Soft news story

Another interesting result from Google News. This time it wasn't the pairing of headline and image that looked inappropriate, but the headline itself:

"Levitra soft tabs erfahrung"* ???

Sounds more spammy than your average headline and, sure enough, if you click through on the alleged story, you end up at canadian-pharma dot com:

According to the website, Levita Soft is "a prescription medication for the treatment of erectile dysfunction (ED)."

Maybe it's just me, but even if the dodgy-looking website didn’t put you off, surely the name of the drug would? Or am I the only person who finds the word "soft" a tad insensitive in this context?



*Google Translate tells me that this is German for "experience."

Update - clicking through on headlines like this is not recommended, unless you want to see more headlines like this in your news feed...

Ukip still existing for some reason

I think that reason might be comedy. Mainly because the remarkable Aidan Powlesland is among the gaggle of fruitcakes, loonies and closet racists now vying for the Ukip leadership. And in a three-way contest for the most ridiculous figure in British politics, Aidan is definitely the only candidate who could beat Lord Buckethead and Jacob Rees-Mogg:

Aidan Powlesland, who is standing for parliament in the rural seat of South Suffolk, told BuzzFeed News he wants to set aside £100 million for "an interstellar colony ship design" and £30 million for an "interstellar nano-probe fleet design" designed to attract the attention of Russian investor Yuri Milner, and will provide a £1 billion prize to any private company that can mine the asteroid belt by 2026.
Asked whether asteroid mining was a priority for most UKIP voters – compared to issues such as immigration controls – Powlesland replied: "I suppose the absence of the centrality of a proposition within a general dialogue doesn’t necessarily mean that the dialogue is heading in the correct direction."

...Powlesland's election leaflet also includes a pledge to cut the welfare cap from £20,000 per household to £10,500, abolishing all residential planning legislation to encourage housebuilding, repealing employment laws that entrench "political correctness" so companies can "hire and fire at will", and stopping road construction – because we will soon all be travelling by flying cars.

Other flagship policies include buying "ten flying aircraft carriers" for the armed forces – apparently reviving the large-scale zeppelin programmes of the 1930s – and investing in electromagnetic-pulse submarines. He would deploy 15,000 British troops close to the Russia's border, although in a symbolic gesture of friendship he would also make it easier for Russian tourists to travel to the UK.

In an age when entertainment value trumps sane policymaking every time, ladies and gentlemen, I think we have a winner.

Vote Powlesland. You know it makes sense. Especially if they give all the Ukippers a one-way ticket on the interstellar colony ship, Golgafrinchan B Ark-style.

Rescue boats? I’d use gunships to stop fascists

Refugee rescue boat sent to help far-right anti-immigrant ship stranded in Mediterranean with mechanical failure

See what I just did there, Katie?

By the way, I'm only joking about going all Apocalypse Now on the alt-reich's Mediterranean hate cruise. Fortunately, Katie Hopkins and her fellow trolls love a bit of edgy banter, so I'm sure they'll be wetting themselves with mirth over the hilarious idea of machine-gunning the survivors.

Unreadier than Æthelred

Brexit
ˈbrɛksɪt/
noun

The undefined being negotiatied by the unprepared in order to get the unspecified for the uninformed.

I don't know who came up with this, but I got it from here, via here and also posted it here.

Don't fear the reaper (?)

"Thursday briefing: Trump 'extremely getting on North Korea's nerves'"

Another odd pairing of text and image from Google News. Let's just hope there's no actual connection between an ominous hooded figure with glowing eyes and the clash of egos between two grotesquely oversized toddlers who are allowed to play with nuclear weapons.

Collapse

Easter's chiefs and priests had previously justified their elite status by claiming relationship to the gods, and by promising to deliver prosperity and bountiful harvests.  As their promises were being proved increasingly hollow, the power of the chiefs and priests was overthrown around 1680 by military leaders called matatoa, and Easter's formerly complexly integrated society collapsed in an epidemic of civil war...

...Oral traditions record that the last ahu [stone platforms] and moai [the famous Easter Island statues] were erected around 1620, and that Paro (the tallest statue) was among the last... That the sizes of the statues had been increasing may reflect not only rival chiefs vying to outdo each other, but also more urgent appeals to ancestors necessitated by the growing environmental crisis.

From Collapse, by Jared Diamond. With our own island's political elite apparently too paralysed by panic to do anything about a readily apparent crisis, other than fight among themselves and make obviously undeliverable promises, it seems to me that we've not learned as much from past catastrophes as we should have.

Hybrid vehicle

Camper vans, motor homes, recreational vehicles - their names are legion, but there are usually only two ways of getting one.

1. Buy an off-the-shelf motor home which the manufacturer has built as a motor home
2. Buy some kind of truck, van, or minibus and have the interior fitted out with the appropriate furniture by a professional coachbuilder (or do it yourself if you have the skills, time and tools).

But the individual responsible for the mobile Frankenhome below has no time for such conventional ways of doing things:

"I have a flat bed truck. I have a towed caravan. I graft the caravan body onto the truck. Behold my creation! It's alive! IT'S ALIVE!!!"

Spotted in Scarborough, earlier this week.