Something Different

At this point, Barack Obama is still some hours away from inauguration, and I have already had it with the non-stop media orgasm over all things Obama. I have never seen anything like this frenzy from the media. Is there any other news out there?

Well, let’s see, shall we?

Tons and tons of lumber is about to wash up on a seashore in Britain. A Russian cargo ship bound for Egypt lost the load in force 10 gales pounding the seas around Britain.

More than 1,500 tonnes of wooden planks are set to wash up on a South coast beach today – a year to the day when 2,000 tons of timber washed up on the same coastline.
The latest batch of wood came off the deck of a Russian-registered cargo ship – The Sinegorsk – and fell into the sea off the coast of Newhaven, East Sussex in force 10 gales at 8.15am, coastguards said.

The incident comes exactly a year after a huge haul of wood washed up at Worthing, West Sussex – attracting visitors from around the country to the bizarre site of thousands upon thousands of planks stacked up on the shoreline.

The wood cliffs of Dover, or why they call it a “seaboard”.

And in some really jolly news, the Black Plague has broken out in an al Qaeda training camp. No, really, it has.

Al Qaeda terrorists have been left fearing the Black Death plague after it wiped out at least 40 insurgents at an Algerian training camp, it was reported today.

The horror disease, which killed 25 million people in medieval Europe, is understood to have been found in a militant’s body dumped at a roadside.

Terror group AQLIM (al Qaeda in the Land of the Islamic Maghreb) was forced to turn its shelter in the Yakouren forests into mass graves and flee, it has been claimed.

Now al Qaeda chiefs are said to fear the plague has been passed into other cells – and possibly Taliban fighters in Afghanistan.

Many insurgents may choose to surrender for treatment rather than die a horrible death.

How fitting for a group that wants to relive the good, old medieval days to be struck down by such a medieval disease. Modern hygiene would have worked wonders.

UPDATE: At least two news outlets are reporting this as an alQaeda bio-war experiment gone very wrong. I dunno if that is true or not. But the conditions in the camp had to be such that they made it possible for the disease to spread. That speaks volumes about al Qaeda, whether they were trying something out on purpose or not. (Via Memeorandum)

And finally, just in case it hasn’t been geeky enough around here the past week or so, here’s this article on how to hot rod your Windows XP so it looks and feels like Vista – without the overhead. It just popped on Google but is datelined July, 2007. So the links and such may or may not still be good. But it is kind of amusing. There are a couple of cute things you can do to your XP system.