Great Yarmouth Beach and Pier

Stevie's Sheds

Where are they then?

Dog on a Table

Swans!

Aren't they lovely?

Model Village in Great Yarmouth

Skin Good Enough To Eat

Sydney's First Fleet Park had a peachy attraction which was modelled on Australian drama All Saints star Jolene Anderson. BMF Sydney created ‘Ella’, a giant naked woman in the centre of Sydney, whose skin was made up entirely of peaches (approximately 24,000); she was a creative and engaging interpretation of Ella Baché’s brand proposition, Skin Good Enough To Eat. Incredible!

New Caption Competition

Anyone got a good caption for this one then?

NEW DEVO VIDEO - Don't Shoot (I'm A Man)

"DON'T SHOOT" - DEVO from DEVO Channel on Vimeo.

Unfortunate Product Display

[With thanks to Lady, That's My Skull]

Suggestive Comic Panel #69

[from Doom Patrol #88]

[With thanks to Random Panels]

Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds Trailer

Inglourious Basterds

58 Trillion Spam Emails Sent in 2008

There were 58 trillion spam emails sent in 2008, according to a recent report by web-monitoring company Pingdom. More than 210 billion emails were sent every day last year, but 70% of these were spam messages that ended up in the inboxes of 1.3 billion emailers around the world. The report also revealed that Asia is the continent with the most people connected to the interweb, with an estimated 578 million online. Europe is in second place with 384 million, and North America is third with 248 million. The number of websites on the internet as of 2008 was 186,727,854. Around 31.5 million new sites were added last year. Blogging continues to boom, with more than 900,000 posts added every day. There were 133 million blogs on the web, with the total number of posts for last year coming to 329 million.

900,000 posts? 133 million blogs? So what are the chances of anyone reading this? I'm too scared to work it out!

What Happens To The Salt On Our Roads?

On average in Britain we throw some two million tonnes of salt on to our roads every year, and during the recent bad weather the Highways Agency was spreading 25,000 tonnes a day. Yet have you ever stopped to wonder what happens to all the salt after it has been spread? After all, if the ancients used it to sterilise land, it must have some environmental effect. So where does it all go?

When salt is applied to any icy road, it dissolves into the meltwater to form brine and breaks down into sodium and chloride ions. Chlorides are resistant to natural decomposition and can move freely through the surrounding environment. They can parch vegetation and leach into waterways and contaminate ground water. Research in Canada has shown that salt run-off from roads can increase local chloride levels to between 100 and 4,000 times normal levels.

The most visible effects of road salt can be seen in plants which are prevented from absorbing water and nutrients, resulting in dehydration and death. High chloride concentrations can alter the soil’s pH chemistry and elevate levels of heavy metal pollutants, while at the same time causing a loss of soil structure and killing off micro-organisms. All of this can render soil unable to support plant growth.

The Canadian study revealed that urban waterways can see chloride levels rising to more than 1,000 milligrams per litre, and sometimes as high as 18,000 milligrams per litre. Other studies have shown that as much as ten per cent of aquatic wildlife is adversely affected by levels as low as 240 milligrams per litre.
We’ve all seen the effects salt has on creatures such as slugs but it can also seriously harm amphibians who, with their permeable skin, are particularly vulnerable. In fact, amphibians have been observed refusing to cross treated roads which can separate them from their traditional breeding areas. And even if they do make it, pools with high salt levels have been shown to kill frog and newt eggs.

Another slightly bizarre side effect is the addictive quality salt has on our wildlife. Mammals such as deer, rabbits, and badgers are attracted to roadside salt pools which have long been identified as a major factor in levels of road kill. Birds are particularly hard hit, with those that are not poisoned outright left in a sort of druggy haze that slows their reaction times and makes them apathetic to the threat of approaching vehicles.
Run-off is not the only way road salt can spread into the environment. As anyone unfortunate to be walking beside a road as a gritter truck thunders past can attest, a great deal of it ricochets off the road surface at near-ballistic speeds. Also on high-speed carriageways passing car tyres throw brine into the air where it spreads as an aerosol over hundreds of metres.

Eventually the chlorides can make it to the water table, making drinking water saltier and increasing pipe corrosion which releases lead and other toxic metals into our water.

Obviously nobody is suggesting that we stop gritting our roads, but even if you dismiss all this as scaremongering, please spare a thought for our highway’s fizzing worms and stoned birds.

Scary stuff, don’t you think?

Devolve Me!

Ready to journey back in time? Use this fun tool to see yourself as you would have looked as an early caveman or woman. The nifty little Devolve Me tool from the Open University, in honour of Darwin Day, will transform a photo of you into your prehistoric self. Try it!

