Category Archives: News

news as it is happening-ish

52,000 Mazda6 sedans have been recalled after several reports that yellow sac spiders (above) were found living in the car’s fuel tank.

Mazda spokesman Jeremy Barnes said it was not clear why the yellow sac spider liked to build nests in the Mazda6.

“Perhaps yellow sac spiders like to go zoom-zoom?” he joked

Playing fast and loose with the word ‘joked’.

Mazda Recall Over Fear Of Spiders (Autoblog)

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l0A8Qf893cs

Activists from the militant-feminist wing of the Russian guerilla art group Voina – famous for the spectacular St Petersburg penis bridge graffiti incident – attack female police officers in the Moscow Metro.

With their lips.

Russian police targeted by ‘mass kissing’ stunt (Yahoo News)

“Food contaminated with teeth, zips and washers were among thousands of complaints dealt with by the Food Safety Authority of Ireland (FSAI) last year.

According to its annual report for 2010 nearly 11,000 queries and complaints were handled by the FSAI advice line last year. One in four those calls related to consumers reporting issues concerning food and food establishments – an increase of over 7 per cent on the previous year.

The FSAI said contamination with foreign objects was frequently reported and specific incidents included a live beetle found in a bag of Caesar salad, a moth in a Madeira cake, a washer ring in a bowl of soup, and a zip in a black pudding.

Needles, safety pins, stones and both live and dead insects were also reported to have been found in food.”

Increase In Food Safety Complaints (Irish Times)

The identity of the Prince of Denmark has fascinated scholars for centuries, with disputes about the name’s Jutish, Icelandic or Latin etymology jostling for academic pre-eminence.

Now Dr Lisa Collinson, a medieval Scandinavian expert at Aberdeen University, has published research which traces the unusual word to a little known Gaelic mystery tale from the dark ages.

Shakespeare is known to have borrowed the name Hamlet from a contemporary History of the Danes that had been translated into French. That version in turn was based upon Scandinavian sagas recorded by a 10th or 11th century Icelandic author known as Snow Bear; one verse even refers to a character called Amlothi.

But Collinson, whose work is published in Oxford University Press’s prestigious Review of English Studies, does not abandon her detective work at the conventional explanation adopted by most Shakespearean enthusiasts.

“We can take this further, and match Amlethus and Amlothi with the Gaelic name Admlithi (the “d” is silent) which is related to a Gaelic word for grinding,” she explained.

Collinson maintains that Snow Bear’s Amlothi was probably a corruption of this Gaelic name, used to describe part of the grinding sea – a motif underlying the text’s theme.

Exploring even earlier, she discovered the name Admlithi (the “d” is silent) in an Irish story entitled The Destruction of Da Derga’s Hostel thought to have been compiled in the 8th or 9th century. The tale recounts the story of a king who breaks social taboos and consequently meets a grisly end.

Was The Great Dane Irish? That Is The Question (Guardian)