Akhibara, Japan is the place to go to get just about anything you want in life…even if that anything includes wanting a creepy doll-like clone of yourself.

Recently a company called “Clone Factory” opened which now allows you to not only have a 3D-printed doll-head of your own mug but your pets as well.

Using several DSLR cameras, Clone Factory captures your face from different angles, puts it all together in the computer, prints it and hands you a bill for $1,300 US bucks.

Clone Factory uses one of the most advanced 3D printers (made by ZCorp) on the market to print out these plastic little mini-selfs of its customers. Disney recently used these same printers during their annual Star Wars Weekends at Walt Disney World where guests could either have their likeness frozen in a slab of carbonite or put onto the body of a Stormtrooper (complete with detachable helmet).

Most of Clone Factory’s customers are actually women. Not only do the women seek to preserve how they look on special days like their weddings, they also have the exact outfits they’re wearing at the time as well as their hair and make-up recreated as well.

Which doesn’t make any of this any less creepy.
[DesignTaxi]

In a case of ‘this is why we can’t take you seriously’, an amateur photographer snapped a couple photos of something that’s currently got the UFO and ‘rod community’ (leave jokes below…we know they’re coming) buzzing. And by buzzing we mean they’re all getting excited by a picture of what’s probably a photo-bombing bug moving across the frame of 43-year-old Corrine Federer’s camera while she was shooting photos of a castle in Amsterdam.

Federer stated that, “It was a tubular-shaped object that had an S-shaped fin on it. If it had been any type of missile, it would’ve had mulptiple fins, but facing the same direction. We heard nothing. It was completely quiet out. The more I flipped through the frames, it was kind of creepy.”

Many people are speculating that it’s a photo of a missile test, airplane or weather balloon.

Federer believes that it could be something more…

“I don’t find it unreasonable that there’s another habitable planet somewhere that has started exploring space. Maybe they’re more advanced than we are and they’ve come by to see what’s going on here.”

While some of us are pointing and giggling at the alleged UFO, many are pointing with serious there’s-all-the-proof-you-need-faces.

[FOX News]

Since Russia is like the overseas equivalent of Florida, news that typically comes out of there is usually skewed toward the weird.

After finding blood splattered near the wheel well of an Airbus passenger plane, authorities moved on to their second what-the-hell discovery…a frozen 22-year-old dead man stuck in said wheel well. This same 22-year-old was not only dead, frozen and stuck in the wheel well of an Airbus…he’d been there for four days and logged at least seven trips before he was discovered!

Giorgio Abduladze’s t-shirt and shorts-clad body underwent an autopsy showing that he froze to death in flight. Crews don’t regularly access the area where Abduladze’s body was found but now everyone’s wondering what he was doing in there in the first place.

[GeekoSystem]

3D printng is the ‘it’ thing right now. It seems like nothing can’t be printed. We can print plastic toys, metal parts and even cell tissues using additive manufacturing. So what’s next?

Food…3D-printed food.

A Texas company is partnering with NASA to explore the idea of printing food during long, deep space missions. Systems and Materials Research and
Consultancy, a company in Austin, was recently awarded a Small Business Innovation Research Phase 1 contract concerning printing
food for astronauts. Currently astronauts eat foods that lose their micronutrients during the process they go through to become official space-food.

Eventually the prepackaged, off-the-shelf, single-servings the astronauts nom on now will make way for customizable recipes.

Anyone else excited to witness the first live-stream of a 3D-printed Thanksgiving dinner…in space? Us too.
[DesignBoom]

Brian, Justin and Bonnie discuss the brand new Kickstarter by Planetary Resources which seeks to put a publicly available telescope in space. And take selfies amongst the stars. Will Brian make the decision to allow commercial drones in our skies if it will bring him a piping hot pan pizza faster? Also, which 18-century American city was so rife with public sex and prostitution it was dubbed “Sin City” long before Vegas?

It’s all part of a new Weird Things podcast.

Support the show by purchasing Andrew’s BRAND NEW BOOK Knight School just click on the image below.

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Picks:

Justin:

Off Camera

Brian:

Supergods

Bonnie:

Healthy Sleep Habits Happy Child

After a hiatus, Brian and Justin return with Bonnie The Invisible Wife for a new episode of Weird Things. Brian is dead and Bonnie is charged with building a monument for her late husband, will she build something so garish it is rejected by the city? SPOILER: she does. A wave of death that left over 150 injured and over 20 dead is investigated. Also, the holodeck is real.

It’s all part of a new Weird Things podcast.

Support the show by purchasing Andrew’s BRAND NEW BOOK Knight School just click on the image below.

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Picks:

Justin:

Star Trek Into Darkness

Brian:

This Machine Kills Secrets

Bonnie:

Zombies, Run!

There’s really not much to talk about here with a bunch of words. They’ll just get in the way of you pressing play and smiling like a little kid as your brain sort of automatically speculates on the possibilities of this in peoples’ homes.

We’ve all dreamed of the Holodeck being a part of our secret lair at home. Microsoft’s new IllumiRoom is a lot like watching a baby take its first steps in the direction of Holodecks becoming a standard part of any man-cave.

Sure we’ve seen mapped projections before like at Walt Disney World’s Magic, Memories and You show at the Magic Kingdom…but nothing on a consumer level and nothing with this kind of customization. Using a Kinect, a couple of cameras and some software, this is something that, while in its newborn stage, could lead to some truly innovative projects and ideas…or just mean that we’re going to be leaving our mother’s basements way less than we already do.

[GizMag]

Someone at Budweiser had apparently just read about Virgin America’s in-cabin, passenger-to-passenger texting service, knocked back a couple bottles and decided that the giant beer-hive should also get in on the act of making social interaction among drunken stalkers and their prey even more uncomfortable.

Using a ‘Buddy Cup’, you scan the cup with your phone, link your Facebook profile to the chip embedded in the bottom of the cup and then, magically, every time you clink cups with someone else who’s gone through the process, you become ‘friends’ on everyone’s favorite social hive.

Buddy Cup! Because there’s nothing like becoming friends with all the people involved in a lot of bad decision-making from the night before.

[BudBrasilOficial YouTube]

It wasn’t too long ago that North America’s Hellmouth of a state was calling for people to go out into the wild and bag/kill as many giant pythons as they possibly could.
Now that that’s yesterday’s Nature versus Humankind battle is over, everyone’s favorite birthing place of weird EVERYTHING is taking us back to the good old days of that era of 1970s horror films when piranha, worms, snakes, rats, bears and even tadpoles decided they were tired of sharing the planet with us.

Just what the hell is this new scourge that’s coming to wreak havoc upon us now?

Brace yourselves, people…

Snails.

SNAILS!

And they’re exactly the kind of snails some of you are imagining right now…
Giant African Snails that can grow to 8 inches long, devour 500 different species of plants and (you’re going to slap your face like Maculay Culkin in Home Alone right about now) they are tearing through stucco and peoples’ homes! Not only that but the snails’ shells are big enough to puncture car tires because they’re Frogger-like skills are nonexistent!

Good luck, Florida.

[Huffington Post]

Brian and Justin are brought to the gates of a mysterious cavern. Is it the literal gate to hell? How far would Andrew go for science? We discover the horrifying outer limits. What would you do with your own vigilante botnet?

It’s all part of a new Weird Things podcast.

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Picks:

Justin:

The Great Gatsby audiobook with Tim Robbins

Brian:

Inside Scientology

Andrew:

War of the Worlds

Recently a group of Japanese scientists at the IEEE Virtual Reality Conference in Orlando, Florida have unveiled
the latest incarnation of…
(sad, loungy drumroll please)
Smell-O-Vision!

That’s right. Scientists have been working hard at making your television smell.

Do we really need to smell the elephants of Africa while watching a beautiful documentary about the animals?

No. Not really.

But advertisers sure would like us to get a whiff of things like the latest addition to the IHOP menu, the latest
colognes and Pilsbury would take the obesity problems in America to a whole new level when that little chubby, animated
chef shows up shoving a tray full of warm, delicious chocolate chip cookies in our faces.

Using gel pellets placed at the four corners of the monitor and small air-streams, scientists are able to get fairly
specific across the face of the monitor where the smell will seem to emanate from. Think of it like 5.1 surround sound but
your nose is the one in the recliner experiencing it.

Modern day theme parks like Universal and Disney often use gel packs or cartridges to send the smell of candy, food or, in the case of Universal’s
Halloween Horror Nights, the smell of rotting meat to add a subtle something to guests’ in-park experience.

What was unveiled at the conference is still fairly primitive but technological developments will continue to improve and
pretty soon you could be smelling the oil and smoking metal of Call of Duty…

Or the sweet, acrid smell of a Well Zombie from the Walking Dead.

[DAILY MAIL UK]

Researchers have found the tentacled god Cthulhu at last he shall walk the earth and consume us all. By earth we mean the gut of termites and by consume we mean engage in a symbiotic relationship. Oh, and this Cthulhu as described in the PLOS ONE paper is actually a microorganism. But he does have tentacles and is as scary as the deep dark hell from which he most certainly came from.

Researchers Invoke Cthulhu In Naming Two New Microorganisms : World : Latinos Post.

What’s better than Yeti tracks in the snow? Video of a Yeti. What’s better than a Yeti? Two Yetis! What’s better than that???? A mama yeti and her child filmed by some 12 year old Russian kid. To top it all off, a Russian scientist has even declared the footage is legit, because it’s not like you could fake something like this. Next you’ll have us believing it really was a meteor that slammed into Russia a few months back. Seriously. Science. Yetis.

Siberian Times
HuffingtonPost.co.uk

Two southerners are getting checks each year from the government for $865 a year. The explanation might break your brain. Andrew explains his current obsession with the real life Monkey Island. Also, his hunt to prove that it not only existed, but the hunt to find the mysterious descendants that might still roam the Southern California wilderness. Is the speed of light a constant? Do we even know what that means? NO! Still, we are blown away.

It’s all part of a new Weird Things podcast.

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Picks:

Justin:

The Provider

Brian:

The Disappearing Spoon

Andrew:

Pterosaur Trouble

As one of his last acts as pope, retired Pope Benedict decreed that Italians should be given a special look into the Turin Cathedral and the Shroud it’s known for. Sealed inside it’s climate controlled case, viewers will get a glimpse of this controversial artifact that some say was the shroud used to bury Jesus. Through some kind of divine Polaroid intervention, his image was supposedly fused into the shroud.

While the scientific evidence says it dates from the medieval times and researchers have shown how easily the shroud could have been made, it’s still a source of inspiration and fascination for millions.

Rare TV appearance for Turin Shroud, Christianity’s famous relic – CNN.com.

NASA plans to put a line for $100 million in an upcoming budget for an asteroid snatching mission with a total expected cost of $2.6 billion. The goal is to grab an asteroid and move it into a lunar orbit so we can get a closer look.

What do you think? At a starting cost of $2.6 billion (and that’s the floor) would we be better off with an X-Prize style initiative? Given the success of NASA’s Commercial Orbital Transportation Services program, is there something to the idea of getting commercial enterprise to offset the costs?

via Bold asteroid-snatching plans to appear in NASA 2014 budget | Ars Technica.

It’s green and came from outer space. While scientists haven’t completely ruled out a Kryptonian origin, they think this rock may in fact be the first piece of the planet Mercury ever found on earth. Sheared away in a collision billions of years ago, further tests will be required to tell us if it came from the first planet, but right now prospects look good.

Green Meteorite May Be from Mercury | Space.com.

The folks at NextBigFuture via Rocketeers.co.uk are reporting the rumor mill has SpaceX planning to send their reusable Grasshopper test rocket to a height of 300,000 feet in the near future with an eye towards trying a controlled re-entry of the primary stage sometime this year.

