olilolo blog

Police in England are reportedly horrified after a massive bladed weapon was handed in to officers during an amnesty period. The weapon, three feet long, and spiked, was described as like something out of a horror movie. What was this horrific weapon, you ask?

A Bat’leth

These should be standard police issue.

What is a Bat’leth, you ask? Is it some ancient Asian weapon, prevalant amongst gangs in the inner city? Is it a weapon favoured amongst some of the more warlike sects of Islam, being encountered by troops on the battelefields of Afghanistan and Iraq?

No. It is a ceremonial weapon used by the Klingons, in the science fiction show Star Trek

Yes. Police are now concerned by cosplay.

Now to be fair, that is a nasty weapon. You could take someone’s eye out with that thing, and probably their head along with it. Once you put aside the fact that it’s a nerdy replica from a science fiction series, it’s a metre-long lump of sharpened steel.

However that doesn’t stop the horrible geek in me from being UTTERLY DISMAYED that that AWESOME FUCKING THING was handed in to the cops. Holy shit, would you look at that thing? That is RAD AS HELL. I bet some kid’s mother found it and handed it in. Either that or some narc of a brother. There is no way someone got their hands on that, and then voluntarily handed it in. No way in the universe.

And to be perfectly honest, while it looks badass on the show, the bat’leth is a very clumsy weapon in real life. You’re more likely to cut your own hand off while using it than inflict damage on someone else.

The guy the police need to track down is the insane genius who actually made a working phaser. All he needs is a small enough power source and that guy will be unsoppable.

A monkey trainer in China received minor injuries when his monkeys, whom he’d trained in the art of Taekwondo, turned on him.

At one point the monkey trainer grabbed a staff to hit the monkeys, only to find himself facing a stick-brandishing monkey that cracked him over the head.

Now obviously that is hilarious, and I wish I could find footage of it. Believe me, I’ve tried. The closest I’ve come is this-

which is awesome in its own way, but not exactly what we’re after.

But the story is also just a little bit worrying. I mean, you train monkeys to fight, okay, I get you, you’re in China and no one’s going to tell you otherwise, fine. Lord knows I’d be knee deep in tapdancing squirrels if I thought the RSPCA would leave me alone for five damn minutes. All “unnatural urges” this and “cruel and unusual” that. What do they know those tree-hugging…

Sorry, I’ve wandered from my point, which is- you teach monkeys to fight, you’d better treat them nicely. You’re already dealing with an animal that can conceivably dart up your pants leg and sink its fangs into your balls, and you’ve also now taught it how to hit the nerve cluster that causes your legs to stop working. You better hope you engender some good-will in your little simian warriors. Unfortunately for the trainer, he hasn’t heard this bit of wisdom.

He was really furious, he made the monkeys kneel on the ground with their hands tied behind their backs to punish them and make them show remorse for their nasty attack.

Oh dear. Yes, public humiliation will do wonders to ensure these animals don’t pick the locks of their cages and cut your throat while you sleep.

I think this stems from some strange part of the human brain which finds dressing animals up as people and making them do people things absolutely endearing, when actually it should terrify you just a little. Seeing a dolphin tap out its name on a voice pad should not provoke sighs of wonder, but make us ask- if the dolphin can do that, exactly what ELSE can it do? Seeing a bear dancing in a little hat should not elicit squeals of glee, but a sense of jealousy that the bear can dance better than you. And seeing a chimp doing roundhouse kicks should not produce delighted laughter , but rather should produce a pile of crap in your pants, as you realise that animal that could already rip your face off now knows how to stun you first.

If humans don’t stop treating animals as furry dolls to prance and jig for our amusement, then one day the animal kingdom is going to get its shit together and END us.

The resulting conflict will be swift, bloody, and adorable.

In a situation of political correctness gone mad, India has decided to ban a centuries old baby-tossing festival.

This year two-hundred infants were hurled from the roof of the nine-metre high temple in Karnataka, onto blankets held by the crowd below. The ritual, which takes place each December, is thought to bring good health and a long life to the baby, and prosperity to the family. If officials have their way will be the very last time the event is held.

