The Cry Baby is on sabbatical ....

Sunday, April 3, 2011

Jesus Christ face appears in a cheese pizza


There's been bedsheets, waffles, walls and shrouds, all said to be bearing the face of Jesus. Now from down under, comes the pizza with Jesus' face in cheese. The face appeared in a three-cheese pizza made at Posh Pizza in New Farm, Brisbane. The pizza was listed for sale on eBay, with proceeds going to charity. (Too late if you were thinking of bidding, the auction has closed.)

Posh Pizza's Maree Phelan said "I can definitely say this isn't a fake, the three-cheese pizza always comes out with very different colours.'' The owners said the pizza has already brought good luck to them. "After discovering it, the owner of the store parked in a loading zone and didn't get a parking ticket,'' they wrote on eBay.

I'm actually pretty sure that's an image of George Harrison in that pizza.

God-man' s supernatural powers exposed in video


This is an Indian God-man. He can create water from air and draw evil spirits from people into coconuts. Or can he? Watch this video to the end to find out.

April 3 – the 38th anniversary of the first cell phone call


Wikimedia Commons
April 3, 1973 should be marked at a national – make that international – holiday. It was on this day that Martin Cooper, now 82, made the first public cell phone call. That first cell phone was so big that it was often described as resembling a shoe, or a brick, weighing 2½ pounds.

Standing on Sixth Avenue in New York City, Cooper made a phone call from a prototype handheld cellular phone before going to a press conference upstairs in the hotel. The phone connected Cooper with the base station on the roof of the Burlington House (now the Alliance Capital Building) across the street from the hotel and into the AT&T land-line telephone system.  As reporters and passers-by watched, he dialed the number and held the phone to his ear and made a call to to Dr. Joel S. Engel, head of research at Bell Labs. 


"As I walked down the street while talking on the phone, sophisticated New Yorkers gaped at the sight of someone actually moving around while making a phone call."

There had been forms of mobile phones before that time, but they were essentially radios, powered by heavy duty components hidden in the car trunk. Cooper was the general manager of Motorola's communications systems division, and believed that people wanted to be able to use the telephone as a mobile device and not be tethered to a wire.

"People want to talk to other people -- not a house, or an office, or a car. Given a choice, people will demand the freedom to communicate wherever they are, unfettered by the infamous copper wire."

Cooper was certainly a visionary, who we can either thank or curse, depending on your viewpoint. A big thank-you Martin Cooper from the Cry Baby.

Charlie Sheen's "My Violent Torpedo of Truth/Defeat is Not an Option" show bombs in Detroit


Not that I was expecting a whole lot from Charlie Sheen's wacko tour, but the reviews seem even worse that expected. The show opened in Detroit and here's a sample of the reviews by BuzzFeed:

• Linda Fugate, 47, of the Detroit suburb of Lincoln Park, left the theater and walked up the street yelling, “I want my money back! “I was hoping for something. I didnt think it would be this bad.”
• “Brutal. I expected him to at least entertain a little bit. It was just a bunch of ranting.” - Rodney Gagnon, 34, of Windsor, Ontario.
• Attendee Chris Acchione, a self-described Sheen fan who traveled all the way from Toronto for the show, says his entire mezzanine row walked out. He's making a fool of himself, he says. Is there a bigger loser in the world? He'll be begging Chuck Lorre for his job back by the end of the week.
* “He was babbling on and on until I wanted to throw up in my seat.”
• Bob Orlowski said he brought six clients to Saturday's performance, thinking it would be an event, but instead witnessed a train wreck. One of his clients said Sheen's performance replaced a Milli Vanilli concert as the worst show he'd ever seen. Now he feels good about Milli Vanilli.
* Tina Mighion, Sterling Heights, MI: “It was the worst thing Ive ever seen in my entire life.”

A roundup of some unfortunate headlines


The history of the world in 100 seconds


Have a look at this 100 second video produced by Gareth Lloyd and Tom Martin. It shows the location and dates of 14,238 historical events between 499 B.C. and 2011 A.D., as recorded by Wikipedia, using only the entries that had geotagging information. From Lloyd's blog:
A static map version on the dataset

"The 'spotlight' is an overlay on the video that tries to keep about 90% of the datapoints within the bright area. It takes a moving average of all the latitudes and longitudes over the past 50 or so years and centres on the mean coordinate. I love the way it opens up, first resembling medieval maps of "The World" which included only Europe and some of Asia, then encompassing "The New World" and finally resembling a modern map."

This is obviously a very Eurocentric, and there are some large gaps in the dataset, but it's very interesting non-the-less.Watch it to the end to get the full effect.


A History of the World in 100 Seconds from Gareth Lloyd on Vimeo.