stray bullets

Chinese troops guarding carrots, tomatoes and one lonesome uglyfruit.

True to form, CIA keeps its spy museum hush-hush I hear the NSA's is even more so. (via)

Unbreakable Fighting Umbrella Splits Watermelons, Defends Presidents I would like to take a moment to tell you how happy I am with my new umbrella. Having been a martial artist for over 30 years I have always wished to find a umbrella that could stand the strain of being used in a true self-defense situation. Your umbrella has answered that call and more! Be sure to check out the video. (via)

New service tracks missing laptops for free When the team members first started work on Adeona, it wasn't the tracking and retrieval of missing laptops that piqued their curiosity. It was a privacy problem: How could they build a laptop-tracking service that was so private that even the people running the service could not discover the location of the laptop?

Overreacting to a Computer Beating Poker Pros Newspapers trumpeted a landmark event last week: a computer program beating professional poker players head-to-head at Limit Hold-Em. Parallels have been drawn to Big Blue’s victory over Gary Kasparov roughly a decade ago. Those parallels are not very meaningful.

Out of this world Iain Banks on how practising with SF led to The Wasp Factory The Wasp Factory was Iain Banks's first novel, right? Try sixth. (via)

S. Darko Ed Harcourt is writing the score.

Poppy powder a cheap 'high' Unlike opium, which oozes out as a milky substance from a lacerated poppy bud, poppy powder is made by grinding dried buds from the dried plants, sold in flower shops for decorative purposes. It's a simple process, and in recent years the powder has been increasingly popular in the burgeoning community of Indian origin west of Toronto. They call it "dode" and it's being used as a stimulant. (via)

Man cuts off own head with chainsaw after flat is earmarked to be bulldozed by developers It is understood police are not treating his death as suspicious. Just extremely fucked up. How do you psyche yourself up for that? (via)

Absurd Entries in the OED Ammon Shea spent a year working his way through the Oxford English Dictionary. The result is his book Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages. But in the run-up to his book’s publication, Shea shared many of his most bizarre finds in an Oxford University Press blog.

also:
Interval signals, signature tunes, airchecks and identification announcements from international, domestic, and clandestine radio stations around the world (via)
Allmenus has 244,822 menus in 8,146 cities nationwide. (via)
13 Things Your Waiter Won’t Tell You