The federal government has spent $550,496 on a project that involved conducting “focus groups and in-depth interviews” with American long-haul truck drivers to learn about their sex lives in order to assess their risk of contracting HIV or other sexually transmitted infections.
The project has failed to find any instances of HIV among the truck drivers studied.
This story was originally written when I was 18 years old (13 years ago), and recently rediscovered in a filing cabinet. First time typed out, aside from some very minor tweaks, it appears here as it was originally written. I took out over 2 pages worth of material that wasn’t really relevant to the plot, mostly dealing with the initial sighting, and Matthew’s relationship with his ex-wife. For a short story written by an 18 year old, it isn’t bad, hope you’ll agree…
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ON THE CLOCK
The rain from the storm beat down harshly upon the shingles of the roof, sounding like tiny soldiers marching in chaotic unison over a volatile battlefield.
Matthew sat and smoked his pipe while skimming through the newspaper which he’d read nearly in its entirety earlier in the evening. The radio buzzed strangely, the static of the storm was almost getting the best of his broadcast. He pulled a puff through the wood tip of his pipe, looked at the clock above his fireplace and exhaled a whiff of vanilla-cinnamon swirl.
It was eleven fifty-five, approximately five minutes before the show was set to air. For now the news was being flashed, speaking of continuing storms throughout the night and tomorrow morning, and about a train wreck that had occurred near downtown earlier today, killing eight people. The voices were getting much harder to understand though, for after nearly every other word a click or low buzz would crackle and ring out like a shouted greeting from the surging storm.
This is a recently-declassified US government photo of a hydrogen bomb detonating in space. The test, called Starfish Prime, set off the nuke 250 miles above the Earth’s surface. NPR explains that the US did so see if the Van Allen radiation belts around the Earth had military uses
MORE VIA: -NEATORAMA-
“The majority of Americans have failed to look beyond the television news, radio, and newspapers of major media outlets for information about 9/11. Many have adopted the views of these sources without critical analysis or any outside research. After all, why think for yourself when you can gather your thoughts and opinions from the evening news? In our culture, we have been trained to believe rather than think. The obvious is rejected and the fictitious is accepted.”
CONSPIRAPORN! 