How scary are drones? Pretty creepy, according to Germany's defense minister.
"We prefer to pull the plug [on drones]. That applies to the future as well, when costs get out of control. Better an end with horror than a horror without end..."
Drone fear could well grow into something mainsteam and durable.
(via Reason; image via Wikipedia)
A new book finds beautiful visuals in the midst of horrible medical imagery.
The imagery is horrible because it usually stems from disease or trauma: Lou Gherig's Disease, ectopic pregnancy, testicular cancer. There's something classically decadent about the project.
(thanks to Todd Bryant)
A flood wiped out and submerged an Argentine town in the 1980s. Yet this year it surfaced, ruins emerging into the air. Call it a kind of ghost town:
People come to see the rusted hulks of automobiles and furniture, crumbled homes and broken appliances...
...They climb staircases that lead nowhere, and wander through a graveyard where the water toppled headstones and exposed tombs to the elements.
(thanks to Jesse Walker)
Russia is such a Gothic nexus that it breeds vampire moths.
Their discovery must have been quite the surprise:
When the Russian moths were experimentally offered human hands this summer, the insects drilled their hook-and-barb-lined tongues under the skin and sucked blood.
Lest you think there's a global epidemic of the critters, here's evidence for an especially Russian breed of bloodsucking moth-things:
Entomologist Jennifer Zaspel at the University of Florida in Gainesville said the discovery suggests the moth population could be on an "evolutionary trajectory" away from other C. thalictri populations...
"Based on geography, based on behavior, and based on a phenotypic variation we saw in the wing pattern, we can speculate that this represents something different, something new," Zaspel said.
Russia: redefining real-life Gothic, monster by monster.
(thanks to Stevem Burnett)
A woman's esophagus mutated into a spiral horror, delighting fans of Uzumaki everywhere:
The woman had lost 11 pounds in the past several months, and told doctors she had cramplike spasms shortly after eating.
Her doctors performed an endoscopy and found that, when she swallowed, her esophagus had the same helical shape as a playground twisty slide.
Nice analogy! It looks like so:
Infocult normally doesn't examine HuffPo, but makes an exception in this case. Stopped analog clocks are, after all, right twice a day.
(via Naked Capitalism)
A Venezuelan skyscraper failed to fill its spaces with business, and fell empty. Gradually poor people moved in, squatting in what sounds like a disturbing ruin:
‘rooms with a view’ lacked walls, working electricity, running water, windows, balcony railings and certainly no elevator, yet the new residents settled in as high as the 30th floor. Chilling stories of small children playing too close to the edge and deadly winds gusting through living quarters were a constant reminder of the risks they were taking.
Yet those squatters self-organized into a healthy community, turning the Gothic vertical slum into what some call a near utopia.
Torre David Trailer from Urban-Think Tank on Vimeo.
(thanks to Randy McCall)
PLAGUE of SEX CRAZED MONSTER GRASSHOPPERS to hit East Coast
Caps in original.
The never-subtle Register goes on to add in subtitle:
Red-eyed, noisy-as-MOTORBIKES insect ORGY imminent
The cicada swarm is of a variety Gothically labeled "Brood II":
Billions of cicadas are hatching out of the ground and swarming across the eastern seaboard looking for love. They have been sighted around the East Coast but numbers are expected to swell to biblical proportions in the coming days...
Triggered by hormones, they will become adults before having huge orgies in front of horrified East Coast residents.
Inevitably, it's being called Swarmageddon. But it's all overblown, as the big bugs don't actually hurt humans, animals, or crops.
Ghost malls have appeared in China. Well, at least one, and it's a doozy:
[T]he mall is virtually deserted. Despite the bombastic design and grand plans, only a handful of stores are occupied. "Most of it empty, with little consumer traffic and a high vacancy rate," according to a report last year by Emporis, a global building data firm. "It has been classified as a 'dead mall.'"
Walking among shattered shops -- its dusty corridors and escalators covered in soiled sheets -- is a walk through a ghost mall. Rubbish piles up along the sides, paint is coming off the walls and store signs and advertisements have faded.
We've already touched on Chinese ghost cities. And we regularly celebrate dead malls in America.
(thanks to Todd Bryant)
There's a terribly Gothic power to drowned cities. 5 Remarkable Ghost Towns Drowned by Damming offers fine examples of these kinds of ruins.
(link thanks to Randy McCall; photo via Andre Estima)
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