We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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This has no connection with legalising drugs, abolishing income tax (see posting below) or the Samizdata.net metacontext, or no connection that I can now think of. But even so, I like it a lot:
Researchers have cracked the puzzle of how pigeons find their way home: they just follow the main roads.
…
Some pigeons stick so rigidly to the roads that they even fly round roundabouts before choosing the exit to lead them back to their lofts.
Animal behaviouralists at Oxford University are stunned by their findings, which follow 10 years of research into homing pigeons. For the last 18 months they have used the latest global-positioning technology, allowing them to track the ground the birds covered to within one to four metres.
I too am stunned, even though I am not an “animal behaviouralist”. Apparently pigeons do have an innate navigation system, but as soon as they identify a road-based route, they use that instead.
“Up until now, we have always thought about the way that birds go in terms of the energetics of the flight efficiency, which is the most direct route home … as in the phrase ‘as the crow flies’.
“But the answer is, they don’t go as the crow flies, and neither, it is my hunch, do crows. …”
No mate. Crows use the latest global-positioning technology.
There used to be a time when companies has serious names. Standard Oil. East India Company. Marks & Spencer. Ford Motor Company. Western Union. General Electric. Blohm und Voss. Consolidated Engineering.
Now companies have names like Eat My Handbag Bitch.
Perhaps the commentariat knows of some other interesting examples? God bless post-modern capitalism!
One interpretation is that it is meant to indicate, from left to right, priority of the seats should go to any person with a broken arm, a person with a child, a pregnant woman or a person with an injured leg…
Will the German embassy protest, one wonders? Hardly the spirit of reconciliation.
The Conservative Party (or as Monty Python would put it, the Silly Party) has a cunning plan to cut bureaucracy. Appoint bureaucrats to decide how much bureaucracy is really necessary!
Now why didn’t I think of that? 
Tomorrow night, chez moi, Michael Jennings is giving a talk. It’s the last Friday of the month, and a talk chez moi is the rule. He’ll be offering a comparative study of Christmas around the world. Christmas is most fun in non-Christian countries he said today, because although they like it – it’s a big party/holiday after all, and who doesn’t like a big party/holiday? – they don’t always get it. Are you going to mention the Father Christmas who got crucified in a Japanese shop window? – I asked. I was saving that he said.
Not as weird as that, but a bit weird, is this picture of Santa Claus under water at the Beijing Aquarium, stroking a giant turtle. Why? Does Santa not have enough on his plate delivering toys to children everywhere? Aren’t reindeers enough of a headache without him getting involved also with underwater creatures?
Meanwhile, here is information penned in 1997 but presumably not that out of date about Christmas in Japan. Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and Christmas Cakes are the two big things, apparently.
I don’t believe in ghosts but even I have to confess that this qualifies as spooky:
Closed-circuit security cameras at Hampton Court Palace, the huge Tudor castle outside London, seem to have snagged an ethereal visitor. Could it be a ghost?
“We’re baffled too — it’s not a joke, we haven’t manufactured it,” said Vikki Wood, a Hampton Court spokeswoman, when asked if the photo the palace released was a Christmas hoax. “We genuinely don’t know who it is or what it is.”
In the still photograph, the figure of a man in a robe-like garment is shown stepping from the shadowy doorway, one arm reaching out for the door handle.
The area around the man is somewhat blurred, and his face appears unnaturally white compared with his outstretched hand.
“It was incredibly spooky because the face just didn’t look human,” said James Faukes, one of the palace security guards.
“My first reaction was that someone was having a laugh, so I asked my colleagues to take a look. We spoke to our costumed guides, but they don’t own a costume like that worn by the figure. It is actually quite unnerving,” Faukes said.
Follow the link and have a good look at the photograph. At first site, I will admit that the image is quite unsettling. However, it is not a ghost. Even if one accepts that human beings can survive physical death and then flit between this world and the next in ethereal form, how, exactly, do they manage to do so while remaining fully dressed? It would take quite a lot of convincing to persuade me that garments possess an eternal soul.
So perhaps this is an elaborate fake? Or some trick of the light? If it is the work of pranksters they deserve some credit for conjuring up such an admirably creepy illusion.
