The Slippery Slide of Civilization

Further proof [as if we needed any more -ed.] of the slippery slope slide towards moral bankruptcy in America.
Poor townsfolk in Bartlett, Tennessee are having to deal with pornographic videos being filmed in their CHILDREN'S PARKS! The sinner seen in the picture to the right was (not) caught filming a pornographic video in a local park. That's illegal right? (parental advisory: this video contains amusing interviews with hicks saying amusing things.)

Full video here. (msn)

[UPDATE 10:17am: due to numerous queries, please be advised, this video does NOT contain anything graphic. It is video of a local news channel in Tennessee. It is not porn. It is okay to watch at work. Sorry to disappoint those of you that thought it WAS porn.]

Sex and the City Olympics. Part Two

Follow up to this story we "reported" about a few weeks ago:

"Tomorrow night thousands of young men and women with the most fit, toned bodies in the world will mingle for the last time before they fly home. What might they get up to?" (timesonline.co.uk)

We're all about the moral decline of the human race this week, and by week we mean always.

Some quotes from the article:

"I played my first Games in Barcelona in 1992 and got laid more often in those two and a half weeks than in the rest of my life up to that point." ... "Women from all the countries of the world: muscular, virile, athletic and oozing estrogen. I spent so much time in a state of lust that I could have passed out."
-----

"It was not just the guys. The women, too, seemed in thrall to their hormones, throwing around daring glances and dynamite smiles like confetti."
-----

"Once we were eliminated from our respective competitions, we lunged at each other like suicidal fencers. There may have been a fair amount of gay sex going on, too - but given the notorious homophobia in sport it was rather more covert."
-----

"When it comes to sex, it simply means that those in relationships no longer recognize, or at least ignore, the boundaries of fidelity and honesty that underpin human monogamy. Philosophers call it moral relativism; the rest of us call it hypocrisy."

...And EIGN calls it SINNING. (it is possible that we are just bitter because we can't get into the olympic village, so our frustration manifests itself as moral supremacy.)


Also, Pete says hi. He would have posted this himself, but he's really lazy.

Good News Wednesday XIX: I Scream, You Scream, We All Scream For Whatever the Fuck A 39 cent "Vanilla Cone" Is Made Out Of

Who said you can't find a good deal out there anymore? Who says there is a global food crisis? Apparently somewhere out there you can still get a "Vanilla Cone" for 39 cents!

Two problems. One: This deal is only available on Sundays. (look closely at the sign) And I hear parking is a bitch there on Sundays. Two: I have no idea where this picture was taken. Presumably between an old person home and a gay pinwheel stand.

(picture originally found here.)

Learning to Fly

Okay, so I do not believe this story at all. But if it's true we may be the first to break it in the US... two separate but equal papers in England are reporting of cats that have grown wings in some freaky Chinese provence. (dailymail.co.uk, telegraph.co.uk)

Can anyone debunk or confirm these reports? Is it natural selection or some freaky Chinese government genetic experiment gone horribly, horribly wrong. I have wanted a cat for a long time now, but there is no way I'm getting one of these freaks of nature. Warning, do not start using the expression "when cat's fly" in place of pigs because it looks like that may soon be happening. Someone really needs to put one of these pictures up on kittenwar.

(image from dailymail.co.uk)

School Lunch Prices

Back in June we had a post, one in a long line of posts, about global food prices and their effects on everything from the cost of popcorn to riots in haiti.
We also had a post about school lunch prices getting set to sky rocket. That post linked to an MSNBC article that, obviously, was written to scare parents everywhere.
And so, as schools are starting to open in a large part of the country today, the NYTimes has this story, three months after MSNBC did, "As Food Costs Rise, So Do School Lunch Prices." (nytimes)

"Prices on some school lunch lines are going up this fall as school officials, like many others, struggle to pay higher prices and delivery fees for staples like bread, milk, fresh fruit and vegetables. The price increases, generally about 25 cents a meal, come as school districts in New York and across the country try to eke more out of already tight budgets, with some switching to four-day schedules to reduce utility and busing costs, and others asking more of their students to walk to school or limiting out-of-town games for athletic teams."(nytimes again)

This is unfortunate for all families struggling to make ends meet already with high energy prices. And now we are asking our children to cut back on sports against their arch rivals over in Shelbyville just seems a little unfair. Then again, I would have been all for a 4 day school week when I was young... our children need no five hole days to be edumacated.
We're already the smartest in the world.... oh wait, never mind. (usde)

More On That Freaky Black Hole Creator Large Hadron Collider

You know something just isn't right when the second sentence of an article from telegraph.co.uk reads "Scientists are pushing ahead with powering up the machine, shrugging off speculative fears that it could destroy all life on Earth by sucking it into a black hole."

