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Missing Mary Road

of cartoons, politics and religion

February 3rd, 2006 by Abbas Halai

Here is a collection of images of the Prophet Mohammed dating back centuries, up to, including and beyond the present set of cartoons causing an uproar.

Warning: some of the more recent images are generally offensive, not just to Islamic fundamentalists.

Edit: The original site may be slow or not load at all due to high traffic volume. Try these mirrors.

Mirror 1.

Mirror 2.

A zipfile of Mirror 2 images.

Google Cache.

Posted in Uncategorized | 15 Comments »

naked lunch

February 3rd, 2006 by Abbas Halai

This is absolutely mind boggling. (pun intended). Ampulex compressa is a wasp that has evolved to tackle roaches, insert a stinger into their brains and disable their escape reflexes. This lets the wasp use the roach’s antennae to steer the roach to its lair, where it can lay its egg in it. Parasite Rex author Carl Zimmer tells the story in gooey, graphic detail:

The wasp slips her stinger through the roach’s exoskeleton and directly into its brain. She apparently use sensors along the sides of the stinger to guide it through the brain, a bit like a surgeon snaking his way to an appendix with a laparoscope. She continues to probe the roach’s brain until she reaches one particular spot that appears to control the escape reflex. She injects a second venom that influences these neurons in such a way that the escape reflex disappears.
From the outside, the effect is surreal. The wasp does not paralyze the cockroach. In fact, the roach is able to lift up its front legs again and walk. But now it cannot move of its own accord. The wasp takes hold of one of the roach’s antennae and leads it–in the words of Israeli scientists who study Ampulex–like a dog on a leash.

The zombie roach crawls where its master leads, which turns out to be the wasp’s burrow. The roach creeps obediently into the burrow and sits there quietly, while the wasp plugs up the burrow with pebbles. Now the wasp turns to the roach once more and lays an egg on its underside. The roach does not resist. The egg hatches, and the larva chews a hole in the side of the roach. In it goes.

The larva grows inside the roach, devouring the organs of its host, for about eight days. It is then ready to weave itself a cocoon–which it makes within the roach as well. After four more weeks, the wasp grows to an adult. It breaks out of its cocoon, and out of the roach as well. Seeing a full-grown wasp crawl out of a roach suddenly makes those Alien movies look pretty derivative.

Read on.

via BB

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spread the fox

February 3rd, 2006 by Abbas Halai

i am happy to say that majority of my readers are non-IE based. spread the fox girls and boys.

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