In Other News

[Dinner]

The EU can go f@ck itself.

[Dauphin]

Typo. Posture.

[pchang]

BoJo is claiming the UK will prosper without a trade deal with the EU. I wonder if BoJo understands what prosper means?

[BeBMan]

Found this nice:

This microscopic 3D-printed Star Trek Voyager can move on its own

Physicists at Leiden University have 3D printed a miniature version of an intrepid spaceship Star Trek (above PC player).

The idea of a tiny spaceship is likely something that you haven’t considered outside of the plot of one Star Trek Episode, but this microscopic model is actually part of a larger research experiment that the physicists published in the scientific journal Soft matter.

The five micron long ship looks like the USS Voyager and was microprinted by the physicists for their micro swimmer research.

Unlike the pulse motors and warp drive of its TV counterpart, this Voyager is powered by liquid through chemical reactions between its platinum coating and the hydrogen peroxide solution in which it was placed by the physicists.

Their article notes that these studies typically use spherical models for testing, so the shapes shown here should produce different results, pushing the boundaries of the researchers’ 3D printer.

(...)

full: https://www.de24.news/2020/11/this-m...n-its-own.html

[Uncle Sparky]

Canada has just now opened the door to Hong Kong 'refugees'. This will absolutely infuriate China.

https://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/canad...?ocid=msedgntp

Also, apparently 2 of the prodemocracy Hong Kong politicians that were recently thrown out of the legislature were dual Canadian citizens.

I expect Trump will take a strong stand, right Lancer? (just kidding)

[Uncle Sparky]

"Hi. I'm Dallas, and this is my brother Eric, and my other brother Eric."

[Ming]

3 Visitors Banned From Yellowstone After Cooking Chickens in Hot Spring
It is illegal to touch or throw objects into hot springs or other hydrothermal features at the park, officials said.



It was supposed to be a fun family summer trip to Yellowstone National Park. Two cousins, a neighbor and their families packed two chickens, canoed about eight hours and hiked to the Shoshone Geyser Basin, where they decided to cook their chickens in a hot spring.

But dinner didn’t go quite as planned. In fact, it led to three of them pleading guilty to petty offenses. They were sentenced to two years’ probation, banned from the park for that period and fined between $500 and $1,200, according to court documents.

The men, said park officials, had violated laws governing the use of the national park.

It is illegal to go off the boardwalk or designated trails and to touch or throw objects into hot springs or other hydrothermal features at the park, said Linda Veress, a park spokeswoman. It’s also dangerous, she added. The water in the park’s hydrothermal systems can exceed 400 degrees Fahrenheit and can cause “severe or fatal burns,” she said.

The three, Eric Romriell, 49, and Eric Roberts, 51, both of Idaho, and Dallas Roberts, 41, of Utah, were among a group that a park ranger found after receiving reports of people hiking with “cooking pots” toward the basin on Aug. 7, Ms. Veress said.

“A ranger responded and found two whole chickens in a burlap sack in a hot spring,” she said. A cooking pot was also found nearby. When Mr. Romriell went to check on the chicken — the group was bathing in the river nearby — he found the park ranger, who then questioned him and the rest of the group of 10 people about it. The next day, the ranger returned to the men’s campsites and issued them citations requiring a mandatory court appearance.

In September, the three men pleaded guilty in U.S. District Court in Casper, Wyo., to foot travel in a thermal area, according to court records. Mr. Romriell also pleaded guilty to the additional charge of having food in a thermal area.

Mr. Romriell, an ophthalmologist in Idaho Falls, Idaho, said in an interview on Tuesday that he hadn’t been aware that he was doing anything wrong. He took monthly camping trips as a scout master in Idaho for several years, he said, and each time, his troop tried creative ways of cooking their meals — something Mr. Romriell described as “how to not rough it while roughing it.”

They made milkshakes out of raspberry or huckleberry fruit they found while hiking, he said, or tied hot dogs to a rope and put them into hot springs to boil while they swam nearby.