LINK

Hitman charges £50 cancellation fee

A 33-year-old wife living in North London arranged for someone to murder her Turkish-Cypriot husband, handing over £800 to someone she knew from her children's primary school. The friend promised that her boyfriend would kill the husband in due course. However, the next day the wife changed her mind and called her friend to cancel the arrangement, only to discover that the hitman was demanding a £50 cancellation fee! Even more bizarrely, the wife then confessed to her husband what she had done, and asked him for the £50 to cancel his own murder contract!

Full story HERE.

Bizarre Ski Accident

In a bizarre incident that will surely lead to litigation (or an out-of-court settlement), a skier at Colorado's ritzy Vail resort was left dangling upside down and pantsless from a chairlift. The January 1 mishap apparently occurred after the male skier, 48, and a child boarded a high-speed lift in Vail's Blue Sky Basin.

Full story and more photos HERE.

Scrabble Keyboard

Amazing! Go HERE for the full story behind this.

Downloading the Internet

Text Maniac

An American teenager has set a world record after sending an unprecedented 14,528 text messages on her mobile phone in one calendar month, a figure that equates to 484 texts per day. Reina Hardesty, 13, came clean to her parents after they received a 440-page phone bill. Fortunately, Reina was signed up to a contract that allowed her unlimited text messaging. Ordinarily, her bill would have been £1,940.

Full story HERE.

Bride Advertises For Guests

A Ukrainian-born bride has advertised for guests to attend her London wedding after most her friends and family were unable come to England for the ceremony. The resourceful bride, whose identity has not been disclosed, posted an ad on free classifieds website Gumtree for 30 ‘decent’ guests to fill her side of the church.

Full story HERE.

Referee Sends Off 19 Players

A football referee issued 19 red cards as a regional match ended up in a brawl. The regional first division clash between Recreativo Linense and Saladillo Algesiras took place in the southern province of Cadiz. With Lisense leading 1-0, a fight broke out between two players. The exchange quickly escalated into a mass brawl involving several players and some spectators who invaded the pitch. Unable to restore order, referee Jose Manuel Barro Escandon fled to the locker room and stopped the match. In his post-match report, he wrote that he had sent off 19 players.

Full story HERE.

Put Women Sailors in Bikinis!

Put women sailors in bikinis and young men will flock to join the Australian navy. That's the suggestion of Commander Tom Phillips, a British-born navy submarine commander. His remark has landed him in hot water among feminists and politicians. The 37-year-old, who joined the Australian navy in 1990, went even further by suggesting that the submariner's equivalent of the 'mile high club' for people having sex on a plane was the 'going down club'.

Pictured above: new recruits for HMS Australasia.

Full story HERE.

Heavy Breathing News Bulletin

BBC newsreaders are famed for their unflappable composure, whatever the circumstances. So viewers tuned to BBC Three's 60 Seconds news bulletin on Thursday night were puzzled, to say the least, by presenter Tasmin Lucia Khan's breathless delivery.

Although she would normally appear fleetingly at the beginning of every programme, only Tasmin's voice could be heard in the broadcast – which some suspicious viewers probably thought just as well. In all, she managed just 28 words before producers decided to abandon the bulletin.

Full story, plus video of the actual bulletin, HERE.

Patrick McGoohan

He is no longer a number; he is now a free man...

Patrick McGoohan, the Emmy-winning actor who created and starred in cult classic TV show The Prisoner, has died. He was 80 years of age. His film producer son-in-law Cleve Landsberg made the announcement.

His death came after a short illness but the much-lauded actor has left a memorable legacy. He won two Emmys for his work on Columbo, the hit detective drama which starred Peter Falk. More recently, he appeared as King Edward Longshanks in the 1995 Mel Gibson film Braveheart. However, he remains best known as the title character Number Six in the surreal 1960s British series The Prisoner. Born in New York, Patrick McGoohan was raised in Ireland and England. He trod the boards but his first real brush with fame came courtesy of Danger Man, a 1960s Brit spy series. The work he did in The Prisoner, his next big TV project, stayed with him for the rest of his life. It was this show that brought us the iconic phrase: "I am not a number! I am a free man!"

First airing on ITV between 1967 and 1968, The Prisoner is viewed by many critics as one of the most radical, thought-provoking dramas in the history of television. Slick and intelligent, the 17-episode series explores numerous themes: from democracy and freedom, conformity and rebellion to the nature of the individual and revolution. Widely regarded as a political commentary which is as relevant today as it was 40 years ago, The Prisoner continues to fascinate. ITV are even remaking it with The Passion Of The Christ's Jim Caviezel in McGoohan's role and Ian McKellen as Number Two, the Chief Administrator of The Village.

At the time of his death, Patrick McGoohan was mostly retired and living in Los Angeles with his wife of 57 years, Joan Drummond McGoohan.