Get Cynical

From Wikipedia.

From Yahoo! Food:

What is the secret to getting a solid 7 to 8 hours of sleep? Head for the kitchen and enjoy one or two of these 10 foods. They relax tense muscles, quiet buzzing minds, and/or get calming, sleep-inducing hormones – serotonin and melatonin – flowing. Yawning yet?

From Creative Capital:

Tracking Transience: The Orwell Project is a self-surveillance project. A former subject of an intensive FBI investigation post 9-11, Hasan Elahi is developing a network device, GPS tracker, and website that will make his exact location continuously available to anyone with access to the Internet. Tracking Transience: The Orwell Project builds on a series of installations, performances, and websites that use Elahi’s self-surveillance to critique contemporary investigative techniques. A second innovation in this work is its embrace of surveillance for its subject’s own protection; Elahi has protected himself from unwanted scrutiny by making his entire life and whereabouts publicly accessible.

Sounds interesting but his website is almost impossible to navigate efficiently.
(Thanks Gaby)

Mat writes:

Dear Chris,

I’m a longtime reader who is in a very desperate situation. My fiancee and I are searching for the facts behind our proposed wedding song which we discovered in a Romanian brothel that we had mistaken for a hotel. We’ve got nothing but the melody which I have uploaded onto my blog in the hope that someone out there might know the song and reveal the title or artist in the comments. It’s a longshot, but at this stage we’ve tried everything else.

http://romaroma.blogspot.com/2007/01/help-us-solve-mystery-song.html

Thanks kindly,

Mat

Ah yes, the old, “I swear I didn’t know it was a brothel, I thought it was a Holiday Inn” excuse.

Ok Cynics, if anybody out there wants show off their knowledge of Romanian songs, here’s your chance.

And Radmila has a post with a bunch of other wacky wedding videos.

Oh dear. I’m a big fan of his Belgariad series.

An acclaimed novelist lost his office in Carson City on Thursday when he threw a lit piece of paper into gasoline.

Fantasy writer David Eddings, 75, said he was using water to flush out the gas tank of his broken-down Excalibur sports car, when some fluid leaked. In a lapse of judgment he readily admitted, Eddings lit a piece of paper and threw into the puddle to test if it was still flammable. The answer came in an orange torrent.

The fire raged through the garage and a quarter of the way into the office that occupies the lot next door to his home. His 95-year-old mother-in-law inside the home, came outside to find the juniper trees lining the driveway had gone up in flames, too.

Eddings said his intention to was to prevent a fire – he was afraid to leave a tank full of gasoline in a car that had gone kaput – but instead he did the opposite.

(via SF Signal)

A gallery is composed of pictures taken automatically whenever this guy’s laptop comes out of sleep mode.

(via del.icio.us/plutor)

From SciAm:

MIAMI (Reuters) – When 75,000 football fans pack into Dolphin Stadium in Miami for the Super Bowl on February 4, at least a few may want to carry notes from their doctors explaining why they’re radioactive enough to set off “dirty bomb” alarms.

With the rising use of radioisotopes in medicine and the growing use of radiation detectors in a security-conscious nation, patients are triggering alarms in places where they may not even realize they’re being scanned, doctors and security officials say.

Nearly 60,000 people a day in the United States undergo treatment or tests that leave tiny amounts of radioactive material in their bodies, according to the Society of Nuclear Medicine. It is not enough to hurt them or anyone else, but it is enough to trigger radiation alarms for up to three months.

In August, the British Medical Journal described the case of a very embarrassed 46-year-old Briton who set off the sensors at Orlando airport in Florida six weeks after having radioiodine treatment for a thyroid condition.

He was detained, strip-searched and sniffed by police dogs before eventually being released, the journal said in its “Lesson of the Week” section.

(via Boing Boing)

From LiveScience:

They may now lie in ruins of crumbling stone but, to the people who lived during their glory days, these cities were the centers of the universe. Find out what made them legendary.

(via Evil Bobby)