And so it goes, we're one step closer to the Large Hadron Collider, which we've talked about before, coming fully online.

"Earlier this month, the successful injection of the first particles - protons - into part of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiment at CERN, the European Centre for Nuclear Research, took place.

This weekend, scientists are hoping to complete testing of another part of the machine, which sits in a 17 mile circular tunnel approximately 100 metres underneath the Franco-Swiss border, with the aim of seeing particles travel the whole way around for the first time." (telegraph.co.uk)

So if we don't live to see Monday, at least we'll know why, however it looks like September 10th is the official day this thing is going live. (Someone get ready to update that wikipedia page). So if we don't live to see September 11th, at least we'll know why.
Happy Friday!

The Sport The Olympics Really Should Shouldn't Should SHOULDN'T Be Televising

Final proof of the moral decline of man! Boycott the Olympics!


So did you know that the olympic athletes (and who knew that there were over 10,000 of them) have access to over 100,000 condoms in the olmypic village? That's the potential for a LOT of sex. And that's only counting the people that have "safe" sex. (Please note: there is no safe sex. the only safe sex is abstinence. Sex before marriage is a sin. You will go to hell.) If you figure an equal distribution of men v. women (EIGN statisticians have no access to data about homosexual athletes, so we'll assume that everyone there is straight as the arrow the gold medal archer uses.) (Please note: Homosexuality is a sin. You will go to hell.) then you have nearly 10 condoms for every athlete. They don't talk about this on NBC, do they? Star athletes at the olympics don't have sex, right? Wrong!

...Olympic organizers are providing 100,000 condoms for the 10,500 mostly young, well-conditioned athletes in Beijing...

Sex may not be an Olympic sport, but that won't stop athletes of all disciplines from going for the gold. And this time around, 100,000 might not be enough. In Sydney, Olympians went through 70,000 condoms, and 20,000 more had to be brought in. In Athens, 130,000 were distributed." (foxsports)

OH the humanity! "[The] fact is, Olympians have received free condoms at every Games since Barcelona in 1992 to raise awareness of AIDS." I now call on all Christians moral people everywhere to boycott the Olympics until this egregious behavior is banned and not sanctioned. Turn it off. Shame on the Olympics for promoting sin! Shame on YOU for watching! And just think about it. How many of those 10,500 athletes aren't even 18? Won't someone think of the children? Why won't someone think of the children?

(Pardon our headline editors crisis of conscious above. You will soon be able to visit him, and the Olympic athletes, in hell.)

Slow and Steady Wins the Race

A few weeks ago EIGN reader Jenn sent me this story from the Washington Post. I've been sitting on it for various reasons, including laziness, but it's pretty funny so I figured it was time to share.

Turtle's are now being used to hunt down your marijuana plants. Now it's not just scary dogs that are going to be sniffing you out. Reptiles are getting in on the game. How is anyone ever going to be able to grow weed any more? If we can somehow only train rodents then we'd finally win the war on drugs. While Nancy Reagan might be happy, I think that would piss off a large number of people. We'd end up with food riots, minus the food...

Okay. So maybe I took some journalistic liberties with this story (ie: embellished the story. ie: lied) in the previous paragraph; it turns out the US Park Police (who serve and protect some of my favorite places on the planet) just got really lucky when "turtle number 72" took a slow walk through the park and straight into a $6,500 batch of weed. Police simply waited for the 19 year old farmer to come in to harvest and arrested him. Oops.

I Choose...... Invisibility!

