Hipsters beware: Classic Casio watch ‘sign of al-Qaida’

According to the Guantanamo Bay files published today in the Guardian and the New York Times, the classic Casio wristwatch is the ‘sign of al-Qaida’.

Worn by hipsters and sold all over the world, the watch, which costs less than £20 was taken by analysts at the camp as evidence of detainees having bomb-making training.

Staff at Guantanamo Bay were trained to spot the device when assessing the threat level of detainees.

According to the leaked documents “The Casio was known to be given to the students at al-Qaida bomb-making training courses in Afghanistan at which the students received instruction in the preparation of timing devices using the watch.

“Approximately one-third of the JTF-GTMO detainees that were captured with these models of watches have known connections to explosives, either having attended explosives training, having association with a facility where IEDs were made or where explosives training was given, or having association with a person identified as an explosives expert.”

Who knew terrorists had such style?

Club Obi Wan in The Temple of Doom

While watching Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom recently, thedocumentative spotted a cool little Star Wars reference.

The reference is little more than a club named after Obi-Wan Kenobi in the opening scene where Indi is trying to escape the evil clutches of Chinese crime lord, Lao Che.

According to the Indiana Jones Wiki (unfortunately the name Indipedia is dedicated to articles relating to the country, India), Club Obi Wan was a restaurant and nightclub in Shanghai, China in the 1930s. Housed in a multi-story building, the club featured fine dining and lavish entertainment productions for both Chinese and foreign patrons. The business was controlled by Lao Che.

In 1935, Willie Scott was a lead singer at the club, performing in a large cast of singers, showgirls, and dancers. The club was also a hangout for its owner, the crime lord, Lao Che, and his men. One evening at the club, Lao Che met with Indiana Jones to trade Nurhachi’s ashes for a large diamond. Lao attempted to double cross Jones with poison, but Jones escaped, taking Scott with him. During the violent confrontation, Jones’ friend Wu Han and Lao Che’s son Chen were both killed.

thedocumentative absolutely loves the fact that there is a wiki dedicated to all things Dr Jones.

Today just got a whole lot better

For anyone who grew up in the 90s, who smoked pot while watching Ren and Stimpy, who had to buy another Doggystyle CD because you just plain played the shit out of your first one, and who’s A-Level results took a severe hammering at the hands of Football Manager, read on, brother, read on.

The SNES is coming back! As a handheld! Yes, that’s right, those wonderfully thoughtful and lovely people over at Hyperkin have gone and made a SNES that fits in your hands.

What’s more, it plays all your old SNES cartridges, has two scarts on the front to plug in controllers and hooks up to your TV.

The SupaBoy, which is still in prototype stage and which will be released this summer, will have us gleefully blowing into cartridges and screaming with sheer delight when we once again find the inimitable golden gun in Golden Eye.

The ‘Cutting Edge’ of miniature masterpieces

‘Nothing is impossible’ has been engraved on the edge of a razor blade measuring just 1/10th of a millimetre.

Graham Short of Birmingham has spent almost half a century honing his craft and putting himself through extremes to produce some of the most intricate and mind-blowing engravings known to man.

His most recent project, which took over 150 attempts and eight months to complete, sees the 19 letters inscribed along the edge of the ‘legendary’ Wilkinson Sword blade.

Mr Short said, “It’s a matter of minute amounts of pressure. I admit I’ve become a bit obsessed by it, but I just can’t resist the idea of going smaller and smaller.”

The words cannot be seen with the naked eye and require a magnification of around 400 times on a medical microscope to be legible.

Mr Short, who got the idea from a Marlon Brando quote in Apocalypse Now, – “I watched a snail crawl along the edge of a straight razor,” – worked from midnight to 5.30am most nights of the week, for eight months on his razor blade.

On a good night he’d manage three minuscule letters.

He said, “Believe me, the blade fought back on many occasions. I have the scars to prove it.”

Working at night enabled him to minimise traffic vibrations, with his right arm bound to a chair with a luggage strap and a stethescope to monitor his heartbeat, he attempted each stroke of the letter only between beats, when he has completely relaxed his body.

The Wilkinson’s Sword blade is now available to buy, with a £47,500 price tag.

Mr Short has also engraved the name of every England, World Cup goalscorer from 1950 – 2010 on a football stud, the Lords Prayer on the head of a gold pin, and the II Amendment of the American Bill of Rights (the right of the people to keep and bear arms) on the end of a silver bullet.

Visit Graham Short’s website, Hands of Genius

AT-AT for America

Star Wars fans (that means everybody) pay attention. One man plans to save America.

Star Wars fan, Mike Koehler, believes he’s found the cure to the ills of post-industrial, post-crash, post-greatness America, by building a full-scale, fully functional AT-AT Imperial Walker. Seriously.

On his blog, atatforamerica.tumblr.com, Koehler admits he has no idea and no ‘mechanical aptitude’ for the impossible difficult task he has set for himself, but believes the ‘nerds, makers, geeks, motorheads, sportos, dudes, steam-punks, Jedis, halfwits, greasers and geniuses’ of America do.

He wants to harness their “brain power, [their] manufacturing prowess, [their] organizational skills and [their] geek-fueled eye for detail” to build something that would a) put the rest of the world to shame and b) build on America’s obsession with popular culture to create a monument to its greatness.

Could this be the greatest open source project the Internets has given us? I think it might just be.

Follow Koehler on Twitter

Dog AT-AT Day Afternoon