Weird Shorts: A Rude Awakening!

When Iranian national Golshifteh Farahani decided to take a stand against Iran's notoriously strict rules for women, she wanted maximun exposure. So what better way for the Paris based actress to show Ahmedinejad the finger than to show a whole lot more than than, by posing naked for a French magazine. Well it certainly got their attention (plus the attention of a many others judging by the huge upsurge in visitors to her Facebook page from her home country), the Iranian government has banned her from ever returning home. According to Ms. Farahani, an official from Iran's Ministry of Culture told her that Iran didn't need any actors or actresses, which was especially ironic since Iran won it's first ever Golden Globe award this year for the film "A Separation" (The Independent).

From the nude to the rude now, as popular British daytime quiz “Countdown” stirred up a bit of controversy this week when a contestant won one round with the word “wanker”. The object of the game is to make the longest possible word from a random selection of vowels and consonants in just 30 seconds, and in this particular round this meant the letters RAEPKWAEN. Mark Murphy’s six letter offering left host Nick Hewer at a loss for words, but was the longest and is in the dictionary, hence took the round after his opponent could do no better than 5. Clearly though “wanker” shouldn’t have netted Mark the points, he could have had “reawaken” for eight (Orange).

A slightly more pleasant shock greeted teacher Parijat Saha from Dinajpur in India when he checked his bank account online one evening. In a classic Monopoly moment, a bank error in his favour gave him a balance of 490 billion rupees (about $9.7 billion). Mr. Saha promptly rang the State Bank of India to report the mistake, joking that the bank appeared to have so much money it was overflowing into his account. A bank spokesman later claimed that the funds were uncleared, and in any case couldn’t have been withdrawn (Digital Spy).

Finally, a three-night astronomy special on British television scored two spectacular successes this week. The BBC show “Stargazing Live”, hosted physicist Brian Cox and comedian Dara O’Briain live from Jodrell Bank, encouraged viewers to get more involved with astronomy, both from their gardens and online, and has led to a 500% surge in telescope sales in the UK in the last few days, but more spectacularly, one viewer may have actually discovered a new exo-planet after visiting a website featured on the show. Chris Holmes was one of sixty thousand people who were inspired to visit planethunter.org after watching the show, and despite having no more than a passing interest before, he identified a possible eclipse of the star SPH10066540 by a Neptune sized object in a 90 day orbit (BBC News).

How to burble a pea

How in the world did I reach the age of 43 without knowing that it was possible to burble a pea?

No Chastity Belt

It doesn't look too difficult to open.

How lace curtains helped win World War II

The story goes that, during the Battle of the Bulge, Sgt. William Furia (shown) decorated his helmet with some lace curtain as a joke. But then he and his fellow soldiers realized the lace made excellent camouflage in the snow. So the practice of decorating helmets with lace curtains became widespread. Which is how lace curtains became America's secret weapon that allowed them to defeat the Nazis.

Two New Weird Books

The book on the left proves that for every conceivable product in the human consumerist culture, there exist fanatical collectors.

The book on the right shows that you don't have to travel to exotic lands to discover weird things.

JAPP Energy Bar Commercials

Kim Jong-Il looking at things

Kim Jong-Il may have died recently, but on this site he continues to look at things every day. Lots of things: tanks, sewing machines, rope, etc.

Of course, one thing he wouldn't be looking at today (if he were alive) is wikipedia, reddit, or boing boing -- all of which have gone dark to protest the SOPA/PIPA legislation. So you can now look at Kim Jong-Il not looking at these sites.

Chuck, on the Stop Online Piracy Act

WeirdUniverse.net isn't going dark today in protest of the two proposed anti-online-piracy bills before Congress (as is Wikipedia, BoingBoing, and Reddit), but my view is that the bills nevertheless suck. It's the old Capitol Hill cliche ("Don't throw the baby out with the bath water") at turbo speed. Online piracy is bad (and I ought to know, as I've made my living for 20 years protected by copyrights). However, it's not SO bad that it's worth changing the character of the Internet to tighten the status quo on copyright. The absolutely most absurd part of the controversy is how it came about. Follow the sequence: (1) Lobbyists from the movie and music industries, with so much money bulging out of their pockets that they could barely squeeze through their Congressman's door, dribbling money on the floor behind them, hit Capitol Hill . . (2) to persuade 535 people whose knowledge of the "Intertubes" is barely greater than that of the infamous (late) Sen. Ted Stevens . . that this Internet-thingy is little more than a way for kids to send stupid text messages and play ridiculous war games and thus that what's the big deal about potentially criminalizing every website that didn't cleanse every single possibly-unauthorized image from its pages? (Ah, but in fairness, let me give an alternative view. An alternative view: "Congress sometimes does things that are even stupider than this." There. That's my alternative view.) Thankya, thankyaverrmuch.

Crow Sledder

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Not all birds fly south for the winter.

Cross-eyed Beau

When talking about music from before the modern era, famed critic Greil Marcus used the phrase "old, weird America." I think this tune qualifies.

More info on the singers here.

All original content in posts is Copyright © 2008 by the author of the post, either Alex Boese ("Alex"), Paul Di Filippo ("Paul"), or Chuck Shepherd ("Chuck"). All rights reserved. The banner illustration at the top of this page is Copyright © 2008 by Rick Altergott.