The Null Device
2004/11/28
The street finds its own uses for obsolete mobile phones, it seems. Football hooligans in the UK are getting around police weapon searches by throwing mobile phones instead. While knives and other traditional hooligan weapons are confiscated on entry to stadiums, football fans are allowed to bring in mobile phones, so the hooligans bring a few extra to lob at the other side. The extra phones are apparently traded around some football clubs. I wonder whether they leave them as is or hollow them out and fill them with ballast of some sort to do more damage.
Meanwhile, a man in Sweden has been arrested after firing arrows with attached mobile phones into a prison yard. Mobile phones have been used to plan three prison escapes in Sweden in recent months.
Two former WW2 codebreakers from Bletchley Park have turned their attention to a coded message on a garden monument in Staffordshire. The 18th-century inscription, on a garden monument, reads "D OUOSVAVV M". Oliver and Sheila Lawn have examined 48 hypotheses about the code, with the two leading categories being those connected to the Knights Templar/Freemasonry and the Holy Grail, pointing right into Holy Blood Holy Grail/Da Vinci Code territory. Other hypotheses involved UFOs, Nostradamus, Turkish maritime maps and occultism. Then again, it could have just been a dedication from the estate owner to his late wife. (via bOING bOING)
Teenaged girl has her mother murdered, posts about it to her LiveJournal (which is titled "My Crappy Life").
Just to let everyone know, my mother was murdered
I wont have computer acess (sic) until the weekend or so because the police took my computer to go through the hard drive. I thank everyone for their thoughts and e-mails, I hope to talk to you when I get my computer back.
Apparently the issue that touched off this unusually fatal bout of teen-angst had to do with Mom keeping food away from her and threatening to send her to fat camp; so she got two of her ex-boyfriends (both 24 years old) to help her out. Not surprisingly, the entry has attracted over 2,000 comments, alternating between variants of "hope you rot in hell" and "nice to see everyone here is so quick to judge", and then degenerating into goatse and such.
In Russia, Vladimir Putin's government plans to revive a Soviet-era programme to instil patriotism in the youth; the updated programme will involve patriotic video games, which, it hopes, will replace the likes of DOOM and inculcate patriotic values in youth. Which could mean something like a post-Soviet America's Army, or something more heavy-handedly jingoistic.