Tag: murder

Stoning, cheating, rats, slugs

The size of the stone used in stoning shall not be too large to kill the convict by one or two throws and at the same time shall not be too small to be called a stone. “That is, pebbles are ruled out, but so are rocks big enough to kill quickly. As Slate magazine explained, the stones should be “around the size of a tangerine.”

→ National Post: Graphic, anatomy of a stoning

And they have rats down there that have maybe never seen the surface. If they did, then they’d run people out. Like in the movies. You see, we only see the tail end of it. And we only see the weak rats, the ones that get forced out to look for food.”

→ BLDGBLOG: Stratigraphies of Infestation

Now as all the Rats will not run out of the packing cases or waste paper, but will hide amongst the same, this is the time to take a good terrier dog or two with you, and to have a bit of sport. Let one dog hunt among the cases, etc., and hold the other, for the Rats will soon make for the holes, but the rags preventing their escape you will catch and kill a great many by this means.

→ Project Gutenberg, Ike Matthews: Full Revelations of a Professional Rat-catcher

After I’ve gathered my sources, I pull out usable quotes, cite them, and distribute them among the sections of the assignment. Over the years, I’ve refined ways of stretching papers. I can write a four-word sentence in 40 words. Just give me one phrase of quotable text, and I’ll produce two pages of ponderous explanation. I can say in 10 pages what most normal people could say in a paragraph.

→The Chronicle of higher education, Ed Dante: The Shadow Scholar

It looks like any other sea slug, aside from its bright green hue. But the Elysia chlorotica is far from ordinary: it is both a plant and an animal, according to biologists who have been studying the species for two decades. Not only does E. chlorotica turn sunlight into energy — something only plants can do — it also appears to have swiped this ability from the algae it consumes.

→ MMN.com, Stephanie Rogers: Bizarre sea slug is half plant, half animal

Reading the city. Dancing in the streets.

Exactly what common ground do the modular megastructure of Plug-In City and the instrumentalized cityscapes of Civilization share? Both of these frameworks propose that urban growth is an algorithmic or procedural operation whereby “the city” (rather than a singular edifice) embodies the essence of Le Corbusier’s technophilic proclamations that architecture should function as a “machine for living”.

→ Serial Consign, Greg Smith: Urban screens: The schematic city in gaming and architectural representation

Schmidt has uncovered a vast and beautiful temple complex, a structure so ancient that it may be the very first thing human beings ever built. The site isn’t just old, it redefines old: the temple was built 11,500 years ago—a staggering 7,000 years before the Great Pyramid, and more than 6,000 years before Stonehenge first took shape. The ruins are so early that they predate villages, pottery, domesticated animals, and even agriculture—the first embers of civilization.

→ Newsweek, Patrick Symmes: History in the Remaking

The first of two fingernails found at the site suggests Ötzi may have been ill. Characteristic lines across the nail suggest his immune system was compromised three times in the months prior to his death. The second nail has yet to be analysed.

→ Cosmos, John Pickrell: Who killed the iceman?

In his spare time Professor Nas is a magician. The magic he’s working for the car companies is to devise the right voice to make driving safest, certainly, but also a voice that gives the car a character that you like, so it seems like your friend, or the other half of your driving team; You and the car. As he puts it: A team-mate bucks you up when you’re down, A team-mate takes over when you need it to take over, and people looove team-mates.

→ BBC, From Our Own Correspondents, Steven Evans: Future of back-seat drivers

[audio:https://www.monocultured.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/FOOC_BBC_Radio_4_03_Jun_2010.mp3|titles=Future of back-seat drivers|artists=BBC – Steven Evans]

Another word for euphemism.

Spritz cologne immediately above where the grilled cheese is made. This gives the cook a more aromatic and pleasant cooking experience.

→ From the Love Letters section of the Boston Globe: Allergic to “grilled cheese”

If you’re dead-set on deep-throating this guy, and he’s dead-set on being deep-throated, then the first step is for him to be a gentleman and cut it out with the facefucking.

→ Ask.Metafilter is as usual less prudish: His cock barely fits in my mouth; how can I give better head?

The tangy metallic is iron from the blood. Then there is the almond nutty context probably based on mucus. And the lightly salted melon. And the durian flavor from dead cells. Any of which can come to the fore based on diet and hormone progression.

→ Ask.Metafilter: Connoisseurs of Cunnilingus: What does it taste like to you?

Charlie crept into Terry and Penny’s first-floor bedroom and fired at them until his gun jammed. He handed the gun to Waid, who fixed the .22 and fired two more shots. They left the room, and then Charlie came back and cut Penny’s throat to make sure she was dead.

→ Pamela Colloff, Texas Monthly: Why did a small-town girl have her family brutally murdered?

Sengamalam, one of the boys, told me that more than 2,000 soldiers had been involved in the round-up of our 22-strong unit, and had dumped the bodies of those who died in the open air. My mind swum with images of Ajanthi and Muralie, their bodies being scavenged by dogs.

→ The Telegraph: Life as a female Tamil Tiger guerilla relived by one of first female soldiers.

Today, my mom’s will was read to the rest of the family. I helped my mom write it a couple years ago, and I was to get funds to pay off school loans. She revised it and put in a note saying I was to get nothing because I was gay. The executor read it out loud. My mom was the only one who knew.

→ Fuck my life: user 2796619

Articles, stories and other lies.

