Category: High Weirdness

The Go Game: San Francisco Urban Wireless Adventure

What happens when the Cacophony Society goes ultra high-tech…

The Go Game is an all-out urban adventure game, a technology-fueled, reality-based experience that encourages hard play and a keen eye for the weird, the beautiful, or the faintly out-of-the-ordinary. The “rule book” is reality, the “board” is your city, and the “pieces” are the players — you and your team.

Through clues downloaded to a wireless device and hints planted in unlikely places, you’ll be guided through a city you only think you’re familiar with. Clues can appear at any time, anywhere. Perhaps you didn’t notice the woman on the bus reading a magazine upside-down. Or the note stuck to the side of the bathroom mirror of your favorite bar, or the electric scooter parked outside with your name on it. After a day of Go, you will.

The SF Weekly has a more descriptive article

Busy spiders in British Columbia weave a 60 acre web

Insert any and all bug movie cliches here. The photos of this thing are amazing…

A biology professor in northern British Columbia has spotted a clover field crawling with spiders. Brian Thair of the College of New Caledonia in Prince George said he saw a silky, white web stretching 60 acres across a field.

“When you see horror movies with spider web festooned from this place to that place and so on, it comes nowhere near approaching what occurred in this field,” Thair told CBC Radio’s As It Happens.

A typical barbwire fence on wood posts surrounded the field about six kilometres east of McBride in the Robson Valley. Thair said it looked like the whole area was covered with an opaque, white plastic grocery store bag.

So did like another one of the Seals open up or something?

They Saved Baader-Meinhof’s Brains!

Nothing like an absolutely weird and random story to brighten the day…

BERLIN, Germany — The brains of three members of the infamous Baader-Meinhof Gang of German urban guerrillas have disappeared, a laboratory said on Monday.

Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin and Jan-Carl Raspe were members of the gang that waged a campaign of killings, bombings and kidnappings against the West German establishment in the 1970s.

After the three extreme leftists committed suicide in prison in 1977, their brains were taken to a university hospital in southern Tuebingen for autopsy, but the brains are no longer there and their whereabouts are unknown.

On This Site: Nothing Happened

Nothing happened here.

It’s long been a tradition in Paris to mount a plaque on a building where a noteworthy tenant – a war hero, major writer or other luminary – lived or died.

But recently, the tradition has taken a curious turn.

Take, for example, a plaque that appeared mysteriously on a facade in eastern Paris stating: “On April 17, 1967 – nothing happened here.”

Or one in the garment district paying homage to a former resident identified as, “Karima Bentiffa – civil servant.”

[via New World Disorder]

Hypersonic sound goes Madison Avenue

hypersoundOf course you knew it was only a matter of time before the advertising industry got hold of the hypersonic directed sound the military was working on.

It’s the most promising audio advance in years, and it’s coming this fall: Hypersonic speakers, from American Technology, focus sound in a tight beam, much like a laser focuses light. … When it rolls out in Coke machines and other products over the next few months, audio quality will rival that of compact discs.

Boeing unveils Klingon Bird Of Prey

boeing-stealthSo this thing has been flying since 1996 and I’m sure it accounts for a nontrivial amount of Area 51 freakouts. As with the F-117, it’s hard to get a handle on just what this thing looks like. I’m sure the folks over at Jane’s have just pulled the phone out of the wall by now.

The promo films on the Boeing site are a prime piece of ephemeral military promo films. Am I the only person to immediately think of the line “The Crossbow Project… Because the best defense is a good offense!”

Tarot Card Sniper victim was FBI computer security expert

Let the conspiracies fly fast and wide on this…

An armed lunatic plaguing the Washington, DC area has managed to do more harm to American cyber-defence with a single .223 caliber bullet than an entire squadron of PLA hackers could hope to accomplish, Vmyths editor Rob Rosenberger points out in a recent rant.

FBI National Infrastructure Protection Center (NIPC) cyber-analyst Linda Franklin became the Beltway sniper’s eleventh victim shot and ninth victim murdered last Monday as she loaded her car with merchandise in a suburban DC shopping mall.

[via Red Rock Eater]

Let’s designate September 18 as “Area 51 Day”

Gee big surprise… Bush II renews the executive order that keeps Area 51, the Most Well Known And Not Secret Secret Base, classified for another year. These orders expire every September 18 and need to be renewed to keep a pack of environmental lawyers from filing hazardous waste claims against the government.

And another ‘way cool’ headline: “Giant squid are taking over the world!”

Will Mr. Lovecraft please pick up the white courtesy phone…

Giant squid are taking over the world, well at least the oceans, and they are getting bigger. According to scientists, squid have overtaken humans in terms of total bio-mass.

[via MetaFilter]