Soviet-era Passenger Ferry is One Boat-Ugly Luxury Yacht
Illinois residents, take heart: there are places on earth with governors more outlandish than yours. Blago might have had the ethical fortitude of Boss Hogg, but at least he traveled in tasteful private planes and chauffeured SUVs. Apparently, such relative restraint is unheard of in one Russian Federal District just north of the nation of Kazakhstan.
An unnamed Siberian governor decided it would be a good idea to convert a 1970s Soviet high-speed ferry boat into a personal luxury watercraft. “The time of reconstruction, including the development of the project was just six months!” gushes exoticboat.ru, a build time that’s a tremendous feat considering what the boat used to look like when it was a passenger ferry.
Exterior modifications were extensive: The bow appears to have been inspired by the nose of a first-generation Oldsmobile Toronado, while the decks were festooned with those glass sunrooms they advertise on daytime TV. Still, nothing beats the interior — which can only be described as the physical manifestation of an Isaac Hayes album.
The vessel started life in the 1970s as a Metor hydrofoil, the most famous model of passenger ferry to operate behind the Iron Curtain. With legendary reliability and a top speed of 40 mph, numerous other Meteors remain in service in former Eastern-bloc countries. This particular boat was taken off ferry duty and converted for private use in 2005. Before and after floor plans show that the boat’s passenger seats and snack bars were replaced with sitting areas, a full kitchen, dining room, bedrooms, and a swimming platform. The only non-cosmetic renovations were new “de Laval” style exhaust nozzles meant to increase the boat’s top speed.
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Even with that added thrust, this boat can’t escape good taste. The public areas are stylish enough for an evil genius in search of a chic hideout, but that’s where the design philosophy begins to crumble. Animal skins, white leather couches, and shag carpeting reveal a fantasy of a Soviet teen who, after reading smuggled copies of Playboy, built his boyhood dream of what a Nixon-era American bachelor pad looked like. Judging by that cat-astrophic leopard-print master bedroom, we think the boat’s new name of “Faithful” is meant to be ironic.
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Photos courtesy exoticboat.ru
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Revisit ?chills and thrills’ in books stores
new delhi, jan 29 (ians) for all those booklovers waiting to unearth a mystery or thriller classic in a tome-store turnings, harpercollins india offers a month long chills and thrills festival ‘09 starting feb 1.”chills and thrills festival ‘09 will promote the writings of evergreen thriller specialists agatha christie and sydney sheldon, challenger to dan …
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Happy Lunar New Year, everyone!
To celebrate, I bring you the moon itself.
The whole thing, first:
(Photo credit: hypergenesb, and I highly recommend you check out the Flickr page of the photo. He has the picture very well annotated.)
And closer up, it’s even more pockmarked.
(Photo credit: Omar Eduardo)
(Photo credit: James Jordan)
Sometimes stuff gets in front of the moon, and somehow that only makes it prettier.
(Photo credit: James Jordan)
(Photo credit: bobtravis)
And sometimes, the “something” in front of the moon is the Earth itself, which is even cooler.
(Photo credit: makelessnoise)
(Photo credit: tizianoj)
If moonlight is just sunlight repackaged, why isn’t it toxic to (non-sparkly) vampires? Just because it’s indirect?
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(Photo credit: johncarney)
I like it when the moon has a halo around it.
(Photo credit: thombo2)
And finally, a tiny sliver of a crescent:
(Photo credit: makelessnoise)
Want more cool pictures? It’s snowing here again, so I’ve got to link to my collection of snow pictures.
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Wreak havoc on an unsuspecting New York City in this open-world action game from Radical Entertainment.
The story that drives Prototype is a mysterious one. As Alex Mercer, you suddenly wake up in a morgue imbued with a suite of superhuman powers, ranging from the ability to sprout razor-sharp blades from your arm to a knack for scaling buildings with a spiteful disregard for gravity that Spider-Man could only dream of. Alex doesn’t know how he got there or why he’s been transformed into a hyperkinetic Swiss Army knife of a human being; all he knows is that he’s angry and needs to find out where to focus that anger.
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Pope reinstates bishop who says Holocaust was exaggerated
According to America, the Jesuit magazine, Pope Benedict XVI has lifted the excommunication of four bishops ordained more than 20 years ago over papal objections.
The bishops are from the ultra-traditionalist Society of St. Pius X.
Benedict’s action was viewed as a concession to loyal followers of the society’s founder, the late Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre of France.
Some Vatican watchers are wondering what the heck the pope was thinking.