The first high-altitude test flight would see the first stage going to the edge of space (the actual edge, not the make-believe-one whenever the media sees a photo from a high altitude balloon) and returning to the launch pad (ideally) at White Sands Missile Range.

If that proves successful, they plan to bring a first stage back down to earth via a rocket controlled descent into the ocean.

Either mission would be a huge, groundbreaking (only figuratively, hopefully) event in space travel. A successful return of a first stage takes us dramatically closer to the dream of a rocket as reusable as a commercial airplane. This would bring the cost of putting things into orbit low enough to create a boom in aerospace development.

We don’t know who Chief Njelele is, or who elected him, but by the accounts were hearing, he’s got a real problem in his region of Zimbabwe. We’re talking a Nelson Mandela, Bill Gates and Bono level solve-this-crisis. On of his villagers is being plagued by too many goblins to count according to the Zimia Dispora:

“I asked her how many goblins she had been given and she told me she could not quantify them because they were too many. She hysterically told me that these goblins were haunting her and making her life a living hell,” said Chief Njelele.

Next time you fret about your first world problems, be glad you don’t have to worry about a bunch of thieving goblins stealing women’s underwear and hiding it in your house.

So notorious is Chief Njelele’s area that last year another villager’s goblin allegedly stole panties belonging to 26 women. Another villager later apologised after a tsikamutanda reportedly fingered him as the owner of the thieving goblin. Reporters has it in good authority that the goblin was also found wearing an underwear belonging to a village headman’s wife.

Panties go missing and they find them in some dude’s house who says those damn goblins are to blame.

Bonnie “The Invisible Wife” joins Brian and Justin to discuss the Week of Weird. A school in Maryland begin instituting a series of outlandish new regulations. Can Bonnie and Brian force themselves and their children to adapt? With all the Pope talk, Justin reveals the most closely guarded papal secret of all time. Meanwhile, the Brushwoods imagine a past where they become teenage super heroes named Blow and Hoe.

It’s all part of a new Weird Things podcast.

Support the show by purchasing Andrew’s BRAND NEW BOOK Knight School just click on the image below.

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Area 1851

Picks:

Justin:

Ridiculous Fishing

Brian:

Downton Abbey

Bonnie:

Lessons from the Top

SpaceX launches does a new rocket test that reminds Justin of a CGI future where humans roam the stars. A new digital scam is fleecing business men our of scads of cash, Justin and Andrew discuss the future of such villainy. Are we climbing out of the uncanny valley? There is life on Mars, and we will Kickstarter ourselves there. What does this mean for our favorite Sci Fi shows and movies?

It’s all part of a new Weird Things podcast.

Support the show by purchasing Andrew’s BRAND NEW BOOK Knight School just click on the image below.

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Sponsor:

Area 1851

Picks:

Andrew:

Marvel Unlimited

Justin:

Dreams & Shadows

Yesterday at the SXSW keynote, SpaceX’s Elon Musk showed the first footage of their most recent test of their reusable rocket system. In what has to be a new record of some kind, the Grasshopper, a rocket 10 stories tall, flew 268 feet in the air and then landed back down on the pad without incident.

Next Grasshopper rocket test is called the Johnny Cash Hover Slam (yeah baby!). Might be our first smoking crater…

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 9, 2013

Even Elon Musk was publicly unsure of the success of the test, suggesting on Twitter this might leave a ‘crater’. The name, “Johnny Cash Hover Slam”, doesn’t inspire confidence in a happy landing. Watch the video accompanied by Cash’s Ring of Fire and remind yourself of the scale of what you’re watching. 268 feet is tall enough to clear the crown of the Statue of Liberty. It’s also probably the heaviest object in the world to ever VTOL.

What’s next for the Grasshopper program and their goal of rapidly reusable rockets? At SXSW, Musk said they’d like to go hypersonic before the end of the year. Any song suggestions for that one?

Quadcopters are the new must-have toys of the tech-headed kids. They’re showing up everywhere and there are thousands of them out ‘in the wild’.

For those frightened that these things will eventually be controlled by SkyNet, this latest advancement in their abilities is only going to reinforce that paranoia.

For the rest of us who believe our robot friends would never hurt us based on a set of laws thrust into existence by an author of science fiction novels? This is pretty awesome to watch.

For a more detailed description of how exactly this whole process works, you can check out RoboHub for a more educational explanation than anything you’re ever going to find here.

Those that just want to be amazed at a serious demonstration of how organized, responsive, agile….

Know what? Forget we ever called those people paranoid.

[RoboHub.Org]

Fans of The Walking Dead know that if you cover yourself in the leftovers of friends, neighbors and family, zombies will just stroll right on by you…until it begins to rain and things go to hell real fast.

Wouldn’t it be awesome if someone would just come up with a scented…oh wait…it’s happened..

Demeter Fragrances has added two new perfumes to their line-up:

‘Zombie for Him’ and ‘Zombie for Her’.

Now there’s no need to don protective wear and hack away for hours when only a butter knife is available in order to smother yourself with the innards of a hapless stranger…or a not quite zombie-apocalypse-prepped friend.

‘Zombie for Him’ is described thusly:

Think forest floor. Zombie for Him is a combination of dried leaves, mushrooms, mildew, moss and earth. A definite must-have for any Man’s scent collection.

‘Zombie for Her’ is:

A slightly lighter version of the Men’s fragrance with a touch of Dregs from the bottom of the wine barrel for that feminine touch.

Now you can protect anyone in an instant by just spritzing them and blending in socially amongst the walking dead…

Until it suddenly rains again.

[DesignTaxi]

For a LOT of the more nerdy kids out there, we’re placing bets that many of you pretended you had the ability to throw fireballs, move objects by waving your hands and occasionally even tried in vain to channel the Force.

That was all fun, lots of pretending and wishful thinking…wasn’t it?

Not any more.

Thalmic Labs, the creators of Myo is a company that, with the help of a special armband, could make a lot of those things a reality.

‘As a company, we’re interested in how we can use technology to enhance our abilities as humans – in short, giving us superpowers,’ Stephen Lake, co-founder and CEO of Thalmic Labs said.

Using gesture control, Myo is an armband that registers the electrical activity in your muscle movements that will produce a signal that’s interpreted and sent wirelessly to your phone, television, kitchen or even your personal drone instantly.

But the best part about Myo?

You can actually pre-order one right now! Scheduled to come out later this year, the Myo armband will begin shipping near the end of the 2013.

The asking price? $149!

At that price why waste time running around in a swamp with an 800 year-old, green, raisin-skinned, wizard clinging to your back and nagging at you or visiting some weird old desert hermit when you can just drop a little cash and skip the middleman?

Let’s just hope people remember to remove it when they’re doing…uh…private stuff involving a lot of gesturing.

We’re pretty sure that this thing can’t help us ‘unsee’ things yet.

[Daily Mail UK]

Last time we checked Brazil seemed like a place where men really wouldn’t be hard up to find a female companion.

We were wrong. Very, very wrong.

How wrong? Just…just keep reading.

There’s a bidding war going on in Brazil right now over a woman. For some she’s the perfect woman. For most of us she’s just plain weird and the ridiculous bidding war over her is even weirder.

Her name is Valentina.

Valentina is, disturbingly enough, the most desirable woman in Brazil right now and the man with the most padded wallet will get the chance to deflower her.

The current going price for Valentina’s virginity right now? $105,000 and climbing.

Wondering what her parents and family might be thinking of all of this craziness? Doesn’t matter.

Valentina isn’t real. She’s a life-like sex doll created by the acme of all sex-doll companies, Real Doll. The company has recently opened a manufacturing plant in Brazil and Valentina is the first doll created there. Now her ‘virginity’ is on the auction block.

The winner of the auction will also receive all-expenses-paid travel to and from São Paulo, a free night’s stay in the Presidential Suite of a fancy hotel, and a complimentary candlelight dinner with French Champagne to share with Valentina.
They’ll even throw in some sexy lingerie as Valentina’s gift to you, and a digital camera “to shoot and then show your friends.”

Not only is this a bidding war for an inanimate woman’s viginity…it also seems like an opportunity to see who the richest, most desperate Brazillian man is who’s got such bad game that he’s willing to shell out a small fortune for a woman who won’t say no to even his worst pitch.

[Gawker]

Anyone who’s been following the evolution of Boston Dynamics has been creeped out at one point by their BigDog robot. BigDog is a quadraped robot that has learned a lot of tricks since it was a terrifying little puppy of a machine. It balances itself even when an engineer makes an attempt at cow-tipping it, it ambles over the most diverse terrain ever laid out in front of a robot, follows humans like an obedient pack-mule and even understands what humans are saying to it.

Each stage in BigDog’s learning process has brought with it a level of creepiness.

But BigDog’s newest trick just put the nail in the coffin of humankind’s demise.

BigDog now throws things.

And what it’s throwing isn’t a spitball. It’s not a paper airplane. It’s not throwing Mardi Gras beads. It’s not a fun frisbee.

Nope. Not anything even remotely associated with enjoyable OR fun…

It’s throwing cinder blocks.

30 pound, concrete cinder blocks…

And it’s throwing them easier and more accurately than you could ever hope to throw one.

Which once again goes to prove that we shouldn’t be worried about the robots taking over in the future…

We should be worried about our own fellow humans helping them.

[Boston Dynamics YouTube Channel]

Original three reunited again for this very special episode of the podcast! Andrew introduces a birthday question in honor of Justin’s 30th Name Day. A space pioneer wants to make a fly by around Mars but the price may be too high for some prospective adventurers. Or too low. Or too stank.

ALSO! Get the first two chapters of Andrew’s new book Knight School read to you by Justin… for free!

It’s all part of a new Weird Things podcast.

Support the show by purchasing Andrew’s BRAND NEW BOOK Knight School just click on the image below.

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Picks:

Andrew:

Gremlins

Justin:

Django Unchained comic

Brian:

Sim City

What’s up with UFOs, volcanoes and Mexico?

Just now hitting the internet are videos of a ‘cigar ufo’ doing a drive-by of a volcano in Mexico. In October of 2012 a more daring group of what’s probably the alien equivalent of a tour bus decided to just fly into a volcano so its occupants could probably Instagram much cooler pics than the other tour groups who were just safely cruising by.

Are we saying it’s a UFO? Nope. Probably just another drunk alien.

[UFOvni2012 YouTube Channel]

In another step toward getting our food like the Jetsons, Fanta has created a print ad to describe, in a lot of adjectives, what their orange-flavored soda tastes like…

Then they offer you a chance to taste it.

And not by giving you a redeemable coupon for a cold, delicious orange-flavored drink from the store…

Nope…we’re in the ‘future’ now, kids.

Fanta is asking people to actually eat the print ad which has been created solely for that purpose.

[Ads of the World]

Ever wonder what it’s like to be homeless?

If you live in Sweden, you can quit wondering and put your money where your wondering is.

In order to raise awareness for the plight of the homeless population in the city of Gothenburg, an interactive agency has set up 10 locations that you can actually book for a stay. These 10 locations are the real deal and by booking one you’ll be giving the money to a charity to help the people actually living in those conditions.

You can even gift a night stay to a friend…or potential ex-friend.

[DesignTAXI]

Russia is a unique place. They drive a little differently there, meteors land there and now they’ve decided to tackle robotics…in the form a creepy walking robot disguised as a cute (but threateningly non-cute and blankly-staring) ostrich-walker.

Like the love-child of an AT-ST from the Star Wars universe and the little robots from the classic sci-fi film Silent Running, this attempt at making roaming ‘bots cute just ends up making it all that much creepier.

Why an ostrich? Only the group of four Russians calling themselves the Konstantin Ivanov could answer that question.

