US haggis fans rejoice – 21 year old ban on haggis imports lifted!

by Scott Carmichael on

Any fans of boiled sheep heart, liver and lungs cooked with oatmeal inside an animal stomach? Well, good news for you – the twenty one year old US ban on Haggis imports has been lifted!

Back in 1989, bovine spongiform encephalopathy (better known as mad cow disease) forced authorities to ban the import of haggis. Apparently, sheep offal can be lethal when infected with BSE.

Even though haggis is not exactly the kind of dish most Scots serve for dinner once a week, it is an important part if our heritage (yes, I’m Scottish). During the annual Burns Night celebrations, Haggis is always on the table.

American butchers tried making their own haggis, but seriously, who in their right mind would eat an American copycat haggis served in a can – especially when it looks (and apparently smells) like dog food?

It will take a couple of months for the first Scottish produced haggis to make it over here, and even then, you’ll need a specialty butcher to actually get your hands on one. Feel free to let us know whether you’ll be rushing to pick one up!

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British Airways offering a crash course to retrain pilots as flight attendants

by Scott Carmichael on

Faced with another threat of a flight attendant strike, British Airways is preparing for the worst. The airline asked everyone within the company to voluntarily sign up for a 21 day training program to turn them into temporary flight attendants.

As of right now, only 216 volunteers signed up for the initiative, which falls quite a bit short of the 13,500 flight crew members that will walk out when a strike takes place. Five of the nine retraining courses are designed for pilots – which would turn them into the best paid cabin crew members in the world. The average BA pilot earns a just under $200,000 per year.

Of course, the union behind the flight attendants is not impressed, and they are quick to point out that the 21 day course is much shorter than the normal 3 month training a flight attendant receives, and could be a serious safety issue.

It makes sense for them to say this – as the public perception of the union and this strike is very negative. The same union almost shut down British Airways over the Christmas period last year, but a British court blocked their efforts at the last minute.

A union spokesperson said “Not only does this show contempt for the crew, what message does it send to passengers who have paid to be cared for by a premier airline?”. Personally, I’d rather have a cabin crew with just three weeks of training than be stuck at the airport for a week because a union was unable to reach an agreement on new pay cuts.

The British aviation authority, CAA, has approved the measures and will be monitoring the safety aspects of the training, to ensure that passengers are never at any kind of risk when they fly on a plane with the new temporary crew members.

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Is the Mona Lisa really Da Vinci in drag?

by Sean McLachlan on

When Marcel Duchamp put a mustache and goatee on the Mona Lisa, he might have guessed more than he knew.

Italian researchers are requesting permission to dig up Leonardo Da Vinci’s grave to prove their theory that his most famous painting is actually a self-portrait. Anthropologist Giorgio Gruppione wants to examine Da Vinci’s skull to see if it has structural similarities to the mysterious woman in the portrait. This process of facial reconstruction is usually reserved for murder victims, but could give evidence to support or refute the theory and add a new possibility for the origins of that enigmatic smile.

There’s been a great deal of discussion among historians as to Da Vinci’s sexuality. In 1476 he was brought before a judge in Florence on charges of sodomy with a male prostitute. Da Vinci claimed the young man was merely his model. They were acquitted for lack of evidence.

Da Vinci never married and claimed the act of reproduction was “disgusting”. He had a serious of close relationships with young men throughout his life but was never charged with sodomy again, perhaps because that close call in Florence taught him caution.

It’s doubtful that authorities in France, where Da Vinci is buried, will give permission to desecrate the grave of one of the world’s most famous artists just to prove he was a cross dresser, so probably we’ll just have to settle for the Transsexual Jesus.

Explore the Arctic with Hurtigruten Tours

by Katie Hammel on

Spitsbergen is the “last stop before the North Pole,” a cold, remote landscape of snow, ice, and arctic wildlife. And you can explore it with Hurtigruten, an adventure tour company.

While some of their longer tours may be prohibitively expensive for a lot of travelers (9-day tours cost around $5000 per person). they do offer a much more affordable 6-day Polar Encounters cruise starting at just over $1300 per person, plus airfare.

Passengers on the cruise will go ashore twice per day with an experienced guide, looking for glaciers, fjords, seals, whales, walruses, and polar bears. Stops include the towns of Longyearbyen, Barentsburg and Ny-Alesund, which vary in size for two thousand to less than two dozen residents.

Hurtigruten also offers cruises around Norway, Greenland, Antartica, the Baltics, and Western Europe.

[via Camels and Chocolate]

Full body scanner operators complain about “pervert” accusations

by Scott Carmichael on

The introduction of full body scanners at the airport checkpoint has created quite a lot of controversy. Passengers are obviously worried about having to show their naked body to a random stranger, and others worry that images of young children will make their way onto pedophile networks.

Now, a new group has come forward complaining about the scanners – the security screeners themselves. The screening staff at Heathrow airport are furious that people assume they’ll get a kick out of seeing blurry images of our genitals.

One airport scanner had the following to say:

“The idea that we are going to get kicks out of seeing a blurry gray image of people’s bodies is frankly offensive. It’s about as sensible as saying the act of patting down a passenger is perverted. We are here to do a job. We have bombs and knives on our minds and that’s it.”

Honestly, I had never thought of it that way – but it still doesn’t put me at ease. Sooner or later, somewhere in the world, one screener will violate our trust, and naked photos of a celebrity or child will make their way onto the Internet.

In the US, the full body imaging equipment has been set up in a way that the security operator can not see the person standing in the imaging machine – he or she will only see their naked image. The TSA assured travelers that images can not be stored or sent, but CNN already discovered documents that prove otherwise.

Image credit: AFP/Getty Images