The BBC has a story on their website about a girl in Belgium who went in to a tattoo parlour to have three small stars tattooed near her eye and ended up with 56 stars all over her face. She claims to have fallen asleep in the chair and only woke up when her nose was being tattooed and now she wants most of them removed. The tattoo artist claims she didn’t fall asleep and got exactly what she ordered and only changed her mind when her father freaked out. Which of the two sounds more likely to you?

Given the picture of the tattoo artist, I don’t think anyone would be surprised if they found themselves covered in tattoos should they happen to fall asleep while he was working on them.

And, how does one fall asleep when one is being tattooed anyway? I would think the pain would be more than enough to keep you awake.

By now you’re probably aware of the Swine flu outbreak that’s wreaking havoc everywhere. People are cancelling vacations, athletes are competing in front of empty stadia and some people are even dying because of it. Consequently, governments are starting to come up with protocols to be followed when someone is suspected of having it. The most extreme protocol is almost certainly the one announced by Secretary Napolitano of the US Department of Homeland Security in a briefing she gave yesterday. I’ve extracted the relevant paragraph here, with emphasis as required:

We’re also actively monitoring travelers at our land, sea, and air ports. We’re watching them for signs of illness, and we have appropriate protocols in place to deal with those who are sick. Precautions are being taken to protect travelers and border personnel. Anyone exhibiting symptoms is being referred to an isolation room where they can be evaluated by a public health official before proceeding to their destruction.

Ouch!

(To be fair to Secretary Napolitano, I do note that since I started to write this entry they’ve corrected the release so that it reads “… before proceeding to their destination.”)

@BadAstronomer re-tweeted a link to some photos of the space shuttle and the International Space Station taken about an hour before they docked yesterday evening that’s worth a visit. If a similar opportunity exists when they separate, I may try to take some pictures, too.

It seems that some geocachers still haven’t figured out that wrapping a piece of PVC pipe in duct tape and hiding it in a public place isn’t a good idea. Fox affiliate WLUK-TV reported on Sunday that a “suspicious device” found in a tree in a park in Allouez, Wisconsin Sunday morning was reported to the police. As a result, the bomb squad was called out and the container was blown up.

One of the firemen who also responded happened to be a geocacher and he was “99% sure that it was a geocache“. He went on to say that though he was pretty sure it was a geocache he wasn’t “going to gamble on it with the one percent”.

The response from the geocaching community has been mixed. Most seem to agree that an unlabelled container, particularly one that looks like a pipe bomb, is a prime candidate to be blown up by the bomb squad. Some people are encouraging the owner of the exploded cache to replace it. One cacher decided to blame the people living in the neighbourhood with this gem of a log entry:

I realize nobody will ever see this note, but I need to vent. To the residents of Irwin and Kalb Streets: This cache had been here for almost two years – in fact, there was another cache in this park before this one. Why did you choose March 15, 2009 to report suspicious behavior at this cache site after so long? Was Wise River Rambler [the last geocacher to find it before the bomb squad –G] really any more suspicious than me or any other finder on this cache? This cache has been found at all various times on weekends, evenings, and other various times that you’re home and watching across the street at the park. Why not yesterday, or the day before, or when tkks was actually placing the cache? You had plenty of opportunity to call the police and tell them that there were GeoCachers there. Seriously folks. . .

It doesn’t matter how long the cache was there or how many people found it. It was placed without permission, was not labelled and looked suspicious. The onus is on the hider to ensure that a geocache is placed in an appropriate location. If geocachers continue to ignore this we’re going to start seeing more laws banning geocaching altogether.

At least the fireman got to log a find with the following log entry:

Hey, I guess I can log this as a find. It should now be a multi because it’s in a million pieces. Ya’ll wouldn’t believe the time, energy & money involved to find it.

Most people I know would not consider a dearth of Chicken McNuggets an appropriate reason to call 911 once, let alone three times. Apparently, however, a lady in Florida felt otherwise.

According to the story, she ordered 10 Chicken McNuggets and was told the restaurant was out. The cashier offered her a more expensive alternative at no additional cost, at which point the lady went what can only be called McStupid. Instead of taking advantage of this offer, she demanded her money back and was told that all sales were final.

Now, to be fair to the lady, McDonald’s policy is apparently to provide a full refund when an order can’t be filled and the customer doesn’t want an alternative. Apparently, the employee she was dealing with apparently wasn’t aware of this policy. It still doesn’t excuse that happened next.

It was somewhere around this point that she started calling 911.

She told police “This is an emergency, If I would have known they didn’t have McNuggets, I wouldn’t have given my money, and now she wants to give me a McDouble, but I don’t want one. This is an emergency.” When the police showed up and took her complaint they wrote in their report…

“Goodman maintained the attitude ‘this is an emergency, my McNuggets are an emergency’”

Her “reward” for being McStupid is an apology from McDonald’s, a full refund and a free meal courtesy of McDonald’s and a notice to appear in court on a misuse of 911 charge.

Gadling blogger Jeffrey White wrote about a YouTube video some guys posted about their visit to Venice. In the video, the guys have bet one of their friends that he can’t jump from a dock to one of the poles that poke out of the water and back to the dock without getting wet.

The guy makes the first jump and manages to catch the pole without getting wet. And then the pole breaks under water and the guy swims back to his friends. No word as to whether he was able to claim the money his friends had anted up or if the bet was off.

It’s asshattery like this that causes American tourists to have a bad reputation with the rest of the world. Rest assured if the tables were turned and some European tourists had broken these guys’ mooring pole that they’d be pretty pissed and ranting on YouTube about the whole incident.

Oh and if you are going to post videos on YouTube, do the world a favour and don’t whine about the fact that the memory in your camera is getting low. Geez.

The BBC has a story reporting that an Iridium communication satellite attempted to occupy the same time-space coordinates as a non-operational Russian satellite somtime on Tuesday. Since the laws of physics generally do not allow this sort of thing to occur, a large cloud of debris has taken their place.

In practical terms, this means that there’s now a whole lot of new things in orbit that can potentially hit other satellites in orbit. The impact took place in a higher orbit than the International Space Station, so it is not considered at high risk. If everything goes well, the pieces of debris will come out of orbit without hitting anything in the process and burn up harmlessly in the atmosphere. Based on the report, NASA isn’t worried about the ISS being hit by the debris in the immediate future.

Since man started lobbing objects into orbit, there have been 6000 satellites launched. In addition to the satellites, there have been other things such as rocket boosters and associated bits and pieces, tools, gloves and even a spacesuit (minus astronaut) that have found their way into orbit. Usually, these things come out of orbit fairly quickly, but they can sometimes remain in orbit for months or years. Occasionally, pieces make it back to Earth, sometimes with non-trivial results. COSMO-954, a Russian satellite, broke up over northern Canada, scattering radioactive debris from its nuclear reactor across the Northwest Territories in January 1978. You can read about Operation Morning Light on the Geologic Survey of Canada’s website.

I saw a strange glowing spiral cloud when I was at the cottage during the summer of 1992, which I later learned was a satellite coming out of orbit. Some people may be treated to a rather unique spectacle if they’re in the right place at the right time when the pieces de-orbit.