Using parts you might find at home and your local Radio Shack, the team set out to contstruct a walking robot on an extremely limited budget as a way of showing what they might be capable of if someone actually opened their wallet for Team Ivanov.

Total cost of Ostrich Mech? $1,500…

Expressions of horror from anyone who sees this thing marching toward them on the street?

Priceless.

[Konstantin Ivanov YouTube]

Justin and Andrew are again two against the world. We discuss the Russian meteor and why it explains how terrible Russia’s music taste is. SpaceX is hinting at a new test launch that could leave a smoking crater in the ground. A law is passed leading to a culinary freedom that might turn your stomach AND FINALLY Florida Python Hunt Results!

It’s all part of a new Weird Things podcast.

Support the show by purchasing Andrew’s BRAND NEW BOOK Hollywood Pharaohs just click on the image below.

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Sponsor:

Child Beauty Pageant Tycoon

Picks:

Andrew:

Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country

Justin:

House of Cards

Like found footage from an unannounced JJ Abrams flick, video is slamming YouTube from all over Russia about a large meteor that hit the atmosphere.

Details are still coming in about the event and we’ll have a fuller piece about it later.

For now? Grab some popcorn and enjoy a teaser for what the end of the world could look like.

The most amazing video that hit the internet almost immediately is from a driver’s dash-cam as the event takes place (for all of you who have NOT seen videos showing why Russian drivers need dash-cams? You’re depriving yourself)!

Next up? The sound of the sonic boom reaching the street. There have been reports of multiple injuries from exploding glass and falling objects…it’s like an ‘air-quake’!

And as people begin turning their cameras to the sky, the whole JJ Abrams-esque thing begins to manifest as everyone stands around staring at this terrifyingly strange and probably overwhelming event.

We’ll post more later as Russia calms the hell down.

Justin and Andrew are riding as a power duo in this episode of the Weird Things podcast. Who is going to be the next Pope? We thumb through many surprising possibilities including a few super spies who would take the head Vatican role on His Majesty In Heaven’s Secret Service. A space death missile will narrowly miss us, but what would happen if it didn’t? And why shouldn’t we be shooting at it?

It’s all part of a new Weird Things podcast.

Support the show by purchasing Andrew’s BRAND NEW BOOK Hollywood Pharaohs just click on the image below.

Try out the brand new PODCASTR player, featuring wireless syncing between desktop browsers and iOS devices.

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Picks:

Andrew:

House of Cards

Justin:

Star Wars Audio Drama

We’re always making references to the ‘Robot Apocalypse’ or about all of us being enslaved by ‘our future overlords’ when it comes to our slowly evolving erector set-like counterparts. While 30 and 40-somethings stand around and make jokes, robots continue their often awkward baby-steps into being a part of our lives.

But what about the children?

You know…the children forced to oil the joints of the those aforementioned ‘future overlords’ so that they can continue their ‘overlording’ of the humans?

Those children won’t be worried because they’ll have grown up with robot friends at school.

Friends like ‘Robovie’.

Higashihikari (sneeze it and it’ll sound just fine) Elementary School in Kyoto began a 14-month experiment just a few days ago where a new ‘student’ joined the fleshy ankle-biters’ ranks in order to collect data that will help ‘Robovie’ and other tin-men of the future to interact more naturally with various people. That way, instead of speaking atomic-age sci-fi robotic phrases like “You will not be needed” or “Exterminate!”, they’ll be sitting us down quietly and gently breaking the news our enslavement is really for our own good.

Although this isn’t the first time that a robot has been placed in this kind of environment, this will be the longest amount of time that a robot has spent in the harsh, Lord of the Flies-like habitat of the elementary school student.

Good luck surviving that, Robovie.

[The Mainichi]

King Richard III’s body has been missing for several centuries now. Most historians figured the guy was buried near Leicester, England…somewhere. Nobody could figure out where the hell the body ended up after Henry VIII’s people lost the records showing the location of the remains.

Using other records of the day, archaeologists determined that the King’s remains were buried somewhere near the altar of the Grey Friars Church…

The very same Grey Friars Church that was about to become a parking lot.

After construction began and trenches were being dug for the new parking lot, things came to a screeching halt as workers found they’d unearthed a skeleton…a skeleton that had been there for a very long time.

Scientists and archaeologists descended on the future home of another forgettable strip mall to see if they could learn more about the skeleton who’d been chilling just a few feet below the surface of the area for what appeared to be several centuries.

After a lot of testing, retesting and verified tests….there was no doubt as to whose body this was.

Discovered last summer, this story has resurfaced (totally intentional pun) as the lab-coats have determined that this, in fact and without a doubt, King Richard III’s remains.

Makes you wonder what the hell’s under the nearest WalMart.

[Telegraph UK]

OG Lineup Reunited! A mystery that could rewrite cultural, space and political history is revealed. What is the future of television? How about a technology that draws on your flipping eye balls! This triggers Brian to imagine a beautiful world where everyone is forced to wear glasses. Then Andrew and Justin disagree. Then the yelling begins. Oh, the yelling.

Ask Thin Lizzy, the Weird Things podcast is back in town!

BROUGHT TO YOU BY:

- Flowers

FLOWERS is the third feature film from writer/director Phil Stevens. An abstract, surreal horror film centering around six dead women waking up in the crawl space below their killer’s house only to discover that they are trapped in their own limbo and purgatory. A movie that tells it’s story in silence. Without any spoken dialog and surrounded in a cryptic and dark visual atmosphere, FLOWERS is a film that builds on the journey and not the destination. check out the site at flowersthefilm.com or help out by donating to the kickstarter at http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/manomatul/flowers-a-return-to-the-dark-art-house-underground.

Support the show by purchasing Andrew’s BRAND NEW BOOK Hollywood Pharaohs just click on the image below.

Try out the brand new PODCASTR player, featuring wireless syncing between desktop browsers and iOS devices.

Subscribe to the Weird Things podcast on iTunes
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Download url: http://www.itricks.com/upload/WeirdThings020813.mp3

Picks:

Brian:

House of Cards

Andrew:

Stone Spring

Justin:

SModcast with Rian Johnson

‘Squirrel!’

Ever wonder what it looked like at the inception point of a thought? Like when your watching ‘fail videos’ online and you do that mental cringe at the exact moment that you’re watching someone sledding down a hill on an oil-pan and suddenly the shot pans far enough to see the gaggle of unattentive people about to meet said oil-pan driver?

Wonder no more!

Researchers in Japan have actually filmed that ‘Oh $#%*!’ moment…

In a zebrafish.

Watch the video. That sudden flash of light takes place the moment the fish noticed food being put into the tank. Zebrafish aren’t going to be taking over the world anytime soon with all of their incredible cerebral abilities, but that was the point of this…to record the inception of a thought in a more simple brain simply to see if it could be done.

A double-transgenic larva was embedded in agarose, and a spot was presented on an LCD display placed on the right-eye side. Ca2+ signals were detected on the left tectum upon appearance (ON) and disappearance (OFF) of the spot. The spot was shown for the first 3 s in this 6 s movie. The video is shown at 3x real time.

Experiments are expected to take place on more advanced brains way too soon.

We could sit around all day and come up with scenarios about this stunning breakthrough.

But if you were a zebrafish, we’d already know that.

[Gizmodo]

Not sure about you…but pretty sure that having the ability to create our own bad-ass appendages like He-Man’s Trap-Jaw would take precedence over things like eating…sleeping…everything…well almost everything.

Ivan Owen created a mechanical hand prop and posted it on YouTube. A couple days later he was contacted by Richard Van As, an amputee and craftsman who admired Owen’s work. Once they put their put their brains together, they created a prosthetic finger for Richard. After many more prototypes, the two learned of an awesome kid named Liam who was born missing the fingers of his right hand. The two men decided to help Liam out.

A few more prototypes later and “Robohand” was born. Crafted for Liam, it took only a few days for him to get adjusted to using his prosthetic.

Most bare-bones, low-end prosthetics can easily set someone back $600 and take weeks to go through the fitting, customizing and refitting process.

Using a 3D printer, Owen and Vas As stripped down those weeks into a matter of hours and that $600 for an arm that was nothing more than a stick with a glove on the end was whittled down to a prosthetic with individually moving fingers for the pocket change of $20.

Using a Replicator 2, Ronning created

During the course of a single day and a couple more twenties? Someone’s eventually going to start tossing out ‘what ifs’.
Next day? Someone’s going to be sporting a grappling hook, a flame-thrower, a buzz-saw, a built-in paintball gun, a slingshot or some kind of ridiculously awesome combination we haven’t even imagined yet.

[GizMag]

Sometimes you go out for dinner and wonder whether or not the guys in the kitchen are fixing your meal based on your server’s impression of you and using questionable ingredients like forehead sweat just to teach you a lesson.

At Ne Quittez Pas (which translates to: “Please don’t leave”, a French restaurant located in Tokyo’s Gotanda District, you don’t have to wonder about weird stuff being put in your food behind your back.

Why?

Because Ne Quittez Pas makes it no secret that many of their meals are created using the same thing many of you as a I’ll-stick-anything-in-my-mouth toddler probably taste-tested…

Dirt.

Ne Quittez Pas’ actually has an entire menu featuring dishes made with dirt!

Here’s your list:

Potato Starch and Dirt Soup
Salad with Dirt Dressing
Dirt Ice Cream and a Dirt Gratin
Dirt Mint Tea
There’s also something called “Minerals of the sea and minerals of the land,” an aspic made with oriental clams and the top layer of sediment, and a dirt risotto with sauteed sea bass and burdock root”.

How does gourmet dirt taste? Most of the people partaking of the ground we all walk on have said that it’s a non-issue because the dishes all taste so flippin’ good!

Next time you’re complaining about being hungry? Stop complaining…

Just grab a handful of what’s right under your feet and toss it down.

We’re not responsible for your bad decisions based on our bad suggestions.

Bon Appetit!

[RocketNews24]

BAM!

You’re chillin’ at home in front of the television.

BAM! BAM! BAM!

You hear some kind of resonating thud from outside. You assume it’s thunder or a neighbor and his anvil.

BAM!

You’re about to be REAL wrong!

BAM! BAM! BAM!

You hear this crazy sound coming from your roof so you go to investigate.

What do you find?

Were you a resident of a small neighborhood in Florida (yep…the streak continues), you might’ve uttered a “Aww….Hell no!” at 21 year-old Gregory Matthew Bruni who would’ve been standing on your roof…marching around on it…naked…BAM!..BAM!…BAM!…

That’s what a resident witnessed upon investigating a loud, thundering sound outside…a naked guy bounding around on his roof.

Once Bruni was discovered as the cause of the disturbance and the jig was up, he fly-tackled the owner of the home who’d come outside to investigate the source of the noise.
After leaping from the roof and onto the homeowner, Bruni ran inside the house screaming. In what can only be described as a tantrum, Bruni ran to the large screen television in the living room and pulled it over onto the floor. Bruni then happened upon the family’s vacuum cleaner and, in the weirdest display of a five-year-old not getting the ice cream he’d wanted, Bruni emptied the vacuum cleaner’s contents back onto the floor it had apparently just cleaned. The homeowner’s wife, who was aware things were gettin’ a little crazy, fired three warning shots with a revolver as Bruni finished undoing what the vacuum had done. In a panic Bruni hit the floor…

He didn’t just hit the floor….that would’ve been too easy (and not quite worthy of being ‘Florida-weird’).

He began amorously rubbing himself against the floor.

Once he felt his relationship with the floor had reached its climax, Bruni ran into the handgun-sporting wife’s closet and rubbed her clothing all over his face.

Bruni continued acting like a raging Muppet until the homeowner that’d been fly-tackled was able to get a shotgun and keep Bruni cornered until deputies arrived and constrained him by finally nailing the guy with a taser.

