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UVB-76 is a number station from Soviet days. Its purpose still remains a mystery. Rumors claim its a dead man’s switch to automatically launch nuclear weapons in the event of the Kremlin being destroyed– but that seems like sheer speculation. Today, August 24 2010, there has been three audio transmissions. What is odd is that in its 20 years of operation the station has only broadcast vocal transmissions five times– two of which were this week! Normally it sounds like a buzzer pulsating a coded message to unknown agents. Whatever purpose the station serves it still receives funding as is staffed. Anything else is a mystery.

The message repeated three times says in Russian:

UVB-76, UVB-76 — 93 882 Naimina 74 14 35 74 — 9 3 8 8 2 Nikolai, Anna, Ivan, Michail, Ivan, Nikolai, Anna, 7, 4, 1, 4, 3, 5, 7, 4

UVB-76 from Satellite

Possibilities abound. Increased military activity? A training excercize like Able Archer 83? Instructions for Iran’s nuclear reactor to come online? Maybe a plan to send more sexy lingerie model spies (yes please)? No one really knows.

There is a live stream and UVB-76 blog dedicated to the enigma for all those amateur code breaks and counter-intelligence agents out there.

Update 19:55: Cracked open my Russian dictionary thinking ‘Naiminia’ might be на имя which means “on names.” I never heard the word ‘naiminia’ before. I’m not a native speaker though, could be wrong.

Update 20:43: An anonymous reader kindly clarified its на имeна the plural form for names and clearly what’s in the audio.

Update August 25, 2010: The numbers could be simple  longitude and latitude coordinates (74.14 N, 35.74 E) pointing to a location in the Barrent sea. It just so happens this week that Russia is carrying out an anti-aircraft missile training exercise in the Barrent sea. Can we breathe a sigh of relief?

Update August 26, 2010: Yup, according to a Wikipedia author, its longitude and latitude coordinates and the other numerical strings point to deserts located in Asia near installations of some kind. Too many instances for coincidence. Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UVB-76#Patterns

(Rest of the episode here and here.)

Any, any, ANY excuse at all to post an episode of Get a Life, the how-the-hell-did-he-get-a-show Chris Elliot sitcom fondly remembered by grown up awkward youth and ex-convicts alike.  (Check the comments on that clip: “Dude I saw this while I was in jail like 20 years ago. Thanks for posting it. It is one of my favourite episodes of any show.”)

And that excuse would be…

On Friday, the police in Ecuador, acting on intelligence gathered by the United States Drug Enforcement Administration, raided a secret jungle shipyard near the country’s border with Colombia and discovered what American officials called “a fully operational submarine built for the primary purpose of transporting multiton quantities of cocaine.”

…

According to the D.E.A., the fiberglass submarine, about 100 feet long and 9 feet high, was the first of its kind to be seized and was captured “before it was able to make its maiden voyage.”

Check out the whole article from The Lede (NYTimes) here, complete with clip from VBS TV of captured coke subs in Colombia.

Good to know that privately owned subs come at such an range of price points.  From back of Boy’s Life kits to DIY oil barrel subs to the Sharper Image jerking around, there’s truly a sub out there for everybody.

If this is authentic, this slide presentation claims that “everything was okay” with the oil rig down in the Gulf then a series of unfortunate incidents caused a big “whoopsie!”– or Oilocolypse. Read the whole BP Washington Debriefing Dated June 7 2010 (PDF) yourself though.

Yesterday, Andrew Revkin over at the New York Times’ Dot Earth blog asked the sky, the ether or whatever great beyond you’re shouting into when you end a blog post with ‘what are your thoughts?’:

Why is salvaged oil going to BP instead of US reserves?

Taken at face value, the answer is fairly obvious: well, because that crude sucks.  While it appears that this gushing black stuff is some high-grade light sweet Louisiana crude, the fact that it’s being captured by some jury-rigged piping installed by a chainsaw-wielding robot under a tight deadline or by whoever has the Dawn soap and the scrub brush on the beach indicates that maybe this stuff just might be half seawater and beach trash.

However, this does raise an interesting point: is there money to be made in gleaning tarballs and filtering slicks, then selling off what you grabbed?  To explain a bit, the walking portion of my daily commute takes me past the dismembered hulks of many former computers, air conditioners, and  other sources of scrap metal so I imagine there just might be bottom-feeders/waste recyclers for any resource industry.  Why not oil?  Whatever the composition of those tar balls, I can’t imagine it contains less crude than oil shale.  And what an incentive for an entrepreneur if they could double dip by taking cleanup money and selling the crude they’ve sucked up at the end of the day.

What sort of cleanup solutions are not being developed by the magic of The Markets because BP is claiming all that gushing oil as their exclusive property, even if it’s on a dead seabird?  What are your thoughts on joining me on some rag-tag pirate venture to salvage tar balls for a bootleg oil refinery?

From a 1960 industrial film from the American Petroleum Institute. Oil is good for oysters! Oil industry cares! Free trade is good! Nothing is wrong with the gulf coast!

