The Virtual Union

London, U.K. – Achieving the head political office and holding for a number of years is a major accomplishment in any country. In some countries though it is far more than deserving of a pat on the back, it is the stuff of legend. Because of her history, The United Kingdom inevitably creates such men and women of legend whether or not they actually deserve that status. Centuries of conquest and global prominence have quite rightly earned the country the right to claim itself as one of the most important, and for her leaders to claim the same. Scrape TV

Mountain View, CA – Every now and then truly disruptive technologies emerge in the world. The printing press, the internal combustion engine, and plastics are examples of such types of technologies. They are developments that have
fundamentally shifted the way the world works and created entirely new industries based around them. Often times those industries, like say writing books, seem totally unrelated because they have become such independent activities, but without that initial shift such developments would not have been possible. Scrape TV

New York, NY – Controversy and rock and roll have been pretty much attached at the hip from the very beginning. Elvis created stirs, so did The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, The Sex Pistols, Motley Crue, Nirvana, and Marilyn Manson. It is an essential part of the game of popular music, not only for bringing attention to the artist but also for the medium of music itself. Whatever the reason, controversy and music have long gone hand-in-hand and likely always will. Scrape TV

Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia – Though it has become almost mundane in modern life, the achievement of flight is still quite incredible in human history. A little over a hundred years old now the fact that we can even consider taking something like
human flight as pedestrian shows how far removed we are from our ancestors. Even fifty years ago commercial flight wasn’t common and now it is hardly more complicated then getting on the bus and riding to the next town. Scrape TV

Berlin, Germany – There is perhaps no word, no phrase, that describes the horrors that occurred during the Holocaust than Auschwitz. That word is, quite rightly, the near personification of pure evil, a word that evokes horrors more profound than anything the devil ever dreamt. As a result of that the small town of Oświęcim (German: Auschwitz), a sleepy Polish city founded 900 years ago, has been forever blighted with the curse of Nazi horror and permanently stained with the ash of over a million people burned in the furnaces just outside the city’s borders. Scrape TV

Aspen, CO – There have been few success stories in the American experience as formidable and remarkable as that of Bill Gates. It isn’t just the billions and billions of dollars that makes Gates’ story so remarkable; it is the influence his success has had on the rest of the world. His company and software may have started to show their age in recent years but there is little doubt that in the early days of home computing, the introduction of Windows fundamentally changed the market and the way we interact with machines and helped to form the modern world. Scrape TV

Nassau, Bahamas – There can be no greater trauma for a parent then the experience of losing a child. While there are certainly deep emotional factors that create such feelings, there is something deeper, something deeper in the human experience. We are in the end breeding machines. Our principle purpose in life, just like every other species on the planet, is to create a new generation, to perpetuate the species. Complex human emotions aside, the loss of offspring goes against our essential nature, it goes against what we were built to do in life. Scrape TV

Phoenix, AZ – it is perhaps one of the great ironies of the American experience that immigration has been so reviled throughout history. While tempers flare in Arizona and other border states about the supposed flood of illegal immigration from Mexico, it is largely forgotten that the history of the country is literally riddled with immigration. Italian and Irish immigrants in the 18th century were pariahs, and the history of African Americans is more than well documented but it is these people, as well as all other Europeans, that have made America into the great nation it has become. The country is a nation of immigrants. Scrape TV

Concord, NH - Hurricane Earl, as it turns out, was more of a whimper than a roar as it made its way up the eastern seaboard of the United States. Downgrading from Hurricane status to Tropical Storm, the system skirted the states that had been prepared for a full out assault from the once monster storm. Now shop and home owners are finally starting to return to normal, removing plywood from windows and going back to regular business. Scrape TV

New York, NY – In the computing world the term ‘Vapourware’ is used to describe products promised by manufacturers but for reason or another have never been released and in many cases never existed at all. Sometimes those products do hit market, most notably Windows which was delayed multiple times and had many fearful that never existed at all, and perform in the market with that monkey on their back. True vapourware though is product that never leaves the drawing board, product that may in fact have never existed at all and was merely a ploy to trick investors. ‘Duke Nukem Forever’ was long believed to be one of those cases. Scrape TV