Bruni is being charged with Criminal Mischief, Battery, Occupied Burglary and resisting without violence.

Authorities believe that Bruni had been taking some kind of drug at the time of the incident but aren’t sure what it may have been.

While they all try to find an answer to what Bruni may have been taking….we’ll just quietly gesture back to our posts during the ‘bath-salt-zombie’ craziness that took place early last year and wonder if it’s not quite over just yet.

Or is Bruni just an idiot who’s late to the game…

Poser.

[NBC2.Com]

Sometimes towns and even countries have to stretch to lure potential tourist dollars.
Occasionally the only thing are some strange promises of something unique about a particular area.

We’ve all seen photos of the Giant Ball of (insert something you might make a giant ball out of). You might be surprised just how many will actually drive out to seek these over-the-top and almost accidental attractions.

To celebrate the ‘Year of Natural Scotland 2013′, the ‘Visit Scotland’ website has created something that might possibly cause peoples’ heads to explode in a ball of confetti, sparkles and female anime character giggles.

They’ve taken one adorable thing and one questionable fashion choice of Scottish heritage and combined them into a nexus of weirdly cute by dressing two ponies, Vitamin and Fivla….

…in cardigans.

Most local websites that often state: ‘Come See the Town of _______ where you can sit for hours and see local squirrels bury their nuts or sit by the lake for hours on end while wondering about other towns where something exciting might be happening’ just never seem to help garner enough buzz for you to even consider visiting.

But…two adorable ponies made even more adorable because they’re wearing sweaters?

We think people might notice.

[Design Taxi]

For two decades Eric Warrant has literally had a pretty crappy job. As a student who specializes in optics at the University of Lund in Sweden, he has been passionately studying the last creature on earth that you’d think of when it came to helping Toyota develop a true-color night-vision system…

The dung beetle.

Dung beetles have an uncanny ability to see clearly and navigate in even the darkest environment. Toyota is interested in developing a night-vision navigation system that allows for an optimal, full-color image in those conditions, we all want to avoid a car accident in the dark and Eric Warrant likes spending time with dung beetles. Everybody wins!

Using dung beetles’ abilities as the launching point and inspiration for this idea, Toyota is developing, in the simplest explanation we can give you, an advanced algorithym system that teaches the camera to look at every pixel in a single frame of video, look at the surrounding pixels, any movement in adjacent pixels and basically milk as much image information from the collected data in real-time to create a perfect, true-color image from nothing but a seemingly black image.

The team originally assumed they would have to design a special processor chip to run the algorithm and this would go inside a digital video camera, Malm says. In fact, the processing unit of a conventional PC graphics card was powerful enough to do the job, and they have managed to fine tune the algorithm to analyse images from the camera’s three colour channels – red, green and blue – simultaneously in real time. Three years after starting the project, the team finally have a way of capturing full-colour moving images shot in what to human eyes is almost total darkness.

Exactly how this technology will eventually be used is anyone’s guess.

But when that tech finally saves lives in the dark?

We can all stand up and applaud a crazy dude and his obsession with a crappy little bug.

[New Scientist]

Andrew is back. Brian is gone. And the one and only Veronica Belmont joins us. Goblins overrrun a Zimbabwe clinic, we take Veronica on quite a tour of our continuing goblin epidemic. We contemplate if a woman would have a neanderthal baby. An update on the Python Killin’ Contest in Florida. We try to sex up a SpaceX announcement.

It’s all coming up on a new Weird Things podcast!

Support the show by purchasing Andrew’s BRAND NEW BOOK Hollywood Pharaohs just click on the image below.

Try out the brand new PODCASTR player, featuring wireless syncing between desktop browsers and iOS devices.

Subscribe to the Weird Things podcast on iTunes
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Download url: http://www.itricks.com/upload/WeirdThings012213.mp3

Picks:

Veronica:

Old Man’s War

Andrew:

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

Justin:

Game of Thrones

Clarence Bright passed away at 93 years of age and his corpse was being prepped for burial in his final resting place.

Key word in that last sentence? ‘Was’.

Just hours before being buried, the body of Clarence Bright went missing. After receiving tips from family members, authorities began searching for Clarence’s son, Vincent. Almost immediately their search turned up a van containing a casket but still no Clarence.

When authorities finally arrived at Vincent’s home, they also found out where Clarence had seemingly sauntered off to.

Vincent, who, according to his family, had extreme religious views, had taken his good ol’ Dad home, in a cliche’ rookie move put him in the freezer in the basement and was going to bring him back to life.

Authorities shook their heads, arrested him, plucked his dad-sicle from the freezer and slapped a $75,000 bond on him.

Wayne County Jail arraigned Vincent via video.

In an understatement to the media, Vincent Bright’s lawyer, Gerald Karafa said:

“It’s an unusual case. It’s not something you see every day.”

Obviously Gerald the lawyer isn’t a regular reader of WeirdThings.

[Associated Press]

While we all wait for the scenes in Planet of the Apes to play out in real-life, a female chimp named Gina will give us all a glimmer of hope that at least a small percentage of our future primate overlords will need us for a little sumthin’ sumthin’…

Even if that something’s acting out her favorite love scenes from high-quality fare like ‘Slappin’ Bumpies 2′.

For those still catching up…

Gina is a female chimp at the Seville Zoo in Spain. As part of the zoo’s enrichment program, Gina was given her very own remote control for a television mounted to a wall near her cage.

Not long after Gina began figuring out how to work the remote, she also found that she preferred certain channels over others.

Those ‘certain channels’ were the ones that featured the people that kept her in cages riding one another like pack animals (obviously we’re skirting the ‘P’ word because that tosses red flags).

Pablo Herreros, the zoo’s primatologist wrote in his paper on Gina and her viewing preferences:

“The surprise was when they found that within a few days, Gina was not only using the remote control perfectly well, but that she also used to choose the p**n channel for entertainment, as many of us would have done.”

At least we know there’ll be a few sympathizers we can count on when we end up in cages with bad day-time television blaring at us.

Even if they just want us for our bodies.

We went there.

[New York Daily News]

Ever leave the house knowing you forgot…something?

We’re wondering what it was like when the guy who was supposed to file paperwork for 18 human heads for medical study realized that he’d forgotten to file paperwork for 18 human heads for medical study.

One week before Santa Claus was to descend on the world with a bag of awesomeness, 18 well-preserved human heads showed up at O’ Hare International Airport with no explanation….just a bunch of questions. It wasn’t until an employee from a crematorium came to pick up the heads that things became clear.

Tagged as ‘medical specimens’, the heads had originally shipped from the US to Rome for medical study and were coming back to the states to be cremated.

Brian Bell of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security stated:
“There’s no issue with the transportation of body parts for medical purposes. There’s nothing against the law that says you cannot ship them, provided you have the right documentation. Everybody here is ‘Oh my gosh, you got a box of heads’ and everybody thinks that it’s unheard of. It is a potentially legitimate medical shipment. We’ve seen it at various ports in the nation.”

You can leave all your ‘I’d-forget-my-head-if-it-wasn’t-attached jokes below.’

[Chicago Sun Times]

In our article about the other new toddler robot called Roboy we mentioned Diego-san. Here’s your first look into the robotic wagon-train that’s leaving Uncanny Valley slowly but surely.

When John Connor shows up and SkyNet goes live it won’t be the T1000s we’re worried about.

Why?

We’ll be too terrified by something that’s already been here.

Robot babies.

And you can tear that cute baby robot picture off the wall of your imagination…because robot babies are about as far as you can get from being ‘cute’.

Because we’re not satisfied with making skeletal robots that look like mechanical grim reapers, the University of San Diego has created a ridiculously amazing and disturbingly realistic over-sized one-year-old in order to study the cognitive development of infants.

“Its main goal is to try and understand the development of sensory motor intelligence from a computational point of view. It brings together researchers in developmental psychology, machine learning, neuroscience, computer vision and robotics. Basically we are trying to understand the computational problems that a baby’s brain faces when learning to move its own body and use it to interact with the physical and social worlds.”

As we continue grinning and patting ourselves on the back about our advances in robot technology and march ourselves into our own demise, you can rest assured that the armies of creepy robot babies are just going to keep on smiling that same frightening smile that’ll remind us of ourselves when we were so excited about our accomplishments in robotics.

Until then just keep hitting the replay button and shuddering at Diego-san’s facial expressions.

[Gizmag.com]

Across the globe from the uncanny valley that is Diego-san’s facial expressions, the University of Zurich’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory making another weird foray into the creation of a robot toddler.

Roboy is being developing with the help of crowd-funding,, sponsorships and almost 40 engineers and scientists.

Just like its weaker, fleshy, real-life inspiration, Roboy’s design gestation is going to take about 9 months to full completion.

Roboy is being developed to ease people into actually living with robots and not being creeped out by them. Roboy’s face was chosen during a Facebook contest. Its body is made entirely of plastic and will be covered with a fleshy, rubber-like material to simulate skin. Unlike typical robot movement mechanisms, Roboy will feature elastic cables pulled by motors in order to provide movement more human-like and less bad robot-dance-like.

Part of Roboy’s mission is to help build a bridge across the uncanny valley and get people more comfortable with having robots around and being a part of their lives.

Service robots are going to be a part of our lives in the very near future. As the population ages, new generations will already be more comfortable with having robots around and using them to do menial tasks for us.

Roboy will heading out into the world as part of the ‘Robots on Tour’ event that begins March and will exhibit all sorts of our future replacements.

Then there’s that incessant and nagging subconscious feeling that we might piss them off and see an army more terrifying than anything Hollywood could put in front of our peepers….

[Roboy]

Tom Merritt is our substitute Mayne this week. A Brazilian prison is part of an elaborate escape plan with an unlikely partner in crime. A police department in Florida is ensconsed in a cloud of technological suffication to the detrimite of car owners. Can a brand new pair of detectives named Hobo McGillicutty and Timetraveler Jones solve the case?

Also: Snake murder is the order of the day in South Florida! Python death up to your knees!

It’s all coming up on a new Weird Things podcast!

Support the show by purchasing Andrew’s BRAND NEW BOOK Hollywood Pharaohs just click on the image below.

Try out the brand new PODCASTR player, featuring wireless syncing between desktop browsers and iOS devices.

Subscribe to the Weird Things podcast on iTunes
Podcast RSS feed
Episode archive
Download url: http://www.itricks.com/upload/WeirdThings010813.mp3

Picks:

Tom:

Glympse.com

Brian:

Star Wars: Scoundrels

Justin:

Portlandia

Giant squids are legendary.

They’ve taken on Moby Dick, Captain Nemo’s Nautilus and even a bunch of Goonies.

While giant squids have been captured in the past and alleged parts of them have surfaced here and there…seeing one in the wild has been something of a Holy Grail moment that misty-eyed scientists and cryptozoologists have dreamt about forever.

Everyone can prepare to drop your jaws because there is now video of one of these mysterious monsters going about its business deep in the Pacific Ocean.

A team of three Japanese scientists spent over 400 hours crammed in a 31 foot submersible over the course of 100 missions about 150 miles north of Iwo Jima.

At a depth of 2,066 feet, the lights from the submersible reflected onto the creature’s silver skin as it eyeballed the sub curiously before it swam off.

The Discovery Channel’s new branch, Curiosity, is keeping the footage secret until the season finale later this month when they’ll unveil it to the world for the first time…

Up until then? A lot of “Release the Kraken!” headlines.

[Discovery.com]

We’ve all heard the expression ‘something old is new again’. Well that, and the fact that Florida was apparently created on top of an ancient Hell Mouth of some sort, brings this creepy discovery coming out of Miami.
Residents of a fancy-shmancy resort on the waters of Biscayne Bay in South Beach had been smelling something ‘unique’ in their building.

