Creative Anti-Smoking Ads

Over the past 40 years, smoking has declined by about half, thanks in part to anti-smoking media campaigns.

But anti-tobacco messages and ads often face fierce opposition from the cigarette manufacturers who have worked vigorously to diminish their impact

Anti-smoking ads began in the late 1960s when the FCC deemed cigarette smoking controversial and therefore subject to the Fairness Doctrine, which requires opening the airwaves to public service messages on opposing viewpoints. The ads were very effective in reducing smoking, despite vigorous counter-advertising by the tobacco companies. (According to a 1972 study, anti-smoking ads cut cigarette smoking by 531 cigarettes per person per year, while tobacco company advertising increased consumption by only 95 cigarettes per person per year.)

Stop Global Warming

Very powerful video about global warming. It's just heartbreaking.

Extreme Piercing at Vegetarian Festival Phuket

Probably the most fascinating and also somewhat gruesome festivals in the world, the Phuket Vegetarian Festival is best known for its aesthetic displays of unusual body piercings. You may see devotees with tire irons through their cheeks, or large spikes driven through their tongues. The festival is held for just over a week annually during the ninth lunar month of the Chinese calendar, falling somewhere in October. This year it runs from the 11th to the 19th of October.

The Phuket Vegetarian Festival and its rituals are thought by many to bring good fortune to religious followers. Phuket residents of Chinese ancestry, called Hokkien Chinese, follow a strict vegan or vegetarian diet for 10 days for the purposes of merit-making and spiritual cleansing. This is accompanied by sacred rituals at Chinese temples and shrines around the island. Stalls of vegan food are set up throughout Phuket City, and even non-vegans will be suitably impressed by the delicious selection.

The festival started in 1825 the paricipants are not allowed to eat meat or have sex at the time of the festival. For obvious reasons participants are asked to use only sterile blades, spears and guns. According to physicians there is a risk of HIV and hepatitis.

Perhaps the most visual of these rituals are the displays of extreme body piercings with large objects that can range from knives to umbrellas. Devotees, called ma song, may even partake in walking over hot coals barefoot or climbing up ladders that have rungs made of knife blades. Visitors can see the ma song walking in their trances during long parades through the streets on every day of the festival.

Giant Animals Still Roam the Earth

A couple of years ago, some 11 year old boy killed the largest wild boar anyone has ever seen. The thing is unbelievably massive. Actually, to be exact, it was "1,051 pounds and measured 9-feet-4 from the tip of its snout to the base of its tail". Seriously? No one notice this thing walking around? It's bigger than my car. And he killed it with a hand gun? Who goes hunting with a hand gun? After reading about this pig-monster, I could think about only 1 thing: how sick of eating pork this kid's family is going to become.

Some more pictures of such giant animals after the jump.

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