The Glee Club at Auschwitz

This photograph, taken at Auschwitz, shows “nearly a hundred officers arrayed like a glee club up the side of a hill. The accordion player stands across the road,” Wilkinson writes. “All the men are singing except those in the very front, who perhaps feel too important for it.” The group includes Richard Baer; Rudolf Hoess, who had supervised the building of Auschwitz and had been its first commandant; and Josef Mengele, the doctor who performed infamous medical experiments on twins and other prisoners. This album contains eight pictures of Mengele—the only known photographs of him at Auschwitz.

From the New Yorker Online this week.

Love These Stamps: Laika

Must Read for You Floydians Who Are Still Out There

From the blurb:

A behind-the-scenes, in-depth look at the making of one of the greatest studio masterpieces and most commercially successful albums ever recorded—fully illustrated with many never-before-seen photos.

Feels Good Doesn't It with Oil at an All Time High

While I do not defend the Hummista, the Pristas ought to know that a Hummer, over its lifetime, creates about half the pollution of a Prius. And if we really wanted to be environmentally friendly, we ought all to be driving Nanos.

March 7, 2007

Prius Outdoes Hummer in Environmental Damage
By Chris Demorro
Staff Writer

The Toyota Prius has become the flagship car for those in our society so environmentally conscious that they are willing to spend a premium to show the world how much they care. Unfortunately for them, their ultimate ‘green car’ is the source of some of the worst pollution in North America; it takes more combined energy per Prius to produce than a Hummer.

...

Building a Toyota Prius causes more environmental damage than a Hummer that is on the road for three times longer than a Prius. As already noted, the Prius is partly driven by a battery which contains nickel. The nickel is mined and smelted at a plant in Sudbury, Ontario. This plant has caused so much environmental damage to the surrounding environment that NASA has used the ‘dead zone’ around the plant to test moon rovers. The area around the plant is devoid of any life for miles.

The plant is the source of all the nickel found in a Prius’ battery and Toyota purchases 1,000 tons annually. Dubbed the Superstack, the plague-factory has spread sulfur dioxide across northern Ontario, becoming every environmentalist’s nightmare.

“The acid rain around Sudbury was so bad it destroyed all the plants and the soil slid down off the hillside,” said Canadian Greenpeace energy-coordinator David Martin during an interview with Mail, a British-based newspaper.

All of this would be bad enough in and of itself; however, the journey to make a hybrid doesn’t end there. The nickel produced by this disastrous plant is shipped via massive container ship to the largest nickel refinery in Europe. From there, the nickel hops over to China to produce ‘nickel foam.’ From there, it goes to Japan. Finally, the completed batteries are shipped to the United States, finalizing the around-the-world trip required to produce a single Prius battery. Are these not sounding less and less like environmentally sound cars and more like a farce?

When you pool together all the combined energy it takes to drive and build a Toyota Prius, the flagship car of energy fanatics, it takes almost 50 percent more energy than a Hummer - the Prius’s arch nemesis.

Original article here.

While the numbers may be a little suspect, Sudbury is still not a beacon of Environmental Enlightenment, though the big stack has done much to put the pollution into the upper atmosphere and out of the surrounding area. And as one wag said it, do miners not count as life?

There's Counterfeiting and there's Counterfeiting and This is Counterfeiting: A Counterfeit Ferrari

"I think this all maybe started with the DVDs and music being pirated and it has just exploded, basically, into something quite different," said model Yasmin Le Bon, an anti-counterfeit campaigner.
-- Sorry to hear that Mrs. Bowie

Built in the back streets of Bangkok, and powered by a Subaru engine, we should be worried about this stuff? What I would really like to be able to do is buy this stuff. The P4 was, is, and will always be a beaut. More info here.