Wednesday, February 06, 2013

A database geek's rant on Mongo (NSFW, and seriously cranky)


Using the Xtranormal tool, a user with an obvious ax to grind about databases created this foul mouthed and hilarious debate about database architecture.  Yeah, it's pretty serious inside baseball.   And a little difficult to understand how worked up he gets. . .

Mongo DB Is Web Scale
by: gar1t


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"My kingdom for a horse": King Richard III's bones discovered in England

By Jack Brummet, Shakespeare Editor

note the pronounced hunch in the spine


Researchers in England announced earlier this week that they have found skeletal remains of 
King Richard III under a parking lot in a Midlands city. Richard is one of the most despised of all Kings due to his short but violent reign.

Richard Buckley, the lead archaeologist told reporters that tests proved “beyond reasonable doubt” that the “individual exhumed” from a makeshift grave under the parking lot was “indeed Richard III, the last Plantagenet king of England.”



A geneticist, Turi King, said in a press conference that DNA samples from living descendants of Richard III’s family matched those of the bones found beneath the parking lot.  The skeleton showed signs of scoliosis, a disease that caused Richard's hunchback. The skeleton also showed a massive blow to the head, which jibes with accounts of his death on the battlefield.  He was not on horseback, but on foot.
King Richard III apparently died on foot, which also squares with Shakespeare's account of the events ("my kingdom for a horse").

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Monday, February 04, 2013

The Day The Music Died

By Jack Brummet


A large large steel pair of horn-rim glasses, similar
to those Buddy Holly wore, sits near the crash site

It was fifty-four years ago today that, as Don McLean wrote in "American Pie," the music died. 

A small airplane crash February 3, 1959, near Clear Lake, Iowa, killed rock musicians Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, J. P. "The Big Bopper" Richardson, and the pilot Roger Peterson


Richardson, Holly, Valens


Buddy Holly had parted ways with the original Crickets by this time, and put together a new band with Waylon Jennings, Tommy Allsup, and Carl Bunch, for a  '"Winter Dance Party" tour. The tour included Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper Richardson, who were promoting their own albums. 
The tour had been on tour buses, but the cold weather, long distances, and conditions aboard the ratty tour buses, began wearing down the musicians.  The bands were passing a raging 'flu virus back and forth, and  Holly's drummer was hospitalized for frostbite. Buddy Holly decided to charter a plane in Clear Lake, Iowa, to reach their next venue in Moorhead, Minnesota (near Fargo).  Waylon Jennings was bumped from the plane in favor of someone who was suffering from the flu (well, I guess that cured the flu). Tommy Allsup flipped a coin with Ritchie Valens to see who got a seat.  Valens "won."  Another survivor, Dion DiMucci (Dion and the Belmonts) didn't want to spend the $36. 


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Germany's failed experiment legalizing beastiality

By Mona Goldwater, Social Mores Ed. 


The German parliament has just passed the country's first anti-bestiality law, and it was an uphill battle much of the way.   “Zoophiles” were organized (ZETA - “Zoophilic Engagement for Tolerance and Enlightenment”) and released loads of propaganda to the German people about how human-animal sex is entirely consensual and how their willing “partners” become sexually aroused.  Beastiality/zoophilia now becomes illegal for the first time in more than 40 years.

Michael Kiok, chairman of the Zoophiles said that "Central to the beliefs of zoophiles is that we don't do anything that the animal doesn't want. We do not treat them cruelly. An animal is quite capable of showing precisely what it wants and does not want. When I look at my dog I know immediately what it wants. Animals are much easier to understand than women.



Other, related ATIT posts:


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Drawings: Weird Scenes on the planet's surface

By Jack Brummet


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Saturday, February 02, 2013

Poem: Escape

By Jack Brummet




Some of us try astral projection.
The rest of us leave in dinghies, bikes, and cars,

And race down highways, expressways,
Streets and boulevards.

