The snow is melting in Greenland and some huge object appears to be making an appearance. This sorta looks like something out of John Carpenter’s ‘The Thing’. Prepare for the alien invasion suckers. Youtube video link

The following spots will leave you wondering just what any of this has to do with cups, noodles or soup. Don’t think about it too hard, you will break your brain.

We don’t usually cover political stuff here on Miniature Brainwave, but this is too good to be true. Leslie Powers, a Brooklyn native, has used her incredible net sleuthing skills to find Osama and tip off the F.B.I.. How did she do it you wonder…she found his Myspace profile! According to Powers the F.B.I. had been looking in the wrong place, Afghanistan, while she narrowed her focus to Brooklyn and caught him red-handed. Unfortunately for us all, this life-changing event has been suddenly covered up by the F.B.I., most likely at the behest of the shadow government.

…then sometime during the next day or so, something disturbing happened. After a brief time of being treated like a hero and being called a gifted researcher and being thanked repeatedly for my tips, the plug was pulled. When I had been calling in the tips before, I would announce that I was the one calling in the Brooklyn tips and they would always put me straight through to whoever was in charge. Two days after Osama’s arrest, I called and mentioned Brooklyn and they acted like they didn’t know what I was talking about.

You are probably thinking that this stinks, so help Leslie out and spread the news far and wide.

Leslie’s Myspace page telling the whole story

The purported Myspace page of Osama Bin Laden

Someone’s gone and invented a flying suit and posted a cool video. Being the kind of site we are, we are looking forward to the first swooping man death crash video on the youtube. Video link via wohba

Congrats to our friends at about:blank on their 1000th post. This cool site was originally brought to our attention by our man Slippy Lane and we quickly became regular readers. Miniature Brainwave just made our 301st post, not enough to throw a party yet, but something we are proud of nonetheless.
Visit about:blank and tell them we sent ya’!

Jones Soda, the comany that has brought us the strangely delightful Thanksgiving pack of soda that contained the flavor Turkey and Gravy, is moving on to other holidays. This year they are producing Christmas and Hanukah gift packs. The Christmas pack features a ham flavored beverage that is bugging me out. A childhood friend of mine used to tell people he liked baloney shakes and we all thought it was funny when someone new would get caught in his trap and he’d go through the recipe which included putting chunks of baloney in a blender. Art imitates life once again.

What do you think the weirdest soda flavor would be? I think they should do a zombie pack that includes flavors like eyeball, guts, blood and human arm.

Get yout Jones holiday packs here

This guy balanced some eggs on top of other eggs and didn’t stop until he created a miniature city. I didn’t even know one could balance an egg on top of another egg. If anyone out there knows more about this guy please let me know.

Ko Ko Kachoo - Link via Spluch

This kid does some freakin’ amazing stunts in a wheelchair, including the world’s first wheelchair back flip. Props to you dude! Youtube video link

“I played D&D for the CIA”

In the process of researching my book, I came across myriad stories, some of them completely believable, a few of them verifiable, many of them outlandish. One of the strangest stories that I found believable was from a man who claimed that, in the early to mid 80s, he had been involved in a CIA plot to infiltrate a Dungeons and Dragons campaign at Cal Tech.

This was back in the old days, long before the idea of “geek chic” had crossed the minds of marketers and scriptwriters. Playing D&D meant sitting in a basement or a dorm room full of almost exclusively male nerdlings, driven by the will to power, sexual frustration and Jolt! Cola by the gallon. This was also when rumors started to circulate about “waves of D&D related suicides” and about people who became convinced they really *were* their characters and murdered people or went to live in the sewers brandishing wooden swords and insisting poker chips were gold pieces. (Note: As far as I can tell, there was exactly one D&D related suicide, which was committed by a boy named Dallas Egbert who had way more problems than his spellcaster failing to advance a level. )

The CIA was aware of these rumors and they wanted to know what was going on. Anything that seemed so effective at causing people to dissociate or take on new identities was of interest. So they sent an asset to infiltrate a game at Cal Tech, one of the hotbeds of nerd activity.

This poor agent spent three months playing a human ranger with (almost exclusively male) physics and chem students in some dude’s dorm room. The reports he filed made extensive use of such phrases as “hapless” “inept” “pointless” and “bizarrely obsessive”. Though he witnessed several slapfights, a number of 19 and 20 year old men crying and innumerable dodecahderal dice flying through the air all in the names of dungeonmaster unfairness or rules violations, he saw nothing of real value to conditioing or dissociating personalities.

The story was, to me, amusing. I enjoy the fact that the CIA was involved in a conspiracy to infiltrate and subvert a D&D campaign. It’s also illustrative of the power that urban myths (the waves of D&D suicides, promulgated at that time by parent groups, Christian fundamentalists and Jack Chick) have even over the intelligence community.


Authorship: “peabody; a member of AboveTopSecret.com”

Title: “I played D&D for the CIA”

URL: http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread300668/pg1#pid3482985.

The greys have been here for a long time. Found over at Rense.com