Our favorite story gaining traction around the Interwebs today has to do with Anglican priest Rev. Tim Jones, who more or less told his congregation that it’s OK to steal from retail giants like grocery chain Tesco if your family is hungry. Makes sense to us, but Rev. Tim (who is not as liberal as it might seem) has been taken to task by conservative politicians and some in the British media for advocating this teensy-weensy exception to the 8th commandment. Here’s what he told his congregation:

“My advice, as a Christian priest, is to shoplift. I do not offer such advice because I think that stealing is a good thing or because I think it is harmless, for it is neither.

“I would ask that they do not steal from small family businesses but from large national businesses, knowing that the costs are ultimately passed on to the rest of us in the form of higher prices. I would ask them not to take any more than they need. I offer the advice with a heavy heart. Let my words not be misrepresented as a simplistic call for people to shoplift.

“The life of the poor in modern Britain is a constant struggle, a minefield of competing opportunities, competing responsibilities, obligations and requirements, a constant effort to achieve the impossible. For many at the bottom of our social ladder, lawful, honest life can sometimes seem to be an apparent impossibility.”

It’s not like Rev. Tim is saying “Go forth and mug people” or that the poor should burgle their neighbor’s homes. He’s basically saying “feed yourself, illegally if you must, just do it in a way that doesn’t harm society.” Given the choice between starving or allowing your family to starve, shoplifting a frozen pizza sounds like a morally acceptable no-brainer to us in these troubled times.

 
Via What’s the Matter with Dino?

At first she doesn’t reveal much about herself…
 

 
Then you delve deeper:
 

 
And deeper still. It all makes no sense. No sense. Not at all. This is the world of ceeceelemon.
 

 
Via Jesse Merlin

 
I have no idea if this is real or not. I’ll let you be the judge.
 
(via Nerdcore)

 
From Pea Hicks, The king of the Optigan.

This is a GE Play-Talk from 1950. It’s a kid’s toy, but it’s actually pretty advanced for the time, since tape recorders were just starting to become available. This is a tape recorder / record player hybrid. The paper disc is coated with magnetic tape and the tonearm has a tape recorder head on it. The little plastic disc that goes over the “tape” disc has a spiral groove for guiding the tonearm. The speaker serves double duty as the microphone. All tube electronics.

What’s great is the way you can play/record in random access mode. There’s no erase head, so the sounds just keep building on top of each other until you erase the disc with a bulk tape eraser.

In the 2nd part of the video, I use another fantastic GE toy- the Tote-A-Tune keyboard from the early 70s. I record a scale onto the disc, then attempt to play a tune by manually moving the tonearm over the disc. Lots of creative lo-fi applications for this sucker!!

 
Never mind its off-putting appearance, what with its Cthulhu like tentacles and weird lil’ miniature celery tops (not too nice to eat those), the celery root or as the French know it, celeriac, is a multi-faceted delight once you get to know it. Chop all the nasty bits off (it’s easier than you would think) then dice into cubes and basically treat it as you would a potato, turnip or any other root vegetable. Roast in the oven, saute with garlic and olive oil, puree into soup, eat raw in a salad, you can’t go wrong. What you taste is the essence of celery-ness but with heavier presence and substance than your standard stalk variety. It’s in season now until spring, so harass your grocer !
 

 

 
Pink Tentacle has a creepy post about Sogo & Seibu announcing plans to build “robot doppelgangers.” Ack!

Pink Tentacle says:

The mechanical doppelgangers are available for a limited time as part of a special New Year?

 
Pittsburgh-based tattoo artist Cliff Maynard has an unusual medium that he works with: used joint ends!

?

A TOY mouse supposed to sing “Jingle Bells, Jingle Bells” has been recalled amid claims it warbles “paedophile, paedophile”.

The 4ins festive novelty, with Santa hat and a cheesy grin, has left parents stunned.

One mum said: “When I squeezed its tummy I couldn’t believe my ears. I recognised the tune, but the words were certainly not traditional. Luckily my children are too young to understand.”

The ?Ǭ

 
An industry not known for giving freebies—ever—has decided to offer its services gratis, just in time for the COP15 climate conference in Copenhagen. When Copenhagen’s mayor, Ritt Bjerregaard, sent off a message to local hotels urging them not to assist hotel guests in town for the event hooking up with… well… hookers, the pros struck back.

The postcards the city council sent read, in part: “Dear hotel owner, we would like to urge you not to arrange contacts between hotel guests and prostitutes.” The local prostitutes became furious, protesting that the council had no right to interfere with them plying their perfectly legal—and the world’s oldest—profession.

From Der Spiegel:

“This is sheer discrimination. Ritt Bjerregaard is abusing her position as Lord Mayor in using her power to prevent us carrying out our perfectly legal job. I don’t understand how she can be allowed to contact people in this way,” SIO Spokeswoman Susanne M?ɬ?ller tells avisen.dk.

M?ɬ?ller adds that it is reprehensible and unfair that Copenhagen politicians have chosen to use the UN Climate Summit as a platform [to target] sex workers.

“But they’ve done it and we have to defend ourselves,” M?ɬ?ller says.