October, 2006:

Reuters had a story this week about Canadian Troops battling 10-foot marijuana plants.   Apparently the Taliban are using the plants for cover, and the plants absorb heat very well rendering thermal devices useless:

Canadian troops fighting Taliban militants in Afghanistan have stumbled across an unexpected and potent enemy — almost impenetrable forests of 10-feet-high marijuana plants.
General Rick Hillier, chief of the Canadian defense staff, said on . . . “We tried burning them with white phosphorous — it didn’t work. We tried burning them with diesel — it didn’t work. The plants are so full of water right now … that we simply couldn’t burn them,” he said.   “A couple of brown plants on the edges of some of those (forests) did catch on fire. But a section of soldiers that was downwind from that had some ill effects and decided that was probably not the right course of action,” Hillier said dryly.  

Perhaps it is true what they say about Military Intelligence – was it “ill effects” those soldiers suffered or a bad case of the munchies?

Girgoyle this one’s for you!   And people say that the idea of CannibalRabbit is twisted!   Check this out.   One of the websites that I keep on getting drawn back to – Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories – Have an article on how to put LEDs into Lego heads, and come up with the Halloween themed Lego Horseman

 

It’s remarkably easy to hack LEDs into Lego minifigures to make awesome, creepy, and tiny decorations for Halloween.

 There sure are some strange people out there ,now where did I leave my lego?

Today in Wired News: Read Between the Lines  there is an interesting article on the art of book-buying.   If anything it emphasises how pervasive “the web” has become:

One of the singular pleasures of wandering into an eclectic independent is the joy of discovering the unexpected. (It’s called “browsing.” That’s real browsing, by the way, not the word as it’s been hijacked to put a smiley face on the soulless practice of online shopping.) You go into the shop intending to find the latest novel by your favorite author and you emerge, perhaps an hour later, with two or three other titles under your arm, by authors you hadn’t even heard of before breakfast.

But surely this doesn’t just apply to book-buying, it applies to almost everything.   Small, independent businesses depend on your business, if we keep going this way corporate blandness beckons – fixed ranges across all stores regardless of the market served, suppliers bidding for shelf space.

By the same token the internet provides niche businesses with access to a global market.   If we shop sensibly hopefully we can have the best of both worlds.   Cheap airport thrillers, and reasonably-priced edgy variety – just give me more Jasper Fforde[^]!   We don’t want to have to rely on K-Mart to provide us with quality or variety of reading material – that would be worse than having to  get quality coffee from  St*rbucks.   The same crap in lots of syrupy “flavours”.