The Great Wikipedia Thread

[stev]

Exploding Whale
Exploding whales have been documented on two notable occasions, as well as several lesser-known ones. The most famous explosion occurred in the United States at Florence, Oregon, in 1970, when a dead sperm whale (originally reported as a gray whale) was blown up by the Oregon Highway Division in an attempt to dispose of its rotting carcass.

There have also been spontaneous explosions. The other best-reported case of an exploding whale was in Taiwan in 2004, when a buildup of gas inside a decomposing sperm whale caused it to explode while it was being transported for a post-mortem examination. As exploding whales are an interesting and absurd topic, they have been written about by several authors.



You can see it on youtube too.

[Fayebelle]

WHOA!


I love this thread already

[boedicca]

Tres Appetizing. But one Groks this concept

Monkey Brains

Monkey brain is a controversial delicacy, often attributed to the Chinese, but found in countries around the world. The practice of eating monkey brains has allegedly led to over-hunting, especially due to the belief that eating the monkeys' brain can cure impotence.[1]

It is not only humans who eat the brains of monkeys. Two species of chimpanzee are known to eat the brains of monkeys to obtain fat in their diet.[2]

Brains as food

The consumption of animal brains is a practice of many cultures. In the Southern United States canned pork brain in gravy can be purchased. This form of brain is often fried with scrambled eggs to produce the famous "Eggs n' Brains".[3]

The brain of animals also features in French cuisine such as in the dish tête de veau, or head of calf.

Pakistani cuisine includes cow or sheep brain known as 'Maghaz'. it is generally prepared with spices and eaten with naan or other flatbreads.

Similar delicacies from around the world include Mexican tacos de sesos/cabeza made with ***tle brain, as well as squirrel brain in the US South.[4]

The Anyang tribe of Cameroon practiced a tradition in which a new tribal chief would consume the brain of a hunted gorilla while another senior member of the tribe would eat the heart.[5]

Live monkey brain was one of the items in the Manchu Han Imperial Feast as part of Imperial cuisine in Beijing during the Qing Dynasty. Paul Burrell, the former butler of Princess Diana, claims he was served monkey brains on banana leaves and coconut palms in one of their visits.[6]

[edit] Risks

Consuming the brain and other nerve tissue of animals is not without risks. Besides the high fat content of brains,[7] brain consumption can also result in contracting fatal transmissible spongiform encephalopathies such as Variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease and other prion diseases in humans and mad cow disease in ***tle.[8]

[edit] Controversy

There is much controversy over certain methods of which Monkey Brains are eaten. A common story is that certain restaurants provide special tables with a hole in the center. The live monkey is immobilized with its body below the table, and the top of its skull is removed with a knife. The head, which protrudes above the table top, serves as a bowl. Liquor may be poured into the skull and mixed with the brain. The diners then proceed to scoop out and eat parts of the brain. While many relegate this to simply folklore, there is evidence that this practice does take place.[9]

This method of serving monkey brains was seen the 1978 mondo film Faces of Death, in which a scene shows a group of people eating the dish in this manner. Several books also include similar descriptions. In the book Born Red, A Chronicle of the Cultural Revolution author Gao Yuan describes looking inside restaurant windows of Guangzhou that "offered the famous monkey brains, served at a special table that locked the monkey's head in place; the waiter would open the skull and the diners would eat while the body wriggled under the table." Maxine Hong Kingston's book The Woman Warrior also contains a description of a monkey feast including the special table; Kingston attributes the description to her mother. The Attic: Memoir of a Chinese Landlord's Son is a 1998 memoir of life in Communist China by Guanlong Cao, in which the author describes the eating of live monkey brains.

[stev]

The most famous incident where a load of silly yanks blew up a beached whale with dynamite can be seen here:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=1_t44siFyb4

Wiki:

After consulting with officials at the United States Navy, they decided that it would be best to remove the whale in the same way they would remove a boulder and, on November 12, used half a ton of dynamite on it. They thought burying the whale would be ineffective, as it would soon be uncovered, and they believed the use of dynamite would cause an explosion that would disintegrate the whale into pieces small enough for scavengers to clear up. The engineer in charge of the operation, George Thornton, was recorded as stating that one set of charges might not be enough and more might be needed. Thornton later explained that he was chosen to remove the whale because the district engineer, Dale Allen, had gone hunting.[4][5]
The explosion caused large pieces of blubber to land some distance away from the beach, resulting in a smashed car. The explosion disintegrated only some of the whale, most of which remained on the beach for the Oregon Highway Division workers to clear away.

