techyum ::

This is so gross and such a biohazard — but, it seems that R&D Systems, a company that does medical testing actually has a permit to dump human and animal blood into the Minneapolis sewer system. (And apparently so do slaughterhouses and other medical facilities, ew.) The amount of blood discovered by sewer workers is so large in volume that it literally spayed up and out into a worker’s face. I mean, here in SF we even have pretty signs over all the sewer drains with pictures of little crabs on them that say “water only, please” — with no disclaimers for animal testing or serial killers.
Blood Sprays Out of Sewer, On City Worker (wcco.com, with icky video, via Digg)

A quick glance around Dream Kitty’s Hello Kitty Digital Life store shows that you too can make your office look like either:
a) you have *outstanding* drug connections
b) you ate Hello Kitty and threw her up all over your workstation
c) you are a Goth with some seriously dark issues
But their newest item? The so-called Hello Kitty Skype Phone. I am not a Skype fan, but still. So cute. It hurts. And the hurting hurts. Ow.

I’m in the market for a drive, so when I found the gorgeous Lexar JumpDrive Lightning, my mind reeled at the fashion possibilities — you may judge if you must, but I want a tool that I’ll want to take everywhere with me, and so it’s gotta look good. You can get these slick little fobs on Amazon for like a third of the price, but they’ll laser-engrave it free for you if you get it from the manufacturer. I just wish my dream drive, the SanDisk Cruzer Titanium (crush-proof over 2000 pounds, SRL safe) looked this good — I’d even wear it as a necklace.
Sixty-second update: Praemedia sez it’s not for Mac users, but a girl can dream.
Wait: There’s a Mac driver for that drive!

I haven’t watched South Park in a while so I missed the episode in question, which ran last wednesday the 28th — in The Snuke they parody 24, depicting an elaborate terrorist plot where the Queen tries to regain control of the US (and Hilary Clinton winds up with a doomsday device in her vagina, hmmm). Upon failure to overthrow our regime du jour, Elizabeth II puts a gun in her mouth and pulls the trigger. Needless to say, some are calling for the ban of this episode, which is set to air in the UK this year. Today there’s a great, even-handed post about it on the Guardian’s Arts Blog that explains more (and a bit of a firestorm in the comments).

BBC America has a writeup on the midwest tornadoes that killed four as they swept through Oklahoma, Texas, Kansas, Colorado and Nebraska (since Wednesday). The really insane photos are by Texas panhandle storm chaser Maupin, taken on the 28th, seen now on Flickr (photo via). Holly, Colorado got hit hard as you can see in the astounding damage to *everything* in this tagged collection by Krissi B. and hsflint’s documentation of what’s left of his neighbors’ homes. There are many, many more…

And we are shocked. They really need to change the name of his department. And maybe the name of his position. Or just the name on his desk. I like the Guardian Unlimited’s piece:

White House approved sacking of prosecutors
· Key aide tells senators of Bush team’s involvement
· Attorney general facing growing pressure to quit
Suzanne Goldenberg in Washington
Friday March 30, 2007
The Guardian
The Bush administration yesterday faced charges of trying to subvert the course of justice for political ends after it emerged in Senate testimony that the White House had been directly involved in the sacking of eight federal prosecutors.
The first direct casualty of yesterday’s proceedings in the Senate judiciary committee was the credibility of the attorney general, Alberto Gonzales, after his former chief of staff, Kyle Sampson, demolished earlier claims that he had not been involved in the sackings.
But Mr Sampson’s testimony may have inflicted even greater damage on the White House by exposing the intimate involvement of George Bush’s most trusted advisers – the political supremo, Karl Rove and the president’s former legal counsel Harriet Miers – in the sacking of prosecutors who did not do enough to further a political agenda.
“The decision makers in this case were the attorney general and the counsel to the president,” Mr Sampson told the committee. “I and others made staff recommendations, but they were approved and signed off on by the principals.”

Link.
Let’s not forget why they were fired.

In practicality, these lovely phones would be useless to me — or, totally useful if all I want to do is look cool and actually answer my phone once in a while. They’re really beautiful, much prettier than the Prada phone (which I’ve held and played with). Here are the two (okay, one and a teaser) available in the US for Nokia’s L’Amour line (sound alert, nokia.com). Dig the ceramic, leather and mirror on the not-yet-released 7380, yum. But the really pwetty ones are available in the UK. I think the 7373 is hot — too bad it’ll probably be like five years until someone makes a sassy qwerty version with this kind of runway-good-looks.
Here’s Giz on L’Amour; here’s Shiny on L’Amour.

Now I’ve decided that the word ‘steampunk’ is wonderful and plan to misuse it accordingly. Not that there’s anything vaguely Jules Verne, neo-Victorian, steam-powered or clock-gear-reminiscent about the body-pierced tribal body armor art I just found in a slideshow at Skin Factory — but it’s just cyberpunk-comes-true enough to almost fit, don’t you think? The body art is astounding, but the slideshows are so tedious and hard to watch (they’re like ten million blog years long) that I capped three faves from slideshow #2: the other two images are after the jump and one is NSFW. Yes, those are lovely pieces of (machined?) metal bolted onto her back by way of body piercings. It sure looks like it’s a tribute to this image by fantasy sci-fi artist Luis Royo.

Read more…

Hey, don’t blame me for using the trendiest word in Blogistan right now to describe this tat — someone in the comments called it ‘steampunk‘, not that the word has much meaning anymore (and… yaaaaawn). But it’s a pretty cool gearhead variation on tribal tats, especially with gray and white ink — here’s the ModBlog post, picture via. (thanks, Suicide Bots!)

Forbes has a fairly complete writeup — woe if you shopped in Marshall’s, T.J. Maxx or any other TJX store from 03-04 — they’ve finally revealed the extent of the damage done, that we first heard about in January. Snip from TJX Says Info From 45.7M Cards Stolen:

Information from at least 45.7 million credit and debit cards was stolen by hackers who accessed TJX’s customer information in a security breach that the discount retailer disclosed more than two months ago.
TJX Cos. (nyse: TJX – news – people ), the owner of about 2,500 stores, said in a regulatory filing late Wednesday that about three-quarters of those cards had either expired at the time of the theft, or data from their magnetic strips had been masked – stored as asterisks rather than numbers.
But TJX acknowledged it still knows little about the full scope of the breach, in part because the hacker or hackers accessed TJX’s encryption software and could have known how to unscramble the information.

Link.