Dilapidated buildings and piles of rubble greet participants on a recent media tour to Gunkanjima (battleship island), an abandoned former coal mining community in Nagasaki. The island has been included in a tentative list of candidates for designation as a UNESCO World Heritage site by the Cultural Affairs Agency, along with other former industrial sites in surrounding prefectures. Officially known as Hashima island, it was a major source of coal until the mine closed in 1974. In its heyday, more than 5,000 people inhabited the island, whose contours resemble a battleship. While Hashima is currently off-limits, the city of Nagasaki plans to open it to the public next spring. Gunkanjima at one point had the highest population density in the world, but now it is a ghost town. Wikipedia article here; slideshow of very evocative photos taken just before abandonment here; another slideshow by the same photographer showing the island in recent years here.
Posted by: Mike ||
11/20/2008 12:39 ||
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#1
Folks, i don't know who the 'Mike Kozlowski' listed in the posting info is, but it ain't me.
Mike
Posted by: Mike Kozlowski ||
11/20/2008 18:51 Comments ||
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#3
Hey - how'd my name get in the bottom of the post there? :-(
Posted by: Barbara Skolaut ||
11/20/2008 19:02 Comments ||
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Don't know but the Pentagon is undergoing a huge cyber attack at the moment as well. Hope it is not a precurser to some other... even more serious situation.
An extraordinary account from a German army medic has finally confirmed what the world long suspected: Hitler only had one testicle. . . . The war tyrantÂ’s medical condition has been mocked for years in a British song.
The lyrics are: It's time for "Sing Along With Mitch Miller," folks. Follow the bouncing, uh ... ball! Hitler has only got one ball,
Göring has two but very small,
Himmler is somewhat sim'lar,
But poor old Goebbels has no balls at all.
Hitler has only got one ball,
The other is on the kitchen wall,
His mother, the dirty b——r,
Chopped it off when he was small.
Until now there has never been complete proof Hitler was monorchic — the medical term for having one testicle. But the document tells how Jambor saw the proof with his own eyes. In the account, he relives the horror of serving as an army medic in World War I. . . .
“For several hours, Johan and his friends picked up injured soldiers. He remembers Hitler.
“They called him the 'Screamer.' He was very noisy. Hitler was screaming ‘help, help.' His abdomen and legs were all in blood. Hitler was injured in the abdomen and lost one testicle. His first question to the doctor was: ‘Will I be able to have children?'"
Hitler’s genitals have long caused controversy. Some historians dismissed the “one ball” song as propaganda. But an alleged Soviet autopsy on Hitler backed it up. Records show Hitler did suffer a groin injury in the Somme.
Posted by: Mike ||
11/20/2008 07:22 ||
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#2
It's sung to the march from the "Bridge on the River Kwai" if you want to try it. The opening scene where they are all whistling, a great musical joke. We used to sing it at High School.
And that is my earworm for today.
Posted by: ed ||
11/20/2008 11:58 Comments ||
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According to my parents, there was another set of ribald lyrics for the same tune circulating at the Fort Knox armor school in the Korean War, which was supposed to have come from the cavalry originally:
Horse shit, it makes the grass grow green,
Horse shit, it makes the grass grow green . . .
Posted by: Mike ||
11/20/2008 12:12 Comments ||
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"...an alleged Soviet autopsy on Hitler backed it up"? That must have been interesting... I thought Hitler's body was so burned it was basically unrecognizable, and generally only bone fragments remained.
Posted by: Dar ||
11/20/2008 16:08 Comments ||
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When was physical evidence a hurdle to Soviet propaganda?
Posted by: ed ||
11/20/2008 16:19 Comments ||
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SHANNON, Ireland, Nov. 19 (UPI) -- A flight attendant aboard an Air Canada passenger jet helped land the aircraft in Ireland after its co-pilot suffered a mental breakdown, officials said. Irish aviation reports revealed the January incident, which necessitated an emergency landing at Shannon Airport, the British tabloid the Daily Mail reported Wednesday.
