This guy *barely* avoided a beatdown

 AARRRGH, blather, Crazy, critters, dumbassery, Gah., news, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Jul 292022
 

So this guy decided to go gambling at a Las Vegas casino. Normal enough. Parked his vehicle on top of the parking garage. Normal enough. But he left his puppy in the car on a day when it reached 113 degrees. Not normal, not good. Spent two hours inside. *And* he taped the dogs mouth shut, probably to keep the famously noisy Husky from alerting people to its plight..

Fortunately the casino security found (or was alerted to) the situation and rescued the dog through the sun roof and called the local police. Police body camera footage shows the moment the owner walked up and the cops response to him. The police officer maintained discipline and professionalism…  but you can tell … just barely. The officer was PO’ed, and rightly so. You can imagine that everyone involved here might well have been hoping that the owner would do something stupid (well, additionally stupid) so as to merit a few love taps from a billyclub. The police officers tone and actions just scream “contempt.” As well they should: I imagine cops dealing with brutalized children and animals must be about the hardest parts of their jobs (after getting shot and stabbed, obviously).

Looks like the casino staff put in a good effort… there are multiple uniformed security guys, a woman caring for the pup, and a guy in a suit who looks… ummm… a bit like A Casino Guy in A Suit You Don’t Want Coming For You. Also a guy with a bicycle who might have been just a bystander, or might have been the guy who found the dog. Shrug.

Some commenters at the twitter thread note that the dogs owner was not read Miranda rights before being arrested. But… Miranda is used to make sure the suspect is aware of their rights before being interrogated. I’m not sure that that directly applies here. It will before he is questioned at the station, but “Is this your car?” doesn’t really seem like that big of a deal.

Who would do this? WHY would anyone do this? Assuming the dog pulls through, I have little doubt that the line of people wanting to adopt it will wrap around the block.

Feh.

Here’s some brain-bleach:

 Posted by at 5:32 pm

“It’s time to move to Russia”

 Crazy, Hmm..., Meh., politics, russian empire, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Jul 292022
 

This video is *claimed* to be some sort of official bit of Russian governmental propaganda, extolling the supposed virtues of Russia to get westerners to move there. But it comes off more like satire. When it says “beautiful women,” if shows two pre-adolescent girls. It claims “no cancel culture,” for the same country that’ll throw your ass in jail if you call the current war a “war.” It claims a “rich history,” but fails to mention that that richness is soaked in blood. It’s just *weird.*

 Posted by at 8:11 am

Daily Nope: “Necrobots”

 AARRRGH, Crazy, critters, Gah., news, science, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Jul 282022
 

Dead spiders reanimated as creepy ‘necrobots’

Taking a dead spider’s lifeless body and reanimating it as a robot is an idea that would be the stuff of nightmares for most people. But scientists aren’t most people. Recently, a team of researchers turned the corpses of wolf spiders into arcade-style claw machines that could pick up and move a variety of objects — including other dead wolf spiders.   

 

Because it’s creepy as hell, I moved the gifs of this scientific abomination below the break…

Continue reading »

 Posted by at 5:15 pm

Flying Yacht

 aircraft, awesomeness, history, youtube  No Responses »
Jul 282022
 

A few weeks ago I posted a link to a video about a “flying Winnebago,” helicopters converted into recreational vehicles. Those were cool. But what I’d *really* want: a PBY Catalina converted into a flying yacht, such as the “Landseaire.” These were glamorous examples of a sadly now bygone era.

The video points out that just because you’ve got buckets of money and a really cool flying yacht, there are some places you just shouldn’t go. There are places on this Earth – Arabia, Detroit, Central America, New York City – where your chances of encountering violent uncivilized barbarians is just too high to risk, and your flying yacht will end up a bullet-riddled wreck slowly corroding away over a span of decades.

It is of course far to much to hope for that production on an aircraft much like the PBY could begin again (as I asked for a short while ago). With modern design and materials, a modern PBY would be lighter and stronger, cheaper to maintain with far better fuel economy and range. But it’s about as likely as restarting the B-17 production line. Eventually 3D metal printing will advance to the point that you can print yourself a PBY kit for little more than the cost of the raw material and the energy needed to melt it all, but even then you’ll still need to assemble it. It’ll be a *long* time before industrial replicators can fab you a complete aircraft in one go.

 Posted by at 3:43 pm

The “Shinzo Heater”

 AARRRGH, Crazy, Hmm..., weapons, youtube, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Jul 272022
 

The one where Brandon Herrera tries to replicate the home-made piece of junk firearm that was used to assassinate Shinzo Abe. The result works, but would likely be fatal to the shooter. This indicates that the assassin either somehow found a way to test and perfect his design (which seems unlikely in Japan), or he thought it through better than Herrera from the get-go.

I bet this one ends up getting yeeted by YouTube, since it shows how a disarmed populace can arm itself.

UPDATE: Yeeted. One might consider it odd that an American company would ban videos that kinda-sorta a little bit show how to make things that are legal for Americans to make. Odd, that.

 Posted by at 12:24 pm

Well, that took long enough…

 art, blather, Hmm..., science fiction, youtube  No Responses »
Jul 272022
 

Looks like Sylvester Stallone finally has himself a superhero movie:

Sure, he was in “Judge Dredd” and “GotG2,” but he wasn’t superpowered in either of those. I don’t recall him having been a superhero before, though I could be wrong.

I suspect the superhero genre is going to run out of steam soon enough…it’s been done to death. Marvel has recent;y announced their spate of new TV/Movie projects, and they are a whole lot of “who the hell is that, and why should I care” characters.

Marvel also recently released the trailer for “Black Panther 2.” I was unimpressed with the first one… the effects were dodgy, the story meh, the worldbuilding bizarre. We were supposed to root for a fascistic ethnostate that was essentially a high-lech primitive civilization… they select their rulers *only* from a single family, and then using trial by combat. They have antigravity and practical energy weapons… and they charge into combat atop rhinos bearing swords and spears. One thing I would like to see from the sequel – and suspect I won’t – is the actual geopolitical fallout from the effects of the first: at the end of the movie, a sci-fi-advanced hidden civilization in central Africa is revealed to the world. They’ve been hidden for centuries behind a cloaking device and holographic projectors; now that’s over. Great, fine, wonderful. But, ummm… right now, hundreds of thousands of sub-Saharan Africans are flooding into Europe annually in the hopes of grabbing themselves a better life. What do the borders of Wakanda look like? Now, a few hundred million poverty-stricken Africans can simply *walk* to a higher-tech better life. Did Wakanda open the doors, and now their original population is a distinct minority in their own land, buried under a crush of migrants? Or did they erect walls? Did the walls/deflector shields/whatever effectively prevent invasion, or are there long rows of corpses along the border, shot down as they tried to climb in?

 

 Posted by at 12:05 pm
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