"Scientists in the US say they are a step closer to developing materials that could render people invisible." (bbc)

"Researchers at the University of California in Berkeley have developed a material that can bend light around 3D objects making them "disappear".
The materials do not occur naturally but have been created on a nano scale, measured in billionths of a metre.
The team says the principles could one day be scaled up to make invisibility cloaks large enough to hide people." (bbc)

Soon you'll be able to do what you always wanted to: mow your lawn naked without your elderly neighbors pressing charges. (image from u.s. consumer product safety commission, which seems sort of ironic. do they really condone driving a lawn mower while invisible?)

Another Part of Your Body Has Been Robo-tized

A while back we posted a few stories about how we're slowly becoming robots. EIGN reader jg3 wrote in to share a story about how diabetics may soon be able to get a robotic pancreas. "Artificial pancreas developed, twice as cool as your boring real one" reads the headline at engadget.com.

Add this to your bionic eyes and hands and we're really starting to make some progress. Personally, I am not so patiently waiting for my new bionic brain. I'm growing increasingly tired of my shit-for real one.

GNW XVIII: I won't have to put up with your shit anymore

Great news for me this week. Soon I won't have to put up with any of you again. (Yes, you. And everyone else.) I'm getting off this rock.

According to "some leading astronomers" it is predicted that we will make contact with an extraterrestrial civilization sometime within the next 20 years. (dailygalaxy.com)

"The search for extraterrestrial life will leap forward next year when NASA launches the Kepler space telescope. The instrument will be constantly scanning the same 100,000 stars over its four-year mission with the exciting objective of discovering Earth-sized planets in the habitable zones around suns."

The only problem I see is that two decades would put us well past 12.21.2012. Here's hoping this find is within 3 years and not 20. For those of you NOT excited about this good news, you'd better start getting those tinfoil hats ready. (photo from newssohot.com)

Wow! Those New Countertops are RadioACTIVE!

Here is one way to impress your neighbor. Or kill your children. Or scare you.
The NYTimes, a few weeks back, ran this story about radioactive gases trapped in granite counter tops.

I didn't realize, or refused to believe, that the new york times was now running "scare the shit out of you" stories in an attempt to boost circulation.

[Dr. Sugarman, a pediatrician] stopped in his tracks in the kitchen, which had richly grained cream, brown and burgundy granite countertops. His Geiger counter indicated that the granite was emitting radiation at levels 10 times higher than those he had measured elsewhere in the house.

“My first thought was, my pregnant daughter was coming for the weekend,” Dr. Sugarman said. When the technician told her to keep her daughter several feet from the countertops just to be safe, she said, “I had them ripped out that very day,” and sent to the state Department of Health for analysis. The granite, it turned out, contained high levels of uranium, which is not only radioactive but releases radon gas as it decays. (nytimes)

So, I'm not sure which is a bigger sign of the coming apocalypse. That your counter may be radio active, that the new york times is printing this crap, or that we eat these stories up like candy. All I know is that I've just got to get me one of those geiger counter things. Who knows what might be radioactive in my house. I hope not this, it already scares the shit out of me.

How a Virgin Blinded Over 50 People

File this under the "what the fuck were you thinking" category:

A bit of news from earlier in the year-- At least 50 people have lost their sight in an Indian Village because they were staring at the sun hoping to see an image of the virgin mary. I wouldn't stare at the sun to see the real virgin mother, let alone an image of her.

"Forty-eight cases of sight-loss, allegedly caused by photochemical burns on the retina, have been recorded at St Joseph's ENT and Eye hospital in the region since Friday." (telegraph.co.uk)

Sasquatch Update

Apparently our own elusive Pacific Northwesterner's cousin is on the verge of being discovered. His Asian counterpart left a pair of hairs behind after binging on some tree sap.

"tests at Oxford Brookes University on hairs said to be from a Yeti in India have failed to link the strands with any known species.

Ape expert Ian Redmond, who is leading the research, said: "The hairs are the most positive evidence yet that a Yeti might possibly exist." (telegraph.co.uk)

We'll have to wait for this one to pan completely out, but it is about damn time for something solid to come along.

Texas Full of Idiots; Recycling Trendy and Over-Hyped!

Strike another blow against the environment, the American south, intelligence and the survival of man/woman-kind.

Houston hates to recycle. The NY Times reported last week about how Houston doesn't give a shit about anyone but themselves. They are the worst recycler among the 30 largest cities in the US, but even that fact does not really convey how piss poor they are at this whole new found recycling fad.