[Fayebelle]

I AM JEDI


The Jedi census phenomenon is a grassroots movement that was created 2001 for citizens in a few English-speaking countries to record their religion as "Jedi" or "Jedi Knight" (after the fictitious quasi-religious order of Force-attuned knights in the Star Wars films) on the national census. Australian Star Wars Appreciation Society president Chris Brennan reported to The New Zealand Herald that while a minority were "true hard-core people that would believe the Jedi religion carte blanche", the majority of self-reported Jedi claimed the religion for their own amusement, or to poke fun at the government.[1] Other news reports also interpreted the exercise as a massive practical joke.

[stev]

I remember that, it was brilliant. Second largest reported religion in New Zealand.

[User10539783]

[DngrMse]

Or SHC for short.

Spontaneous human combustion (SHC) refers to the belief that the human body sometimes burns without an external source of ignition. There is much speculation and controversy regarding SHC, for it is not a proven natural phenomenon. Many theories and hypotheses have attempted to explain how SHC might occur, some of which are grounded in current scientific understanding. One such hypothesis is the "wick effect", in which the clothing of the victim soaks up melted human fat and acts like the wick of a candle. Another possibility is that the clothing is caused to burn by a discharge of static electricity. The likelihood that truly spontaneous human combustion actually takes place is remote, due to the presence of water and the lack of highly flammable compounds and oxygen in the human body.[1]

The Wick Effect:

The wick effect is the partial destruction of a human body by fire, when the clothing of the victim soaks up melted human fat and acts like the wick of a candle. The wick effect is a real phenomenon that has been shown to occur under certain conditions. Since both wick effect and SHC would necessarily involve the incineration of bodies, and therefore the melting and combustion of body fat, there are many similarities between the known phenomenon (wick effect) and the alleged phenomenon (SHC).

[stev]

The Brown Dog Affair

The Brown Dog affair was a political controversy about vivisection that raged in Edwardian England from 1903 until 1910.[1] It involved the infiltration of University of London medical lectures by Swedish women activists, pitched battles between medical students and the police, police protection for the statue of a dog, a libel trial at the Royal Courts of Justice, and the establishment of a Royal Commission to investigate the use of animals in experiments. The affair became a cause célèbre that reportedly divided the country.[2][3]

The controversy was triggered by allegations that William Bayliss of the Department of Physiology at University College, London, had performed illegal dissection in February 1903 on a brown terrier dog—adequately anaesthetized, according to Bayliss and his team,[4] conscious and struggling, according to the Swedish activists[5]—before an audience of medical students.[6] The procedure was condemned as cruel and unlawful by the National Anti-Vivisection Society. Bayliss, whose research on dogs led to the discovery of hormones, was outraged by the assault on his reputation. He sued for libel and won.[5]

Anti-vivisectionists commissioned a bronze statue of the dog as a memorial, unveiled in Battersea in 1906, but medical students were angered by its provo***ive plaque—"Men and women of England, how long shall these things be?"—leading to frequent vandalism of the memorial and the need for a 24-hour police guard against the so-called "anti-doggers". On 10 December 1907, 1,000 anti-doggers marched through central London, clashing with suffragettes, trade unionists, and 400 police officers in Trafalgar Square, one of a series of battles that became known as the Brown Dog riots.[6][7]

Tired of the controversy, Battersea Council removed the statue in 1910 under cover of darkness, after which it was allegedly destroyed by the council's blacksmith, despite a 20,000-strong petition in its favour.[8] A new statue of the brown dog was commissioned by anti-vivisection groups over 70 years later, and was erected in Battersea Park in 1985.[9]

[stev]

Bonsai Kitten

Only really worth visiting if, like me, you thought it was real.