"help us obi-wan, you're our only hope!"

Jets scramble to defend Israel...from Tony Blair!

Monkey operates robotic arm with its mind...

Link

via Boing Boing

Well, we're fucked.

I normally hate monkeys, but robot monkeys could almost be cool.

I, for one, welcome our new monkey-controlled robot overlords.

Next development: Monkey hurls his shit unprecedented distance with robot arm.

?!!?!?!

Those aliens always contact the sane guys, don't they?

Only if they live in a trailer covered in tinfoil.

Fubar.

Telecoms, the oil barons of the new century.

quote:

Telecoms, the oil barons of the new century

Headline, 1978.

Washington DC police to cordon off neighbourhoods and control access.

quote:

D.C. police will seal off entire neighborhoods, set up checkpoints and kick out strangers under a new program that D.C. officials hope will help them rescue the city from its out-of-control violence.

Under an executive order expected to be announced today, police Chief Cathy L. Lanier will have the authority to designate “Neighborhood Safety Zones.” At least six officers will man cordons around those zones and demand identification from people coming in and out of them. Anyone who doesn’t live there, work there or have “legitimate reason” to be there will be sent away or face arrest, documents obtained by The Examiner show.

Welcome to your new country.

That's awful. Another sign of the creep of Big Government. I mean, that function used to be performed by private drug gangs.

EDIT: By which I mean only that DC has been Mad Max-ville as long as I've been alive. I've seen some heinous, dystopian shit, but a friend of mine with DEA in DC tells stories that make my toenails curl up and spontaneously combust. This is not a sign of our "new country." This is just another chapter in the established, crazy story of our national shame, err, capital.

You need a capital city that's so skullfuckingly boring by design that no one'll ever want to go there, let alone start a crackhouse.

Like Canberra. You can't have inner-city crime if no one can find the damn inner city.

quote:

Originally posted by Metro Dynamics:

quote:

Telecoms, the oil barons of the new century

Headline, 1978.

Touche.

Meh! Gromit.

Ahmadijan could have a great career in stand-up comedy.

quote:

Originally posted by lithos:
You need a capital city that's so skullfuckingly boring by design that no one'll ever want to go there, let alone start a crackhouse.

Like Canberra. You can't have inner-city crime if no one can find the damn inner city.

As was supposedly said when they started to build the place: 'a waste of a good paddock'.

They say there're are people there. They went once, travelled beyond their known boundaries, to see the city borne of one of the greatest spats betwixt Melbourne and Sydney, the City-Territory because, face it, once you stop seeing houses it's all just bushfire fuel. They came. And the short buildings rose up a little around them, and they stretched as far as the eye could see - about until New South Wales - and the streets lay as orderly as graves, as lines and curves on that heartless bastard Burley Griffin's protractor.

And they circle. Ad infinitum, endless roads looped and twisted like a Moebius strip, one-sided, infinite, poring over the cursed scrolls from the unholy church of Tourist Information, until the steering of their vehicles unbalance, mirroring their sanity, synchronous and perfect skewing as the the loop locks them in. It's written, in books bound in bunyip leather and held by chains that shackled the convicts from the Lady Penrhyn and Prince of Wales, ships so evil not even Sydney named ferries after them, that when the Great Upright Torrent spews heavenward, the spell shall be broken, sanity regained, only at night and if two lost vehicles are near enough, and these travellers shall come together and join what little soul they have left.

You'll see them, some days, if your GPS holds and you're willing not to be drawn into, drawn into the spell - "There's fuck-all to see here. There's nothing. Well, Parliament Hou- no. No. Why'd I wanna go there?" - the Lost, the Taken, perhaps, would be a better name, but what's in a name? Cruising 'round in near-ethereal FJ Holdens. Morris Majors, maybe even the odd Leyland P76, unmodified Toranas. All in perfect nick. For these are now homes. Homes of the Damned, who a condemned to endless ring The Capital like vultures waiting for the last breath to leave the metropolitan body and groan upwards towards waiting ears.

And all they wanted, all they never found, would never find, locations not etched on any chart in this dimension or the next, was somewhere to take a piss, maybe grab something to eat.

This is the fate of all Canberran tourists who lack the strength of will to bore straight through and out the other side.