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For starters, the Society of St. Pius X, while professing its loyalty to the Holy See, rejects many, if not most, of the changes to Catholic practice, liturgy and teaching adopted by the Second Vatican Council.
That alone might not bother Pope Benedict much. Even though he took part in Vatican II (as the Rev. Joseph Ratzinger), he often acts like he, too, could do without the modernizations that followed the groundbreaking council. (One famous example: As pope he’s made it easier for conservative Catholics to find a Mass celebrated in Latin, according to the pre-Vatican II missal.)
Far worse than the Lefebvrites anti-modernist streak — worse, at least, in terms of the face the pope presents to the non-Catholic world — is that one of the four reinstated bishops, Richard Williamson of Britain, is on record as saying that Hitler wasn’t nearly as bad a guy as most people make him out to be.
In a TV interview recently broadcast in Europe — and sure to be re-aired now again and again — Williamson said: “I believe that the historical evidence … is hugely against 6 million Jews having been deliberately gassed in gas chambers as a deliberate policy of Adolf Hitler.”
At most, he said, maybe 300,000 people died in Nazi concentration camps, “but not one of them by gassing in a gas chamber.”
At worst, the interview makes Williamson look like an anti-Semite. At best, he comes across as an ignorant crackpot.
Making him a bishop again will surely exacerbate strains between Jews and the Catholic Church — strains that have grown more evident during Benedict’s papacy.
Just this month, Italy’s rabbis said they wanted nothing to do with an annual Catholic celebration of Judaism. The rabbis accused Pope Benedict XVI of turning back decades of interfaith progress with his statements about the superiority of the Christian faith and his decision to restore a prayer for the conversion of Jews to the Easter Week liturgy. (Understandably, Jews take umbrage at the notion that they need to be “saved” through conversion to another faith.)
On top of those perceived insults, the Vatican has won few friends among Jews with its recent criticisms of the fighting in Gaza — criticisms that seem to many to be directed more at Israel than at the Palestinians.
Two weeks ago, Israel’s foreign ministry reacted angrily when Cardinal Renato Martino, head of the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, comparing Gaza to a “huge concentration camp.”
You know. Like those concentration camps where Hitler didn’t gas any Jews.
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Virgin Scraps Legal P2P Music Plans After Labels Get Jitters
Virgin Media (NSDQ: VMED) has scrapped groundbreaking plans to pay music labels for songs its customers download illegally - effectively legitimising P2P - after lack of support from some of the majors, The Register first reported and paidContent:UK has confirmed.
We learned last year Virgin Media was talking with Playlouder MSP - a veteran vendor working on the model - about creating the service, which was due for launch this Q1. But what The Reg now says was to be called “Virgin Music Unlimited” has been scuppered at the last minute by major-label demands the ISP block transfer of songs outside of computers owned by subscribers.
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The service would have been revolutionary, helping to monetise some of the 95 percent of music downloads the music business acknowledges are illegal. Virgin would have effectively allowed paying subscribers to continue transferring songs over P2P networks, and would have paid royalty collectors for the privilege.
Playlouder strategy director Paul Sanders told paidContent:UK: “The music service as it was conceived is on ice. It’s incredibly sad for both sides, and even sadder for consumers as the research from MidemNet shows consumers want legal P2P services and want to buy them from their ISP. The project is off and the project team is stood down.”
As the music biz is nearing its last chance to build conventional retail stores that can make a dent in illegal downloading, momentum had recently gathered behind the radical legal P2P model. Isle of Man’s government this week mooted a plan to legalise P2P in return for raising a ?1 levy on ISP customers. Billy Bragg manager Peter Jenner told this weekend’s MidemNet in Cannes: “The music industry is in the f***ing dumper; the reality is we’ve got to compete with free.”
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The news is a blow to pioneering Shoreditch, London-based Playlouder, which has been trying to popularise the model after setting up its own small ISP as far back as 2003. After switching to focus on providing the service on a white label basis, it had concentrated its efforts on working with Virgin Media. Still, the increasing prominence now being given to the legal P2P model - and the fact that Playlouder has garnered so much experience in the area - means its work may not be lost. Sanders told us: “Playlouder MSP has had a fantastic amount of interesting from around the UK and Europe, and we will be accelerating those discussions now we are free to do so.” Sounds like the company is certainly open for business.
UK Music CEO Fergal Sharkey said at Midem an ISP accord with the music biz is “weeks away”. But, with this plan having disappeared, music offerings likely to be created are more likely to resemble conventional download stores or subscription packages. Sky’s JV with Universal, announced last year, has gone remarkably quiet.
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