Particle accelerator in Anchorage home; Global warming may spark ice age; Spoon bending for Israel & Palestine; How much coca in ya Coca-Cola?

Dick Van Patten eats dog food. Japanese Monkeys have accents. With a start like that, the basis for today's goodies must be fark.

Magic touch, bent spoons help on Israeli-Palestinian deal
GENEVA (AFP) - Entertainer and psychic Uri Geller played an unusual role in breaking the ice during talks on a historic deal between the Palestinian Red Crescent and its Israeli counterpart by bending spoons.

The Good Stuff: High Times has a feature story on coca growers in Peru, which seems to indicate that Coca-Cola purchases about 200 tons of coca leaf from Peru and Bolivia annually. So yes, the major American brand is still using the flavorings of nose candy to hook millions -- including myself. Congratulations. Apparently this was originally picked up by the excellent Narco News Bulletin.

Good Stuff Pt. II: Hack a Coke Machine (also Google hacking - damn!). You can change around many Coke machine settings. There was a fark story but its link seems broken. b3ta.com presents the Phallic Logo Awards.

We'll always have the burned out ruins of Paris: Commentary on how maybe this marks the death of the welfare state, etc. A little apocalyptic in tone.

Phasers on Stun: The Air Force has developed a hand-held laser weapon, according to Jane's Defense Weekly.

While only in prototype form and years away from fielding, the weapon, known as the Personnel Halting and Stimulation Response (PHaSR) system, holds great promise, they said.

Although maybe it only blinds people. But now their thirst for Power has only been increased!

The Travolta Complex: The Scientologists built this weird thing in the New Mexico desert full of Hubbard's teachings, engraved in metal. It is depressing that millions of years after the apocalypse, aliens will find this shit and make fun of humanity for the Xenu story.

But the deep desert glyphs may not only be geographical markers: "Former Scientologists familiar with Hubbard's teachings on reincarnation say the symbol marks a 'return point' so loyal staff members know where they can find the founder's works when they travel here in the future from other places in the universe. 'As a lifetime staff member, you sign a billion-year contract. It's not just symbolic,' said Bruce Hines of Denver, who spent 30 years in Scientology but is now critical of it... 'The fact that they would etch this into the desert to be seen from space, it fits into the whole ideology.'"

Henry Earl still a hero for freedom: The Dude has gotten 43 44 offenses so far this year. He is currently in jail. Average jail duration: 3.85 days. Average not-jail duration: 1.6 days. Total offenses: 933. Now that's a rap sheet. Burglar stuck in a window. Hockey player tries to kill his agent.

Open Pandora's Box: The Music Genome Project is sweet. Basically you type in who you like, and the system will start playing similar music. So cool. Seems to work well.

Ancient Pyramid found in Bosnian hill. Body of Missing Mobster Turns Up in NJ car trunk. How original. Genovese crime family, involved control of the waterfront.

Winter health tips: drink water, don't smoke, reduce alcohol, stay clean, wash your hands a lot, get a flu shot, do some detox, get your vitamins. Smart. I would add that smoking cigarettes is especially bad in winter because you basically put all the germs on your hands into your mouth.

Atheists lead the way: Atheist Agenda, a group at U Texas-San Antonio, staged a Porno for Bibles (or Smut for Smut) event. Religious dogma could be traded for exploitative images devoid of theological frameworks. Nice. (As always I am still a militant atheist and approve wholeheartedly) Here's their site.

This project was partly to have fun on campus before finals, but also proclaim that we find religious text to be smut. To set pornography and religious texts as equal forms of smut.

This included the Qur'an and Torah. Equal opportunity smuttery. They provide a link to Church of Virus which sounds weirdly interesting.

Because you only live once: Grandma hits the three-story beer bong.

The first video game was on an oscilloscope: This is really pretty cool. Back in the late 1950s, a researcher at Brookhaven designed a tennis game that could be played on an oscilloscope, making it much older than PONG. That's freakin' awesome.

