Solar eclipse to disrupt power supplies - Telegraph

Eclipse to block out 95 per cent of sunlight in parts of Europe

According to the report appearing in the UK TELEGRAPH today, this nearly 100% eclipse on March 20 may actually cause problems..

The eclipse is going to be the biggest one since 1999.

Victoria Ward writes this,

Power supplies could drop suddenly next month when the UK is plunged into darkness with an eclipse of the sun.
Energy experts warned there could be possible blackouts in the biggest solar eclipse since 1999.
Nearly 90 per cent of the sun’s rays will be blocked out in parts of Europe on March 20.
In London and the South East, 85 per cent of the sun will be obscured by the moon whilst in northern Scotland, more than 95 per cent will be covered.
The National Grid has warned that solar power output in Britain will halve during the event.

My first inclination on this was that the story appearing is just an example of fear porn and attempt to get readers and clicks. But it could also be a relevant message about the future. If we rely heavily on solar energy, there very well will be moments where, perhaps, our power source goes black. Or maybe times when that same power source throws a hissy fit and solar storms knock down a grid..

Ward says, 

He told the Financial Times: “In a way March 20 is a glimpse into the future of our power systems.”
The eclipse will last around two hours from 8.40am. The next one will not be until 2026.

So .. Eclipsepocalypse 2015 begins in earnest.. 
Be afraid.

Solar eclipse to disrupt power supplies - Telegraph

LADY GAGA RUMORED TO BE STAR OF NEXT 'AMERICAN HORROR STORY'

LADY GAGA RUMORED TO BE STAR OF NEXT 'AMERICAN HORROR STORY'

If you have some spare time in the coming days, listen to last night's CLYDE LEWIS radio show..

It was beyond important.

The title was “My Name is Metal” and talked about the very real future that is about to hit humanity like a freight train: Babies becoming less inclined to being born from a womb.. instead, futuristic ways of putting stem cells away for later, so women can choose when she has a child, is coming. Along with that, religious implications, societal upheaval, commonplace gay parents, and future shock..

Clyde Lewis opened his show with shock and awe:

Being in a lab or a building where we can grow children is at least two years away according to a report from Russia Today and the child-growing lab is being used in order to allow two men to have children.
Babies of same-sex couples are becoming a future prospect, as scientists have disclosed revolutionary research on making human egg and sperm cells using the skin of two adults.
It means that we might soon see a fully “dish-manufactured” baby in a lab.

The show had a free-flowing only caller driven format .. during the course of the program—and this is not a scientific viewpoint at all—the majority of younger callers seemed to be better apt to having agreeable minds to the future coming. However, older callers—and those who professed more of a Bible bumper belief system—did not. 

The amazing part is this: It’s all happening. Not later, but now. 

Last week TIME magazine published a cover with an adorable baby’s face: The headline read ‘This baby could live to 142 years old’ 

There are dangers with this future. But amazing possibilities too.. the idea of knowing genetic defects prior to birth.. the chance for parents who cannot have children being able to in new ways.. And even more, as Clyde Lewis argued, this could end the abortion debate. Imagine no more need for women to consider aborting a fetus… instead putting it all on hold, saving the pregnancy for when she is ready through the use of artificial practices.

The future is now.
And it’s going to scare a lot of people.
It’s going to shred old style beliefs on life and death..
And it’s going to be a totally more revolutionary idea than the test tube baby of last century.

Welcome to the brave new world, earth.

You can—and should—listen to the show here: https://soundcloud.com/groundzeromedia

For a LOT of fun, go about 2 hours and 29 minutes into the broadcast.. 

And while you’re at it, check out the "the future" tag from Coal Speaker to see all of the years I have been talking and thinking about this very thing.,.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=059mz_oQM50?feature=oembed&enablejsapi=1&origin=http://safe.txmblr.com&wmode=opaque&w=500&h=281]

Gas heat is amazing.
But when it’s not working, hissing, or leaking, awful things happen.

This video of a house exploding in New Jersey, is evidence of how powerful a gas explosion can be.  

This video was caught by a police dash cam. You can see, quite literally out of the clear blue sky, the gas line ruptures and the entire house blows to bits. 

The current thought is that a gas main was ruptured—somehow. This is how the UK TELEGRAPH summed up the event for historical record:

The explosion happened about 90 minutes after police received the first report of a strong gas smell in the area.

"As the gas company was working to localise and mitigate the gas leak there was an explosion that by all accounts totally destroyed the house at 59 Oak Avenue, there’s nothing left there but the basement foundation," said Captain Tom Dellane of the Stafford Police Department.

This is a prime reason that if you are going to excavate the ground, place a call before you dig. Call 811.. It can save a life.. The footage you see is not foreign.. it can happy in any happy and quaint neighborhood near you..

