Wednesday, March 14th at the Museum of the Weird!
Conference starts at 8:00pm
Freakshow starts at 10:30pm
Live on stage in the Weird Theater! featuring:
• Cut Throat Freak Show
• Lizard Man
• John T-Rex
• Drew Blood & Pickled Punk Sideshow
• Ballyhoo Betty & more!
$15 for the Freakshow
$20 gets you in to the Conference and the Freakshow
Get your pre-sale tickets here now! Space is extremely limited.
Today is an incredibly sad day for those of us in Austin, Texas and around the world, for we’ve lost an amazingly bright and beautiful spirit that truly embodied the city’s slogan of “Keep Austin Weird”, Leslie Cochran.
Another bright star, deep in the heart of texas, has shined his last warming light upon us and will not soon be forgotten.
KXAN writes:
Albert Leslie Cochran, the thong-wearing street person who became the living embodiment of the city’s “Keep Austin Weird” slogan, died Thursday morning after more than two years of declining health.
He was 60.
Cochran had been hospitalized since Feb. 16 and inhospice care for the past week. Friends said he had never fully recovered from a head injury from the fall he suffered in October 2009.
“Leslie lived outside the box,” said friend Christine Ann, a South Austin merchant. “He exemplified that, but also spoke … passionately that we not take ourselves too seriously. And Leslie, of course, never did.”
Read more at kxan.com
Once you think you’ve tried all the different diets out there in the world, a new one comes along and just changes everything.
This amazing new diet was discovered by Kerry Trebilcock of Mylar, Cornwall and to just put it simply, it cleans your body up!
Kerry has eaten countless numbers of sponges, from little chopped up slices in a ziplock bag with some tomato and bbq sauce (as a snack), to a “sponge-dog”, which is any standard cleaning sponge you’d find around your own sink at home, added with hot relish, ketchup, mustard and honey all folded into a hotdog bun shape! Sometimes, she’ll even spring for a fruit-scented bar of soap to chow down on if no sponges are around ’cause you know, that’s normal.
From what I’ve gathered, it seems that by eating dry sponges for almost every meal, all the normally bad, unhealthy and acidic liquids you’d ingest during an average day would simply be absorbed by the sponges! How neat!
I’d imagine they would start in your belly, absorbing and taking with them all the terrible stomach acid and badness sitting in there into the digestive track. There they would pass through all your bodies filtration systems saying “It’s cool guys, I got this!”, letting those hard working organs rest and relax for once, to the colon where it will be passed out and into the commode to be swept away into the unknown forever by swirling streams of water.
I guess the eating of the soap every so often as Kerry does would also help ‘clean-out’ your system by sudsing up your insides and making them squeaky clean so the sponges can be extra effective the next go ’round?
Sounds about right, right?
Wait, I see here the article says ‘disorder’, not ‘diet’…. oh.
The Sun writes:
Kerry Trebilcock, 21, has also munched more than 100 bars of SOAP.
She suffers from pica, which causes victims to crave objects that are not food. Kerry, of Mylor, Cornwall, said: “One day I will beat this and be able to have a shower or do the washing-up without feeling hungry.”
Sponge eater Kerry said she likes to spice up her bizarre snacks with hot sauce or mustard. Sometimes, she dips them in tea or hot chocolate like biscuits. She also chomps on chunks of soap — but only organic fruit-flavoured varieties, with lemon and lime her favourite.
Kerry said: “I have been very particular about the type of sponges and soaps I’d eat and how I’d prepare them. If I went out for the day I’d carry a small plastic bag of cut-up pieces of sponge with some tomato and BBQ sauce in Tupperware. I was never without a ‘snack’.”
Other pica sufferers eat metal, coal, sand, chalk — or even lightbulbs and furniture. Petite Kerry, who weighs just 8st, has endured shocking stomach cramps, constipation and diarrhoea.
And although she has cut down on her sponge munching, she has been unable to totally shake the condition. At one point Kerry was eating five a day topped with hot relish, BBQ sauce, ketchup, mustard, jam or honey.
Read more at thesun.co.uk
Ever been at the office, library or park enjoying the peace and quiet when, all of a sudden, an incredibly rude person decides to shatter the silence and start talking on their phone annoyingly or, continues to attempt conversation with others over and over again besides being told to ‘shh’ or ‘please, be quiet’ a thousand times?!
Do you want to shut their mouth without ever touching them or getting into an argument? Of course you do!
Well have no fear, for the Japanese Speech-Jamming gun is here!
Wired writes:
What inspired Japanese researchers Kazutaka Kurihara and Koji Tsukada to create a prototype for a speech-jamming gun? J.G. Ballard and Philip K. Dick novels? Dystopian art-house cinema? The Muzak Corporation? German avant-garde electronic experiments? The LRAD sound cannon? The answer, it turns out, was the friendly local science museum.
Kurihara, a research scientist at Japan’s National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, broke it down in an e-mail exchange with Wired. “One day I just came by a science museum and enjoyed a demonstration about Delayed Auditory Feedback (DAF) at [the] cognitive science corner,” says Kurihara. “When I spoke to a microphone, my voice came back to me after a few hundred millisecond delay. Then, I could not continue to speak any more. That’s fun!”
Kurihara soon realized his adventures in the science museum could be applicable to other fields. He was already interested in developing a system that “controls appropriate turn-taking at discussions.” The science museum visit was his “a-ha!” moment. “Then I came up with the gun-type SpeechJammer idea utilizing DAF,” says Kurihara. “That’s the destiny.”
Read more at wired.com
More cool news coming from the spider-science world!
