Random News Stories

[Leo Enticknap]

From Popular Mechanics:

5G Truthers Bought Faraday Cages to Protect Their Routers. They're Mad They Worked.

Let's say you hate 5G and genuinely believe it causes cancer or spreads COVID-19, despite there being no evidence to support those wild conspiracies. To shield 5G's myriad evils, then, you put your WiFi router in a metallic box that "blocks about 90 percent" of the signal. There! Now you're instantly protected from those treacherous waves of radiation!

This may sound like a made-up scenario, but 5G truthers really have bought these devices in droves. There's just one small problem with their fool-proof plan: The kinds of containers that truly do block all electromagnetic radiation are called Faraday cages, and they're not the same thing as these so-called "router guards" that look like glorified mesh file organizers. If they were real Faraday cages, none of your home WiFi signal would come through.

There are scores of sketchy companies waiting to cash in on customers who believe in 5G-related conspiracy theories, including the brands "Router Guard" and "EMF Essentials." These scams aren't necessarily new, but the Amazon product listings have gone viral after a December 2 tweet pointed out the irony of the whole ordeal.

Right about now, Michael Faraday is rolling around in his grave.

If the man who invented the namesake technology for blocking electronic fields could read the reviews for Amazon products that promise to act like Faraday cages and shield radiation (while still letting wireless internet into your home), he'd probably just get in a cage, lock it, and throw away the key.

That's because by definition, a Faraday cage is an enclosure that distributes an electrical charge or radiation all around the exterior of the cage, protecting anything inside. Put another way, it's a hollow conductor, and the charge is on the outside surface of the cage. If the various iterations of "router guard" and "router cover" selling on Amazon for well over $60 let any internet access through, they're not Faraday cages at all.

There are some legitimate Faraday pouches and other enclosures you can purchase for your key fob or laptop to keep it protected from hackers at all times (see below), but the shady router covers fit squarely in the "do not recommend" pile.

I'm surprised that the people who bought these things are ranting on social media, though, given that they cut off their own Internet access!

[Leo Enticknap]

A single-engined small commuter airliner on a delivery fight from Santa Rosa, CA, to Hilo, HI, with long range ferry tanks installed, suffered engine failure at almost exactly the halfway point over the Pacific, and had to ditch in the ocean. Miraculously, both pilots were rescued uninjured.

HONOLULU (KHON2) — The U.S. Coast Guard and a pair of good Samaritans responded to a downed aircraft approximately 1,100 miles northeast of Oahu on Nov. 6.

The Coast Guard says there were two crew members in the PC-12 Pilatus aircraft, and no injuries have been reported.

Officials say the Joint Rescue Coordination Center (JRCC) received reports of a downed aircraft around 2:30 p.m.

The JRCC then issued an Urgent Marine Information Broadcast (UMIF) and directed air units from Air Station Barbers Point to their location. All vessels over 20 meters in length within U.S. waters are required to monitor UMIF channels.

Two good Samaritans in the area also responded to the UMIF and set a course to the downed aircraft’s location.

The Coast Guard and good Samaritans arrived at the scene around 7:15 p.m.

The PC-12 Pilatus is a single-engine, turbine-driven propeller aircraft that is manufactured in Stans, Switzerland.

Makes me thankful that whenever I've done that flight (or its rough equivalent; usually OAK or SMF to HNL on Southwest to service calls in Hawaii), it's been on a plane with two engines. Even then, I've always felt a slight sense of relief at the sight of Makap'uu Point (westbound) or the Point Bonita Lighthouse (eastbound) near the end of the flight. There is simply nothing but water between them. Despite the statistical unlikelihood of the engine breaking down, it must take serious guts to be willing to make that flight with only one of them. But I'm guessing that there is no other viable way to deliver these single engined small aircraft, of which there appear to be many operating inter-island flights (I've seen many Cessna Grand Caravans at Hawaiian airports, too), from the mainland to the islands.

[Leo Enticknap]

JR shot the USSR, according to its final leader:

Former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev blames TV show Dallas for the fall of the USSR because it opened people's eyes to western lifestyles

TV show Dallas was the main reason behind the collapse of communism in the Soviet Union, it has been claimed.

Eurythmics co-founder Dave Stewart said that former Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev told him that the 1980s soap opera 'had more effect' in ending the Cold War than anything else.

Mr Stewart, 68, said the Gorbachev admitted an illicit broadcast of the US show in Russia had opened his people's eyes to Western life, and the Texas-based show 'brought down' the communist superpower.

