This is the Holy Grail of the plant kingdom. All plant nuts have seen pictures and then searched for this rarity...indeed only a few specimens are known in cultivation. In 1995, Dr. Jim Symon (now deceased), found a few wild specimens (one with seed). For those of you new to these plants, A. titanum has the world's largest inflorescence of any plant...to 8 feet tall. The giant red vase, with an equally large central spathe, is truly one of the wonders of the world. The giant leaf atop a mottled stalk, to 15', appears after the flower. The seed stalk, which reaches to 6' tall and holds large red berries, is equally unbelievable. It may only go dormant every 2-3 years and as a rule, A. titanum likes it hot! Please do not order this unless you are a passionate and very serious plant NUT! Pot size: 24 fl. oz (709.77 ml)

Triffids are real.

PDN -- Amorphophallus titanum

We've made an update to MemeStreams that hopefully improves the look of the site. There are also some security fixes in here, as well as some new features which should help us fight spam more effectively going forward. In addition, Acidus contributed some improvements to the MemeBox to make it easier to sort and keep track of new messages. We'd also like to thank Eric White for some HTML input that helped us improve the look of the site and Terratogen for some graphics work.

As always, let us know if you discover anything that isn't working right...

(Safari users may find some color misalignment. We're going to address that in a future update. We wanted this out and we decided to optomize for FF and IE for the time being. Safair literally displays some colors differently in some contexts.)

Yes, we know the Inbox isn't lighting up when you have new memes. We should have that fixed up soon.

MemeStreams Look and Feel update

Hijexx writes:

Summary: A retired chemist and food plant manager converted his car to run on a vegetable oil / diesel blend. He has used it this way for the last four years.

He gets a visit one morning at his home from agents of the Illinois Department of Revenue. He is being investigated for criminal activity.

Turns out, Illinois wants him to pay retroactive fuel taxes on the vegetable oil. They also want him to apply for a license to become a special fuel supplier as well as a special fuel receiver. He also has to pay a $2500 bond as insurance that his "business" will pay the taxes in the future.

The State also sent him a cease and desist letter, threatening him with felony charges if he continued to operate his vehicle without giving the State their cut and dancing their dance.

Thankfully, there is a State Senator taking up his cause, but this is just patently wrong on its face. Why send agents out to someone's house who is trying to do the right thing? Why use that Gestapo tactic? I hate seeing people being bullied like that.

Worth a read, article has some good points.

On first read, this seems too stupid to believe. This man is doing something that should be commended. Garage level innovation in alternative fuel sources is something that should be encouraged. Someone needs to look at the big picture here, and see that a stop is put to the harassment he and anyone else in his situation is receiving. This is a story that should be tracked.

State makes big fuss over local couple's vegetable oil car fuel

while male circumcision has extraordinary potential to prevent HIV infection, these new findings remind us that we must proceed with thought and care in developing strategies to expand male circumcision in Africa," said Dr. Kevin De Cock, director of WHO's AIDS department.

Circumcision may lift HIV risk for women - Yahoo! News

This guy must have had to much free time on his hands,
but feel free to come up with more fresh ideas on how
to make the day more fun :)

Are you bored?

Of all the words used to describe the campaign of Rudy Giuliani, transvestite may be the most accurate. The video from 2000--which shows Donald Trump thrusting his face into Rudy's deftly sported novelty breasts--may be the first thing that comes to mind. But Giuliani's fetish for frocks is more of a one-liner than what really makes him a cross-dresser.

Video.

So... This coming election might be between a transvestite, a woman, and a black man. Maybe someday we'll allow a third party candidate a fair shot of running.

FRAMESHOP by Jeffrey Feldman

Rattle wrote:

Your mission, if you choose to accept it...

Create a funny, original, intelligent, and accurate joke that begins with:

Alice and Bob walk into a bar...

All entries will be judged by a panel of elite IMI personnel at an upcoming conference. Reply to this post with your entries. Be prepared to back up your joke with examples, proofs, and academic papers.

Alice and Bob walk into a bar... but Alice was not amused because Bob didn't give a crap that he was going to be late because he was more concerned with building up slack.

RE: Industrial Memetics Hacker Challenge 2007

possibly noteworthy wrote:

No matter how much films may improve, their prospects are not likely to — which suggests that something has fundamentally changed in our relationship to the movies. The long, long romance may finally be losing its bloom, and that is why Hollywood should be concerned.

Movies were the barometers of the American psyche. More than any other form, they defined us, and to this day, the rest of the world knows us as much for our films as for any other export.

Today, movies just don't seem to matter in the same way — not to the general public and not to the high culture either, where a Pauline Kael review in the New Yorker could once ignite an intellectual firestorm. There aren't any firestorms now.

To the extent that the Internet is a niche machine, dividing its users into tiny, self-defined categories, it is providing a challenge to the movies that not even television did, because the Internet addresses a change in consciousness while television simply addressed a change in delivery of content.

The Internet ... plays to [a] powerful force in modern America and one that undermines the movies: narcissism.

In effect, we have become our own movies.

I don't think the problem lies with the ability of films to move people. I think the problem lies with the fact that Hollywood is insistent on releasing essentially the same movie repackaged over and over. People in general don't go to the movies to see something new, there's really high pressure to put something on the screen that they expect. Surprises have shown not to sell as well as the standard crap so the problem has more to do with American audiences that suck (in much the same ways they do in American elections.) In a closed system, entropy occurs and thats a pretty good summing up of Hollywood.

RE: The movie magic is gone

As a child going to the circus, you might expect the clown to throw a bucket of confetti at you, or squirt you with water from the flower on his lapel.

You certainly wouldn't be prepared for him to grab you by the scruff of the neck, punch and kick you and leave you needing hospital treatment for cuts and bruises.

As these astonishing pictures show, that's what happened when 12-year-old Amos Lutz met Kaspar the Clown at a circus in Leipzig, Germany.

'Kasper the Clown' faces prison for punching schoolboy | News | This is London

If you eat animal crackers while thinking of mustard they taste really odd.