BP is probably recoloring this and will be using this in 3…2…1…

From the LA Times article “Kevin Costner may hold key to oil spill cleanup“:

The “Kevin Costner solution” to the worsening oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico may actually work, and none too soon for the president of Plaquemines Parish.

Wow. I had no idea Kevin Costner held the key to anything, let alone solving an environmental disaster. Or that the abysmal movie Waterworld might save the world.

I couldn’t stop myself from firing up Photoshop to make the movie poster for this affair.

According to Faisal Shahzad’s resume he has a background in finance and has the email address fshahzad1@gmail.com. The Daily News reports that he is 30 years old.

Curiously a YouTube user going as fshahzad1 last signed on 6 months and says in his profile he’s 29. This YouTube user commented on the video “Peter Schiff vs the Federal Reserve – LIVE! – Part 1 of 5” the following:

“oh we still have dollar? I thought we were done with it in 2001, who owns FED RES,
300 people. not US GOV”

Maybe another user who also has the same username of “fshahzad1″– however given the users age, Google/GMail/YouTube Accounts are often the same username, and this video’s subject of finance it seems we are dealing with the same Faisal Shahzad. A man who interestingly enough shared values with Conservatives, Libertarians, Tea Partiers, and Ron Paul supporters that seemingly in American media contrast a Fundamentalist Islamic Terrorist. As both believe the US Dollar is not owned by the US Government but rather a cabal. An interesting conspiracy theory from an interesting person in the news.

For anyone looking to take a trip down the memory lane of rumors and hearsay past, Snopes’ “Rumors of War” section provides an excellent resource for digging through what happened, didn’t happen and was said to have happened, related to 9/11 and the subsequent spasms compiled into the narrative of the American “War on Terror”.  The anecdotes like “Time magazine is considering designating Osama bin Laden their Man of the Year for 2001″ (true) and “Hospitals experience a sharp increase in births nine months after September 11″ (false) are given the critical eye, providing for interesting reading.

What a valuable resource for recreating the mood around these events.  By providing a record of the sort of urban legends, misinformation and anecdotes that were passed around, Snopes brings back the emotion of those times in a way that a straight factual record fails to do. It’s also a great starting place for a search on half-remembered things from the confusing aftermath of 9/11.

Amidst a million other things going on this week, I thought I’d take a moment to note the passing of the man behind Taco Bell, Glen Bell, Jr.  I grew up waiting with barely contained excitement for taco night, which in my gabacho household meant the ritual spooning of meat, colby-jack cheese and lettuce into a crispy tortilla.  Later, it became the first meal I ever figured out how to make myself (with help from a kit), starting me down the road of culinary self-sufficiency I walk today.

According to the New York Times’ obituary page, I have a man to thank for this glorious innovation of the pre-crisped taco shell:

… Mr. Bell, a fan of Mexican food, had a hunch that ground beef, chopped lettuce, shredded cheese and chili sauce served in the right wrap could give burgers a run for the money. The problem was which wrap. Tacos served in Mexican restaurants at the time were made with soft tortillas.“If you wanted a dozen, you were in for a wait,” Mr. Bell said. “They stuffed them first, quickly fried them and stuck them together with a toothpick.”

The solution: preformed fried shells that would then be stuffed. Mr. Bell asked a man who made chicken coops to fashion a frying contraption made of wire.

Much innovation has come from the creative abuse of chicken wire.  May ever more tasty creations be spawned from the hands of geniuses with pliers.

So Mr. Bell, for cheaply feeding generations of mall employees, for prepping my tender palette to the wonders of churros, and for introducing the joys of beans and tortillas to the North American masses, long before many in those white bread zones had ever met a real live Mexican, I salute you.

Between Obama receiving the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo, Norway and these mysterious lights in northern Norway much is going on in Norway. The Daily Mail has photos and videos of this oddity.

As the Daily Mail reports, the lights were not seen by many. Lenticular Clouds, Northern Lights, and other natural phenomenon could be a cause. Some are propose the mysterious lights are caused by a missle from Russia. The Russian military of course denies this. Others say it might be a UFO of extraterrestrial origin.

This would not be the first time Scandinavia had a flap with ghost rockets and UFO’s. During World War II, Nazi scientists tested V1 and V2 rockets over Sweden and Norway. After the war reports of mysterious lights and objects emerged. At its height in the late 1940′s the Swedish Defence Research Agency (Totalförsvarets forskningsinstitut, FOI) stated “nearly one hundred impacts have been reported and thirty pieces of debris have been received and examined by FOI.” Some hypothesized these UFOs tests by Russia and a few wondered at the possibility of an out of this world phenomenon– including the US Military. A 1948 USAF document states: “we are inclined not to discredit entirely this somewhat spectacular theory [extraterrestrial origins], meantime keeping an open mind on the subject.”

Who knows maybe its a natural phenomenon, missile, or UFO. Or maybe Sarah Palin is pissed at Obama and summoned her buddy Thor.

EDIT: Yeah, it was a rocket. But a rocket spewing out tiny sapphires!  Not Thor, but still cool.