I just love this story from BUZZFEED..
18 Things You Can Find On Tonya Harding's Web Page
Nigeria defended its response to the kidnapping of hundreds of schoolgirls by a terror group even as details emerged Tuesday about a second mass abduction.
The newest mass abduction the nation is seeing occurred Sunday when, according to reports, gunmen moved door to door snatching girls and beating anyone who attempted to stop them.
Nigeria’s government is downplaying criticism.. They are also being accused of downplaying the original abductions. A social media campaign brought attention to the matter and the little action that was initially taken to do anything about the crimes..
A terrorist video released threatened to sell the now 300+ girls ‘on the market.’
The story is unfolding..
And it’s only just begun..
Chances are you have yet to hear about the Youtube Channel where a user named “Webdriver Torso” has been busy uploading videos—77,000+ of them to be exact. Each video is an 11-second video of red and blue rectangles along with weird tones..
A new modern Youtube version of a numbers station?
A contact to aliens?
A coded message perhaps for an upcoming movie?
Maybe French spies?
The story has been pretty big in the UK--some suspect that the origin of the weird YOUTUBE account is from France, being that one video was of the Eiffel Tower.
The mystery began in September 2013 when videos being being posted.. hundreds a day in some instances. All 11 seconds.
The BBC discovered a potential French connection to the mystery a few days ago, writing:
The very first video uploaded to the channel, over a month before the first rectangle classic, reveals a completely different side to Webdriver.
Locked behind a 1.99 euro ($2.76; £1.63) paywall and only accessible if you’re in France, is a clip from the cartoon series Aqua Teen Hunger Force, in which the show’s three anthropomorphic fast-food items - Frylock, Meatwad and Master Shake - fail to win a pub quiz.
The second anomalous clip only raises more questions.
In video 1,182 we have what could be our first sighting of Webdriver.
Filmed from a Parisian balcony, the six-second clip shows an Eiffel Tower lightshow followed by a fleeting glimpse of a face.
Below the video, Webdriver has left a comment, their only known communication with the world: “Matei is highly intelligent.”
BOING BOING wondered if this is the modern version of a creepy numbers station.. It actually makes sense. Even spies have APPs now..
The Webdriver Torso account also has some thinking it’s apart of that other weird internet mystery: Cicada 3301—the 2014 net mystery began four months ago with a ‘good luck 3301’ message.
But the bubble of mystery is being burst by the UK GUARDIAN, which claims a bit of a more mundane argument as to what Webdriver Torso’s channel is. The paper writes this:
Isaul Vargas, a New York-based software tester, spotted the videos in a post on BoingBoing and recognised them from an automation conference he had been at a year ago. They were being shown by a European firm that made streaming software for set-top boxes, the kit that sits under a TV and connects to services such as Sky or Netflix.
But the GUARDIAN also had this postscript on their mundane attribution:
But there’s another twist. Isaul has tracked down the presentation he saw, which was given by the British company YouView. While it features similar videos, it is not identical: so although the general principle of using WebDriver, YouTube and automatic image recognition to test software stands, the culprit has slipped off into the night.
When one door closes, another opens. A thousand videos into the series is one six-second clip that breaks the mould. A short video of the Eiffel Tower, it features a comment from the uploader: “Matei is highly intelligent.” Already, readers have been hard at work trying to find someone who fits the bill, but it’s tricky. Matei is a common Romanian name, and even assuming that Matei is the uploader, is based in France, and has a public profile, there are at least two possibilities: Basarab Matei, who works on image recognition at the University of Paris North (suggested by @DAddYE), and Matei Mancas, who works on attention modelling at the University of Mons in Belgium (suggested by @marquis)
So that’s that for now.
You can join the thousands of people commenting on the Webdriver Torso videos…you can be like them and try to unravel the mystery. Or you can safely adjust your tin foil hat and wait for the aliens to beam back their response to the video.
Or just watch the pictures as they FTP through the air.. from France, or some other undisclosed location for reasons of security and therefore insecurity.