The problem arose when deputy commissioner, R Shantharaj (aka Seargent Killjoy), was transferred to the area. Not being a local, he was unaware of the tradition and was horrified when he witnessed the act. He described it as “inhumane, and terrifying” for the children. Mr Shantharaj is confident that attempting to ban one of their ancient and revered traditions will help the community no longer see him as an outsider, and embrace him as one of their own.

In unrelated news sale in pitchforks have risen in the area 234%.

We at olilolo are shocked and horrified at this attack on tradition. I say if you don’t like it champ, grab your shit and go home, and as an act of protest I shall be flinging my child from the 30 storey window of olilolo Tower into a small kid’s wading pool below.

You have to be cruel to be kind in this world, and while I don’t know how that exactly relates to my child and a large drop from a building, I do know that I’ll be charging $35 bucks a ticket. So in the end, I guess the economy wins, and really isn’t that all governments really give a shit about nowadays.

With changing climate, and pressures put on animals by human encroachment into their habitats, times are touch for our critter friends. And not just tough in an “I can’t find food” kind of way. It turns out that all this destruction of the planet is putting a real damper on animals being able to find a mate. Global warming is cock-blocking the animal kingdom.

Scientists have been noticing the emergence of a brand new animal, created solely out of sweet interspecies love- the Grolar bear. Half Polar bear, half Grizzly bear, all Artic killing machine.  Seriously, that’s a hybrid of the two largest land predators in the world. These things are going to sweep down from the Great White North and devour us all. How will they cross the oceans, you ask? They’ll fucking swim, that’s how. The ocean won’t be game to tell these guys they can’t.

Of course, this isn’t a Ways the World Will End column, so put that aside for now (seriously though, you’ve been warned). The intersting thing about the grolar bear is that it occurred completely on its own, in the wild, without human intervention. Until the thing lumbered at a group of hunters and was shot, presumably as the aborted first wave of their eventual killing spree, we had no idea polars and grizzlies were getting their bone on.

"It was screaming 'Death to all humans'. It actually screamed that."

Previous cross-species hybrids have all been created by humans, usually for a drunken bet. Thus we get useful animals like the Mule (a male donkey crossed with a female horse) and awesome animals like the Liger (a male lion crossed with a female tiger)

An awesome abomination of the natural order

Now, scientists are saying that changing conditions across the globe are going to see many species suddenly reconsider their priorities and maybe lower their standards a little. Researchers in Australia say they expect to start seeing hybrid bird species very soon, given the high nature of specialisation in Australia where there are often several sub-species of bird in a single area, all evolved to feed on diferent types of seeds and nuts.

The upshot of all this is don’t be surprised if you see a wallaroo on your next trip to the bush, or a zebraffe on your next safari. Not to mention King Douchbag Kirk Cameron might finally get his wish of seeing a Crocoduck.

This thing ignores the bread you're throwing and goes staight for the fingers.

I tried writing several different introductions to this week’s piece of crazy news from the internet, and to be honest I just can’t really think of a damn thing that I could say which would make this any weirder than it already is. So here we go.

A guy from Minneapolis has only ever spoken Klingon to his son.

Klingons are… you know what? You know what Klingons are. Everyone does, even those pygmy bushmen in Africa who think an empty coke bottle is technology from the gods. “Ah,” they say “The large (click) bumpy headed warrior (click) race from Star Trek.” And they’re right, that’s what Klingons are.

What you may mercifully not know is that Trek fandom has embraced the Klingon ‘culture” with open arms, to the point where they’ve developed intricate caste systems and social hierarchies and even a spoken language, based on the few snippets of gibberish used in the show. There’s Klingon translations of Shakespeare and the Bible, if you’re chasing that guttural, phlegmatic feeling German just can’t provide any more.

People who learn Klingon and who speak it fluently are at the same time awesome and pathetic beyond comprehension. But that’s a choice they’ve made, probably the last in a series of bad choices, but still, they chose to do that. To learn Klingon. So they could have conversations in Klingon. Presumably in public, where people could see them doing this terrible thing.

