Hulleye Comes By!

a giant list of band name origins.

AC/DC - 1) It is said that one of the band member saw it on an appliance and thought it had something to do with power. (It does mean “alternating current / direct current”.) The band used it not realizing it was also slang for a bisexual- the band claims NOT to be bisexual. 2) In the vogue of other anti-everything bands it stands for Against Christ/Devil’s Children.

ALICE IN CHAINS - a funny rumor is that they were named after a lost episode from The Brady Bunch series!…

CHUMBAWAMBA - In a band member’s dream, he didn’t know which door to use in a public toilet because the signs said “Chumba” and “Wamba” instead of “Men” and “Women”…

JETHRO TULL - popular 70’s band that is named after the rather obscure inventor of the farmer’s seed drill…

JUDAS PRIEST - originally a mild curse said to avoid saying “Jesus Christ” - also from the Bob Dylan song “The ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest”…

T PAU - after a high priestess from the planet VULCAN in the American TV series STAR TREK…

YO LA TENGO -translates to “I have it” from Spanish - said to be the phrase called out by Hispanic baseball players when fielding a pop fly ball. Singer/guitar player Ira Kaplan got the expression from a book he was reading about baseball called The Five Seasons.

ZZ TOP - taken from the name of a Texas Blues man ZZ Hill. Though a rumor is that they got their name by combining Zig Zag and Top, two well known brands of “cigarette” rolling papers.

The population of earth fell into “ecological debt” with the planet yesterday. “The date symbolised the day of the year when people’s demands exceeded the Earth’s ability to supply resources and absorb the demands placed upon it.” In 1987, ecological debt day fell on December 19.

Weirdly enough, Bob Holmes for New Scientist has this interesting tidbit.

Imagine that all the people on Earth - all 6.5 billion of us and counting - could be spirited away tomorrow, transported to a re-education camp in a far-off galaxy. (Let’s not invoke the mother of all plagues to wipe us out, if only to avoid complications from all the corpses). Left once more to its own devices, Nature would begin to reclaim the planet, as fields and pastures reverted to prairies and forest, the air and water cleansed themselves of pollutants, and roads and cities crumbled back to dust.

“The sad truth is, once the humans get out of the picture, the outlook starts to get a lot better,” says John Orrock, a conservation biologist at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis in Santa Barbara, California. But would the footprint of humanity ever fade away completely, or have we so altered the Earth that even a million years from now a visitor would know that an industrial society once ruled the planet?

Yossi Vardi shows that data transfer by snail is faster than broadband. “He showed a slide of a snail hitched to a tiny chariot with DVDs for wheels. If each disk contains 4.7 gigabytes of data, and if the snail (chasing a scrap of lettuce) travels at 0.000023 metres per second, the snail-system performance rate is over thirty-seven megabits per second. That blows ADSL out of the water.”