Mental Floss has a quiz where you try to match 10 popular drug with their warning labels. Sample warnings:

"Babies born to mothers who have taken [this drug] in the latter half of pregnancy have reported complications, including difficulties with breathing, turning blue, floppiness, stiffness, irritability or constant crying."

"Vision changes, such as seeing a blue tinge to objects or having difficulty telling the difference between the colors blue and green." Also, "An erection that won't go away."

"Some patients tried to end their own lives. And some people have ended their own lives."

Link

10 Zen Monkeys has a great interview with marijuana growing guru, Ed Rosenthal. From the introduction:

From a certain perspective, Ed Rosenthal may have caught a break when Judge Breyer sentenced him to just one day in prison plus time served when he was convicted for growing hundreds of marijuana plants in Oakland, California. But it would be difficult to argue that his trial was anything short of Kafkaesque. Rosenthal had been deputized by the City of Oakland to grow medical marijuana. But after being busted by the Feds, he was not even allowed to mention his relationship to the lawful government of Oakland nor was he allowed to present witnesses who could talk about it.

So after his conviction, Rosenthal took his case to the 9th Circuit of the Supreme Court and won. His conviction was overturned, but it was overturned on a technicality. Then, in a clear case of vengeful prosecution, the D.A. in the case decided to bring up charges again, adding new charges to the original. Again Rosenthal was not allowed to present the obvious defense — his deputization with the City of Oakland — and he was re-convicted.

Link to transcript | Audio link

Eero Saarinen couldn't have come up with a nicer-looking ceiling design than this one, created by water damage. Link

Luo Cuifen, 29 of Beijing, China, consulted doctors after noticing blood in her urine. Turns out she has 23 inch-long needles in her gut. Surgeons will now carefully remove the needles that allegedly were inserted by her grandparents who were hoping to kill her. From the Associated Press:

Many of the needles have worked their way into Luo's vital organs including her lungs, liver, bladder and kidneys, making their removal difficult, said Qu Rui, a spokesman for the Richland International Hospital in Yunnan province's capital, Kunming...

Qu said doctors believe the woman's grandparents may have inserted the needles long ago, hoping she would die and her parents might have a boy in her place. China limits most families to just one child, although rural Chinese may be allowed to have a second if their first is a girl, subject to the payment of fines.

It wasn't clear whether further investigations into the case were planned, with media reports saying Luo's grandparents had already died.

Link (Thanks, Jennifer Lum!)

"Do you want your car to have the look of a real sunroof? You can install it in 5 minutes!! Extremely fashion and new aparent sun roof, made of a sticker that will give any car the image of a real sunroof."

The winning bidder at eBay paid $24.99 + $6.15 postage. (Via haha.nu)

Manybooks.net is offering Tom Godwin's Space Prison (Original title: The Survivors) as a free ebook.

I haven't read it, but the reviews are positive and the cover art and design is perfect.

I'm almost glad contemporary book design is generally awful, otherwise I'd blow even more money on books than I already do. Link

(UPDATE: Article is from 2004.) A Phoenix SWAT team armed with tear gas, plenty of guns, and an armored personnel carrier stormed a house, burned it down, and killed the family dog. They were looking for illegal weapons, but found none. However, they did capture a 26-year-old man who had failed to appear in Tempe Municipal Court on two traffic violations.

In less than 30 minutes, [Maricopa County Sheriff Joe] Arpaio's special forces unleashed an unprecedented wave of violence on this quiet community. Consider this:

• Just after the tear gas canisters were shot, a fire erupted and destroyed a $250,000 home plus all the contents inside. (The home's occupants believe the tear gas canisters caused the fire. Phoenix fire officials say the blaze was probably started by a lighted candle that was knocked onto a bed during the confusion.)

• The armored personnel carrier careened down the street and smashed into a parked car after its brakes failed.

• And in the ultimate display of cruelty, a SWAT team member drove a dog trying to flee the home back into the inferno, where it met an agonizing death.

Deputies then reportedly laughed as the dog's owners came unglued as it perished in the blaze.

...

And what did Arpaio's crack SWAT team net from the raid that left a needless trail of death and destruction?

MCSO stormed the house believing there was a cache of stolen automatic weapons and armor-piercing ammunition. But MCSO got bushwhacked. Instead of finding weapons of mass destruction, they discovered an antique shotgun and a 9 mm pistol that appear to be legal weapons.

There was no sign of the cop-killer bullets. Perhaps they are buried somewhere out in the desert, with Saddam's plutonium.

Link

Leslie says: "A McDonald's worker in Georgia was arrested after serving a burger with too much salt to a police officer in the drive-thru. The next time I am served bad fast food, I'm going to try calling the cops and see what happens!"

