May 2, 2011
Alien abduction insurance is an insurance policy issued against alien abduction. Simon Burgess, former Managing Director of British Insurance, well known for being involved in the bizarre end of the business, said ‘Of course, the burden of proof lies with the claimant. Let’s face it – insurance is so tedious that if I can enlighten my dreary life with a bit of humor every now and again, I will.’ Policies typically cover injuries suffered during an alien examinations or death caused by aliens. The first company to offer UFO insurance was the St. Lawrence Agency in Florida. The company says that it has paid out at least two claims of $1 per year until their death or for 1 million years, whichever comes first. The insurance is normally purchased by the ‘feeble-minded,’ according to Burgess. Prominent policyholders have included Shirley MacLaine and a Harvard University professor who has written on aliens.
The Heaven’s Gate religious group purchased alien abduction insurance before their mass suicide. Their insurance company (London brokerage Goodfellow Rebecca Ingrams Pearson) stopped offering alien abduction insurance after the suicide – having sold the policy to about four thousand people (mostly in England and the United States). At a cost of roughly $155 a year the GRIP policy would pay about $160,000 to someone who could show that they had been abducted by a being who was not from Earth. The payment would double if the insured person was impregnated during the event. Men were also able to purchase the impregnation insurance for protection against the unknown capabilities of alien technology.
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April 28, 2011
Eating your own dog food, also called dogfooding, is when a company (usually, a software company) uses the products that it makes. In 1988, Microsoft manager Paul Maritz wrote an email titled ‘Eating our own Dogfood,’ challenging his team to increase internal usage of the company’s product.
From there, the usage of the term spread through the company. The term is believed to have derived from a 1980s television advertisements for Alpo dog food, where TV actor, Lorne Greene pointed out that he fed Alpo to his own dogs.
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April 28, 2011
A leisure suit is a casual suit consisting of a shirt-like jacket and matching trousers, often associated with American-influenced fashion and fads of the 1970s.
Suits as casual wear became popular among members of Britain’s mod subculture in the 1960s, but only achieved widespread popularity in the United States when—with the creation and popularization of synthetic materials—unprecedented cheapness met with a culture that had come to hate formality.
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April 27, 2011
The Art of the Motorcycle was an exhibition that presented 114 motorcycles chosen for their historic importance or design excellence in a display designed by Frank Gehry in the curved rotunda of the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City, running for three months in late 1998.
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April 26, 2011
A pizza farm is an educational visitor attraction consisting of a small farm on a circular region of land partitioned into plots shaped like pizza wedges.
The farm’s segments produce ingredients that can be used in pizza, such as wheat for the crust, tomatoes or herbs, pork for pepperoni, dairy cows for cheese, and even trees for pizza oven firewood. Certain farms may even have access to coal or natural gas deposits that can be used as alternative pizza oven heating fuels.
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April 26, 2011
A location-based service (LBS) is an information or entertainment service, accessible with mobile devices through the mobile network and utilizing the ability to make use of the geographical position of the mobile device. LBS include services to identify a location of a person or object, such as discovering the nearest ATM or the whereabouts of a friend or employee.
It also include parcel tracking and vehicle tracking services, and can include mobile commerce when taking the form of coupons or advertising directed at customers based on their current location. They include personalized weather services and even location-based games. They are an example of telecommunication convergence.
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April 26, 2011
Music Under New York (MUNY) is part of the New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s ‘Arts for Transit Office’ that increases the attractiveness of transit facilities for customers.
At present more than 350 individual performers and music ensembles participate in over 7,000 annual performances in approximately 25 locations throughout the transit system.
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April 25, 2011
A podstakannik (Russian: ‘thing under the glass’) is a tea glass holder. The primary purpose of podstakanniks is to be able to hold a very hot glass of tea, which is usually consumed right after it is brewed. It is a traditional way of serving and drinking tea in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and other post-Soviet states.
Podstakanniks appeared in Russian tea culture in the late 18th century, when drinking tea became common in Russia. Very soon podstakanniks became not just practical utensils, but also works of art, just like samovars (urns) that were used for boiling water. Expensive podstakanniks for the rich and the elite were made of silver, however they were not very practical, since they would get quite hot very quickly due to the high thermal conductivity of silver.
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April 25, 2011
Shakedown street is the area of a Jam Band (e.g. Phish, Widespread Panic) parking lot where the vending takes place. It is named after the Grateful Dead song of the same name and has been popular since the early 1980s. In the Deadhead community, and other likeminded musical scenes, an interesting tailgating culture evolved. More than just a party for fans, it is a way for the faithful to sell wares which in turn fund their tickets and gas to the next concert in order to spend weeks, months, or even entire tours on the road.
Along with the more traditional fare, there is a large selection of vegetarian food such as egg rolls, burritos, pizza, and falafel. Certain illicit foods like hash brownies and ‘ganja gooballs’ are also often found among the foods in the parking lots. Other products available for the tailgaters include handmade jewellery, bumper stickers, t-shirts, or drug paraphernalia.
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April 25, 2011
Rainbow Gatherings are temporary intentional communities, typically held in outdoor settings, and espousing and practicing ideals of peace, love, harmony, freedom and community, as a consciously expressed alternative to mainstream popular culture, consumerism, capitalism and mass media.
Rainbow Gatherings are an expression of a Utopian impulse, combined with bohemianism, hipster and hippie culture, with roots traceable to the 1960’s counterculture. Mainstream society is commonly referred to and viewed as ‘Babylon,’ connoting the participants’ widely held belief that modern lifestyles and systems of government are unhealthy, unsustainable, exploitative and out of harmony with the natural systems of the planet.
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April 21, 2011
Andrew Wakefield (b. 1957) is a British former surgeon and medical researcher known for his fraudulent claims of a causative connection between the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine and autism. He also created the term ‘autistic enterocolitis’ to describe an unproven form of inflammatory bowel disease (not to be confused with irritable bowel syndrome).
In January 2011, an article by British investigative reporter, Brian Deer and its accompanying editorial in the British Medical Journal identified Wakefield’s work as an ‘elaborate fraud.’ In a follow-up article, Deer said that Wakefield had planned to launch a venture on the back of an MMR vaccination scare that would profit from new medical tests and ‘litigation driven testing.’ Wakefield’s study and public recommendations against the use of the combined MMR vaccine were linked to a steep decline in vaccination rates in the United Kingdom and a corresponding rise in measles cases, resulting in serious illness and several fatalities.
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April 20, 2011
Oaksterdam is a cultural district on the north end of downtown Oakland, California, where medical cannabis in a variety of competitively priced smokeable and edible preparations is available for purchase in multiple cafes, clubs, and patient dispensaries. Since 2005, cannabis has been legally available to patients with patient identification and physician recommendation at a dispensary in the neighborhood, one of Oakland’s four officially licensed dispensaries under the current municipal ordinance.
Measure Z clubs are businesses that sell cannabis to people over the age of 18. One private club in Oaksterdam sells cannabis and food containing cannabis to adults who do not hold valid physician recommendations for medical marijuana, which are needed to obtain county-issued patient identification cards in California. One such club is named after Oakland’s Measure Z, a city ballot initiative which makes the private sales, cultivation, and possession of cannabis the lowest police priority and mandates that the City of Oakland tax and regulate cannabis as soon as possible under state law.
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