moonbuggy

‘A new Texas law requires every computer repair technician to obtain a private investigator’s license, according to a lawsuit filed in Austin. Violators can face a $4,000 fine and one year in jail, as well as a $10,000 civil penalty.

Unlicensed computer shops will have to close down until they obtain a private investigator’s license.

A private investigator’s license can be obtained by acquiring a criminal justice degree or by getting a three-year apprenticeship under a licensed private investigator. [..]

In the Austin American-Statesman, State Rep. Joe Driver, (R-Garland) explains the intent of the law, and claims it does not place such restrictions on most computer shops.’

‘Of all the careers available to a devout Christian couple, revamping an urban pub and winning over its hardcore regulars was always going to be a gamble.

Sure enough, Krista and John Fleming found they were preaching to the unconverted - and the regulars had every intention of staying that way.

Now the Flemings, who banned swearing and gambling on horseracing, have been sacked after takings plunged. [..]

She said: ‘They should have built pews in here rather than chairs. I have no problem with their religion but… a pub is a pub. They started having a quiz and loads of the questions were on the Bible.

‘They took down the dart board… and now there’s some kind of calligraphy up there. [..]’

‘The Florida Retail Corporation and the Florida Chamber of Commerce are taking legal action against recent legislation which allows employees who have concealed weapons permits to bring guns to the workplace.

Disney and Publix are seeking to ban firearms from all areas of their property including the parking lots. Under the Florida law, workers will not only be permitted to have weapons, their employers will be prohibited from searching their vehicles or taking punitive action if a weapon is found.

In response to concerns that this legislation puts others at risk, Florida Governor Charlie Crist stated “It’s always a good idea to be able to protect yourself and the Second Amendment is a precious, cherished amendment that I fully support.”

Florida Chamber of Commerce member Sherri McInvale commented “It will absolutely hinder an employer’s right to control what happens on their property and most likely will not allow an employer to provide a safe environment for their employees and consumers.”‘

‘A man who used several different bent sticks to hit a ball to an area comprised of very short grass surrounding a hole in the ground was praised for his courage Monday after he used a somewhat smaller stick to gently roll the ball into the aforementioned hole in fewer attempts than his competitors. “What guts, what confidence,” ESPN commentator Scott Van Pelt said of the man, who was evidently unable to carry his sticks himself, employing someone else to hold the sticks and manipulate the flag sticking out of the hole in the ground while he rolled the ball into it. “You have to be so brave, so self-assured, so strong mentally to [roll a ball into a hole in the ground]. Amazing.” The man in question apparently hurt his knee during this activity.’

Not particularly clever, really. Lucky tho.

(2.4meg Flash video)

see it here »

‘A serious debate has heated up in the Swedish blogosphere on Monday after an eight-year-old boy’s failure to invite two classmates to his birthday party resulted in a complaint filed with parliament. Nearly 200 outraged comments had been posted on the website of the local southern Swedish daily Sydsvenskan on Monday, just days after the paper reported about the unlikely string of events that followed a young boy’s decision to invite all of his classmates to his birthday party except two.

The policy at the boy’s school in the southern town of Lund was that all children (or all the boys or all the girls) had to be invited to parties when their invitations were handed out in class. When a teacher noticed that two children had been left out of a party list, she promptly confiscated all the invitations, according to Sydsvenskan.

“Two people in class had not been invited, and that is not allowed. The ones who were not invited felt sad and left out,” the school principal, who was not named, told the paper.

The boy’s father meanwhile decided to file a complaint with the Swedish parliamentary ombudsman, insisting his son’s rights had been trampled on. [..]’

‘A Washington woman said she filed a federal lawsuit accusing a Miami hospital of “anti-gay animus” after workers refused to let her see her dying partner.

Janice Langbehn and her partner Lisa Marie Pond, both aged 39, intended to enjoy a vacation cruise with three of their four children, marking the women’s 18 years as a couple in February 2007, the South Florida Sun-Sentinel reported Thursday.

The trip abruptly ended when Pond had a massive stroke as the ship was preparing to leave port, the newspaper said.

She was taken to Miami’s Jackson Memorial Hospital, where Langbehn said workers would not let her see her ailing partner.

A social worker allegedly said the couple was in an “anti-gay city and state.”‘

That looks fairly painful. That’ll teach him I s’pose.

(1.0meg Flash video)

see it here »

‘Transit police have identified the man seen with a young girl on-board a bus at Sullivan Station Sunday night.

Officers have met with both the young girl, and the family member who was with her on the bus.

A passenger noticed a man holding the child’s hand. That passenger says she overheard the girl say she was hungry, and the man told her to “Please be quiet.”

T police say there was no criminal conduct. They consider the case closed.’

‘even the magnums are too small for me, is there anywhere you can order bigger ones on line? they fit great on the shaft but it is way too tight around my ball sack and it squeezes my balls which is very uncomfortable.’

‘He’s dead! Motherfucker!’

(4.0meg Flash video)

see it here »

It’s not a good idea at all.

(858kB Flash video)

see it here »

‘Six weeks after public health authorities on the Caribbean island of Curaçao (Netherlands Antilles) impounded the Scientology cult’s 440-foot luxury liner “Freewinds,” the ship remains locked down. Experts advise that decontaminating the ship would cost millions of dollars and may not even be possible. Meanwhile, the cult continues to solicit funds for cruises that will not happen.