HDTV is making celebrities freak out, because they look Too Sharp, and this may require new makeup techniques, surgery and the rest. Seeing as how I never watch HDTV, I have no idea. I hope the extra pixels make Hollywood implode in an orgy of vanity and botox. of course this guy did Best and Worst on HDTV. (more - blech - via TVpredictions.com)

OnStar 'help' leads to drunk driving ticket: Some guys that were wasted in their Escalade pressed the OnStar button but refused to talk to the person on the other end, so the OnStar AllSeeingEye Illuminati Panopticon Service dispatched the police to their GPS-transmitted coordinates. Horrible.

Meanwhile "FDA approves injecting ID chips in patients", Satan Lobby Approves. (and you can get somewhat oddball researcher Michel Chossudovsky's book on the War on Terror for a mere $14 for Christmas from the Centre for Research on Globalization.

The Japanese and their android chicks: Well this one was not a big surprise. But it's spooky. The site, Akihabaranews.com, has a lot more sweet robots. All right. Harper's reports on a talking doll marketed for the lonely Japanese elderly.

Grateful Dead recording fight: Archive.org has tons of free Grateful Dead concerts from decades past (1965-1995!), and apparently the drummers demanded that a lot of this material be pulled. However there was a quick boycott and the decision was mostly reversed, although high-quality direct soundboard recordings will not be available. An Internet forum goer said it "sucked royally."

A city bus in Richmond VA collided with the State Capitol, bounced across the street and blasted a hole in the Department of Transportation.

The crack researchers at FoxNews tell us that "Sexy Attire Works Against Businesswomen."

Oh by the way some mild bird flu was found in California.

Russian Squirrel Mafia: Something strange about Koko the Gorilla's "nipple fetish." A pack of Russian squirrels killed a dog; also Komosmolskaya Pravda notes that in the fall chipmunks terrorized cats nearby. A lack of pinecones has been blamed for the situation.

Cold Particles: A guy in Anchorage wants to install a particle accelerator at his house/business. He built his first cyclotron when he was 17.

Nelson Mandela was granted permission to wander around a British town with sheep and a sword.

Woodward's a DB: John Belushi's sister is pissed off with Bob Woodward because he wrote a hack book in 1985 about his death. So she is getting even by writing a nasty bio of Woodward. John Landis and Al Franken agree. Franken:

"I went over to [Woodward] and said, 'Well, you know, the only time I ever saw John snorting coke was with [Woodward's colleague] Carl Bernstein.' And that was the last I ever heard from him." (Franken assures us that he was just kidding.)

Kick some ass at the toll booth: What happens when people are really stupid? I am sad because the site I was just looking at, TollRoadsNews.com, got disabled, probably because this good story about two cars stuck in a toll booth was too popular.

Mentos Kaboom: Kind of like the old baking soda volcano.

Snow Crash: A while ago I saw a show on PBS about how global warming might cause a circulating pattern of water in the Atlantic Ocean to suddenly halt -- so that more heat would stay in the tropics, and the north would get colder. It is thought that the mini-ice age in Europe a few centuries ago may have been caused by this phenomenon.

Now researchers find that the current has dropped about 30% in intensity. So we're on our way to total destabilization.

Failing ocean current raises fears of mini ice age
The ocean current that gives western Europe its relatively balmy climate is stuttering, raising fears that it might fail entirely and plunge the continent into a mini ice age.

The dramatic finding comes from a study of ocean circulation in the North Atlantic, which found a 30% reduction in the warm currents that carry water north from the Gulf Stream. The slow-down, which has long been predicted as a possible consequence of global warming, will give renewed urgency to intergovernmental talks in Montreal, Canada, this week on a successor to the Kyoto Protocol.
.....
After warming Europe, this flow comes to a halt in the waters off Greenland, sinks to the ocean floor and returns south. The water arriving from the south is already more saline and so more dense than Arctic seas, and is made more so as ice forms.

But Bryden’s study has revealed that while one area of sinking water, on the Canadian side of Greenland, still seems to be functioning as normal, a second area on the European side has partially shut down and is sending only half as much deep water south as before. The two southward flows can be distinguished because they travel at different depths.
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The last shutdown, which prompted a temperature drop of 5°C to 10°C in western Europe, was probably at the end of the last ice age, 12,000 years ago. There may also have been a slowing of Atlantic circulation during the Little Ice Age, which lasted sporadically from 1300 to about 1850 and created temperatures low enough to freeze the River Thames in London.