It ain’t easy being Barry O.
He seems sad lately.. the hope is gone. The change dried up..
Replacing it, according to David Remnick, is a disappointment with the world. He’s upset with the Republicans, and more.. as Remnick says, “Bashar al-Assad disappoints him, Putin as well.”
Nothing about himself, though. That department is fine.
It’s just ‘me against the world’..
I am quite literally emotionally drained after weeping through this video of “Connor the Crusher” being cheered on by professional wrestlers from the WWE..
Connor died of brain cancer after his amazing day at Wrestlemania.. The WWE put up a tribute video for the little amazing old soul who is not longer with the planet earth.
William Shatner is cool. Not only is he the face of Michael Myers but he’s also writing a novel about aliens abductions.
In this interview snippet from Larry King and Shatner, he explains why he is writing it, and what he believes about UFOs.
Shatner uses the story of John E. Mack (and his unfortunate early death) as a means to inspire deeper thought about aliens—why don’t they display and what would their intention be to abduct? For those who may not know, John Mack was a Harvard professor involved with interview 62 children from a school house in Africa that claimed they all saw aliens with long hair—aliens who warned them that the planet was in environmental danger.. This 1994 event was called the Encounter in Ruwa. Mack was also a frequent guest on Coast to Coast AM when Art Bell hosted.. Like Shatner, I have always been extremely interested in Mack—but particularly in his conclusion that alien life was real, abductions were real, and that UFOs were from another reality..
I love Shatner.
Who doesn’t?
And finally, it’s good to see Larry King on HULU. Makes me feel like it’s the 1990s again.
The image you are looking at was taken by the AP of a person in Brazil suffering from xeroderma pigmentosum, or “XP.” It’s a condition in which, for better or worse as a description, people ‘melt away’ ..
The rare disease stops the skin from being able to heal itself from the sun’s rays.
The AP has more on relatively high amount of people in one village that are suffering from this..
It’s time to burn the beret and bury the blue dress
Monica Lewisnky, in an exclusive VANITY FAIR story..
She expressed regret in the article concerning her affair with Bill Clinton.
She experienced job rejections because of her famed ‘job’ with Bubba..
And she expressed tears when she heard of a 2010 suicide of Tyler Clementi..
She blamed Matt Drudge and the Drudge Report for being “possibly the first person whose global humiliation was driven by the Internet.”
She said the public humiliation she experienced altered her life. I am sure Linda Tripp agreed.
Pretty amazing redo of Giorgio Moroder’s THE CHASE by a band called Kings Love Jacks.
It’s like Art Bell and George Noory on ecstasy near the end. Or the soundtrack to a real alien anal probe.
By Alexei Anishchuk MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a law on Monday making the denial of Nazi crimes and distortion of the Soviet Union’s role in the World War Two a criminal offence punishable by up to five years in jail. The law, described by critics as an attempt to curb freedom of expression to appease conservative Russians, the ex-KGB spy’s main support base, also criminalizes the public desecration of war memorials. The Kremlin has used World War Two as a pillar to unite a society that Putin has said lost its moral bearings following the 1991 Soviet collapse. The new law would ban “wittingly spreading false information about the activity of the USSR during the years of World War Two.”
Los Angeles Clippers guard J.J. Redick says that owner Donald Sterling was hesitant to sign him last summer because he’s white.
This is going to certainly stir the pot of controversy..
So now we know: Donald Sterling basically just hates people—all people. Maybe he’s another classless member of the ruling class, the lifestyles of the elite rich and famous, who will literally step on the backs of downtrodden on streets just to get ahead? Maybe he’s got the blackest heart of evil..
A crazy old slug-like faced man of misery..
The CBS report:
“I’ve been told both ways: one, that he didn’t want to pay me because I was white, and that he didn’t want to pay me because I was a bench player,” Redick, the former Duke University star told USA Today. “I didn’t know until after the face. I just got a weird phone call from Doc (Rivers) on July 4, and I got off the phone and said to my wife, ‘Something’s going on.’ He’s like, ‘You better play for me (expletive).’ And I was like, ‘Yeah, that’s the plan. We figured this out two days ago, right?’
