Why? Because Pope Benedict XVI can do what he wants, I guess. He spent about twenty minutes video chatting with the crew of the International Space Station and the U.S shuttle Endeavour, conveying well-wishes for Gabrielle Gifford’s husband, and generally just shooting the breeze.
ANC Nelson Mandela Bay chairperson Nceba Faku encouraged more than 100 party members to burn down Port Elizabeth’s The Herald newspaper as he celebrated the party’s election victory outside the Port Elizabeth City Hall on Thursday night. Faku said the party was celebrating an “important battle that is between the ANC and the media”.
Final results of the local government elections have been trickling in all day and the country’s free broadcaster has been doing a good job of keeping live feeds interesting. Just after lunchtime things got a little hectique though when ANCYL child Julius Malema refused a live debate with the DA’s Lindiwe Mazibuko, calling her “The madam’s tea lady.”
Viagra might be the saviour for many men in the sack, but it turns out that man’s love-drug of choice might be causing hearing loss.
The Tokyo Electric Power Company has released dramatic new photographs showing the immense power and immediate devastation the tsunami waves caused at Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant on March 11. The moment-of-impact images were taken from the fourth floor of the radioactive waste disposal building.
It’s called iPlayboy because, well hell, what else were they going to call it? The appeal here is not so much that you get to see tastefully nude photographs in glorious iPad detail as the fact that the application offers full access tothe Playboy archives – you would own every Playboy issue ever. Welcome to the future.
Zimbabwean defence minister, Emmerson Mnangagwa, has told the Zimbabwean parliament that China will put up the money for the completion of the Robert Mugabe School of Intelligence. It’s not clear how and when the money will be repaid by the Zimbabwean government, who’s debt to China is now about US$1.65 billion.
Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo, the commercial spaceflight vehicle, recently had its seventh test flight, dropped from a height of 15km to see if it could adjust speed and bearing with various wing configurations. Which sounds technically fancy, but really just looks insanely cool.
Google has been hit with a string of security flaws lately and the internet giant has now been exposed yet again with a “significant security hole” being found in its smartphone operating system, Google Android. As usual with these things, it can allow attackers to gain access to users’ personal information without their permission.
Ha! Well done. Exactly nine days after setting up a Twitter account, the Secret Service was seen to post the following: “Had to monitor FOX for a story. Can’t. Deal. With. The. Blathering.” The tweet wasn’t deleted in time for all of the giggling, left-wing internet to leap at it. An “internal follow-up” is in progress.
Car Magazine’s May issue is ever so slightly different from previous incarnations. Sure, there’s a hot car on the cover. The typeface “CAR” is as red, and bold, as ever. All of the usual sluglines are there. And then you notice this QR code at the bottom left-hand corner of the cover.
Wow. Alright. Apple gave the the green light to a mobile app that promises to connect rich old dudes with young women. Sugar daddies with gold diggers. Seriously. They call themselves SugarSugar, “the world’s most effective and discreet place for finding Sugar Daddy and Sugar Baby relationships.”
In what is surely a ground-breaking ruling around the subject of freedom of speech in South Africa, the words “dubula ibhunu” (shoot the boer) were declared an incitement to murder in a judgement handed down in the High Court in Johannesburg today by Judge Leon Halgryn.
Since 9/11, flying has sucked. For all of the wrong reasons, flight security has become paranoid and despotic, and nowhere worse than the USA – where TSA agents have manhandled infants and the infirm in ‘the war on terror.’ So it’s nice to see that the Texas House of Representatives just banned TSA searches without probable cause.
The ANCYL’s website has been suffering a plethora of minor hack attacks over the course of the last 24 hours – and by “hack attack” we don’t mean pithy insults by liberal journalists. Yesterday evening the landing page of ancyl.org.za looked like this:
Billionaire co-founder of Galleon Group, Raj Rajaratnam, has been convicted in what prosecutors called the largest insider trading case ever involving hedge funds. He remains free on $100 million bail and was placed under house arrest at his Manhattan home to await sentencing on July 29.
2oceansvibers are renowned for appreciating a bit of creative advertising humour from time to time. And with electioneering currently taking up a rather large amount of media space as we get ready for the local government elections next Wednesday, the ever resourceful Kalahari.net has decided to bless us with some radvertising.
Archaeologists in Florence, Italy, began searching yesterday for the remains of a woman thought to be the model who sat for Leonardo Da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa”. The reason: curiosity.
Some years ago I made my way over to mud island, London specifically, and one thing I always appreciated was not having to rush to the bank on a Saturday morning just because that was the way things were. This is surely good for banking in South Africa and a giant leap toward getting Saturday mornings back.
Hooray! I hear you say at the great news that Rovio, creator of the extremely addictive “Angry Birds”, has decided to release a version for Google Chrome. Peter Vesterbacka of Finnish software firm Rovio, made the announcement at a Google developers conference yesterday.
Surprise! Security firm Symantec yesterday reported that a hole in the Facebook security system allowed third-parties like advertisers access to user accounts and private data – and that this hole has been in place for the past four years, since Facebook first started offering apps to its users.
And now I don’t want to live on this planet anymore. Around 3,000 words have been added this year in the “most comprehensive Scrabble wordlist ever produced,” which I would be more upset about if most of my Scrabble games didn’t end in tears and fire. Also included: ‘innit,’ ‘thang,’ ‘fansite,’ and ‘Facebook.’
The crew of National Geographic Channel’s hit series Shark Men announced this past Friday that they had broken the previous record for the biggest Great White Shark ever caught and released alive. They exhibited their capture on Sunday night on the US version of the show. We’ll unfortunately have to wait a bit to see it over here in Africa.
Maybe some out there think that the whole “zombie” thing has become a bit passé, but they are, of course, wrong. Now the whole “vampire” thing, that’s passé. That is why when I saw this house, I felt obliged to share it with you, the good readers of 2oceansvibe. Welcome to the world’s first zombie-proof house, a cube of concrete that closes in on itself.
Reports over the weekend have claimed that UK journalist and newspaper Twitter feeds are possibly going to become regulated. In essence they’ll be brought under the regulation of the Press Complaints Commission later in the year. No doubt fingers will strike keypads aggressively in weeks to come, the fearless bunch that the UK press are.
Apparently not content with Facebook poking, the Kajimoto Research Laboratory is trying to enhance long-distance relationships with electronic kissing. It’s called the Kiss Transmission Device: a straw-like contraption whereby as one user waggles his or her tongue around the straw to rotate it, the straw on the other end rotates accordingly.
Yay, future. If you’ve had a digital camera stolen, you can upload a photo taken with the missing camera to StolenCameraFinder.com and it’ll use the serial number embedded in the image to search for matching photos online – meaning you can find the douche who took your stuff.
I’ve been keeping an eye on what I refer to as the ‘jet-pack issue’ since I was a small child. I am of course referring to the personal jet-backpack we first saw James Bond use in Thunderball. It was understood that Bond might be ahead of the game and it may well take a bit […]
Chinese factories making iPads and iPhones are forcing staff to sign pledges not to commit suicide. If your first reaction to this story’s headline is one of confusion, then join the club. I mean, why would someone who builds iPads for a living be anything but ecstatic, right? But do yourself a favour and read through the rest of this piece before switching careers.
Hemingway drank cocktails. I’m just saying that now so that any concerns about masculinity and ‘girly drinks’ are shelved from the get-go. Multimedia artist Marcos Lutyens has set up an installation that projects arsty scans from EEG headsets worn by people drinking Absolut vodka, and if boozey brain-waves isn’t art then I don’t know what is.