Happy New Year everyone.
Get involved in some crazy new year sillyness over at Socyberty.
Happy new year to you all – I’m off to the local to get blotto’ed, reflect on this years accomplishments and start regret the tattoo’s I had done in march.
Out-of-body experience recreated
Experts have found a way to trigger an out-of-body experience in volunteers.The experiments, described in the Science journal, offer a scientific explanation for a phenomenon experienced by one in 10 people.
Two teams used virtual reality goggles to con the brain into thinking the body was located elsewhere.
The visual illusion plus the feel of their real bodies being touched made volunteers sense that they had moved outside of their physical bodies.
BBC (Thanks Amanda)
Derren Brown: Evening of Wonders
Tuesday 13 January - 10:00pm - 11:40pm - Channel 4. Enjoy. 
Discover magazine top 100 stories of 2008
Interesting round up from Discover. I especially like to hold up a light to the theory of “fixed IQ at birth” being shattered – I seriously need some IQ boosting after my experience with Jack Daniels at xmas.
Photoset / Amazing Human Body Part Records
Some of these pictures might gross you out…these records are in the Guinness Book 2009
Top 10 science hoaxes of all time – Discovery Channel
In the interest of digging up the most famous debunked hoaxes in science and discovery – no Mars microbe (not faked but not confirmed as true or false), Shroud of Turin (how true or how false), alien corpse at Area 51 (unprovable speculation on what’s really there) or whether or not the United States landed on the Moon (as for this last one, we’re pretty sure that happened)…
Shown above here is the “Potato Web Server”.
…Here now are our picks for the 10 greatest shams of science, discovery, and technology of all time, no joke! (Thanks Ekaf)
Merry xmas songs from Coops Blog
We couldn’t resist this awesome video that really sums up xmas for all of us. It contains everything we feel the festive period is about. Were looking in to asking these guys to make Derrens next 5 series because of the classy production and sheer enthusiasm.
Santa VS God
God and Santa come off pretty equal. Thing is I’m personally more scared of Santa.
Interesting blog from a former evangelical Christian over at Unreasonable Faith
Harold Pinter – R.I.P
Sad news for xmas day, but I’m sure you will have seen on the news that today we lost a great playwright and political activists. He was 78.
Harold Pinter, CH, CBE, Nobel Laureate (10 October 1930 – 24 December 2008), was a world-renowned English playwright, screenwriter, actor, director, poet, political activist, and president of the Central School of Speech and Drama, a constituent college of the University of London. After publishing poetry as a teenager and acting in school plays, Pinter began his theatrical career in the mid-1950s as a rep actor using the stage name David Baron.
During a writing career spanning over half a century, beginning with his first play, The Room (1957), Pinter has written 29 stage plays; 26 screenplays; many dramatic sketches, radio and TV plays; poetry; some short fiction; a novel; and essays, speeches, and letters. He is best known as a playwright and screenwriter, especially for The Birthday Party (1957), The Caretaker (1959), The Homecoming (1964), and Betrayal (1978), all of which he has adapted to film, and for his screenplay adaptations of others’ works, such as The Servant (1963), The Go-Between (1970), The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1981), The Trial (1993), and Sleuth (2007). He has also directed almost 50 stage, TV, and film productions of his own and others’ works.
Despite frail health since 2001, he has continued to act on stage and screen, most recently in the October 2006 critically-acclaimed production of Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape, during the 50th anniversary season of the Royal Court. In addition to continuing to write (mostly poetry), to give interviews, to speak about political issues, and to attend theatrical and cinematic premieres of his own and others’ works, he accepted the presidency of the Central School of Speech and Drama in October 2008.
The above painting by Derren was done in 2003.
Merry Xmas and HNY to you all
A bloody great big THANK YOU to you all – hoping you have a good xmas and a great new year. Several of us will be traveling to the far flung regions of the world or crawling under a rock whilst the quietness allows us to – the blog will calm down a little and we will tweak and tinker with it over the quiet period – so sorry if it goes down a few times.
You’ve all been great sending in your wonderful comments, links, complaints, advice, updates, personal tragedies of cat deaths and strange personal situations. We appreciate it all including the good and the bad as it helps us make this blog what you guys want, lets us know where were going right and wrong and adequately pumps our egos.
We’re so very close to 1 MILLION hits it should happen in the next week which is a great way to start the new year. Please keep sending us your thoughts even if we can’t reply and always feel free to leave comments – even if you are from somewhere weird like Iceland, the USA or the DBFF!.
Expect better content on the blog – the new DB art site will launch feb/march and eventually around april we should see the new main site launch which will be a lot of fun, very interactive and have a pile of juicy content and some incredibly great stuff that we can’t wait to give away.
xxx
Coops, Mr Brown and the reprebates.