He recalled the conversation with Gorbachev while speaking to Joss Stone on her A Cuppa Happy podcast'.

Mr Stewart said it had taken place in the early 1990s just as the Soviet Union was starting to open up. Before then, the Russians had been stopped by the government from listening to Western music or watching TV shows.

He said: 'He was saying what brought Russia down was they weren't allowed to see any shows from anywhere and they had in the churches they had giant blockers of signals so they'd only get fed the information from the government.

'People would go and try and crack open these blockers.

'My friend, him and his mate lay on their back and heard Radio Caroline for 15 minutes and they heard the Beatles and another band and they were just lying on their back in a church just crying because they'd never heard anything like it.

'What Gorbachev was saying it was Dallas the TV show, somebody managed to get a VHS to work and broadcast it to part of Russia and they thought, ''Hang on, that's how people live in America?''

'He said that had more effect, that half an hour, than anything else.'

My emphasis.

I'm surprised that anyone managed to broadcast pirate TV with a strong enough signal to reach a significant number of people in as tightly controlled a society as the USSR, even as glasnost was taking hold. I'd have thought that the equipment needed to do that would be impossible to get hold of, and that even if you did get hold of it, the authorities would shut you down within a minute of two of going on the air.

[Leo Enticknap]

He likely drove it more carefully than most of the school bus drivers who do it for a living.

For those who naively believed that the phrase "jump up and bite you in the ass" was just a metaphor, this from the International Business Times:

7-Foot Snake Hiding Inside Toilet Bites 54-Year-Old Woman, Reptile Captured

A woman was hospitalized after a seven-foot-long snake bit her while she was using the toilet at her home in Thailand on Sunday.

The woman, identified as 54-year-old Boonsong Plaikaew, was using the toilet when she felt a searing pain and noticed blood gushing down her legs. The woman panicked and turned to find a snake hiding inside the toilet.

The reptile then bit the woman again on the finger. She managed to pull the snake off her fingers and threw it on floor before rushing outside the bathroom screaming for help, Apple Daily reported.

The woman’s husband immediately locked the bathroom door and alerted the snake rescuers. They arrived at the home and found the reptile slithering on the floor. The reptile was identified as a python and was released into the wild.

In the meantime, paramedics arrived at the home and gave the woman first aid. She was then rushed to a local hospital for treatment. She was given antibiotics to prevent infection and then discharged from the hospital.

The woman said she moved into the home 10 years ago and this was the first time she had an encounter with a snake.

She added she was scared to enter the bathroom and checked every time before using the toilet.

Earlier this month, International Business Times had spoken to a snake catcher regarding why these reptiles show up in some unusual and unexpected places .

"Smaller species often get brought inside the home by a cat, larger species end up inside by accident through cat/dog doors and/or flyscreen holes due to temperature. It may be too hot outside so they need to cool off inside on tiles. They also sneak in through doors and windows that are left open for longer than needed," Joshua Castle, a snake catcher from Brisbane, Australia, told IBT.

"Some species of snakes can slither up the pipework to your toilet /sink/shower, this often happens by accident too, they either were looking for water or they got into a disagreement with a cat and bolted into the sewage," he added.

[Randy Stankey]

Eleven Year Old Kid Steals a School Bus and Leads Police in High Speed Chase.

Source: https://www.wbrz.com/news/child-in-c...-images-video/




BATON ROUGE - An 11-year-old juvenile was taken into custody Sunday after police said the kid stole a school bus and took officers on a pursuit from Scotlandville to Central.

Police started pursuing the stolen school bus before 11 Sunday morning. Authorities say the bus was stolen from the 300 block of Elmer St. According to police, the bus belonged to a private owner who subcontracted the vehicle with Progress Head Start.

By 11:30, the bus had crashed and officers had surrounded the bus and taken the juvenile driver into custody. The bus stopped on Greenwell Springs Road in Central where it hit a gas line, and a tree.

An eyewitness recorded a video of police chasing the bus. Click HERE to see the clip.

The crash did not appear to have caused any major damage, according to reports from the scene. There did not appear to be any injuries.

On Monday, police said the bus had no keys in it but had a push-to-start ignition. Officers also believe the child was too small to reach the pedals and had to stand up to drive the bus.

Police added that the 11-year-old was seen flipping his middle finger to officers as he drove past them.

Police have not released the name of the juvenile.

An eyewitness shared pictures of authorities detaining the juvenile.