If anything odd happens to the weather, they blame Global Warming and say that therefore it will get worse and that we are to blame. We Brought It On Ourselves. But it must be admitted that it, in this case, is rather startling:
BARCELONA, Spain — A Spanish-American scientific team will be scanning the United States this winter for what might be one of the weirdest byproducts of global warming: great balls of ice that fall from the sky.
The baffling phenomenon was first detected in Spain three years ago and has since been reported in a number of other countries, including the United States. So scientists now plan to monitor in a systematic way what they call “megacryometeors” — or great balls of ice that fall from the sky.
“I’m not worried that a block of ice may fall on your head,” said Dr. Jesus Martinez-Frias of the Center for Astrobiology in Madrid. “I’m worried that great blocks of ice are forming where they shouldn’t exist.”
Ice balls, which generally weigh 25 to 35 pounds but can be much bigger, have punched holes in the roofs of houses, smashed through car windshields, and whizzed right past people’s heads.
How very odd, as we say here. And as you constantly say if you are a regular reader of Dave Barry.
It’s tempting to start speculating where, and upon whom or what, we would most like one of these things to land.
This is a classic weird trivia story, dug up (not to say exhumed) by one of Dave Barry‘s army of weird trivia searchers.
Marc Marchal, 32, died such a dreadful death that the undertakers advised his family that his coffin should be closed when they said their final farewells. But the undertakers forgot about one little thing:
The family of a dead motorcyclist are pressing charges against bungling Antwerp undertakers after the man’s mobile phone began ringing in his coffin as they sat beside it in a chapel of rest.
There is no answer to that. I am guessing there was not, anyway.
Okay, I have fifteen minutes left today, November 19th, to tell you what Dave Barry told his readers a blog-age ago (yesterday): today is World Toilet Day.
Says who? The World Toilet Organization,that’s who. So now you know what WTO really stands for.
Here is the World Toilet Day Press Release, which lists ten things everyone can do. My favourite is number 7:
Treat the public toilet you are in, as if its in your own home.
Their punctuation. In my case that would mean cleaning it only rarely, but putting up lots of bookshelves.
What would happen if the Sahara Desert went communist? – For fifty years nothing, then a shortage of sand. Remember that old joke? Well, have a read of this, from the BBC earlier in the week:
Saudi Arabia has reportedly imposed strict border checks to enforce a ban on the export of sand.
There are fears that the growing demands of the construction industry could lead to a shortage in the desert kingdom.
The Arab News newspaper reports that neighbouring Bahrain needs to import large quantities of sand for reclaiming land from the sea.
Demand is also expected to grow as the process of reconstruction in Iraq gathers pace.
Although sand remains plentiful in Saudi Arabia, construction experts say the high costs of bagging and transporting make exploiting it difficult.
Experts have told the newspaper that if a mechanism could be devised to move sand from the vast desert region known as the Empty Quarter, it could be a very profitable proposition.
As the paper points out, there is more sand in the kingdom than oil.
Cement is also in high demand, the report says, with many cement factories having to expand their production capabilities to meet domestic demand.
We speculated here that if the Americans went into Iraq they could then put pressure on Saudi Arabia. Now the American plan is revealing itself. “I know it sounds crazy, but guys, here’s the plan. We’re going to suck all the sand out of the place. We’ll have them over a barrel.”
To be more serious, I guess the thing about about sand, compared to oil, is that sand can’t, unlike oil, be controlled. Oil extraction requires expensive infrastructure manned by a highly skilled workforce. Once it’s out of the ground, it can still then be stolen and smuggled, but until then, it’s the possession of the resident power structure. But sand “extraction”? Anyone can do that.
What is the world coming to!
A French hunter was shot by his dog after he left a loaded shotgun in the boot of his car with two dogs and one of the animals accidentally stepped on the trigger, police say.
The man, from the village of Espelette in the Basque region, was admitted to hospital in the nearby town of Bayonne on Monday with leadshot injuries to the hip.
“As he was driving along, one of his dogs accidentally set off the gun,” a police official said on Wednesday.
I didn’t know it was loaded, okay?
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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