It wasn’t the uniquely fancy-shmancy food.

Three chickens and one goat washed up together on the sidewalk behind the resort. They were all missing one important thing…their heads.

After phone calls were made to the police regarding the animals, a spokesman for the department said that they weren’t going to get involved because “the dead animals didn’t appear to be sacrificed as a threat directed against any particular individual.” So instead? They just let them rot there for a couple of days.

Eventually Richard Couto, an investigator of the Animal Recovery Mission, stated that the animals seem to have been killed as part of a Santeria or Palo Mayombe ritual. Everyone involved, with the exception of those living in the nearby luxury condos, simply shrugged the event off as something that happens all the time because of the mixture of Afro-Caribbean cultures in the area. Animal sacrifice for religious purposes is also not against the law and is protected under first amendment rights.

Where the animals actually came from is still a mystery. Other reports of animal sacrifices in the area have been quietly popping up in the local news but those too are being ignored as just something that happens in the area.

Is there something else going on in South Florida?

We’ll be watching…but we’ll be locking up our pets…you know…just in case.

[Miami Herald]

We told you to check this film out in theaters. We pleaded on the Weird Things podcast, we begged you on Twitter. We even asked you all to take the Dredd Pledge.

Some of you did. For those of you who didn’t, or those of you who love, love this movie and want to take this gem of a film home, now here’s your chance.

Amazon is running a promo on Dredd (over 50% off!) where you can get the Blu-ray, the 3D Blu-ray version, the UltraViolet version nobody will use AND a digital copy you can save to your iTunes account you can watch on your PC, Mac, iPhone, iPad and AppleTV. It’s basically future-proof, so when we’re all living in the irradiated wasteland of America in Mega City One, we can stay safely behind barred windows and watch this awesome little flick over and over again.

Dredd isn’t for everyone. But for those of you into the idea of a High Noon meets Die Hard meets Mad Max in one glorious riot of ultraviolence, we think you’ll dig this. Plus it stars Karl “New Bones” Urban and Lena Headey of Game of Thrones and Sara Conner Chronicles fame.

Get it now while it lasts for just $19.99

ANDREW returns! We finally get our update on The Snuggery! Will our intrepid reporter unleash a b-dog on this poor woman? Mayne tells us of a hilarious run-in with a legendary magician. The boys peruse a vintage catalogue of hazing devices. We review our predictions of 2012 and make new ones for 2013.

It’s a DOUBLE STUFFED edition of the Weird Things Podcast!

Support the show by purchasing Andrew’s BRAND NEW BOOK Hollywood Pharaohs just click on the image below.

Try out the brand new PODCASTR player, featuring wireless syncing between desktop browsers and iOS devices.

Subscribe to the Weird Things podcast on iTunes
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Download url: http://www.itricks.com/upload/WeirdThings010113.mp3

Picks:

Andrew:

1933 King Kong

Brian:

Doctor Who – The Snowmen

Justin:

Django Unchained

Christmas has come and gone. Statuses everywhere are lit up with the swag given by friends and family.

Someone’s aunt got them this. Someone’s brother got them that.

Big flippin’ deal.

Why?

Because a group of scientists have been given gifts from freakin’ dolphins since 1998!

Dolphins!

Dolphins that offer gifts to humans!

Though the dolphins at the Tangalooma Island Resort in Australia haven’t been dropping PS3s or brand new iPhones they have been presenting gifts of food to human recipients. Scientists that have been studying these particular dolphins on a regular basis and in frequent contact with them have received everything from eels to tuna to squid.

Animals sharing food is a rare occurrence and typically takes place when an animal can’t fend for itself so others of its own kind help out. Most of the time it’s more ”you rub my back and I’ll rub yours” kind of a thing where the animal doing the giving expects something it can’t get for itself in return.

When they start offering up empty coffee cups they’ve found floating in the surf for Starbuck’s gift cards, though? THAT’S about the time we should all start questioning our place in things.

[Discovery.com]

Spiders are a little creepy to most people, right?

Well that other percent that didn’t think they were creepy? You can come join the rest of us now.

You’re walking through the woods and notice an interesting looking spider in the middle of its web from a distance. You decide to go in for a closer look. You make that ‘quizzical dog face’ because it’s a pretty weird-looking spider.

As you get closer, something seems a little ‘off’ about the ‘interesting’ spider…which begins to throb and shake in the most un-spider-like movement you’ve ever seen.

That’s about the time when your fear meter begins to spike as you realize the ‘spider’ you’ve been staring at is actually comprised of dead insects, debris and leaves and is being puppeteered by the real spider hiding just out of sight.

The ‘decoy spider’ is being looked at to see whether or not it’s a new species of spider or, in a step leading to total nightmare material, if it’s an already known spider that’s taught itself this behavior.

While scientists continue to determine what’s going on with this horrifying development in the spider kingdom, we’ll just keep hoping that human flesh is completely unpleasant to their terrifying little tastebuds.

[PeruNature.Com]

Harry Potter had one. Frodo Baggins had one. Even Max from Disney Channel’s Wizards of Waverly Place had one.

In fact, just about every single geek on the planet at some point in their life has probably hypothesized about how cool it would be to have some kind of a cape or blanket that you could cover yourself in and become instantly invisible.

Right?

Well that might soon become a reality.

While we’re still going to have to keep to our hypothetical invisible scenarios in our grinning heads, it won’t be long until soldiers, special ops agents and even….uh…submarines…begin using something called ‘Quantum Stealth’ to get all Predator-like.

Guy Cramer, the president and CEO of Hyperstealth Biotechnology in Canada, is vaguely but loudly declaring that he’s developed an invisibility cloak-like material!

After checking his site and looking at the ‘mock-up’ photos on display, we’re secretly hoping this is a serious technology that’s about to put old-school camouflage in the closet. Poking around online to see if there was ANY hint at what Cramer is developing turned up nothing that actually shows off the technology. He’s claiming that if a soldier were wearing his top secret material you wouldn’t know he was there until you tripped over him.

Pretty bold claims considering we’ve seen this kind of promise before.

But if we know our audience? We’re guessing you’re all crossing your fingers, doing some kind of little victory dance and hoping it’s true too.

[HyperStealth.com]

People in Blackfoot, Idaho are reporting something weird in their skies.

Local Tara Pagan, who stated that her whole family is comprised of skeptics, witnessed a strange group of orange balls of light in the sky that kept changing formation.

Pagan snapped the typical blurry ufo photo while her cousin called the first people we’d call if something like this were to happen…the fire department. Expectedly they claimed to have nothing to do with what they were witnessing.

Going online, Pagan found a phone number for Peter Davenport of the National UFO Reporting Center.

Davenport told Pagan he’d already received two other calls about the same anomaly.

By the end of the night six calls about the same object had been reported.

“They were not aircrafts, to the best of our knowledge,” Davenport said. “They were not hot air balloons … They were not crash dummies, swamp gas, weather balloons or any other item of pedestrian or terrestrial origin that I can imagine.”

The mystery of why you’d call the fire department to report a UFO continues to baffle only us apparently.

[LocalNews8.com]

Everyone say thank you to those crazy Mayans. Not only did they give us reason to create some truly spectacular parties where hangovers and regret would never even have a chance to hit us but those forward-thinking ancient-folk are also helping build small businesses like this one in Fayetteville, New York.

‘Survival: Adventure to Apocalypse’ is a real store catering to everyone’s favorite Mayan holiday…Armageddon. Owner and lady with a name that should heave her into a television-action series soon, Calypso Ford has stocked her new business venture with everything from boots for your pets to waterproof notepads as the impending, and probably disappointing, end of the world draws to its conclusion.

Ford’s store won’t carry guns or ammunition but it will carry items that would help people during something like a natural disaster. Survival: Adventure to Apocalypse will be open 7 days a week leading up the big day.

We’re going to be the first in line on the 22nd for the big half-off sale.

[CNYCentral News]

Who ya gonna call when someone you know or love or even yourself is suffering from demonic possession?

Answer? Not the Ghostbusters.

No. You’re going to call the Catholic Church. Not because the Ghostbusters are a fictional group of ghost-catching celebrities who can’t get their act together for that long-awaited third film.

You’ll be calling because the church is offering the service in the real world and the big clincher in our recession-slammed economy…it’s free.

The Catholic Church’s largest diocese is located in Milan is now offering exorcisms over-the-phone.

Chief exorcist Monsignor Angelo Mascheroni has recently doubled the amount of people manning the phones because of the increasing level of possession.

“We get many requests for names, addresses and phone numbers; that’s why we’ve set up a switchboard in the curia from Monday to Friday from 2.30pm to 5pm. People in need can call and will be able to find a priest in the same area who doesn’t have to travel too far.”

Monsignor says that most of the calls that come in are simply parents of disobedient teens that are dealing with typical disobedient teen stuff and that the actual phenomena of demonic possession are rare. Other calls from parents claiming their child is possessed are, sadly, simply children with psychiatric or mental disorders.

We’re just wondering when the app will drop.

[The Independent UK]

One young lady gets skeeved on, another gets a mouth full of metal without the pain of braces. One brother has his past failures haunt him, another just gets haunted by his brother. We introduce a new black character just as another one dies. Lighting crashes.

The Governor gets an eyeful of his future, gates are stormed and we have an underwhelming cliffhanger. All of it is chopped up in this week’s breakdown AFTER THE JUMP…

A Villain… Born

Except for the fact that he’s already a bad guy. Remember when he killed the army people? That’s bad. Also, The Governor goes out of his way to let his lieutenants know that he wants our jolly gang of prison folk dead. Which is pretty rude. I mean, they really aren’t any different than random road folk for whom his entire community is comprised. Right? I understand killing a military unit for security fears, one day they could just invoke some random part of the constitution and depose you. But what does Woodbury even know about the prison gang aside from that they heartily encourage interracial dating?

Hell, at that point they don’t even know our prisoners were storming their gates.

Which is a very long way of saying that the Gov’s “origin” moment where Michonne kills his already dead daughter and then gives him a very close look at a glass shard just felt… hollow.

Why make him that bad of a guy initially? What if he’s a bit of a chicken hawk and knows he turns a blind eye to Merle’s brutality but at heart is a politician. A politician who would relish the chance to bring in new constituents. Let’s say he tells his brain trust that they need to offer terms of protection for the prisoners. Maybe even unreasonable ones. And if they don’t agree, take care of him.

THEN when the poop hits the fan and he’s left looking like Sagat there is a change in plans. As it is now he went from “let’s kill everyone in the prison” to “LET’S KILL EVERYONE IN THE PRISON”. Sure he will be a little bit more eeeeeeeeevil but how much more can you tarnish a man who killed unsuspecting soldiers in cold blood by himself?

Tyrese Arrives!

Not that Tyrese. It’s the Tyrese FROM THE COMICS!

I’ll get into some questions of how this screen version of T differs from his COMICS! version. In general, I have no idea why they introduced him in this episode. The Creepy Axel plotline was way more interesting and I would have loved more time there or maybe even flesh out our escape plan in Woodbury. Not to say that Tyrese won’t be a valuable character going forward, I just wish he and his group would have introduced when they had something to do.

The Cliffhanger

Let’s look at the peril our characters find themselves in, in order from most danger to least danger.

- Merle Dixon: Made to be scapegoat for incursion. Also kind of deserves it since he told the Gov that he killed Michonne before she returned to slice his eyeball like sushi.
- Daryl Dixon The only character who we love that is in genuine danger. But we don’t quite know how he was caught or what the Governor plans to do with him. It’s not like he even yelled “let’s kill them!” as they faded to black. We just know they are going to think about it for the next few months.
- Rick, Michonne, Maggie and Glenn In the woods, thinking about what to do. It’s not like Rick even yelled “we gotta go back!” or “we gotta leave him” as they faded to black. We just know he is going to think about for the next few months
- Andrea Hopefully drinking bleach off screen.
- Beth the 17-year-old sex object of creepball Axel Upgraded to Defcon 4 to guard against possible night molestation.