This little boy took a school bus on a joy ride this morning, causing a police chase with several BRPD units. Crashed into a tree and took out a gas line. He is okay. @sydneykern is on scene. https://t.co/n9WPLtyy4d

— Bess Casserleigh (@BCasserleigh) October 11, 2020

#update Here’s a closer look at the bus. The homeowners said they saw the kid get out of the bus and he looked okay. Still no confirmation on an age, but the homeowners say the child was very small. @WBRZ pic.twitter.com/vg8bCFNnWG
— Sydney Kern (@sydneykern) October 11, 2020

The child was booked into juvenile detention on multiple charges including theft of a motor vehicle and aggravated assault. According to BRPD, the aggravated assault charge comes from the boy "purposely trying to strike a vehicle."

[Leo Enticknap]

I will try as hard as I can to keep the following remarks apolitical, but this one is simply too funny to pass up.

It appears that our friends in Iran were so eager to vanquish the Great Satan, that they built a full-scale wooden mockup of one of our aircraft carriers, in order to practice bombing and torpedo-ing it. This they did - so enthusiastically, in fact, that they sunk the thing, and the wreck now lies submerged in shallow water, buggering up shipping lanes in the Strait of Hormuz.

This from Popular Mechanics:

Iran Accidentally Sinks Its Fake American Aircraft Carrier

An Iranian barge modified to resemble an American aircraft carrier sank near the Strait of Hormuz. The “carrier,” built to take abuse in propaganda videos made by the Iranian regime, unexpectedly turned on its side near the Iranian port city of Bandar Abbas. The fake carrier is now a hazard for local shipping, and experts believe it will need to be towed away and salvaged.

The unnamed barge was recently a star in Iran’s “Great Prophet 14” exercises. The annual air and naval exercises are used to showcase all the ways Iran believes it can stand up to American military power. In last month’s exercises, Iranian forces launched an anti-ship missile at the barge, and commandos fast-roped onto the deck of the make-believe ship.

The barge, which Iran previously attacked in 2015 (and subsequently repaired), apparently sustained enough damage during that exercise to cause it to sink. The image below was taken by an PLEIADES Earth-imaging satellite as it passed over the Persian Gulf region.

New imagery from yesterday shows the capsized #IRGC replica of the Nimitz Class Carrier appears to have listed more outside of Bandar Abbas Port, #Iran. She appears more listed here than previous imagery from the 31st July. The depth here is a reported 14m. Fun to reclaim.... pic.twitter.com/tKTHJAaGCS
— Aurora Intel (@AuroraIntel) August 2, 2020

The barge sank in 45 feet of water and now, as Forbes points out, is proving a more formidable opponent as when it was afloat. It's currently near Bandar Abbas, a major Iranian port responsible for shipping the country’s oil overseas and also one of the Islamic Republic of Iran Navy’s largest naval bases.

This could very well create tension between the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps Navy, the paramilitary force that hammered the fake carrier during the Great Prophet Exercises, and the more traditional Iranian Navy.

The barge is the second Iranian “warship” to sink in the area in the past three months. Back in May, an anti-ship missile accidentally targeted an Iranian Navy vessel, sinking it. The friendly fire incident killed 19 sailors and injured another 15.

[Frank Cox]

Don't address your cocaine to a movie mafia boss....

https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/20/europ...ntl/index.html

Police in Italy discovered cocaine stuffed inside individually hollowed-out coffee beans, after opening a parcel addressed to a fictional Mafia boss from a Hollywood movie.


Investigators found 130 grams of cocaine in a two kilogram shipment of coffee beans that arrived at Milan's Malpensa Airport from Colombia, according to a statement from the Guardia di Finanza financial police.

Customs officers decided to check the package after noticing that its intended recipient shared the name of a fictional character: Santino D'Antonio, a Mafia boss in the movie John Wick: Chapter 2, Italian police told CNN.

Once they opened the parcel they found more than 500 coffee beans that had been hollowed out, filled with cocaine and resealed using dark brown tape, the statement said.

And I would have gotten away with it too, if it weren't for you meddling... action movie fans?

[Randy Stankey]

If you've ever been inside a food preparation plant, you probably would have had to go through a contraption like that at some point.

It's a lot like an airlock that you might pass through when entering a clean room. First, you have to put on a full length smock, hairnet, gloves and face mask. Then have to go through a double set of interlocking doors, into a small foyer where there is a device that resembles a Stairmaster (exercise machine) that has rotating brushes which clean the bottoms of your feet with liquid sanitizer. There's an air curtain that blows down on you whenever you enter or leave.

