...from News of the Weird (very good this week)
Bright Ideas
Among the secret British military plans recently revealed from classified documents: (1) a huge landmine to be planted during World War II on the German plains (to prevent the Soviet army from overreaching), to be kept at a warm, detonatable temperature by the body heat of thousands of live chickens underground (according to Britain's National Archives in April), and (2) a post-World War II plan disclosed in May to equip pigeons as suicide dive-bombers carrying explosives and biological agents to a targeted area. (The military said its research showed that homing pigeons could be tricked via electromagnetic fields into sensing that their "home" was actually the target area, but pigeon experts say it is more likely the pigeons would have returned to dive-bomb Britain.) [Boston Globe-AP, 4-1-04] [Australian Broadcasting Company Online, 5-22-04]
At the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign's "Sex Out Loud" Health Awareness Fair in March, the Feminist Majority organization sponsored a "giant vagina structure" for which students could pay a dollar and stick their heads in to have their pictures taken. Said a spokesperson, "There are a lot of phallic symbols in society, and we wanted to put a vaginal one out there." [Daily Illini, 3-19-04]
News of the Weird
Among the secret British military plans recently revealed from classified documents: (1) a huge landmine to be planted during World War II on the German plains (to prevent the Soviet army from overreaching), to be kept at a warm, detonatable temperature by the body heat of thousands of live chickens underground (according to Britain's National Archives in April), and (2) a post-World War II plan disclosed in May to equip pigeons as suicide dive-bombers carrying explosives and biological agents to a targeted area. (The military said its research showed that homing pigeons could be tricked via electromagnetic fields into sensing that their "home" was actually the target area, but pigeon experts say it is more likely the pigeons would have returned to dive-bomb Britain.) [Boston Globe-AP, 4-1-04] [Australian Broadcasting Company Online, 5-22-04]
At the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign's "Sex Out Loud" Health Awareness Fair in March, the Feminist Majority organization sponsored a "giant vagina structure" for which students could pay a dollar and stick their heads in to have their pictures taken. Said a spokesperson, "There are a lot of phallic symbols in society, and we wanted to put a vaginal one out there." [Daily Illini, 3-19-04]
News of the Weird