Is anyone really in any more danger than they normally are? Are there any consequences that we have to deal with in the upcoming half of the season? Pardon me if I just don’t see them.

Carl

On the upside I really, really liked Carl. He’s my favorite character now.

BUT IN THE COMICS!!!! Corner

BUT IN THE COMICS!!! Corner tries to predict arguments you will hear from fans of the show that are also fans of the comic book.

Couple nominees from Twitter. “BUT IN THE COMICS it was an eye patch not a bandage” is good and even BUT IN THE COMICS Tyrese goes crazy killing zombies in the gym not the electrical room.

I can’t think of any better. So if you have one, leave it in the comments or something. Or don’t, it’s fine.

Which Brings Us…

Eh. We’ll see. Whatever happens it will probably just be really inconsistent peppered with inventive ideas and random surprise deaths.

A while back we posted an article about a bakery that looked like a franchise from a Saw film where the creative pastry chef decided to create realistic-looking human body parts from, of all things, bread.

Not to be outdone by some pastry chef, the culinary magicians over at Conjurer’s Kitchen had recently been privately commissioned to provide nightmare fuel for anyone laying eyes on their latest creations…

Edible baby heads made from chocolate.

“A private commission (that’s all we can say), they are solid white chocolate baby heads, and the same size as the head of your average newborn baby. They also TERRIFY me! As I was tweeting earlier there is something SO disturbing about these heads but I just can’t put my finger on it. Maybe it’s as they have no body, or maybe it’s just as they are a baby’s head?!? Either way I am so proud to be heading up a movement which leads to the creation of amazing edible works of art just like these. We’ll be using them in a project very soon I am sure!!!”

They’re not allowed to let loose the information regarding who commissioned these awesomely amazing, yet disturbing, treats.

We’re pretty sure that we’re happier NOT knowing.

[EvilCakeHead.Com]

While everyone sits around and debates the cost of solar power and that anything that could effectively power your home right now would cost more than feeding your family for about a year, a teenager in Nepal has come up with a solution that NONE of us thought of…

Using human hair instead of silicon to generate electricity from our buddy, the sun.

Along with fellow students, this kid created a solar panel made using human hair that can generate enough electricity to charge a smartphone! It also brings the prices of this thing down to under $40.

Most people would be like, “Big whoop-de-doo. He can charge a phone.”

When you’re living in some of the less-developed parts of the world? The available wall-sockets are just a little…uh…limited.

Oh..did we mention? He’s a freakin’ KID!

[Design Taxi]

We are joined by Jason Murphy of Loading Bar and Spill.com. The boys revisit the mysterious explosion in an Indiana suburb and finally get a deadly update. SpaceX has a plan to send 80,000 people to Mars but Brian has to make a horrifying choice that could ruin his marriage. A startling link between balding men and apes is discovered.

It’s all coming up on yet another edition of Weird Things.

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When the Hall of Presidents attraction opened in Disneyland decades ago, the animatronics featured in it floored guests with their life-like movements. Disney became known for its animatronics in other attractions like Pirates of the Caribbean, Haunted Mansion and others. It was good ol’ Abe Lincoln, though that got a lot of attention…especially when he stood up.

But that was then.

Recently a video has surfaced on YouTube from a Disney R&D lab in Pittsburgh that hints at what they’ve been working on since then. Imagineers are now literally playing ball with a robot prototype that can track object movement and respond in real-time!

Being that this is just taking its baby-steps at this point, it both frightening and amazing to think about what Disney might have in the works for this type of interactivity with a robot and park guests.

From the video’s description:

Robots in entertainment environments typically do not allow for physical interaction and contact with people. However, catching and throwing back objects is one form of physical engagement that still maintains a safe distance between the robot and participants. Using an animatronic humanoid robot, we developed a test bed for a throwing and catching game scenario. We use an external camera system (ASUS Xtion PRO LIVE) to locate balls and a Kalman ?lter to predict ball destination and timing. The robot’s hand and joint-space are calibrated to the vision coordinate system using a least-squares technique, such that the hand can be positioned to the predicted location. Successful catches are thrown back two and a half meters forward to the participant, and missed catches are detected to trigger suitable animations that indicate failure. Human to robot partner juggling (three ball cascade pattern, one hand for each partner) is also achieved by speeding up the catching/throwing cycle. We tested the throwing/catching system on six participants (one child and ?ve adults, including one elderly), and the juggling system on three skilled jugglers.

Let’s just hope it doesn’t get bored of playing catch with the guests in the parks and decide one day to unbolt itself, head to Cinderella’s Castle and proclaim the Disney parks as the headquarters of our new robotic overlords!
[DisneyResearchHub]

Every year at the Waldorf Astoria in New York, the annual meeting of the Explorers’ Club takes place. One of the highlights of the event is the gala dinner and its infamous cocktail party which is like the more sophisticated and classy version of the dinner scene from Temple of Doom but with the same menu.

What’s the weirdest thing YOU’VE ever eaten? We’re curious to see just how weird the palettes of WeirdThings’ fans are.

[NatGeo YouTube Channel]

Just when I think this show couldn’t get any dumber. It runs an episode like this…

AND KIND OF REDEEMS ITSELF!

By and large this episode of the Walking Dead did what I’d hoped much of the third season would do: revealing Woodbury to be the complex, brutal, fascinating entity in a world otherwise comprised of mindless, plodding death.

Hop in the Hyundai, it’s as big as a whale and it’s about to set sail… AFTER THE JUMP.

- Governor, Revealed

Finally! A little real-time decision making reveals more about how our otherwise milquetoast Big Bad behaves under pressure. We will get to his heavy-headed hostage treatment in a minute but let’s focus on the little things. First, by way of the Andrea subplot we understand that he is condoning and interested in real-world scientific understanding of the apocalypse which has consumed him.

Second, we get a little bit more into his relationship with Merle. Three times he questions his loyalty or competence: taking over the interrogation with Maggie, sneering that Merle said clearing out the prison couldn’t be done and by outright asking if he could trust him to fight against his brother.

This gives us a little insight into why the Merle we once knew is now an eager lapdog. Specifically potent since…

- Merle, Regressed

We get the old Merle back for an episode! He’s mean! He’s racist! He’s monologuing! This is TWD giving one of it’s most fascinating characters the chance to throw it’s best pitch over and over again. By the time Merle releases the walker into the holding cell armed with the Chinese food taunt, you can’t help but wonder why the writers don’t find reasons to put him in these positions every episode. So loathsome.

- Old Guy, Reanimated

Rarely can TWD string together a strong C plot but this was a rare exception.

Andrea and Milton provide clashing world views that don’t devolve into a shouting match or a gun fight. It also recalls one of my favorite moments in the series, the “birth of zombie Amy” scene from season one. Eschewing an easy jump scare for a soft, infant-like murmur is so much more powerful and among my favorite additions this show has made to the greater genre cannon.

Did anyone else think Andrea was walking in on a sham demonstration on how they’d made progress in “curing” the zombie disease? Just asking.

- Michonne, Still An Emotionless Plot Catalyst

She walks! She talks! She moves characters from one location to another when they would otherwise have no reason to! What’s Michonne’s motivation? Why advancing the plot along for the benefit of you the viewer, of course!

- This Week in BUT IN THE COMIC!

If you only watch the show and care not to hear it compared to the source material comic book series than please stop reading.

I have yet to see what the carp level is about the Governor only feigning getting his rape on, but I assume some are miffed. Let’s forget for a second that there is plenty of time for the Gov to actually rape plenty of other characters (including Michonne who is the unlucky recipient IN THE COMICS) instead we can focus on why the change was made.

The show and this series seems pretty bent on keeping The Governor a “complicated” character. Now, you might say that he’s already murdered a group of infantry men in cold blood and keeps a creepy wall of zombie faces. To you I would say look at the poor hillbilly cabin dweller who got knifed in chest and tossed to his death by our heroes Rick and Michonne all for the crime of trying to defend his meager dwelling.

If the Gov raped Maggie it would have relegated him to permanent black hat territory. Or at least that’s what I would guess the writer’s room thought. Now you might say that IN THE COMICS the Governor was still a complicated character even after the raping. To which, I’d say you’re right.

I don’t know, maybe Hyundai said they didn’t want to be associated with a show that raped a main character while her battered boyfriend and one-armed assailant listened through thin sheet metal walls. Who knows…

We all watch movies like National Treasure and secretly hope that something cool like that might actually be out there in the world or even better that it might, out of some cosmic chance, actually happen to us.

David Martin of England had a small bit of such wishful awesomeness fall into his lap when he began renovating his 17th century fireplace. Inside the chimney were the remains of a pigeon….but not just any pigeon…

David Martin uncovered the remains of a carrier pigeon…and not just ANY old remains of some random carrier pigeon…

These particular remains were attached to a small red cylindrical container…and not just ANY small red cylindrical container…oh no, kids…Mr. Martin had found the remains of a World War II carrier pigeon that was still clutching a little red container which held a small, cigarette paper-sized encrypted message!

Martin found this mysterious container in 1982 and sent it off to have it solved. Intelligence officials believed that it was impossible to break because the code books from back then that might hold the answers to this particular code had been lost or gone missing.

Addressed to the mysterious “X02″ from the more mysterious “Sjt W Stot”, the message, sent during the Allied invasion, continues to baffle codebreakers who are working on the message. Bletchly Park, once a highly secretive location where the Nazi’s Enigma Code was broken and now features a museum about pigeons’ role in the war, has more than 30 messages carried by pigeon and not a single one is written in code which causes many of those involved to believe that this message was of utmost importance and urgency.

Just how important was the information this little bad-assed bird o’ war was carrying?

When Martin showed the bird to a counter-espionage specialist who was actually THE inspiration for Ian Fleming’s infamous agent 007?

“When I showed the bird and code, the blood drained from his face and he advised us to back off. He said nothing would ever be published.”

[Discovery News]

Tom Merritt joins us as we discuss a massive natural event that happens to alert us to the opening of a new movie. Tom has to make a terrible decision that could leave him buried in Apple rumors or Sasquatch reports.

Also, is belief a chief tenant of science?

All this and more in an unfortunately Mayne-less episode of Weird Things.

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Star Wars: The Thrawn Trilogy, Book 3: The Last Command

Happy Thanksgiving, everybody!

And in true WeirdThings fashion here’s a story to enjoy while you’re waiting for your Turducken to golden its sweet self.

Most of you prefer white meat. Some of you prefer dark meat.

NYPD officer Gilberto Valle prefers something he’s coined ‘girl meat’. According to the prosecution in a bizarre case against Valle, he was going to sit down to a Thanksgiving dinner with all the trimmings and a plateful of said ‘girl meat’.

“I’m planning on getting some girl meat. This November, for Thanksgiving. It’s a long way off, but I’m getting the plan in motion now. She’s not a volunteer. She has to be abducted. I know where she lives. I will grab her from her house. I was thinking of tying her body onto some kind of apparatus. Cook her over a low heat, keep her alive as long as possible.”

We can hear everyone quietly putting down their forks and looking around awkwardly.

Valle is apparently part of a small subculture that prefers its meat right off the bone…the human bone. The ‘girl meat’ that Valle was refering to was just that…the meat of an abducted girl. Federal prosecutors produced the transcript of an online chat between Gilberto Valle and an alleged co-conspirator that revealed his plan to abduct a woman he knew and roast her alive and slowly over an open flame.