(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)

UK GUARDIAN REPORTS: Season of the witch: why young women are flocking to the ancient craft

Rapper Azealia Banks brought witchcraft back into the mainstream by tweeting ‘I’m really a witch’. But women in the US have been harnessing its power for decades as a ‘spiritual but not religious’ way to express feminist ambitions

This fascinating story written by Sady Doyle in the UK GUARDIAN explains how a new burst of ‘witches’ is taking place in the modern world.. 

The GUARDIAN seems to credit modern pop culture and entertainment with the new witchcraft of our age.. Things like AMERICAN HORROR STORY and the COVEN. Doyle even gives a nod to the TUMBLR site http://charmcore.tumblr.com/.. I have visited it, though it seems more that it’s a site of reblogs as opposed to original content. 

But there is another angle, one more political: Feminism and the power of the female, symbolized by the strength of a witch.. 

Doyle writes, 

Wicca, with its focus on a goddess (rather than a male god – though it has those too) and its relatively open approach to creating canon, was a natural fit for many feminist women interested in writing their own spiritual script. But women who weren’t explicitly Wiccan were also drawn to “witchy” ways of processing the world: not only did women make feminist tarot cards in the 1970s, author Alice Walker personally endorsed one set – the Motherpeace deck. Feminist psychologists such as Jean Shinoda Bolen and Clarissa Pinkola Estés wrote books on using goddess imagery and myths as means of understanding female subjectivity.

There has been a long and wrong series of centuries in which witches were proclaimed evil.. they were stoned, drowned to death, and ‘pressed’ with heavy objects.   

I know several people who practice Wicca. They are fine, amazing people. While they may have one too many ‘coexist’ bumper stickers, they don’t cause harm to me or society. 

Suddenly witches are trendy. Get ready for that..

UK GUARDIAN REPORTS: Season of the witch: why young women are flocking to the ancient craft

This is a movie poster blast from the past.. it was called THE TOWN THAT DREADED SUNDOWN, and a was loosely based on the ‘Phanton Killer’ or the ‘Texarkana Moonlight Murders' that took place ni 1946..

The other evening, I got the chance to watch the 2014 remake of this 1976 classic.. The redo was interesting. It was like DICK TRACY meets SCREAM, a movie with cartoonish appeal that also featured a ‘we know this is a horror movie’ attitude like Wes Craven’s late 20th century horror series.. 

However, any time I watch a remake, I typically go back and watch the original. Either for posterity or just because I want to check off the similarities and differences between each incarnation.. 

The original SUNDOWN film wasn’t exceptional by any stretch of imagination.. But it created a new genre—it may be one of the least known movies that started the slasher flicks of the late 70s and all of the 1980s. The TOWN THAT DREADED SUNDOWN was brutal at times and most likely difficult to view during some moments in theaters during the Carter years.. 

But there was one thing that THE TOWN THAT DREADED SUNDOWN got right in 1976: One of the most memorable posters I have ever seen for a movie, especially a horror flick..  There’s something freakish about that sunset image and the town, that lonely town, tucked safely but dangerously between the trees and mountains.. And that foreboding image of the Phantom with his freakish mask that only displays two eye holes..

This poster has stuck in my mind for years.. Since I was younger and first stayed up late without my parents knowing to watch this on Rhonda Shear’s UP ALL NIGHT, I remembered that poster. . and that quaint image of Americana destroyed by a masked villain to stole innocence..

I was born in 1980, years after this original film.. But as a child of the 1980s, a certain spirit of the 70s was bred into my in my early life.. 

This image presented on the poster haunted me for two distinct reasons: 1) It reminded me of the scene from ET where Halloweeners begin to the roam the streets at sundown, and 2) the image looks amazingly like the town I grew up in the 80s, Centralia PA—a town with an underground mine fire that met its demise because of that crisis.. 

This post is not a movie review .. I quite frankly disliked the new remake and the original was lackluster. But it was important in the history of horror movies. It gave us the slasher flick.
And it gave me chills each time I thought about that hauntingly beautiful movie poster..

Two newspapers followed me on TUMBLR today—2!

Out of respect, I will hold off on my ‘print is dead’ rhetoric for at least a week.

Democratic FCC commissioner balks at net neutrality

This is going to become quite the epic battle. Not sure how many internet users realize how important this is, if they did their be moving gifs and memes already

Democratic FCC commissioner balks at net neutrality

The disappeared: Chicago police detain Americans at abuse-laden 'black site'

UK GUARDIAN: Exclusive: Secret interrogation facility reveals creeping aspects of war on terror in US city as accounts describe shackling and brutality without basic rights

British press dropped a bombshell on the world.. Reporting by Spencer Ackerman of the UK GUARDIAN has created a firestorm of controversy around the globe, even though American news seemingly is ignoring the revelations printed in latest runs of the British paper..