"Houston recycles just 2.6 percent of its total waste, according to a study this year by Waste News, a trade magazine. By comparison, San Francisco and New York recycle 69 percent and 34 percent of their waste respectively. Moreover, 25,000 Houston residents have been waiting as long as 10 years to get recycling bins from the city." (nytimes)

At least this d.b. will be heading back your way soon. Good luck with that. Can we send any other trash your way?

And leave it to their mayor to be the biggest idiot of them all: "We have an independent streak that rebels against mandates or anything that seems trendy or hyped up,” said Mayor Bill White."

Well, good for you Texas, good for you, you've once again proven to be the fucking psycho 16 year old high school sophomore that listens to the sex pistols in your parents basement, shops at thrift stores, not to mention hot topic, smokes camel wide cigarettes out behind the school bus, and doesn't go to the prom because you're so ugly and scary that you can't find someone to go with you so you say it's cliche and you're better than it, even though you'd totally go with that cute chick that looks like that girl from clarissa explains it all from homeroom in middle school that you are unwilling to admit to even yourself that you still have a crush on that has no idea who you are, not to mention the fact that you'd generally sell out in a fraction of a second if the popular kids even looked at you once with anything other than pure, unconditional pity, which they won't even do to your face because they are so scared of you and what you like to pretend you're capable of so they just continue to not talk about you while they are drinking their wine coolers or natty-lite on Friday night at that stupid kids, with the stupid out of town parents, house on the cul-de-sac on the rich side of town while you’re smoking your bad pot, drinking your mad dog and trying to figure out how some day you can screw the man by … … … not recycling.

Good News Wednesday XVII: Scary Black Hole Creating Hadron Collider Nearly Ready

Great news for science! Bad news for you! We're all going to be gone before the end of the year.

Boston.com has some amazing pictures of the Large Hadron Collider we talked about a few weeks ago.

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a 17 mile long particle accelerator straddling the border of Switzerland and France, is nearly set to begin its first particle beam tests. The European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) is preparing for its first small tests in early August, leading to a planned full-track test in September - and the first planned particle collisions before the end of the year. (boston.com)

EIGN will try and keep you updated as to exactly when this thing is set to go live; that way you can get your affairs in order, or have an affair!, before the world gets sucked up by a mini black hole.

100th Post Spectacular Is Nothing Compared to 125,000 Gorillas

Great News Wednesday Tuesday...
100th EIGN post spectacular...
125,000 Gorillas we didn't know about...
BIG FOOT.

As reported, well, everywhere, the "Mother Load" of Western Lowland Gorillas were found in the forests of the Congo. (npr)

And the question both of your co-founders, writers, and generally apocalyptic Earth is Going Nova friends want to know is, if there is still a place on earth that can hide 125,000 fucking apes, why can't there be a few Big Foots hanging around somewhere. Hell, even Jane Goodall said once in 2002, on National Public Radio, that she believes they exist.

125,000 gorillas is an astonishingly large amount of apes. It has basically doubled the number thought to have existed in the wild before this find.

Skeptics argument against a big foot, sasquatch, or yeti, saying that there is no way such a large creature could still exist without being discovered has simply been thrown out the window.

We here at EIGN, namely Pete and I, are putting together a Big Foot search party, likely to depart to the north western states of the US sometime in 2009. All those interested are urged to contact us. The race for such a great find is on, and we're going to beat Jane Goodall, and her rag-tag bunch of scientists, conservationists, and interns, to the punch.

And Big Foot, if you're reading this, don't worry we're not going to hurt you, turn you in, put a graining video of you on youtube, or sell you out in the name of profit or anything else. Just don't hurt us when we find you.

As an aside: Thanks to all of our loyal EIGN readers--all two of you. We never would have made it to this 100th post without you and all of your support. We've had fun so far and we hope to see you at post 200.

When Dolphins Attack (ie: a cool picture)

Which is scarier: seeing one shark coming towards you while on a surfboard, or seeing at least 8 dolphins coming at you, inside a big fucking wave that's about to break on you.

At least the dolphins seem to be recovering from those horrible, horrible tuna nets that bring such tasty, tasty treats. (I love you spicy tuna)

Photo via forum on surfermag.com