The drama started early Friday when [employee Kendra Bull] said she accidently dumped too much salt on a burger she was preparing for herself. A co-worker tried to remove the salt, and Bull said she told a supervisor about the heavy dose of condiment.

The supervisor acknowledged the salt, she said, but still put the patty on the officer's bun, Bull said. The supervisor denied Bull's account when questioned by police.

Asked why someone would try and salvage the burger, Bull said she wasn't sure.

"They've been saying we've been wasting too much meat," she said.

The police officer said that after he ate the burger, he nearly threw up. Bull wonders why the officer didn't he throw it away after taking a bite? By the way, the McDonald's gives free meals to the police who eat there. Lots of articles here

BB reader William Grewe-Mullins says,

I found these grisly 1920's posters while riding on an historic train through Georgia and Tennessee. They don't make 'em like that anymore.

Link.

Update: BB reader Cathy Resmer says,

And this is what happens when kids pick coal on the railroad tracks. Mary McCormick's father used to do just that. One winter day he was on a bridge with his friend and his friend's kid brother when a train came. He tells the story to his daughter in this fantastic interview excerpt from the StoryCorps oral history project. I get chills every time I listen to it. Link.

They like wearing purple, and they like AKs. Snip from BBC article: "An advance party of around 300 former rebel fighters have arrived in the Congolese capital, Brazzaville, to welcome their leader, Pastor Ntumi. The ex-fighters, who call themselves the Ninjas, are a semi-religious group led by the guitar-playing Pastor Ntumi, whose real name is Frederick Bintsamou." Link to "Ninja leader due in Congo capital." (Thanks, Andrew H)

Photojournalist Allan Tannenbaum was at ground zero on September 11, 2001 and has since been chronicling the lives of first responders like NYC Paramedic Marvin Bethea, above, who became sick because of debris exposure that day.

Many of these people lack proper health care, many have protested what they believe to be an unequal and inadequate distribution of aid. Many have died.

Above, one of many photos on Tannenbaum's website "9/11 Still Killing." Mr. Bethea, at his home in Queens, with medicines he now must take after getting buried in debris twice on 9/11. Mr. Bethea says:

What people must remember about 9/11 is that the cops, firemen, EMTs, all had very physical jobs. These were healthy people who had these jobs. We had to pass a physical every year. The question now becomes, if all these people were healthy, why are they all sick now? You don't need to be a rocket scientist to figure this out. What is the common denominator? 9/11 - Ground Zero.

Time magazine has published some of these images online along with audio interviews: Link. (Image above (c) 2006, Allan Tannenbaum.)

Wired's Danger Room blog points us to the oddest headline of the week, spotted in The Times of India -- "Osama Bin Laden is Dyed and Alive," referencing OBL's newly darkened beard-do on his latest vlog. Link. And here's the video, on YouTube, right next to skateboarding pugs and phonecammed booty dances. Man, the internet is weird. Tomorrow is 9/11.

Delightful and innocent song from a Dutch kids' program rendered totally NSFW by adding phonetic captions to the video. Link (Thanks, Dan!)

In the 19th century, Timothy Clark Smith of Vermont was so concerned about the possibility of being buried alive that he arrange to be buried in a special crypt that included a breathing tube and a glass window in his grave marker that would permit him to peer out to the living world six feet above.

The crypt is still in New Haven, should you care to see if Mr. Smith has revived and needs recusing. Link

For his birthday, Lil Derrick' parents gave him a Grand Theft Auto themed birthday cake, with a picture of a gun-toting car thief and rolled-up play money stuff into the frosting. (NOTE: I do not know whether it is a hoax or real.) Link

MZ says:

It's amazing how accurate these predictions from 1966 were about home computers in 1999, and not just what they can do (or having them at all) but what many people would inevitably use them for most of the time: shopping online, paying bills online, managing our bank accounts, and using an "electronic correspondence machine...which allows for instant communication between individuals anywhere in the world."

Strangely, though this little clip is fascinatingly insightful on the technology tack, they are shockingly fossilized in their view of gender roles in 1999. Behold "father" coming home to his computer to shake is head over the e-bills sent directly to him from "mother's" gleeful shopping at her console (when she wasn't raising their children by video conference).

(Original link is offline, here's the Google Video:) Link

This unfortunate toy gun has a whistle on the end of the barrel. Here's a video and more photos of the Mystery Gun Suicide Whistle. (Thanks, Darryl!)

Anime fans in Singapore staged a micro-sized protest against a Singapore animation distributor by attaching tiny signs to plastic robot and monster statuettes and placing them in public.

The Singapore authorities responded by sending four riot vans. The organizer of the protest, Zer0 told reporters that the police removed the figurines and that plainclothes officers filmed them.