The suspected terrorists, who reportedly have links to Al Qaeda, were arrested in Kuala Lumpur.
This is amazing stuff.
Amazing. But true??
While CNN and others are slowly forgetting a plane carrying 239 people vanished weeks ago, international news orgs in the UK and are carrying this story of the arrested terrorists and their suspected connection to the missing Flight 370..
While CNN and others are slowly forgetting a plane carrying 239 people vanished weeks ago, international news orgs in the UK and are carrying this story of the arrested terrorists and their suspected connection to the missing Flight 370..
The International BUSINESS TIMES says this:
Explanations for its possible disappearance have been focused on a range of theories, from equipment failure, damage to the fuselage, a suicide mission and a terror attack implicating the pilots.
The mystery of the vanished Malaysia Airlines flight took a new twist with the international team probing the incident, considering the possibility that the plane may have landed rather than ended up in the Indian Ocean.
All of this after months now of changing stories, altered quotes, and weird government actions in connection with the aftermath of a plane gone missing.
Is the terrorism angle possible? I suppose at this point anything is..
I still think about Sarah Bacj—people laughed at her saying she thought people from Flight 370 still may be alive.
We don’t even know half of the half of what happened.. And now this series of terror attests certainly has eyebrows raised.
And really, at this point, do we believe anything we are told regarding this story?
An anonymous UK citizen has filed suit against Bryan Singer and Gary Goddard, alleging that they both sexually assaulted him when he was a teenager.
It’s probably not what anyone in the production team or advertising and marketing department of X-MEN want to hear.. but this Hollywood wasteland news is getting only deeper.
The DAILY BEAST had a amazingly graphic account of the lawsuit details yesterday.. This new lawsuit is separate from that filed Michael Egan..
The HOLLYWOOD REPORTER writes on the allegations:
Singer had sex with the plaintiff at a Superman after after party in a London hotel room when the plaintiff was 17, according to the suit. (This is presumably a reference to Singer’s Superman Returns, which had its U.K. premiere July 13, 2006.) The boy resisted, the suit continues, but Goddard brought in a “large, musclebound man” who smacked the teenager around, holding him while Singer grabbed him and Goddard, naked on the bed, watched. Singer then allegedly attempted to rape the plaintiff. The complaint, although a civil matter, states or suggests that Singer and Goddard violated federal and state criminal law.
Marty singer is Bryan Singer’s lawyer—no relation though. Team Singer is doing its best to resuscitate the image of the X-MEN director and deny all allegations..
But now, as the movie release date comes closer, it will be interesting to see how they affect the film’s entrance onto the box office scene.. will people see it without concern, or will others be completely offput by the thoughts of SUPERMAN sex and rough looking muscle bound goons slapping a young teenage boy who did not want to have sex with a Hollywood hit?
Sordid tales of Hollywood are not new..
But these allegations—and an upcoming documentary being made by the same person who exposed the Catholic church--promises more explosive fireworks.
With the never ending drip of allegations against Singer and others in Hollywood, it will be interesting to see what other storms brew..
The rest of the world is not paying attention to the ongoing disaster at the Hanford nuclear site in Washington state.. I have been, and a brief search in the archives of this site, and you’ll find some mentions.
This link being reported today is actually days old—not to my credit at all, but I completely missed it this weekend.
Apparently a pipe explosion occurred at the plant weeks ago—something the public was never told about. NBC RIGHT NOW reported this from Washington state:
The Hanford union representative says it happened when workers were cutting some pipe as part of the demolition of the Plutonium Finishing Plant.
The union representative wants to remain anonymous and says workers are concerned management isn’t putting worker safety first."Having a pipe explode at probably the most contaminated facility in the United States. This is one of the most hazardous buildings in the U.S." said the Union representative.