News for Youse: Climate change ruins hockey, and the curious world of Sting
With thousands or possibly even hundreds of Vancouverites taking to the streets on Saturday to protest the Robocall scandal, it’s time for News for Youse to forcefully state yet again: technology—what a douche!
Take for instance this astoundingly pointless and stupid new thing dubbed a “speech-jamming gun”.
Designed by researchers in Japan, the speech-jamming gun uses the Delayed Audio Feedback effect to achieve our long-cherished dream of making people involuntarily babble like stroke victims. Why? Because “we have to establish and obey rules for proper turn-taking when speaking,” according to its inventors.
Or, to put it another way—bullshit! This nightmarish machine was built “to enforce ‘proper’ conversations” as the people at Extreme Tech quite rightfully point out. Or it was designed to make newsreaders look even goofier than usual:
We owe some thanks tour friends at the Rigorous Intuition message board for speculating that the mysterious rash of suddenly aphasic newsreaders we saw last spring was the result of some underhanded speech-jammer field testing. We have no evidence to support the claim, but you know.
Moving on—good news for those among us who feel there just aren’t enough insanely destructive new weapons in the hands of the military. Here’s a video of the US Office of Naval Research testing its long-coveted railgun, which is capable of shooting a 40-pound cinder block at 5600 miles per hour over a distance of 50 to 100 nautical miles.
Just wait till they approve that mofo for home use! Technology is also continuing to not solve our incipient climate change problems—unless you factor in the potential use of hypersonic cinder blocks and speech-jamming machinery to enforce post-collapse military lockdown, but you probably already connected those dots.
More immediately, the CBC reports today that Canada’s outdoor ice-rinks are in jeopardy thanks to global warming. A British study co-authored by McGill University’s Lawrence Mysak states that “a warmer winter caused by climate change is restricting outdoor ice rinks from operating,” with southeastern British Columbia being among the hardest hit. So there you go hockey fans: no more Scott Niedermayers for you. Kindly address your rage to the Heartland Institute, ExxonMobil, and your election-tampering government.
Finally, News for Youse cannot let pass without comment the recent emergence of pictures showing finely-cut fake new wave artist turned weirdo multi-billionaire Sting palling around with Syrian despot Bashar al-Assad.
Putting aside all that guff about his work with Amnesty International and what a great guy he really is— really, really—we should remember that Mr. Sumner’s former bandmate and manager were both children of lifetime CIA officer Miles Copeland. Along with his other Middle Eastern adventures, which included helping to depose Iran’s democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh in ‘53, Copeland was heavily involved in engineering Syrian politics in the late ‘40s—an effort that snowballed into the lovely situation we see there today.
Ipso facto, therefore, and in the spirit of all this, News for Youse is maintaining that the Police were an intelligence front as much as they were a band; an unprovable and largely stupid assertion that nonetheless still makes more sense to us than either Sting’s “Hey, I had no idea!” excuse for the meeting with Assad, or the sales figures for Zenyatta Modatta.
Comments
4 Comments
DavidH
Mar 5, 2012 at 11:05am
According to climate change deniers, the disappearance of outdoor hockey rinks is a perfectly natural result of periodic "global warming" and has nothing whatsoever to do with pumping a gazillion, trillion tons of toxic waste into the atmosphere.
I look forward to the day when I see Don Cherry and his ventrilo-dummy conduct their NHL Winter Classic interviews standing knee-deep in really cold water. Perfectly natural (and explained by at least six whack-job scientists employed by Shell Oil).
In other news, it is perfectly natural to have a gazillion, trillion tons of plastic waste forming "islands" in the world's oceans. Apparently, this has been happening every few centuries, even before plastic was invented. Odd, that.
Mark Fornataro
Mar 5, 2012 at 3:16pm
Stephen Harper is a big hockey fan;I believe he even wrote a book about it. I'd love to see him invited to an outdoor hockey game for PR reasons, and then have a news report it was cancelled due to warm temperatures attributed to climate change. He's probably clever enough, though, to not risk that.
A. MacInnis
Mar 6, 2012 at 12:06am
On a more aphasic note, I think I have a pretty good theory for the first speaker's incoherent babbling: he was reporting "live from Japan," or whatever gets said at the end of the clip. There is an unfortunate tendency among some people in the non-English-speaking world, frustrated by years of exposure to incompetent and impractical language teaching and on the verge of giving up even trying to learn English, to simply plug text (in Japanese) into translating programs and copy down verbatim what the program provides (I mean, if the computer says its right, it must be right, eh?). ESL students of mine have done this and made me deeply afraid for their mental health, before I realized what they were up to. I THINK this poor shmuck is reading English produced in just this way off a teleprompter; he's incapable of correcting it as he goes because he has no more sense what the story is supposed to read than we do. To illustrate how RIDICULOUS such English can be, I will now copy all of the above into the Babelfish translation engine, translate it into Japanese, then back into English, and repost it here, as my next comment.
A. MacInnis
Mar 6, 2012 at 12:11am
NOTE: the following is what happens when my "previous" post is bounced through the Yahoo Babel Fish translation Engine, from English into Japanese and then back again:
More with the note of aphasic, I me first speaker' You think of that for the sake of it possesses rather good theory; Clatter in the non connection of s: As for him " of report; Was; Japanese " The empty live; Or being said by the edge of the clip, as for those which can with what. What which the program offers being disabled, to language professor who is not authentic and learning English simply, in the translator and the copy the text (with Japanese) word-for-word there is an unfortunate tendency between the people of some person of the world where you do not speak English which is disappointed by year of exposure just before of offer of thing which tries the thing which inserts, if (I the computer say right, that it must be correct? It means). The ESL student of my ones before I actualize, did this to those which are, me tried to fear deeply because of their mental health. If I this bad shmuck separated like this do from Teleprompter exactly, with you think of that English which is created is read; he' The story reads is supposed because what which he the possession does not do the feeling above this when he goes, simultaneously cannot do that correction from s which us. Ridiculous that kind of England how in case of a certain, whether it is, in order to explain, I in Japanese, that, copy that in repost again in the Babelfish translation engine everything with respect to now, is translated here and as English and my following comment. Satan! Satan! Satan!
(Okay, I added that last part).