Asinine Webpage of the Week

New feature: Asinine Webpage of the week.

This week’s winner: “40 pound box of rape” Demotivator

Comments: Only funny to an inbred troglodyte with a limited vocabulary. Witless, no redeeming social, artistic, educational, or comedic merit, and just generally tasteless and offensive.

Plus, demotivators became trite about a year ago (a pattern that Lolcats will follow*). I don’t care if I EVER see another one.

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*Actually, they’re already trite, which is distinct from “popular.”

The Radioactive Boy Scout

This is one of the strangest real-life stories I’ve ever read, and more than a little disturbing.

Complete article @ Harper’s Magazine Online

Condensed version

Golf Manor, a subdivision in Commerce Township, Mich., some 25 miles outside of Detroit, is the kind of place where nothing unusual is supposed to happen, where the only thing lurking around the corner is an ice-cream truck. But June 26, 1995, was not a typical day.

Ask Dottie Pease. Cruising down Pinto Drive, Pease saw half a dozen men crossing her neighbor’s lawn. Three, in respirators and white moon suits, were dismantling her next-door neighbor’s shed with electric saws, stuffing the pieces into large steel drums emblazoned with radioactive warning signs.

Huddled with a group of neighbors, Pease was nervous. “I was pretty disturbed,” she recalls. Publicly, the employees of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) that day said there was nothing to fear. The truth is far more bizarre: the shed was dangerously irradiated and, according to the EPA, up to 40,000 residents of the area could be at risk.

The cleanup was provoked by the boy next door, David Hahn. He had attempted to build a nuclear reactor in his mother’s shed following a Boy Scout merit-badge project….

(from the condensed version)

Particles

Visit the site, and simply click your mouse within the circle, where the particles are swirling. Try clicking in different locations, or multiple clicks in one location, or try moving your cursor around in quick circles, holding the left mouse button down, and then abruptly releasing it. The effect is really quite beautiful.