Witnesses told investigators the co-pilot aboard the Toronto-to-London flight, which was carrying 146 passengers, began rambling incoherently and eventually became belligerent and uncooperative. His erratic behavior forced the pilot to enlist the help of the flight crew to remove him from the cockpit and restrain him in a passenger seat.
The pilot then asked those aboard the Boeing 767 if anyone had any piloting experience, and a flight attendant with a commercial pilot's license was tapped to help land the jetliner at Shannon, the newspaper said.
Irish officials praised the flight attendant and the rest of the crew for maintaining their calm. Officials indicated the co-pilot was admitted to the acute psychiatric unit of Ennis Regional Hospital in County Claire for 11 days, the Daily Mail said.
Posted by: Steve White ||
11/20/2008 00:00 ||
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If he gets some off campus privileges, he should go down to Miltown Malbay. Great pubs. Or maybe Doolin.
Posted by: Alaska Paul ||
11/20/2008 1:12 Comments ||
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I'm tempted to ask if they interrupted his prayer session, but I won't.
#6
While having a commercial pilot's license means the Flight Attendant wasn't quite so inexperienced as you'd think, it's still quite good for them to step up to the plate when needed.
#8
Probably wanted to be a pilot, and qualified as such, but with the cutbacks there were no positions available. So she gets to serve lunch (they still do that?) until things turn around for the industry. She may retire first.
#10
I could be wrong but commercial pilot license means you can fly 747s but only as long as they are loaded with cargo not passengers.
In oral circumsatnces you also need to be qualified for that specific plane.
Also notice that in this particular case there was a qualified pilot doing the landing so the attendant only needed to act like Pilot not in Function (ie communicate the radio, read the check list and similar tasks.
Rajshahi University authorities yesterday banned a theatre group under pressure from Islami Chhatra Shibir for staging a drama that Shibir claimed to be blasphemous. RU Registrar Prof Muhammad Shafi issued a press release, banning Dhumketu Natya Sangsad and staging of its drama "Mandar" on the campus.
However, an RU committee formed to review the play did not find anything blasphemous in it.
Sources said although the authorities showed Dhumketu's being unregistered with the Teacher Student Culture Centre as the reason for the ban, it was banned for staging the play on November 3 in protest against removal of baul sculptures from the airport intersection in Dhaka.
Shibir, the student wing of Jamaat-e-Islami, observed a strike on the campus demanding punishment to the Udichi activists who performed in the play and threatened to stop the ongoing admission tests if Udichi and Dhumketu were not banned.
Sources alleged that the RU authorities took the decision to ban Dhumketu bypassing the recommendations of the 11-member review committee headed by social science faculty Dean Prof Sadekul Islam.
Abu Sayem, general secretary of Udichi RU unit, criticised the university authorities saying the Jamaat-backed administration took the decision under threats from Shibir. He said they would take legal action against the authorities.
When contacted, RU Vice-Chancellor Prof Mamnunul Keramat said, "We took the decision on the basis of a review of the overall situation."
Posted by: Fred ||
11/20/2008 00:00 ||
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A senior Mexican police official who worked as the country's liaison with Interpol was arrested Tuesday as part of an ongoing investigation into information leaks from top law enforcement authorities to the nation's notorious drug cartels.
Posted by: Fred ||
11/20/2008 00:00 ||
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I suppose this will affect his police pension. Tough break. It is encouraging to see this kind of progress in the drug wars. Better than we seem to be doing at home, comparatively speaking.
Posted by: Richard of Oregon ||
11/20/2008 4:16 Comments ||
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OT: Reinhard Heydrich ran Interpol for a few years...
#1
The reason that this all happened was because of the fierce and brutal competition between video card manufacturers, all over computer gaming. Gamers were intensely interested on having the best system, and would pay the big bills for it.
#2
If this stuff gets exported to Iran it will make things all the harder. But Obama has a plan to fix all this. He will spread NVIDIAs wealth around to a bunch of clueless fuc&s who won't use the money productively.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