One of the places I used to work, a food plant, had an allergen-free zone (wheat, soy, egg, milk, etc.) and anybody entering or leaving that area had to be decontaminated.

So, YES! Contraptions like the one Jim shows really do exist!
But I highly doubt that the theater-going public would tolerate such a thing.

The chemical concoction used in the foot scrubber was something called "FS Amine Z" maze by Zep, the cleaning chemical company.

I don't think that the theater-going public would tolerate being sprayed with this stuff, either, even if it is used at the recommended dilution of 1:128 (1 fl. oz./gal.)

[Jim Cassedy]

This idea for a system that would "sanitize" theater patrons as they entered a theater
lobby was proposed & published in 1945. Who knows, with all the current Corona-Virus
concerns, perhaps this system isn't as far-fetched as it seems! The parts were described
as follows: 1) Air vents in foyer ceiling through which air and immunizing chemicals descend
on patrons; 2) Tanks containing the chemicals; 3) Pressure pump which operates system;
4) Vacuum pump that sucks dirty air off patrons. Also sucks up shoe dirt & water that
may be tracked in by patrons; 5) Dirt & moisture trap; 6) Floor vents; 7) Ultraviolet
lights in air ducts to further sanitize the air. (The the actual type of "sanitizing chemical"
that was going to be sprayed over arriving guests was never specified)

[Randy Stankey]

He sounds like a real tight ass to me!

[Carl Martin]

he swore he would smash a pair of chopsticks for every 10,000 votes

he still owes us 53 chopsticks!

[Frank Cox]

Just arsing about.

[Kenneth Wuepper]

It seems that the isolation has caused humor to bottom out!

[Frank Cox]

https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/3945555

https://youtu.be/nqO4sqGPKME

AIPEI (Taiwan News) — After losing a bet on the voter turnout for the recall of former Kuomintang (KMT) Kaohsiung Mayor Han Kuo-yu (韓國瑜), Taipei City councilor Chiu Wei-chieh (邱威傑) on Tuesday (June 9) crushed 53 chopsticks with his buttocks.

Chiu, a YouTuber who founded the "Can't Stop This Party" (歡樂無法黨) in May, claimed that no more than 400,000 people would turn out for the recall vote on Han, thus failing to meet the minimum of 574,996 required to succeed. However, if more showed up, he swore he would smash a pair of chopsticks for every 10,000 votes above his bet with his behind.

To his horror, 939,090 Kaohsiung residents voted to remove Han from office on Saturday (June 6), translating into 53.909 chopsticks. Many netizens waited with eager anticipation to watch his antics that same day but were disappointed when he failed to surface over the weekend.

Finally, on Monday (June 8), Chiu summoned up the courage and released a teaser on his Facebook page announcing that he would indeed follow through on his promise the next day with "the battle of the anus versus chopsticks." On Tuesday, Chiu, who goes by the YouTube handle "Froggy" (呱吉), released his long-anticipated video on his YouTube channel.


Chiu howling in pain as he breaks a chopstick. (YouTube, Froggy screenshot)

In the video, which he describes as "not safe for work," Chiu explains that he had performed the stunt once before on stage in Kaohsiung in 2019. He says he was inspired by a Japanese TV show that demonstrated the technique 20 years ago.

Chiu then proceeds to remove his pants to reveal tight, black underwear. He then inserts the first chopstick under his underwear and across his rear end and squeezes it rigorously with his gluteus maximus to, in effect, give himself a wedgie and snap the wooden utensil in the process.

Onlookers can be seen cringing each time Chiu painfully snaps one chopstick after another. At one point, he even crushes three chopsticks in one fell swoop.

Chiu even suffers a minor injury when splinters from one chopstick drew some blood. Undaunted, Chiu bravely pushes onward with his mission and eventually reaches his goal of cracking 53 chopsticks.


Chiu grimacing as he snaps yet another chopstick. (YouTube, Froggy screenshot)

At the end of the video, Chiu said that his feat was amazing, but not as amazing as the 939,000 people of Kaohsiung who came forward to vote.

Many netizens were impressed at Chiu's display:

"Doing what you promise, that's what I call a real politician."

"Froggy is a real man!"

"Why are they wooden chopsticks? Shouldn't they be metal?"

"Super fierce, next time he should challenge sugar cane."

"The saddest day in the history of chopsticks."

[Leo Enticknap]

Given how alkaline urine is, I wonder if that generated enough electrolysis to charge his phone?