Ackerman writes,

The Chicago police department operates an off-the-books interrogation compound, rendering Americans unable to be found by family or attorneys while locked inside what lawyers say is the domestic equivalent of a CIA black site.
The facility, a nondescript warehouse on Chicago’s west side known as Homan Square, has long been the scene of secretive work by special police units. Interviews with local attorneys and one protester who spent the better part of a day shackled in Homan Square describe operations that deny access to basic constitutional rights.

Among the many points blasted in the story from the GUARDIAN, police do some interesting things.. these salient points are presented:

• Keeping arrestees out of official booking databases.
  
• Beating by police, resulting in head wounds.
  
• Shackling for prolonged periods.
• Denying attorneys access to the “secure” facility.
• Holding people without legal counsel for between 12 and 24 hours, including people as young as 15.

At least one man was found unresponsive in a Homan Square “interview room” and later pronounced dead.

One quote from the article was a bit chilling, with one protester telling the reporter, “It’s a domestic black site. When you go in, no one knows what’s happened to you”

The Chicago police department was forced into an awkward position on this matter.. they issued their defense in a statement to the GUARDIAN.. They said, in part:

"The allegations in this instance are not supported by facts. The vast majority of our officers serve the public with honor and integrity, and alleged actions of one individual decades ago are in no way indicative of the hard working men and women who put their lives on the line each day to protect residents."

Is this the night Chicago died? Or the night that constitutional did?

The disappeared: Chicago police detain Americans at abuse-laden 'black site'

Keith Olbermann Suspended For Penn State Tweets

It all started with a quote ‘we are’ tweet. Olbermann responded ‘pitiful’.. The problem is the original post linked a story showing that Penn State raised 13 million dollars for cancer research. Regardless of the controversy, he did not back down ..

Keith Olbermann Suspended For Penn State Tweets

New poll on vaccinations: Forty-four percent of respondents said parents should be mandated to vaccinate their child, while 38% favored some parental choice. The survey also showed a generational difference in vaccination support with younger Americans more in favor of it.

The results come amid a measles outbreak in the U.S.

New poll on vaccinations: Forty-four percent of respondents said parents should be mandated to vaccinate their child, while 38% favored some parental choice. The survey also showed a generational difference in vaccination support with younger Americans more in favor of it.

Get ready to have your history books shredded and your world rocked: Scientists now suspect gerbils were the real villains in the Black Death — not rats

A new study finds that great gerbils in Asia, not rats, helped spread Europe’s black death and kill millions.

This is a bit of a game changer when it comes to history. 
I knew there was always something I really didn’t like about gerbils..

Get ready to have your history books shredded and your world rocked: Scientists now suspect gerbils were the real villains in the Black Death — not rats

Google bans porn from Blogger

Google is banning public pornography on its Blogger site.

Google Blogger bans porn.. The world just remembered that people still use BLOGGER.. There are also some fears that GOOGLE will start to just disappear websites over ten years old–ten years ago was a heyday for GOOGLE BLOGGER users.. In response, the Internet Archive is going to attempt to begin trying to back them all up..  

This is interesting for a number of reasons.. First off, one may ask why GOOGLE BLOGGER is suddenly worried about this issue? And secondarily, does anyone still even use GOOGLE blogger?

I am much more worried about fake sites, like gambling and over redirect Blogspots than I am REAL end users who post porn…

I ponder the same as others.. is this just an attempt to clean the servers of some old blogs that don’t get updated anymore?

As for me, I left Blogger about five years ago when they stopped allowing automatic FTP uploads of posts.

Google bans porn from Blogger

Gigantic human eating statues based on the popular ATTACK ON TITAN anime series are part of a new Japanese theme park.. Lots of other interesting things abound in the park, as well.. 

Four more enormous holes have been found in Siberia.. Newest scientific theory is that they are be being caused by gas underground and the fear is that craters are going to become more commonplace as temperatures globally rise.. Other less popular theories conclude that they are the gates of hell, ajar for the world to see.

I swear I just saw Horatio Sans pumping gas

Alter the likelihood of him being in Minersville Pennsylvania pumping gas is slim to none.

Horatio: you have a doppelganger in the coal region …

Leonard Nimoy rushed to the hospital

Leonard Nimoy rushed to the hospital

What happens when the conspiracy is on the other server?

A Facebook study has been conducted on people without them knowing. Again..

What happens when the conspiracy is on the other server?

The city that never drinks

There is a major drought in a major city in Brazil. It has big ramifications and perhaps will showcase the beginning of the coming water wars..

The city that never drinks

ISIS vow to ‘throw homosexuals off of your leaning tower of PIZZA’

ISIS vow to ‘throw homosexuals off of your leaning tower of PIZZA’