During the trip to Yellowstone, the group decided to try a chicken dinner. They brined the chicken for several days beforehand. Mr. Romriell said he looked at the park regulations and found only a line prohibiting “tossing, throwing, or rolling rocks or other items” inside the thermal features.

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“The way I interpreted it was don’t be destructive,” Mr. Romriell said, “and I didn’t feel like I was.”

Mr. Romriell said he double-packed the chickens in a roasting bag and a burlap sack so that he would not contaminate the water. He placed the chickens carefully inside a spring that was right off the trail.

“One of the big rules for scouting and camping is leave no trace,” he said, adding that an officer that inspected his campsite said it was clean. “I don’t intend to be a naughty person. I don’t intend to be a troublemaker.”

One of the other men, Dallas Roberts, who owns a window-cleaning business in West Valley City, Utah, said he had seen some “small and old laminated” signs indicating they were approaching a closed area, but did not realize they applied to the hot springs. (A park spokeswoman responded on Tuesday, saying, “There are signs throughout the park, as well as on the park website and on printed material.”)

Mr. Roberts agreed that the group wasn’t doing any damage, but added, “I can see that we should not have done that.”

“We definitely have respect for Yellowstone,” he said. “We have respect for the outdoors, and would never do anything in any way to contaminate that or to cause problems for others.”

Eric Roberts, the third man involved and a cousin of Dallas Roberts, declined to comment on Tuesday.

There have been a number of episodes in which visitors have been hurt in a hot basin at the park. Last month, a 3-year-old girl suffered second-degree-thermal burns to her lower body and back after she slipped and fell into a small thermal feature near Midway Geyser Basin, according to the park.

In 2016, a 23-year-old man died after walking off a boardwalk, slipping and falling into one of Yellowstone’s hot springs. The man, Colin Nathaniel Scott, of Portland, Ore., had walked about 225 yards away from trails near Porkchop Geyser when his sister saw him fall into the Norris Geyser Basin.

Yellowstone became the country’s first national park in 1872. The park, which is mostly in Wyoming but also includes small portions in Idaho and Montana, encompasses 3,472 square miles, including national forests and Grand Teton National Park.

The park’s hydrothermal activity, one of the big draws for tourists, is part of the Yellowstone Volcano, which is powered by an underlying hot spot, according to the park service.

Dallas Roberts and Mr. Romriell said they wouldn’t try what they did again at Yellowstone, but Mr. Romriell added that he viewed it as a question of “when is land use appropriate, when is land use abusive.”

“My opinion was it was land use,” he said, “but it wasn’t land abuse.”

After the park ranger left them following their first encounter on Aug. 7, the group still managed to have the dinner they had prepared. As for the chicken, Mr. Romriell said, “It was fantastic.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/10/us/yellowstone-chickens.html

[N35t0r]

That's particularly old. There's also every now and then reports of drug busts where the total amount of confiscated drugs keeps going down as the stories unfold (someone over a couple of months).

[Uncle Sparky]

That is quite a tail.

[Ming]

And I thought the "dog ate my homework" was a lame excuse...


Cops Fired After Blaming Missing Half-Ton Of Pot On Stoner Mice

A judge tried to weed out the truth.



What a ratty thing to do ― blaming mice for 1,000 pounds of missing marijuana.

That’s the dubious excuse eight police officers in Pilar, Argentina, gave after a half-ton of pot disappeared from a police warehouse.

About 13,000 pounds of bud were supposed to be in storage, but a recent police inspection revealed 1,000 pounds were missing, according to The Guardian.

Javer Specia, the city’s former police commissioner, was ordered to explain the shortfall to a judge. He and three subordinates told the skeptical jurist the missing marijuana must have been eaten by mice.

Experts, however, sent that theory up in smoke, saying rodents wouldn’t confuse marijuana with food. In the off-chance they did, the mice likely would have died from the dope, and investigators would have found the cannabis-laden corpses, according to USA Today.