While his defense claims that Valle would never commit such an act and that his thoughts alone don’t deserve jail-time (he’s currently locked up in solitary confinement), an FBI expert from Quantico looked at the case and stated that he would definitely eventually act on his plans.

The judge handling the case has denied bail for the third time as of this posting and the court proceedings begin on January 22nd which could actually make CourtTV worth watching.

Now pass us those fava beans (we couldn’t resist)!

[NY Times]

Michonne and Merle get all Hunger Games, but who is Katniss and who is the weird wolf monsters from the end? Andrea continues to have the absolute worst taste in men… or does she. And Rick is on the edge of the madness.

The edge! The edge! The edge!

The return of the Walking Dissection happens just after the jump.I hate the phone gimmick The worst kind of storytelling ends with “but it was all a dream”. In fact, you can make the argument that the second you cease telling a real world story with stakes and consequences, you’re communicating to your audience that it’s fine to check out. After all, if the storyteller can’t be bothered to stay in the real world, why should the viewer.

Granted, spending an entire episode talking on a broken phone with dead people isn’t exactly a dream sequence but it’s close enough. Thankfully we got the reveal at the end and therefore only have to suffer it as a bottle episode and not an annoying subplot DRAMATICALLY (I am raising my arms in a very dramatic pose after writing that word) revealed in the fall finale.

There is a contingent of viewers of this show that just want elements they’ve known from the source material slapped on screen no matter how disjointed or stupid it is. For those people, I’ll assume the phone gimmick this episode pleased them greatly.

The problem is that IN THE COMIC (please drink for every time anyone writes this, not just in this column but on any internet discussion of TWD) the phone trope comes as a moment of very fractured calm. In a valley of our story when the world of our characters has been blown apart. There is plenty of grief here for Rick but there’s also plenty for him to do. We can see him going mad while interacting with others.

His private freak out minimizes drama by quarantining the unreliability of THE most reliable character in a subplot that is fairly boring until we get an anti-climactic reveal.

At the end of the ep, Rick emerges from his Kook Cave and slinks toward his new born baby as if to say “Sorry I wasted this episode, ya’ll.”

Is the Governor really a bad guy? We know The Governor kills people himself, and gives murder orders pretty liberally and has a man cave decorated with the heads of actual men. But other than that, how bad of a guy is he?

At times he even feels a little “aw shucks” gullible. His downright a-”d’aw”-able courtship of Andrea muddies the waters on who he is and what he ultimately wants. And not in a good way.

An ambiguous character has goals, and then he/she surprises us in what they will or will not do to achieve them. But seriously, I have no earthly idea what The Governor wants.

Is he protecting Woodbury? Does he want to run the community as a cult leader, “pollinating” his way through every available woman? Is his true passion staging his zombie bum fights? AND BY THE WAY how does Andrea end last episode prancing away like a startled dandy from the staged zombie fight and begins this episode by again turning up her nose but then ends things admitting that she’s addicted to the thrill of killing zombies and sleeping with the Vince MacMahon of fake zombie fights.

By the way, I’d like The Governor better if he entered every room to Vince MacMahon’s entrance music.

Here is my question: does Woodbury want new residents?

Are they trying to repopulate the Earth? Or are they trying to survive and understand they can only feed so many mouths? How often do they come across survivors? How many stay?

One more question: why does the Governor sound like Liam Neeson?

Is it just because dialect coaches can only teach one American accent?

What’s the motivation for Merle? I’ve been very vocal about how awesome I think the character of Merle could be. At this point, it looks like they are splitting some of the the more reprehensible tendencies of the Governor IN THE COMICS into Daryl’s lost brother. But really, I have no beat on who he is this season. He seems like a man who “found jesus” in the metaphorical sense. The man who once had to be handcuffed to a roof because he couldn’t be a team player is now leading a squad into the woods as the old grizzled veteran.

Gone is also any trace of the drug use that seemed to define him when we knew him before.

Maybe he’s just a simple, dumb henchmen and I am reading way to much into his character because I like Michael Rooker and think he’s the best actor on the show. BTW, when can we get that man a monologue? He made a career crushing intense monologues and meanwhile it’s DARYL that gets to tell the gruesome story of how their mother died. Boooooo.

Still though, the idea that we believe Merle to be the sadistic element of Woodbury while the Governor keeps an arms length to it all is an interesting dynamic. BUT we already say the Gov murder military men in cold blood, so that’s kind of out.

Carol isn’t dead and no one cares either way Seriously. Who cared? Did you?

Connecting the dots As has often been the case with this series we find ourselves at a point in our story where we know a collision is coming and we are just waiting for it to happen.

It’s just hard to get excited about where the plot is headed when our master villain seems so… clumsy.

Zipping through the thin air of Denver, a mystery has been uncovered by a local man and his Fox affiliate. The Unidentified Flying Object(s?) seem to appear every day between noon and 2 p.m. and are not visible to the naked eye. In fact, even the professional cameras caught them and had to slow things down frame by frame to see it (them).

By our math we got two explanations:

There is that of Benjamin Radford of Discovery…

The most likely explanation? A bug or insect, probably a fly or bee.

Or there is the fun one we just made up. Aliens are getting day drunk and driving home, ya’ll!

How else would you account for how erratic that driving is? Furthermore, only 23 minutes away the main brewery for beer magnate Coors. What I am saying is that it’s highly likely these aliens are working night jobs in the greater Denver area. Knocking off their shift around 6 a.m. and somehow sneaking into the source of Rocky Mountain refreshments. They enjoy one too many Cold Certified beverages.

They return to their craft and take off like a Silver Bullet. Zigging and zagging until they break orbit and find their way home. Wasted.

If it didn’t make sense then please check this evidence.

What would you do if you could live forever. Also, do we now know if the initials to SpaceX’s MCT project? What exploded a peaceful neighborhood in Indiana? We return to the Snuggery after a WTP listener offers to go investigate. Also, when will it be unethical to turn off a video game character?

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A woman has a strange job. It sparks a statistical argument between Brian and Justin to rival the Presidential Election. A new way to tell if Mars is housing a killer plague sets up a scenario involving precursor aliens and bears on a level you never before seen. The boys discuss the place the Water Bears have their picnic.

Also.

Star Wars TALK!!!

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Star Wars uses tractor beams as frequently as newly graduated college kids use U-Haul trailers.

Imagine if, just like in the movies, you could hook up those U-Hauls with a tractor beam instead of trying to get one of those ball-and-cup trailer hook-ups?

That day might not be as far away as it once was according to research at the Department of Physics and Centre for Soft Matter Research at New York University. Although it’s on a significantly smaller scale than trying to yank the Millenium Falcon into your garage using a flashlight, scientists have recently used a beam of light to pull a particle in a line. While researchers of the ideas surrounding what’s being called ‘soft matter’ have used laser ‘tweezers’ to pull along particles, using light alone to move something verged on magical.

By varying the relative phase of the two beams, this technique traps the particle in a moving hologram they call an ‘optical conveyor’ which allows ‘bi-directional transport in three dimensions’.
New Scientist explains how projecting the beams in this way creates a pattern of alternating bright and dark regions. By fine tuning the beam photons in the bright regions which flow past the chosen particle can be made to scatter backwards, hitting the particle and knocking it on towards the next bright region.

Watch the guy in the video explain it in an endearingly enthusiastic nerdy manner…and then explain what he’s talking about to us.

[Daily Mail UK]

December 21st of this year is the big party date for the supposed end of our world.

Sure everyone’s already ordering kegs, ordering faux “Danger: Apocalypse In Progress – Do Not Cross” banner tape by the case and prepping for their end-of-the-world get-togethers.

But then again…everyone hasn’t been watching the news coming out of Mexico that clearly shows an active volcano and something entering it from the sky like an old Thunderbirds vehicle.

Falling star? Busted satellite? No one’s sure at this point but seriously…the odds of something as agile (sarcasm, kids…sarcasm) as a giant mountain full of raging lava catching an object from space? Slim.

We’ll let you put all those party supplies back, start handing you some nails and plywood and make sure your shotgun’s loaded.

[CidMexico YouTube Channel]

Okay, maybe not quite – at least it looks like Bilbo’s house from the photo of the archeological site. What scientists do think they’ve found is the oldest town in Europe, dating back to somewhere around 4500 BC; 1,500 years before the start of Greek civilization.

Located in modern day Bulgaria, the town may have centered around the trade of salt bricks used to preserve meat.

40 years prior, the oldest hoard of gold was found in a cemetary 21 mile away, indicating this area was rife with commerce nearly 7,000 years ago.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-20156681

Gary and The Weasel make their podcast debut to solve a Polish crime. Who would win in a fight: a Neanderthal or a human? Andrew quizzes us on a mysterious man who witnessed something amazing. Can the boys figure out his identity? And what did he see?

The results connect the very fabric of our history through a meld of technology and culture! Prepare friends, for yet another Weird Things podcast!

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“It makes me feel as if my son has never left me,” Tian said. “When my wife and I want to talk to him, we can just pull up some chairs, lift the lid and chat with him as if he had never been taken from us.”

His son had just begun college when they found out about his leukemia.

“We were devastated. We visited many doctors, but there was nothing else we could do. I just prayed we would not lose him,” Mr. Tian said.

“When he died, I just couldn’t face never seeing my child again, so we decided to put him in a freezer to preserve his body.”

Even more upsetting, this isn’t the first child death that has affected Mr. Tian:

“After the death of my daughter, I gave up my job so that I could spend more time with my wife and son.”

He also said that at first not a lot of people knew about it, and then rumors started to spread.

“Not many people knew at first what we had done as we did not want anyone to find out. We kept it a secret for a long time. But over the years, the news spread.”

When asked if they will bury him eventually, he said, “One day the time will come when his mother and I can no longer look after him and we will then give him a proper burial, but now is not the time. When the time is right, we will give him the most dignified burial and have a celebration of his life, and invite everyone to pay their respects to him. But later.”

I really hope I’m not the only person getting a sense of real-life Friday the 13th obsession from this man.

[Weird Asia]

Remember that weird and completely creepy mule-like, self-stablizing robot that’s been swimming around the internet for a while now called the BigDog from Boston Dynamics?

Well BigDog just got out-weirded and out-creeped by DARPA’s newest step toward removing the word ‘human’ from ‘humanity’.

Designed as a part of DARPA’s Robotics Challenge, the robot ‘thing’ in the video above, known as the Pet-Proto, will be let loose in a series of environments designed to replicate the conditions of a natural disaster. Several other teams are working on similar robots to compete in the challenge. They will all be competing to gain access to a more advanced version of the Pet-Proto called the Atlas which will be used in the 2013-2014 live disaster-response event.

We don’t know what’s worse…being trapped in a natural disaster or being saved from natural disaster from something that looks like this.

[DARPAtv]

Leadership is a strange concept.

There are elements of leadership we admire and those we apologize for. At best, an effective leader needs to achieve the goals of his community, make tough decisions when they need to be made and advance the cause. The identification and execution of the methods are up to them.

We’ve slowly seen the toll leadership has taken on Rick. He’s become a shoot first murderer multiple times and felt less and less remorse after each incident. Was he right? We think so, or at least we hope so.

So when it comes to The Governor, the major villain of this series, it’s very important that we understand, and sympathize, with his motivations. His actions can remain diabolical, but his sense of duty must remain pure.

He’s the effective leader you apologize for.

Head into Woodbury AFTER THE JUMP…

Born Leader Let me get this out as plainly as possible. This episode left me very cold.

It’s not that it was inherently boring. It’s just that I was expecting a lot from The Governor. It’s like finally playing a long awaited video game and realizing during the first level that it isn’t quite what you hoped. Is it enough to give up? No. But are you worried that you might make it all the way through and ultimately be disappointed, yes.

The Gov was just… well… too in the middle. And not in a conflicted “is he good or bad” kind of way. In a stoic, sociopath kind of way. Which are the most boring sociopaths of all.

