcycle fueled by poop

Many inventors are looking to cash-in on the green movement, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing.  I’m all for lower car emissions and reducing our “carbon footprint”.  But it’s not surprising that some people don’t know where to draw the line between good idea in theory and bad idea in practice.  Hence the Toilet Bike Neo.

Japanese toilet manufacturer Toto has created their own green driving machine.  Actually, it should be called a green driving latrine.  It’s literally a toilet combined with a three-wheel motorcycle.

The Toilet Bike Neo runs on biogas, which is a more scientific way of saying poop.  I’m not against the concept — using excrement for energy is a good idea.  But including the toilet on the motorcycle seems a little odd to me.  Well, let’s be honest, more than odd — more like “that ain’t right”.  I know a few people who might would even use it (where are you, Buck Elvis?), but most people would rather have privacy when taking a dump.  Plus there’s the post-pooping customs to deal with, which I shouldn’t have to explain.

It appears to have a giant roll of toilet paper on the back, but that doesn’t seem plausible.  Surely there’s some bidet-type system installed.  The bike even has a little toilet hood ornament, in case the driver wasn’t embarrassed enough by sitting on a giant toilet.

A commenter at CNet calculated the motorcycle would need about 218 pounds of poop daily to create 2 gallons worth of gasoline.  And supposedly it takes about 18 days for the poop to be converted into biogas, so you’d need to carry around about 2 tons of poop to keep the process flowing for daily usage.  That would increase the weight of the bike so much that you’d need much more poop because your gas mileage would be so bad.  However you figure it, that’s a big load of crap!

antelope tackling bicycle rider & bread helmet man

Apparently the viral video of the day is a bicycle rider getting knocked down by an antelope during a race in Africa.  It is quite unusual and unexpected. It was also unexpected to see it on TV twice already in one day.  But since it’s so popular, I’ll post it here for you, so you can tell all your friends and co-workers that you saw it and they should watch it too.  After all, this is what’s popular.  Maybe it’s even the cat’s pajamas…

Now don’t you feel cooler?  You are now in the know.  Although, by the time you’re reading this, this video might be old news.  There’s probably another video already gone viral that everyone is talking about.

Sometimes you can’t predict what will be viral next.  For example, someone can just show up to a protest with bread taped to their head and become an Internet meme.  He was just trying to “protect” himself against makeshift projectiles, so some protesters made makeshift “armor”.  Now this guy is known as Bread Helmet Man, and he’s appeared in “photographs” all around teh internets…  A few examples…

I wonder if he has any idea of his 15 megabytes of fame…

FYI, I already know the Bread Helmet Man meme is old (in Internet years, anyway).  But it was never referenced here, and it certainly is random, and the post just needed something else…  Was it worth your time?  Wait, don’t answer that.  Keeping up with viral videos and memes often isn’t worth your time, which is why they aren’t closely followed here…  And my rambling about wasting your time might not be worth your time, so I’ll stop typing now.