According to the Yahoo News brief, "public protests are rare in Singapore, where outdoor demonstrations are banned and any public gathering of more than four people requires a permit."

Link | Photos here (Thanks, Najjib!)

It's one week before Point Pleasant, West Virginia's annual Mothman Festival. In the mid-1960s, an unusual bird-like beastie dubbed the Mothman reportedly visited the small town and left a trail of high weirdness and a tragic bridge collapse in its wake. The first festival took place in 2002 after the release of The Mothman Prophecies film, based loosely on journalist John Keel's classic 1975 book about his own involvement in the strange occurrences. Leading up to this year's festival, Loren Coleman, author of Mothman And Other Curious Encounters, has posted a series of blog entries about the creepy cryptid:

• New Death & Bridge Collapse in Mothman Country Link

• Mothman’s Fate Link

• Spooky Southcoast: Mothman Link

• Mothman Festival Details Link

Link to buy Mothman and Other Curious Encounters, Link to buy The Mothman Prophecies

Previously on BB:
• Mothman Festival 2005 Link
• Cryptid photo contest winner Link

Stamen Design, the incredibly innovative design firm/research lab behind such wonderful data visualizations as Cabspotting.org and Graffiti Archaeology, have launched Oakland Crimespotting, an interactive map of crimes in that city. Once a day, the system scrapes crime reports from the Oakland Police Department's Crimewatch site. The information about specific aggravated assaults, murders, acts of arson, vandalism, narcotics, prostitution, and a host of other crimes is then mapped onto Microsoft Virtual Earth. From the project description:

Our map view is completely explorable - it’s possible to pan and zoom, select date ranges in the past, and view specific kinds of crimes. You can also share links directly to a particular view of the map, which is important for sharing and publishing information. If you don’t have the required Flash plug-in to view the interactive map, we have a browseable crime database with maps in image form for combinations of dates and types of crime.

We believe that this map-first approach is a valuable and sensible way to publish information for people to use - everyone knows how to find their house, school, or workplace on a map, but few people remember relevant details such as the city council district or police beat these places occupy.

Link

Previously on BB:
• Cabspotting: an alternate view of a living city Link
• Graffiti Archaeology Link

BB pal Coop is "paintblogging" the creation of his latest artwork. For this piece, he decided to hand paint a representation of the muddy, blurred dots used as shading in halftone printing. From his blog post at Positive Ape Index:

I have a halftone fetish. I'm not sure why, maybe looking at too many old comic books and xeroxed punk 'zines as a kid. Whatever the reason, there is something about those little black dots that drives me wild, particularly when the printed result is muddy and imperfect, when those perfect black circles have metastasized into ugly imperfect blobs on a yellowed piece of newsprint.

When I started on (my last series) Parts With Appeal, I spent several weeks poring through my old car mags, scanning tiny ads for compelling examples of just what I'm talking about. I kept trying to figure out a way to reproduce those blotchy halftones at the large scale of my canvas. I thought about Warhol's method of silkscreening on canvas, but I wanted to keep myself honest, and find a method that was more time-consuming and pain-in-the-asstastic.

Roy Lichtenstein had a stencil method for painting halftones on canvas, but that seemed too precise for the look I wanted, and I didn't want the result to look like his work, anyway. Dali also used halftones in his later paintings, but I've read conflicting stories as to whether they were painted by hand or reproduced mechanically, and i've never seen any of these paintings in person to judge for myself.

I finally decided there was only one way to pull it off properly, and that was just to paint the whole damn thing by hand, one dot at a time.

Link

Previously on BB:
• Coop's new painting, step-by-step Link
• Paint by blog with Coop Link
• Coop's timelapse painting slideshows Link

I spotted these beautiful early 19th century skull statuettes in a back alley shop in Paris's Saint-Germain-des-Prés neighborhood. The smaller one, an anatomical model, is just a bit bigger than a shotglass. Unfortunately, they're made from ivory which was a popular medium at the time. Of course, the acquisition of ivory has tragically devastated populations of elephants, rhinos hippos, and other animals that produce the material. Click the images for bigger photos.

Humphrey Barasa is a trenchant Kenyan political cartoonist -- but he doesn't draw for a newspaper. Instead, he draws his daily toons on a busy bus-shelter.

The cartoons, which Mr Barasa draws on the face of the shelter, highlight various issues - from politics and politicians, to health and social issues - and act as a pictorial analysis of current affairs.

He says that before he started, he had to work on the neglected bus shelter so that it could be an appropriate canvas for his work.

"Before I started drawing here, this board there were so many posters as you can see. It was too dirty. So I came here and painted it to make it clean," says the artist, who was quick to identify a unique location for his art.

Link (Thanks, Bill!)