weird news

Chris Knight's avatar

A few years after the Civil War ended, Nicolas Cage was transported into the past and posed for this photograph in the vicinity of Bristol, Tennessee…

You can purchase the above photograph on eBay, provided you’ve got $1,000,000 to fork over for it.

From the item’s eBay page…

Original c.1870 carte de visite showing a man who looks exactly like Nick Cage. Personally, I believe it’s him and that he is some sort of walking undead / vampire, et cetera, who quickens / reinvents himself once every 75 years or so. 150 years from now, he might be a politician, the leader of a cult, or a talk show host.

This is not a trick photo of any kind and has not been manipulated in Photoshop or any other graphics program. It’s an original photo of a man who lived in Bristol, TN sometime around the Civil War.

I’ve

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Chris Knight's avatar

There’s a chap named Richard Handl in southern Sweden who is right curious about things like physics and nuclear chemistry. So he, ummmm… attempted to build a nuclear breeder reactor in his flat’s kitchen.

But it can’t honestly be said that he had any nefarious motives, because Richard has a blog set up chronicling all the steps that he’s taken on his lil’ adventure into the world of fissionable atoms. He even documented a nuclear meltdown in his kitchen’s oven.

Turns out though that splitting atoms at home is the sort of thing that the local constabulary (not to mention the Swedish Radiation Authority) tends to frown upon. Richard Handl was arrested several days ago. He’s since been released from jail but his reactor equipment has been confiscated (and probably buried under several tons of concrete by now), but Handl is determined to continue his research at “the ...

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Chris Knight's avatar

Wasn’t this the kind of thing that the DHARMA Initiative was playing with on that mysterious Island? We all know how great that turned out, huh?

Some thinkin’ dudes at Cornell University have torn a hole in time itself. The result is a “time cloak” that hides events from being observed by the rest of the universe.

From the article at Gizmodo…

The process relies on similar methods of distorting electromagnetic fields as invisibility cloaks, but it exploits a time-space duality in electromagnetic theory: diffraction and dispersion of light in space are mathematically equivalent. Scientists have used this theory to create a “time-lens [that] can, for example, magnify or compress in time”.

The time cloak takes two of those lenses and arranges them so that one compresses a beam of light while the other decompresses it. That leaves the beam seemingly unchanged, but the diffraction and dispersion actually “cloak”

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Chris Knight's avatar

Aimi Eguchi is a 16-year old music star in Japan, with a loyal following of several thousands of fans. She lives north of Tokyo, has an official website, and enjoys track and field sports.

And she doesn’t exist outside of a hard drive.

Good friend and fellow blogger Lee Shelton was the first to draw my attention to the intriguing but also unsettling story of Aimi Eguchi: a computer-generated composite of six different girls, who until now had fooled many people into believing she was a real flesh and blood person…

Click here for more about Aimi Eguchi’s “biography”.

I’m telling you people here and now: one of these days, this is going to be an American politician who “runs” for office. Whether or not it wins is a commentary that I shall leave as an exercise for the reader…...

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Chris Knight's avatar

About the same time that Operation: Desert Storm was going on but before the ground war started in Iraq back in 1991, I read The Hobbit for the first time. Immediately after that I plunged into The Lord of the Rings. And it wasn’t long after that when I thought that since I was on such a hot streak that I’d read The Silmarillion as well.

And my brain immediately got befuddled by the vastness of J.R.R. Tolkien’s cosmology that had only been hinted at in The Lord of the Rings.

The thing which I most couldn’t wrap my mind around was Middle-earth before the fall of Númenor: Tolkien had the world that would eventually be our own as a “flat Earth”, and it stayed that way until the last king of Númenor sailed into the west to try to wrest away an immortality that could never ...

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In the state of New York a government agency is ordering pet cemeteries to cease and desist with interring the cremated remains of human pet owners with their beloved dogs and cats.

Meanwhile in Fort Pierce, Florida (I happen to have lots of family there) two women were taped by video surveillance at a Winn Dixie supermarket stealing seventy-five sticks of deodorant. Police figure the ladies will try to sell the deodorant to convenience stores.

Not the craziest stories that I’ve heard lately, but certainly worth passing along for your mirth and merriment 😛...

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And their mad skillz with the legendary Star Wars weaponry garnered wild applause for Tom Costello and Ryan Angco! Unfortunately while their classmates were thrilled with the mock combat, the principal of Westfield High School in Massachusetts – perhaps seduced by the Dark Side – suspended seniors Tom Costello and Ryan Angco and declared that they wouldn’t participate with their classmates at graduation!

But thanks to a groundswell of support from a Facebook group, Principal Raymond K. Broderick has turned back to the Light Side and rescinded the suspensions, so Tom and Ryan get to walk at graduation and get their sheepskins after all.

Here’s the story from WHDH and here’s the report from WWLP…

This story gives me a new hope that ridiculous “zero tolerance” policies will once and for all be thrown over the railing and into the abyss where they belong! Principal Broderick, my hat’s tipped ...

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Chris Knight's avatar

Being reported this hour that a guy not far away from here in Lexington, North Carolina has been arrested for stealing two Slush machines from a Sonic Drive-In. He was caught when he attempted to sell them to a recycling center.

According to the Fox 8 report, the slushy makers are valued at $15,000 and George Jensen, Jr. tried to sell them for about $165.

This is the kind of story that ever since finally reading Atlas Shrugged a few months, makes me giggle for all the wrong reasons :-...

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Somewhere tonight, The X-Files creator Chris Carter is certainly licking his chops about this…

President John F. Kennedy wrote two letters to the head of the CIA, asking for highly classified files pertaining to the existence of unidentified flying objects.

And JFK sent the letters on November 12th, 1963: just ten days before he was killed by an assassin(s?) bullet(s?) in Dallas, Texas(?).

One of the letters asks for the UFO files and in the other letter, Kennedy expresses a strong desire to cooperate with the Soviet Union on space activities.

Very interesting. And no doubt going to be the fodder for a whole new industry of conspiracy theories 😛...

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