I guess I just hoped for someone with a little more meat on his bones. He didn’t have to be explosive like Al Swearengen or quietly manipulative like Ben Linus. Just… something.

Take our pivotal character beat: he massacres a convoy of soldiers, presumably for their food and ammo. Unclear is why. There are plenty of good reasons. Maybe it’s just a numbers game, they only have so many resources and you can’t add 15 people to his population and at the same time, he can’t be seen turning soldiers away at the gates. Maybe he’s tried to bring in military types in the past and they screw up his strong man leadership. Or maybe he just likes killing people.

The dumbest choice is the third. Most notably because serial killers tend to make terrible leaders and The Governor’s biggest trait is that he is running a societal oasis in a raging hellscape.

I hope there is more here. I really do.

Merle Rooker is back.

It seems as if Woodbury has done him well. He was far more even keel and didn’t drop a single racial slur the entire hour. He even seemed downright conciliatory toward Andrea.

My biggest questions:

- Is Merle clean? Did the Governor help him kick the habit?
- Is Merle still racist? Has this time changed him?
- Does he regret his actions leading up to the “hand incident”?

Face Facts Dale face is dead. Long live the Michonne Mug!

The overarching story of The Walking Dead in any form or function in the loss of humanity amongst the living while the dead roam the Earth. In the same way that Battlestar Galactica could be set on a submarine and still be awesome, TWD could be about a global political uprising or a world where all the electricity stopped running. Okay, maybe not the second one.

At it’s best, we watch the characters evolve and measure ourselves against their actions. If they succeed, we find redemption in even their darkest moments. At the very least, we understand why they would do something even if we never would.

This episode was one where we continue to understand how this experience has taken a toll on our survivors. After a long Winter, the seeds sown have born strange fruit.

Read more AFTER THE JUMP…

Mo Momentum Beyond any of the developments in the story, I was most happy with the speed in which we moved through it. Specifically in two areas. First, Herschel’s injury did not turn into a five episode arc (a al Carl’s coma) and instead was resolved after the television-requisite bedside confession.

Second, the stand off with the prison cafeteria contingent headed by Razor Ramon ended by way of a blade Razor’s head. Again, beyond thrilled to see this not take seven episodes. There is no doubt in my mind that in season two this would have taken 14 episodes and countless brow furrowings between Rick, Lori and the ghost of Dale who would appear like Obi Wan only to make the Dale face.

Here is my point more specifically: we know Herschel isn’t going to die and once Rick confesses to Lori that killing the Cafeteria Gang is an option we wouldn’t be surprised if that happens either. Therefore, why put an unsurprising ending between the beginning of our story and myriad pointless conversations that tediously inch our way to the inevitable?

These stories were as interesting as the time they were given, which is to say: one episode. But that’s not bad. They held my interest for the hour and in a season with some BIG issues to deal with, that’s fine.

Whoa, Mute Ricky I was trying to put my finger on why Andrew Lincoln’s portrayal of Rick has not bothered me this season, as it did last year. After talking with the incomparable Scott Johnson, it hit me.

He’s not talking as much.

With the character increasingly withdrawn, his dialogue has followed suit. No overwrought, walkie talkie monologues. No DRAMATIC conversations with Dale or Shane highlighting his inconsistent American accent.

Less is more for Lincoln’s Grimes. His quiet nature lead to a more dramatic explosion when violence become the only option.

To Come… Listen, I liked this episode, but to be honest I liked it best as a place setter for what’s to come. Not only did we get a ham-fisted hint that there are sentient beings in the woods. But the word is out that next week we see the return of Merle Dixon and with him, hopefully the Governor follows quickly behind.

My excitement for this just may eclipse my burning hatred for last season.

Maybe…

Body modification seemed to root itself into underground culture of the 90s. Since that time we’ve seen our share of modded bods. You’d think that there just wasn’t anything to really mod until low-cost cybernetic parts started popping up on the shelves at WalMart. Wrong.

Check out all the fun these body-moddin’ kids are having!

They’ve sadly been slapped with the descriptive slang-term “BagelHeads”.

The whole ‘BagelHead’ scene has been around for many years already but is only recently getting some serious face-time across the internets after the Taboo show aired on Discovery.

In a nutshell the kids are taking needles, inserting them into their foreheads and then dripping saline into their heads creating what looks like some kind of giant egg under their skin. Once the ‘egg’ is big enough someone then presses slowly into the center of the bloated lump leaving a small indentation in the center. The end result? It looks exactly like a doctor was caught mid-breakfast and just left his bagel under the patient’s skin on her forehead.

Sexy, right? Yeah…that’s a no…we don’t think so either.

[Mtv.com]

There are a lot of animals that mimic human vocalization.

But when an animal you’d never expect to develop mimicry suddenly begins doing it? It’s a little disturbing. Imagine if your dog suddenly quit barking and just started asking for his dinner in a crude-sounding human voice? You’d understandably be a little freaked the hell out.

This is exactly what happened recently National Marine Mammal Foundation in California. NOC, a nine-year-old Beluga whale, suddenly began making strange sounds unlike anything his trainers had ever heard. At first, no one could tell that it was actually the whale making the bizarre noises. As days went by and the sounds were more frequent, the trainers realized it was NOC.

There have been reports of this kind of mimicry taking place amongst Beluga whales (who’re often called the ‘canaries of the sea’) but it’s never been recorded until now.

At one point one of the divers actually got out of the pool that NOC was in and asked the other trainers at the facility who told him to get out of the pool. We could only imagine the slack-jawing that took place when they realized that their own whale had just told them to get out of his pool.

Just think…we’ve been looking for signs of a robotic take-over or the zombie apocalypse while these adorable whales have just been swimming around…plotting.

[Exclusive TV News' YouTube]

Because there’s not enough tension already in North and South Korea, a company has now developed what’s being hailed as a ‘super gun’ to help keep an eyeball on the demilitarized zone between the Hatfield/McCoy-style rivalry amongst the two countries.

The Super aEgis II is one of the most intimidating weapons ever to back up someone’s ‘No Trespassing’ policies. Featuring a thermal camera, a laser range-finder and can nail and destroy a human-sized target from almost 2 miles away. Because it’s designed as a modular system, the aEgis II’s ‘gun pod’ can be replaced and fitted with various other life-destroying joys like surface-to-air missiles or similar goodies yet to be revealed by its manufacturer.

What’s disturbing about the Super aEgis II isn’t that it can destroy a target before the target’s even aware it’s being destroyed…it’s that once Skynet takes over or some 12 year-old hacker decides to add them to their toybox? We’re all in a lot of trouble.

[Reuters]

Here’s Brian’s explanation of what it’s all about:

What’s This All About Anyway?

Hey all, Brian Brushwood here, host of Scam School on the Revision3 network.

For the past four years, the Scam School audience has been asking for a place to go to pick up all of the odd and fun stuff they see on the show. So I want to launch ScamStuff.com, a sort of “Con Man’s woot.com” for fans to go to get all the hard-to-find stuff I recommend on the show, from bump keys to flat-edged toothpicks, to the unusual shirts I wear on the show.

**Note: The above is a mockup of ScamStuff.com

The problem is I’m constantly touring with my live stage show to audiences across the globe. Starting Scam Stuff would require me to stop touring for a couple of months to focus on making this project possible.

What We Need

The first product we want to make available on ScamStuff.com is the “Scam Pack.”

The Scam Pack contains everything you need to pull off over 115 of the best Scam School tricks, including 17 unusual or hard-to-find items and (most importantly) Theory 11′s premium Rebel deck of cards. Everything will come packed in the first-ever official Brian Brushwood pint glass.

The thing is, we need $10,000 in total presales to launch everything smoothly. The funds will go directly toward purchasing the intial stock for hundreds of Scam Packs and other goodies we plan to sell on ScamStuff.com.

Additionally, this fund will make it possible to stop touring for some time to move my main focus to building ScamStuff.com, while keeping my family fed and happy, including the newest member who is due on December 24th!

Awesome Loot

We have perks of all sizes to fit your giving ability accordingly, from exclusive desktop wallpapers to personal tutoring sessions with me over Skype, and from digital downloads of the Scam School books to flying YOU out to San Fransisco be on the show!

At the $30 level, we’ll hook you up with one of the very first Scam Packs, AND digital copies of Scam School books 1 and 2.

(Important Note for International contributions: We’d appreciate an extra $7 to guarantee quality shipping to your region. Please just add this on top of your chosen perk leve. Thank you!)

For everyone who contributes $75 and above, we’re hooking you up with one of the first 200 copies of the physical Scam School book! (That’s right, I’ve signed my very first real publishing deal, and I couldn’t be more excited!)

Take a look at the specifics of each perk – there’s some seriously awesome, and highly unconventional rewards over there.

-Brian

PS – You are looking very tall and handsome today. I forgot to mention that.

Other Ways You Can Help

Spread the word!

Go to IndieGoGo and support this project

Long before we were able to see inside people with x-rays, tiny cameras or accurate 3D models doctors still had to know what pieces we were made up and where they went. Students learning anatomy didn’t always have the luxury of a bunch of fresh cadavers to study either.

Enter the wax anatomy model.

During the 17th century, there wasn’t any way to learn anatomy unless someone died and their body was immediately trucked-in fresh for people in disciplines that needed to study anatomy. Instead, artists began creating anatomy models out of wax. The intricacy of these models is unsettling and creepy but also amazing because of the stunning extent of the details. Many of these wax models featured things like a removable chest, face or vital organs which, when removed, would reveal even more gruesome details of our inner anatomy.

A lengthy but disturbingly interesting write-up about the details of these models, including photos, was posted on the Journal of Anatomy way back in 2009. Why are we talking about them just now? Well they’re currently on display at the Museum of London.

Often called ‘Venuses’, referencing the Venus Di Medici statue created by an unknown Greek sculptor, most of the models were female forms and several were put in often nightmare-inducing poses.

What do we mean about nightmare-inducing? How about a pregnant woman showing her womb in operation by pulling back flaps of skin on her belly.

We warned you.

[IO9]

If you’ve been following WeirdThings for any length of time now, you know that every time space exploration is mentioned we grab our big, pointy-fingered, foam hand and start fist-pumping toward the heavens.

Most of us are never going to get the chance to hop inside any of Space X’s amazing space vehicles and just sit there like little kids in the coolest toy store ever.

Everyone make a sad face.

But now you can give a big hug to our old buddy the Internet for helping Space X provide us with a panoramic view of what it’s like inside the Dragon capsule!

Go visit, take a look around and linger (images will transistion revealing airlocks, storage lockers opening and more) over the interior of a vehicle which is heralding one amazing future.

[Space X]

The Mine Kafon (teaser) from Callum Cooper on Vimeo.

Looking like a cross between a Transformer sea anemone robot and a giant 1960s-styled light fixture in some swank space-lounge of that era, this strange-looking object is set to save a lot of lives on the battlefield.

What you’re looking at is the Mine Kafon. Created by Massoud Hassani, the Kafon is made to do something that, if we didn’t tease it in the headline for this article, you wouldn’t expect…it’s a landmine clearer.

Powered by the wind, the Kafon can take quite a bit of punishment before being retired. In the center of the porcupine-like ball is a small core ball containing a GPS sensor to track the Kafon’s whereabouts.

Designed to clear up to up to 4 landmines, Hassani is looking to begin mass-producing the Kafon once a contract is approved. Before that begins, Hassani is about to open a KickStarter to help move production of the Kafon forward. Currently it costs about $1200 (USD) to get rid of a single landmine. The cost of the Mine Kafon? Just shy of $90!

The cost of saving civilians and soldiers’ lives? Priceless.

[MassoudHassani.Com]