Peli-can I Get A Table Dance?
A pelican from Florida flew 1400 miles to a strip club in Canada. Above is a completely accurate artist’s rendering of these events. Just look at how happy he is. That’s because pelicans can’t catch herpes. Well, I don’t think they can. Nothing showed up in a search for “pelican herpes” although I’m pretty sure I’m on another watchlist now.
Algeria Update
On Saturday we mentioned the protests in Algeria planned for that day. Now we can offer an update. Despite flooding Algiers with about 35,000 police officers and blocking roads into the city, thousands of protesters still made it to the May 1 Square and chanted, “Free and democratic Algeria”. Hundreds of protesters and Algerian expats also assembled at the Place de la République in Paris in solidarity with pro-democracy Algerians.
The riot police in Algiers used tear gas and rubber bullets on the protesters, and at least 500 people were arrested. There are reports that journalists were especially targeted for arrest, particularly if they had a camera. Some are speculating the government is trying to keep images and news of the protest under wraps, and they’re probably right considering the Algerian government’s current tactic: internet providers were shut down and Facebook profiles were deleted en masse during the Saturday protest. Great idea. Internet suppression didn’t backfire at all in Egypt.
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- Florida pelican travels to Canada, visits strip club. As one does. (9News)
- Demonstrators gather in Algiers and in Paris to protest the Algerian government.
- Algeria shuts down internet providers and deletes Facebook accounts during the protests on Saturday. (Telegraph)
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- The guerilla art group Voina (“War”) in Russia painted a 65 meter (~213 ft) penis on a bascule bridge which would face the Federal Security Services (successor of the KGB) building when raised. That takes balls. (Arbroath, with video)
- A Kickstarter project is replacing every use of the n-word in Huck Finn with the word “robot” as well as updating the illustrations with the new “Robot Jim” character. This still makes more sense than that other censored version. (Kickstarter)
- Music-suggestion internet radio service Pandora is filing for an IPO, plans to suggest buyers look at another stock that’s nothing like the one they were looking for. (TheNextWeb)
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- Music-sharing website SoundCloud (founded 2008) has signed up its 3 millionth user after growing 50% in 100 days. Your move, Myspace. (Mashable)
- Is music piracy really killing the business? In a study commissioned by NBC Universal, only 2.9% of files in a BitTorrent tracker were music files. Porn videos were the number one category (35.8%). Feature films and TV shows also has a strong showing with 35.2% and 12.7% respectively. (SAI)
- USAID celebrates its 50th anniversary with this infographic. We celebrated by chugging antimalarial drugs and gin.
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