Adding to the list of incredible and awesome uses for spider-silk, a scientist of Japan’s Nara Medical University, Shigeyoshi Osaki, has developed a set of violin strings woven from the ‘dragline’ silk spiders use to hang themselves from.
It’s apparently stronger and resonates brighter than the usual, aluminum coated, string traditionally used on violins and other stringed instruments! Researchers have been studying the pros and cons of using spider-silk for quite some time now and have been making breakthrough after breakthrough. Hopefully we’ll see some more incredible stuff very soon!
BBC News writes:
A Japanese researcher has used thousands of strands of spider silk to spin a set of violin strings.
The strings are said to have a “soft and profound timbre” relative to traditional gut or steel strings.
That may arise from the way the strings are twisted, resulting in a “packing structure” that leaves practically no space between any of the strands.
The strings will be described in a forthcoming edition of the journal Physical Review Letters.
Read more at bbcnews.co.uk
This is why you should, at the very least, double-check to see if the person you just laid to rest in a coffin, is actually dead.
95 year old, Li Xiufeng, was presumed dead by neighbors when she was found lifeless and non-responsive in her home. They laid Li in a coffin for a few days while they made funeral preparations, and so friends and relatives could come visit and pay respects.
The day before the funeral was set to happen, Mr. Qingwang, the man making the plans, came to check and prepare the coffin, only to find it empty!
Apparently, being dead for a few days works up quite the appetite, because they found Li Xiufeng doing just fine in her kitchen and making herself some breakfast. She’s quoted as saying “I slept for a long time. After waking up, I felt so hungry, and wanted to cook something to eat.”
Again, just double-check.
Daily Mail writes:
A 95-year-old Chinese woman thought to have passed away stunned her neighbours – after waking up six days after she had been placed in a coffin. Li Xiufeng was found motionless and not breathing in bed by a neighbour two weeks after tripping and suffering a head injury at her home in Beiliu, Guangxi Province.
When the neighbor who found her could not wake the pensioner up, they feared the worst and thought the elderly woman had passed away. She was placed in a coffin which was kept in her house unsealed under Chinese tradition for friends and relatives to pay respects.
But the day before the funeral, neighbours found an empty coffin, and later discovered the 95-year-old, who had since woken up, in her kitchen cooking. Neighbor Chen Qingwang, 60, who originally found Mrs Xiufeng, said: ‘She didn’t get up, so I came up to wake her up.
‘No matter how hard I pushed her and called her name, she had no reactions. ‘I felt something was wrong, so I tried her breath, and she has gone, but her body is still not cold.’
As Mrs Xiufeng lived alone, Mr Qingwang and his son made preparations for her funeral, and the ‘dead’ woman was left in her coffin two days after she was discovered. The day before she was due to be permanently laid to rest, however, Mr Qingwang arrived at his neighbour’s property and found her ‘corpse’ had disappeared.
Read more at dailymail.co.uk
Here’s a cool little story about a not-so-little bug that was once widely accepted as extinct, only to be discovered 80 years later, hidden from the world on a huge, lonely rock out in the middle of the ocean.
The giant stick bug or ‘tree lobster’ that was once found on Lord Howe Island near Australia, was believed to have gone extinct over 80 years ago when a grounded ship allowed black rats to escape from it’s cargo and subsequently find their new favorite meal, huge phasmid insects called, easily enough, stick bugs. Just a few years later, the bugs were nowhere to be found… and the rats had gotten fat.
A couple of researchers thought they may have some luck finding these guys still alive after some info came down the pipe-line about a possible sighting on another island just a few miles away called Ball’s Pyramid.
Sure enough, they were there, clinging to the one plant that survived on the lifeless island. The researchers quickly made a plea to the Australian government to take some specimens and attempt to build a population large enough to re-introduce back to the island it once inhabited, after the black rats are taken care of, of course.
The Daily Mail writes:
A narrow and forbidding rock that stands higher than the Empire State Building, it does not look like the most welcoming place to set up home.
But that did not stop an insect which was thought to be extinct for 80 years from building its last known colony on the 1,844ft high Ball’s Pyramid.
Scientists have discovered 24 of the creatures living 500ft above the South Pacific Ocean around the single plant that had survived on the rock.
The ‘tree lobster’ insect, which is as large as a human hand, had somehow made its camp despite the lack of food and the harsh conditions.
Nobody could say how they got there in the first place – but four have now been taken off and have bred thousands more to ensure their species survives.
Read more at dailymail.com
A dog-headed pig monster has began to terrorize villagers in northern Namibia, which is on the southwest coast of Africa, and seems to have caused quite a bit of trouble by attacking dogs, goats and anything else that gets in its way.
People of the region just beyond the Kalahari desert have never seen anything like this creature before and say it must be the work of aliens or ‘black magic’.
Although there are no photos of said monster, it has worked it’s way into the headlines of major news outlets around the world.
Yahoo News writes:
Residents in northern Namibia, on the southwest coast of Africa, have reported being terrorized by a bizarre dog-pig hybrid creature.
The animal is said to be mostly white and unlike anything the villagers have ever seen, with a doglike head and the broad, round, nearly hairless back and shoulders of a giant pig. The beast was spotted chasing and attacking dogs, goats and other domestic animals in this arid region not far from the Kalahari desert.
As often happens when rumors of monsters spread in rural areas around the world, some locals have taken extra safety precautions, such as traveling in groups and arming themselves with weapons.
In 1995 and 1996, some Puerto Ricans armed themselves against the vampire beast el chupacabra; last year, Malaysian residents patrolled the streets searching for the mysterious orang minyak, or “oily man” creature that had recently terrorized them.
Read more at news.yahoo.com