The doctor in charge, who is now on trial, reportedly lured teenagers with unwanted pregnancies by offering to help with abortion. They would be locked up there until they gave birth, whereupon they would be forced to give up their babies for a token fee of around 20,000 naira (170 dollars, 135 euros).

→ Babies for sale in Nigeria [via Warren Ellis]

As the hornet enters the nest, a large mob of about five hundred honey bees surrounds it, completely covering it and preventing it from moving, and begin quickly vibrating their flight muscles. This has the effect of raising the temperature of the honey bee mass to 47 °C. The honey bees can just about tolerate this temperature, but the hornet cannot survive more than 46 °C, so it dies. Often several bees perish along with the intruder, but the death of the hornet scout prevents it from summoning reinforcements which would wipe out the colony.

→ Wikipedia on the giant Asian hornet

[audio:The_Cave_Part_3.mp3]

Rose-Marie Gascoigne of New Orleans was the first to answer. She had sat with her lightboard for hours each evening, accompanied by two disinterested tabbies. She said later that her heart had “just plain stopped” when the lights began to flicker on and off. “The whole world just held its breath. I could hear the blood rushing in my head. I knew what to do–what the hell else was that damn button for? It just took me a couple of days to work myself up to it. It was like sending a message to God.”

→ The loneliness engine [Via MetaFilter]

An artificial appropriation of different styles from different eras, the hipster represents the end of Western civilization – a culture lost in the superficiality of its past and unable to create any new meaning. Not only is it unsustainable, it is suicidal. While previous youth movements have challenged the dysfunction and decadence of their elders, today we have the “hipster” – a youth subculture that mirrors the doomed shallowness of mainstream society.

→ Hipster: The dead end of western civilization

And worst of all. Dumbest, deafest, shittest of all, you have removed the unstressed ‘a’ so that the stress that should have fallen on “nosh” is lost, and my piece ends on an unstressed syllable. When you’re winding up a piece of prose, metre is crucial. Can’t you hear? Can’t you hear that it is wrong? It’s not fucking rocket science. It’s fucking pre-GCSE scansion. I have written 350 restaurant reviews for The Times and i have never ended on an unstressed syllable. Fuck. fuck, fuck, fuck.

→ Giles Coren: Indefinite article, definitive anger

John Schula, 30, a Latino male from Montebello, and a 17-year-old boy were fatally wounded in what sheriff’s deputies described as a gang-related shooting in the 3900 block of Aleman Avenue at 10:45 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 18. The double homicide ended a year of relative calm in Pico Rivera. It took place near where 57-year-old grandmother Maria Hicks was gunned down in August 2007 after trying to intervene when taggers were spray-painting graffiti on a wall in her neighborhood.

→ Los Angeles Times: The homicide report

Marriage, masturbation, mortality, Melvin

Marriage:

My friend Mirjana got married on Saturday. It was a short ceremony at city hall. And by short I mean really short. Less than one minute in fact. The halls were full of couples getting wed, and they were all processed on a conveyour belt (not really, but sort of):

mirjana wedding

In the image they have just turned their heads as the man doing the ceremony sped by like a small and quite fast japanese car. Do you? Do you? You’re done!
He even managed to include an aphorism about love that had us scratching our heads for a while: “To love is nothing, to be loved is something, to love and be loved is everything”. I think he liked the rhythm of “nothing-something-everything”. If it was “something-something-everything” we wouldn’t have had as much trouble parsing it as we had.

All the best to Mirjana and Dimitri on the endevour. Yay you! Etc.

Masturbation:

beautifulagono.com

I was innocently browsing the internets for images of cute puppies and things that would make my mom proud when I stumbled upon this art porn site. I’ve been suggesting to my friends that we should get in on this neoporn thing while the getting is good – there has to be other ways of turning people on rather than showing the same worn out cumshots – but since I’m not a very prolific porn-surfer I haven’t seen much of this new-wave porn but rather heard it thrown around a bit (mostly on high profile blogs like boingboing.net or violet blues’ tinynibbles.com).

It’s videos showing the faces of people helping themselves to a handful of loving. All the pretentious stuff aside, it’s very onturning. Oh, and if you click the image and subscribe I might actually get a free months’ subscription. help me help myself, so to speak.

Mortality:

I was on the phone with mom the other day and she told me that a kid I grew up and went to kindergarden with got stabbed to death on new years eve. His name was Samir and during a fight outside a party he and some other people got knifed. I haven’t found any accounts of it (there were a few stabbings in Stockholm on new years), so I don’t know what happened.

He was living in the apartment building across from my moms when I was in grade school, and we would have fallouts because we both were stubborn. The strongest memory I have of him was when we were in afterschool daycare and after a spat I accidentally threw a baking pin in his face (the handle came off while I was waving it around), forcing him to visit a hospital and get his forehead stiched up. I recall being quite frightened at the small trail of blood leading to the bathroom where one of the grown-ups cleaned up the wound.

I was too engrossed in the taunting and ostracizing I was experiencing at school to consider if I was being overly mean to him (he was two years my junior I think) but I might have been. Anyways. RIP Samir

Melvin:

mark melvin January party
Mark Melvin came by to visit us gothenburgians, and it was much appreciated. I missed his show cause of the marriage but he did get a small telegram (with picture!) in the national/local paper about the exhibition.

Yes, he usually covers his face whenever being photographed. I don’t know why. It might be because he doesn’t want any bad images to appear on any blogs or such. Too bad I have enough decency not to show the image I have of him doing the face he always does when frustrated. Damn shame.