The Linkage for July 31st
Here’s a quick look at what I was reading online from July 18th to July 31st:
Music publisher accuses Men At Work of plundering tune
A music publisher that says Australian band Men At Work stole a melody from a popular children’s song and used it in their 1981 hit “Down Under.” Quite a bit of legal drama for the land down under, where beer does flow and men chunder.
Tags: music australia law
Mass hysteria over perfume sends 34 to hospital
At first, fire officials suspected that carbon monoxide or some other poisonous fumes might have sickened almost 150 people at a Fort Worth bank call center. But then they figured out that the culprit was just perfume.
Tags: texas fort_worth stupid
Aeroflot upgrading what really matters: stewardesses
In further proof that the Soviet mindset is melting away and Russia is finally entering the late 1960s, Russian airline Aeroflot – known as one of the crappiest airlines in the world – is proudly announcing that they’re upgrading their fleet of flight attendants.
Tags: russia travel business
Scientists create transparent aluminum
In news that’ll make future Starfleet engineers proud, Oxford scientists have created a transparent form of aluminum by bombarding the metal with the world’s most powerful soft X-ray laser. Well, they did for about 40 femtoseconds. And no, I don’t know what qualifies an X-ray laser as “soft.”
Tags: science physics star_trek
202 Star Wars T-Shirts
I would wear almost all of these.
Tags: movies star_wars fashion
House of the Century is the funkiest thing near Angleton
After all this time, I never knew there was a hippie folk art house somewhere north of Angleton. I now need to go find this.
Tags: texas angleton art weird architecture
Iraq gets baseball uniforms, courtesy of Ebbets Field
A company that makes reproductions of vintage baseball uniforms read about the sorry state of the Iraqi national baseball team and decided to do something about it.
Tags: baseball business iraq
We have a nominee for Worst Dentist Ever
If you think sore gums are the worst thing that can happen to you at the dentist’s, think again. Why would you go back after the first incident?
Tags: medicine florida
Gallery: Wait, that says Google?!
A gallery of the search engine’s most obscure doodled logos.
Tags: google art
British museum challenges Wikipedia’s ‘fair use’ doctrine
The National Portrait Gallery is fighting Wikipedia after a volunteer added 3,300 high-resolution images of works of art to the online encyclopedia. The museum argues that making the content freely available will undercut funding for their digitization program; the very program which made the paintings available online in the first place.
Tags: technology art wikipedia law uk net_issues
France set to relax Sunday shopping ban
Since 1906, commerical activity on Sundays has been forbidden in France, except in the largest cities. French president Nicolas Sarkozy is now pushing through a measure that would greatly relax that restriction, although he’s had to water it down in the face of significant opposition.
Tags: eu france business society
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