Real-Life Weirdness

[William]

'Planet Mercury Covered in Strange Blue Substance.' Awesome headline, interesting real-life astronomical mystery, and definitely a line that'll grab you for a nice game of Tales of the Solar Patrol, or dealing with a bad alchemical accident in a Cabal game, or a Mythos horror establishing a base in our solar system...

[William]

Originally Posted by NYTimes

At the open house on Oct. 18, 1958, Tennis for Two proved to be a hit beyond Dr. Higinbotham’s wildest expectations. ... Though he may have regretted it later, Dr. Higinbotham never sought a patent for the game. His reasoning was that the game was not such a leap from the initial computer he had used. And the federal government, which finances the lab (Brookhaven National Laboratory), would have owned the patent. The notion of the federal treasury profiting from video games is intriguing.

It is, isn't it? 1958: Federal government takes out patent on electronic entertainment system. A penny of every quarter dropped into a Pac-Man goes to Uncle Sam... does it kill the videogame industry, or does it give the U.S. government a major business in Japan and every other industrialized nation across the globe?

[RevBob]

Originally Posted by William

'Planet Mercury Covered in Strange Blue Substance.' Awesome headline, interesting real-life astronomical mystery, and definitely a line that'll grab you for a nice game of Tales of the Solar Patrol, or dealing with a bad alchemical accident in a Cabal game, or a Mythos horror establishing a base in our solar system...

Frankly, I was more weirded-out by an article just one link away: Fungi Caught Having Sex in Humans

[Anaraxes]

But what about humans caught having sex in fungi?

[William]

Mysterious Aurora Spotted On Saturn around its poles... this after strange hexagonal cyclones also observed there.

Something big is building up here...

[Spudzill]

Hexagonal cyclone? Sounds like a portal to the Well World to me. :)

[Flyndaran]

Originally Posted by Spudzill

Hexagonal cyclone? Sounds like a portal to the Well World to me. :)

Or the giant gas bees are just starting their mega-hive.

[RevBob]

Or just completing it....

[tantric]

i think i've encountered a real life necronomicon drive-the-reader-insane book. it's called Parallel Botany

a paragraph makes my ears ring. after a chapter, i'm seeing spots and dizzy. the prose is just - wrong. it reads like english, but there's no information there at all. it's just layer after layer of detailed delirium using the writing pattern of a scientific publication. given, the subject matter concerns imaginary plants that can only be experienced subjectively, but still....the horrible bit is that the author writes children's books, some of which i remember. the only review on amazon.com talks about having visions of an insane asylum full of plants.

" I have often mentioned the matterlessness of parallel plants, drawing attention not only to their entire lack of organs but, also to the fact that they have no real interior. Oskar Halbstein extends this notion, typical of parallel botany, to everything in the world, observing that the interior of material objects is nothing but a mental image, an idea. He pours out that when we cut something in two we do not reveal its interior, as we set out to do, but rather two visible exteriors which did not exist before. Repeating the action an infinite number of times, we would merely produce an endless series of new exteriors. For Halbstein the inside of things does not exist. It is a theoretical construct, a hypothesis which we are forbidden to verify.
The interior of parallel plants, moreover, eludes even theoretical definition. As we are concerned with a substance that is totally "other," that cannot be found in nature, it is literally unthinkable. Halbstein speaks of it as being of a "blind color," but to me it seems arbitrary and scientifically risky to draw even the most openly poetic comparisons with the normal world. (pl. XIV)

The Tubolara, which for the most part are found on the Central Plateau of Talistan in India, put the problem of the interior of parallel plants in a new and rather different light. It concerns not so much their matterlessness as their form, not so much the solid interior of their ambiguous substance as the hollow exterior- which, in a sense, is the external limit of the interior of the plant.

Here then is the paradox of the Tubolara: two interiors, one of which in normal terms would be its substance and which at bottom is responsible for its presence, is imperceptible, while the one wewould normally be inclined to think of as nonexistent, the void contained by the plant, is visible. The paradox is even greater when we think that the void within the tube, the visible interior, has a very precise function: that of containing, like a fragment of its own habitat, part of the environment in which the plant itself is contained. "

[Kale]

Here's a couple good ones:

"Statisticians claims the Pope's life could be in imminent danger - because the Welsh rugby team won the Grand Slam this year."
Apparently the Welsh team did extraordinarily well every year that a Pope died.
Link to the article on Ananova:
http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_3126226.html?menu=

Even better (and weirder):
"Archeologists in China are baffled after finding a tiny Swiss watch in a 400-year-old tomb."
It's a ring carved to resemble a tiny swiss watch, with the words 'swiss' actually engraved on the back of it. Time traveler anyone? (a local copied the traveler's watch, in ring form) @:-)
The link:
http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_3122542.html?menu=