The newborn baby did not, however, have a choice. d’Armond Speers spoke only Klingon to his child for the first three years of his life. Sure, he’s now in high school and speaks English fine, but this isn’t the sort of thing you’re supposed to just mess around with. Because his Dad is a bit of a weirdo, that kid could have been in the situation of experiencing every actual language on Earth as a second language, because all his hardwiring was based around a made-up language created by fans of a science fiction TV show.

The evil punchline to the whole thing is that the Dad is apparently not even that big a Star Trek fan. He just did it to see if it would work. I mean, you look in this guy’s high school locker, you’re going to find a few dead puppies, you know?

But the worst thing about all this is that when I first heard about this story, I thought “Holy shit, that is SO AWESOME. I wonder if he had a little bat’leth and some mini-dreds to go with it!”

I am a bad person.

Ancient myth and lore tells us of several fantastic and wondrous cities, which are for the most part lost or hidden to regular mortals. The great lost city of Atlantis, long ago sunk beneath the ocean waves. Bonny Brigadoon, only appearing in the misty Scottish highlands once every hundred years. And Chako Paul City in Sweden, full of Nordic lesbains.

No, not really, if such a perfect thing were to exist it would signal Ragnarok. The legend of the sapphic city states that it was founded in 1820 by a man-hating widow, who encouraged all like-minded young nordic lasses to come and live in the city for some healthy outdoor calisthenics and lots of salads.

The city is purported to today contain 25 000 residents, all of them Scandinavian lesbains. The lure of such a city is such that when reports surfaced in Chinese media, literally million of calls flooded into Sweden’s various tourist agencies asking how one goes about organising a Con Tiki Tour to Chako Paul.

Now of course this city is merely a myth, a product of someone’s fertile imagination. Claes Bertilson from the local tourism agency says as much in response to media inquiries about the legendary town-

“At 25,000 residents, the town would be one of the largest in northern Sweden, and I find it hard to believe that you could keep something like that a secret for more than 150 years”

Of course, if I lived next to a city of tens of thousands of beautiful lesbians, I’d probably want to keep it to myself as well, so take him with a grain of salt.

Canada has a problem. No, not the fact that they are effectively better than America in every single way and yet have to cop endless taunts from not only Americans but everyone else, now that cultural trickle has taken place. They bear the jokes with typical good-natured stoicism.

No, their problem is that severed feet keep washing up on their beaches.

You heard me.

Eight so far in the last two years. A couple of pairs, and a few singles. Some in shoes, some not.

There was even a hoax foot, where someone stuffed an animal paw in a sneaker and threw it in the seas to wash up for the cops to find. People like to be involved.

The thing that I love about this story is there is absolutely no logical explanation for it. I’m sure there IS an explanation, but it could not possibly be described as “logical”. Occams razor suggests people falling overboard, maybe throwing themselves off a cliff, whatever. But why are just the feet washing up? Why not other parts as well? There’s been at least foyur or five seperate people who’ll never run a marathon again, but only their feet, and no other body parts, are washing up on beaches? Discarding Occam brings a whole host of possibilities, from aliens to very picky sharks.

Either way, there is no way that if they find out what’s causing this, people will go “oh, of COURSE”. I love that. A mystery so strange even the answer is a puzzle.

According to a university scholar, robots will replace all mundane jobs in the tourism industry by 2050, including prostitution.

While the dirty perv in me welcomes such a world, and the ‘human’ in me shakes his head in disbelief; I wonder if this prediction comes from the same scientists who promised me a moon house, rocket pack and peace on earth… all by the year 1990.

Wrestling Midgets Killed by Fake Hookers

Otherwise known as “The Best Headline I Have Ever Seen, Ever”.

I mean, sure, maybe the story is fake or the facts are embellished slightly, but tell me you’re not going to buy a copy of the paper with that on it.

Logging in to MSN Messenger the other night, I was confronted with this pop up spam:

I love the lack of quality control. The system has scanned the article, recognised the word pirate, and chosen an archived picture.

The diplomatic difficulties of Sudanese pirates violently attacking foreign vessels in international waters… portrayed through the art of puppetry.

If it was a TV series I’d watch it.