January 2, 2010

Man hit by New Year’s dive starting gun

Filed under: Weird by Branko Collin @ 1:09 pm

An alderman from Oldenzaal in Twente got hit in the leg yesterday when a cannon went off near him. The third edition of the local New Year’s dive was to have been started by the alderman, Frits Rorink, firing the gun, but the device initially refused to go off. According to AD, swimmers had already taken to the water when the cannon fired after all.

Rorink was brought to a hospital where doctors diagnosed him with a broken fibula. His recovery is expected to take some time and multiple operations, according to Tubantia.

A 59-year-old man from Enschede was arrested on suspicion of a “possible connection” with the accident.

(Photo of the 2010 New Year’s dive of Scheveningen, in which so far no new models were discovered, by Alexander Fritze, some rights reserved.)

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January 1, 2010

Web 2.0 Suicide Machine helps clean out social networking accounts

Filed under: Online by Branko Collin @ 2:03 pm

“Wenn ich Facebook höre, entsichere ich meinen Browning!” I am not sure those were the exact words Queen Beatrix uttered during her most recent Christmas speech, but it was something to that effect.

If you desire to hark her majesty’s caution against the pervasive and dehumanizing nature of social networks, you can now use the Web 2.0 Suicide Machine to obliterate your Facebook, Myspace, LinkedIn and Twitter accounts in minutes rather than the hours a manual purge would take.

The site at suicidemachine.org will unfriend your friends, untweet your tweets and so on, but will leave the accounts intact. The process cannot be stopped. Afterwards, go introduce yourself to your neighbour, or read a book or something.

New Year’s Day is one of hope, the site, built by Rotterdam media lab called Moddr, won’t function today.

See also:

(Link: Sargasso.)

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