February 24, 2000

SURREAL AND PSYCHOTRONIC

A bizarre and trippy couple of weeks are in store at the Blinding Light!! cinema. Starting Feb. 25 through Mar. 5 is Surreal City, a collection of all things surreal on celluloid, including a 3 night run of Rare & Classic Surreal Animation, Mar. 3-5. Then, Mar. 9 through Mar. 15, don't miss The Johnny Legend Psychotronic Film Festival, which is billed as "The First Ever Teenage UFO Rock'n'Roll Wrestling Psycho Sex Monster Show!" and features films with titles such as Hell American Style, Sonny Bono's Marijuana, The Sadist, and Timothy Leary's Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out. Don't forget your favourite hallucinogen and a friend to help you home.

AT LAST, A REAL LIVE FREAK SHOW

If you plan on being in London, England the last weekend of April, make plans to check out Unconvention 2000. Billed as "the strangest show on Earth", Uncon 2000 topics will include ghost hunting, Atlantis, urban legends, living monsters, UFOs, independent space travel, Stone Age psychedelia, chaos magic, mind control, black helicopters, Nazi Satanism, sea serpents, Cornish witchcraft, electrical resurrection, Innuit shaman, near death experiences, and more! The show goes April 29 and 30, and please, no weirdos.

YOU'RE GONNA DIE

Bad news everyone. Looks like I'll be dead on August 25, 2041. Check out the website www.deathclock.com, punch in your personal stats, and get your very own date of death. Cheers! (AP)

SPIKED!

A group calling itself The Lorax has claimed responsibility for spiking hundreds of old-growth trees in the Elaho Valley in areas approved for clearcut logging. The Lorax hope to protect grizzly bear habitat and to deter International Forest Products from clearcutting this ancient coastal rainforest.

SAY IT WITH VIOLENCE

Hard-line Hindu nationalists opposed to western cultural imports attacked hundreds of couples celebrating Valentine's day last week, and ransacked dozens of shops selling flowers, chocolates, and hallmark cards. (AP)

CHOC-O-SPIN

Among all the news reports of the new research that suggests chocolate may be good for you, why did nobody mention that the research was funded by Mars Inc.? It couldn't possibly have anything to do with advertising dollars, could it? Oddly, news outlets also failed to mention that flavanoids, the magic ingredient that may be beneficial to your health, is found in cocoa, which, these days, is only a minor ingredient in the pathetic excuse for chocolate that Mars Inc. peddles. Their products are mostly hydrogenated oil, refined white sugar, and milk "solids", hardly healthful substances.

HOW ABOUT "I'M GONNA KILL MY BOSS"?

Microsoft has developed a program called Cameo which will allow employers to sift through the e-mail of their staff. The program can scan 50,000 e-mails per hour, and when it finds an objectionable word, forwards the message to the boss. Objectionable words include: bimbo, fondle, resume, reefer, anarchy, meth, stress, pipe bombs, Aryan, and ammonium nitrate. (San Francisco Chronicle)

FINALLY, AN HONEST POLITICIAN

A CNN on-line chat with Bill Clinton brought an interesting answer from the president regarding the future of the internet. "Personally, I'd like to see more porn on the Internet," said the president. CNN later e-mailed a statement to the White House saying that the chat room had been infiltrated by an imposter. Yeah, right.(FoxNews)

DON'T WORRY, BE HAPPY

A Mayo clinic study that questioned 839 people between 1962 and 1965 has concluded, 30 years later, that optimistic people live about 19 per cent longer than pessimists. (Mayo Clinic Proceedings)

THEN THE LITTLE DRUGGIES WILL GRADUATE TO HARDER SUBSTANCES

NASA has revealed the results of experiments that fed spiders psychotropic drugs in order to examine the effects on their ability to spin webs. Spiders on marijuana made a reasonable start at spinning their webs, but lost concentration about halfway through. Spiders on Benzedrine spun their webs with great energy, but left huge holes in the web. Chloral Hydrat, an agent in sleeping pills, caused them to fall asleep. Surprisingly, the worst effect was from caffeine, which made the spiders incapable of spinning anything better than a few threads strung together at random. (New Scientist)

NOW THAT'S A FETISH

Certainly you know what necrophilia is: "an abnormal attraction, especially of an erotic nature, to corpses," states my dictionary (is there such a thing as a normal attraction to corpses?) But you probably haven't heard of a couple of other fetishes involving dead people. Necrosadism involves performing sadistic acts on a corpse, such as biting, dismembering, cutting or stabbing for sexual arousal (yikes!), and mysophilia is the practice of ingesting the body fluids of corpses, particularly urine. A mysophile may also want to roll their body in the open wounds or secretions of a corpse. Sounds like a good party trick. (Bizarre)

ATTACK OF THE KILLER FUNGI

Last month we learned of the development of a marijuana killing fungus being developed in the States. This week, U.S. drug chief Richard Baum revealed that a fungus that eats only coca plants will soon be tested in Columbia to help kill their source for cocaine. (Scripps Howard)

BETTER THAN BRITA

An international team of scientists has found that while coffee is filtering, the coffee grounds mop up as much as 90 per cent of the copper and lead in tap water. (New Scientist)

HOW ABOUT ADOPT-A-CEO?

In order to boost morale for its workers, who have faced a recent round of layoffs and are being forced to cut expenses, Bank of America has introduced its "Adopt-An-ATM" program. The "morale booster" involves bank employees taking care of their own "adopted" ATM machine, by cleaning up trash from around it and wiping it down with window cleaner and a soft cloth. But isn't it the ATM's that are largely responsible for the layoffs that are demoralizing the workers? It's kind of like cleaning up after the guy who breaks into your house, isn't it? (Reuters)

February 24, 2000

SURREAL AND PSYCHOTRONIC

AT LAST, A REAL LIVE FREAK SHOW

YOU'RE GONNA DIE

Bad news everyone. Looks like I'll be dead on August 25, 2041. Check out the website www.deathclock.com, punch in your personal stats, and get your very own date of death. Cheers! (AP)

SPIKED!

SAY IT WITH VIOLENCE

Hard-line Hindu nationalists opposed to western cultural imports attacked hundreds of couples celebrating Valentine's day last week, and ransacked dozens of shops selling flowers, chocolates, and hallmark cards. (AP)

CHOC-O-SPIN

HOW ABOUT "I'M GONNA KILL MY BOSS"?

FINALLY, AN HONEST POLITICIAN

DON'T WORRY, BE HAPPY

A Mayo clinic study that questioned 839 people between 1962 and 1965 has concluded, 30 years later, that optimistic people live about 19 per cent longer than pessimists. (Mayo Clinic Proceedings)

THEN THE LITTLE DRUGGIES WILL GRADUATE TO HARDER SUBSTANCES

NOW THAT'S A FETISH

ATTACK OF THE KILLER FUNGI

Last month we learned of the development of a marijuana killing fungus being developed in the States. This week, U.S. drug chief Richard Baum revealed that a fungus that eats only coca plants will soon be tested in Columbia to help kill their source for cocaine. (Scripps Howard)

BETTER THAN BRITA

An international team of scientists has found that while coffee is filtering, the coffee grounds mop up as much as 90 per cent of the copper and lead in tap water. (New Scientist)

HOW ABOUT ADOPT-A-CEO?

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