A continent of smoking skull orchard
Recedes in the rear view mirror.
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Faces No. 358 - the waiting room

By Jack Brummet


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Friday, February 01, 2013

Alien Lore - The Nation of Islam, UFOs, and The Greys

By Jack Brummet, Paranormal Editor, and
Mona Goldwater, Society Editor



A few weeks ago,  the Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan delivered his annual Saviours' Day speech in Rosemont, Illinois.  In the speech, Farrakhan vowed that he would force the U.S. government to open all UFO files (ed's note: not unlike the governments of France and Russia have recently done). 



As it turns out, UFOs are a central tenet in the teachings of the Nation of Islam.  The NOI is a 50,000 person church based in America (as opposed to the Islam Religion, with almost two billion members).

An early NOI leader--Elijah Muhammad--told The Nation of a gigantic Earth-orbiting "Mother Plane" equipped with many weapons.  According to an article on AOL News, "seeking the divine in the skies is one of the core beliefs of NOI leaders and followers, which explains why so much of their literature tells of UFOs, or what they prefer to call airborne 'wheels.'"

The bummer for me, and the readers of our Alien Lore series is that it is not Greys, or aliens flying these saucers around.  The Nation of Islam teachings say the circular spacecraft were built by humans on Earth, many centuries ago, under the guidance of God. 

NOI teachings claim that the original "wheel" was built by scientists on the islands of what is now Japan, "at a cost of $15 billion in gold."  The story also says that "these original UFOs were used to create mountains on Earth."

Naturally, this is tied into Ezekiel's Wheel (ed's note: remember the song..."Ezekiel saw a wheel/Way up/In The middle of the air?").  The encounter in The Bible of the prophet Ezekiel with a wheel-like UFO, is central to the Nation of Islam religion.


Farrakhan told the group in Chicago that "Many have died or have been killed to keep from sharing what they have seen."  Does this sound familiar to any Alien Lore fans?  If you dig into nearly any Alien Lore story, eventually it comes down to conspiracy and cover-ups.

In his Saviour's Day speech the year before, Farrakhan said that in 1985 he himself had been taken aboard the craft.  And, when he was on the flaying saucer, he heard Elijah Muhammad speak to him.

The gathering in Illinois included a group of international UFOligists.  "They have in us allies. They have in us their protectors. They have in us those that will help them to gain the finance to keep up their research."

"Since the founding of the Nation of Islam, these wheel-like objects have been taught to us of their existence and their function," said Ishmael Muhammad, one of Elijah Muhammad's sons.


"The founder of the Nation of Islam, Fard Muhammad, taught us about these objects that the world calls UFOs, and he gave us great details as to the materials that they were constructed of and that most of these objects come from this planet Earth," Ishmael Muhammad told AOL News.

"He also taught us of the existence of life on other planets, as well as a highly advanced civilization on the planet Mars. He taught us about the Mother Plane (UFO) and gave us the dimensions that it was a half mile by a half mile, human-made planet, one mile in height, and that this Mother Plane carried 1,500 smaller planes."

He went on to claim that the FBI and other feds have, in their various raids, confiscated much of the evidence the NOI had collected over the years.   One of the UFOlogists at the conference said "The entire discussion [with Farrakhan] was about UFOs, and it didn't deviate. He [Farrakhan] kept talking about how heroic and brave we were in the face of worldwide skepticism and the media so often treating this at such a high level of ridicule. I was pleasantly surprised when he offered both emotional and financial support for our work, and he came across as very humble in our presence."

Ishmael Muhammad, Nation of Islam's national assistant minister, spoke to AOL News about NOI's fascination with UFOs and their fervent hope that they will somehow unite all the religions of Earth."


"I believe that the recent release of UFO documents by the British government is very significant, along with other countries that have released their own," Ishmael Muhammad added.  "I think it says that they know that contact is imminent."
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"Welcome to Costco. I love you."



Click to enlarge. . . A shining moment from "Idiocracy"
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