“Buenos Aires University experts have explained that mice wouldn’t mistake the drug for food, and that if a large group of mice had eaten it, a lot of corpses would have been found in the warehouse,” a spokesperson for the judge said.

All eight officers were dismissed from their jobs, and will testify in front of the judge on May 4. The judge will then decide if the drugs are missing due to “expedience or negligence,” according to the BBC.

[BeBMan]

Something that normally only happens in movies:

Whale sculpture stops Dutch train crashing into water

A metro train that overran the stop blocks at a station outside Rotterdam has been left balancing 10 metres above ground on the plastic tail of a whale sculpture.

The metro driver was reportedly able to free himself from the train without injury after the incident shortly after midnight on Monday morning. There were no passengers onboard.

Maarten Struijs, who made the sculpture of two tails emerging from water beneath the elevated metro line, said he was surprised the sculpture had held together.

(...)

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/nov/02/all-cetaceans-go-whale-sculpture-stops-dutch-train-crashing-into-water

[ricketyclik]

I've sleep-weed many times. Always while very drunk.

[Ming]

Ronald McDonald appears if you say ‘canceled clown’ in Burger King mirror



Bloody Mary is getting a run for her money.

As part of a Halloween publicity campaign, Burger King has summoned the mascot of its rival fast food chain:

“Four years ago a particular clown was abruptly cancelled by his employer,” reads the text on a trailer Burger King released Monday on its Swedish YouTube channel. The clip then cuts to black and white security camera footage of customers walking into a restaurant bathroom and recording themselves saying “cancelled clown,” three times into the mirror.

The words trigger the lights to turn off and for Ronald McDonald to appear in the mirror — causing horrified customers to make faces in the dark and run out of the bathroom, according to the rest of the trailer.

To create the prank, the chain installed voice-recognition software in the bathrooms, Business Insider reported.

“Do you dare to make him appear?” the trailer asks. “Summon him and you might be rewarded,” teases the video description.

The spooky trick is a riff on the “Bloody Mary,” urban legend. According to folklore, saying “Bloody Mary,” in a mirror repeatedly makes a ghost appear and cause any number of kinds of pain and suffering to the chanter.

The 2020 Halloween stunt is only the most recent in Burger King’s campaigns taking a bite out of McDonald’s.

In 2017, in another jab at Ronald, the chain offered free Whoppers to anyone dressed up like a clown for their “Scary Clown Night.” In 2019, Burger King went after McDonald’s following its failed bid to trademark “Big Mac” in Europe, with Burger Kings’ Swedish operation revamping its menu to have an entire section called “Not Big Macs,” including options such as “Like a Big Mac but Actually Big,” “The Burger Big Mac Wished it Was” and “Anything but a Big Mac.”

The trolling has also gone in the other direction. In 2017, a McDonald’s street sign placed directly outside a Burger King outlet urged customers to make a U-turn, reading: “You’ve just passed us.”

https://nypost.com/2020/10/28/ronald-mcdonald-appears-if-you-say-canceled-clown-in-burger-king-mirror/

[BeBMan]

The saying "better late than never" has never been more apt than for Berlin's new airport which is finally opening — nearly 10 years behind schedule.

The Berlin Brandenburg Airport (BER), which continues its streak of luck by opening in the middle of a pandemic that has caused travel worldwide to plummet, was meant to open its door on October 30, 2011, but poor planning and construction work has delayed the project multiple times and inflated its cost to the tunes of billions of euros.

Euronews recaps the whole saga.

(snipsnap)

full: https://www.euronews.com/2020/10/31/...es-over-budget

The project had become more of a running gag over the years. Now it opens the gates - and will start with losses in the first year due to the pandemic. With some luck it may become an important hub for air travel in the future though....if air travel come back that is...

[Kidlicious]

Man falls 15 ft into pit of rats after sinkhole opens up in NYC.

https://dailycaller.com/2020/10/29/leonard-shoulders-new-york-city-bronx-rats-sidewalk-sinkhole/