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The Forbidden Island

The Forbidden Island:

After a tense standoff lasting a few more days, the crew of the Primrose were evacuated by helicopter to safety. They were lucky to get away: It was their misfortune to have run aground just offshore of one of the strangest islands on Earth, and probably the very last of its kind. Anthropologists believe the men who appeared on the beach that morning in 1981 are members of a hunter-gatherer tribe that has lived on the island for 65,000 years. That's 35,000 years before the last ice age, 55,000 years before the great woolly mammoths disappeared from North America, and 62,000 years before the ancient Egyptians built the pyramids at Giza. These people are believed to be the direct descendants of the first humans out of Africa.

(article originally appeared in "Uncle John's 24-Karat Gold Bathroom Reader")

The X-Ray Terrorists

A New York man who allegedly wanted to kill President Obama and apparently blamed him for the recent Boston bombings has been arrested for trying to build and detonate a weapon of mass destruction.

Glendon Scott Crawford, 49, of Galway, N.Y., spent months designing and constructing an X-ray system that would emit deadly amounts of radiation and could be detonated remotely, according to the FBI. Crawford recruited Eric J. Feight, 54, of Hudson, N.Y, to join in the plot, and both were arrested Tuesday, the FBI said.

Crawford and Feight allegedly planned to hide their weapon in a truck and FBI experts said it would have been "functional" and "lethal."

According to the FBI, Crawford cited "a political figure" and a Muslim organization as "potential targets." Sources familiar with the investigation identified the "political figure" as Obama.

"Obama's policies caused this," Crawford allegedly wrote in a text message on April 15, the day a series of bombings killed three and injured scores more at the Boston marathon.

"He directed the [government] to start bringing [Muslims] here without background checks," Crawford wrote, according to the FBI. "They don't have to follow any laws, and this administration has done more to enable a government sponsored invasion than the press can cover up."

The FBI launched an investigation into Crawford last spring after he allegedly walked into a synagogue in Albany, N.Y., and inquired about technology that could kill "Israel's enemies while they slept." The synagogue notified police, and within six weeks the FBI had a source secretly recording meetings with Crawford, according an FBI affidavit filed in the case.

XKCD FTW

xkcd illustrates something that's always bugged me: the tendency of people to think that today's life (for all values of today) is especially hectic, or hurried, or that its people are especially inconsiderate or dumb or lacking in the virtues of previous eras. Well, Skippy, people in those blessed eras thought the same thing, because people are always the same: hurried, inconsiderate, dumb, and have always lacked the virtues that your grandparents tricked you into thinking everybody once had. People don't change: each era just finds new ways to do what people have always done.