After the ship was quarantined on April 26, the Curaçao Drydock Company was contracted to carry out refurbishment and repairs. The contamination was so extensive that the company decided that the risk to its workers was too great, and ceased operations. At that point Scientology sent a team of its “Sea Org” internal paramilitary force to clean the ship themselves. They are bringing the blue asbestos by the truckload to dump at the island’s Selikor landfill site at Malpais. [..]

Incredibly, top leaders of the Scientology cult were informed of the pervasive contamination back in 1987, but chose to do nothing. [..] Since Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard had never mentioned that asbestos was dangerous, they were not going to worry about it. Scientologists believe that disease is caused not by microbes or toxic substances, but by the presence of “suppressive persons” (SPs), or people who disagree with Scientology and its goals. Moreover, Scientologists believe that high-level Sea Org members cannot get cancer or any other disease.’

‘Last June, Matthew Lincoln was attending an evening service at his nondenominational Tennessee church when he approached the altar where a visiting minister was offering individual prayers for parishioners. Assigned “catchers” were present on the altar in case congregants fainted, fell, or otherwise lost control. When the minister, Robert Lavala, slightly touched his forehead, the Knoxville-area man “received the spirit and fell backwards.” Except nobody was there to catch him, Lincoln charges in a $2.5 million lawsuit filed yesterday against Lakewind Church and its pastors. Lincoln, 58, claims that he fell backwards, striking his head against the “carpet-covered cement floor,” according to the Circuit Court complaint [..]

Lincoln alleges that Lakewind and its pastors were “negligent in not supervising the catchers to be sure that they stood behind the person being prayed for…should they have a dizzying, fainting, or falling in the spirit as had occurred on many occasions before.”‘

‘Automatic car features are supposed to make life easier for motorists, but they may be leaving some people without the know-how to do things the old-fashioned way. That’s what happened to a driver in Utah County who became trapped inside her own car.

A woman called Orem police Friday afternoon needing help because her battery died and she was locked inside her car.

When police arrived, they found the woman sitting in the car, unable to get herself out. She couldn’t hear the officers instructions through the rolled-up windows so she motioned to them to call her on her cell phone, according to police.

Once officers were able to talk to the woman on the phone, they were able to tell her how to manually operate the slide lock mechanism on the inside door panel to open the door and free herself.

“I’m just glad she had a cell phone to call for help,” an officer said.’

‘At the western entrance to the Iraqi city of Fallujah Tuesday, Muamar Anad handed his residence badge to the U.S. Marines guarding the city. They checked to be sure that he was a city resident, and when they were done, Anad said, a Marine slipped a coin out of his pocket and put it in his hand.

Out of fear, he accepted it, Anad said. When he was inside the city, the college student said, he looked at one side of the coin. “Where will you spend eternity?” it asked.

He flipped it over, and on the other side it read, “For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life. John 3:16.”

“They are trying to convert us to Christianity,” said Anad, a Sunni Muslim like most residents of this city in Anbar province. At home, he told his story, and his relatives echoed their disapproval: They’d been given the coins, too, he said.’

‘A donkey has been sent to prison in southern Mexico for a brutal case of ass-ault and battery.

The animal was locked up at a local jail that normally holds people for public drunkenness and other disturbances after it bit and kicked two men near a ranch in the state of Chiapas.

The two victims accuse it of biting one of them in the chest and then kicking the other as he came to the rescue, fracturing his ankle.

Police said it took half a dozen men to control the enraged beast.’

‘At 2:25 P.M., I happened to be down on the street, smoking a cigarette with a co-worker. Out of the blue, I hear “Splat,” followed by piercing, vivid screams of fear and nauseous anxiety.

Suddenly, I saw two girls running down the side of the street with blood and muscle tissue covering their faces. And I just walked around, asking myself what the hell was going on.

In the confusion, my buddy told me to turn around. I did, and there it was: [..]’

‘Blake Dwyer remembers pain:

And shouting.

And fear.

“I thought a swarm of wasps was after me,” the 17-year-old Guyer High School athlete said. “I was trying to fight them off.”

He doesn’t remember the epileptic seizure he suffered July 18, 2007, when he was 16.

He doesn’t remember fighting to keep from being tied to a stretcher or hitting a paramedic.

His brother, Travis Baker, 17, remembers all of it. He recalls screaming at Corinth police to stop shocking Blake with a Taser. His mother, Deana, remembers hearing Travis crying on the telephone.

“He was saying, ‘Blake is having a seizure, and they’re hurting him,’” she said.’

‘Two children and their mother lived for about two months with the decaying body of a 90-year-old woman on the toilet of their home’s only bathroom, on the advice of a religious “superior” who claimed the corpse would come back to life, authorities said Friday.

The children—a 15-year-old girl and a 12-year-old boy—cried hysterically Wednesday after a deputy who came to their Necedah home looking for Magdeline Alvina Middlesworth ordered them out because of the stench from her body.

The children were in foster care Friday. Their mother, Tammy Lewis, and self-described “bishop” Alan Bushey remained in custody on felony counts of being a party to causing mental harm to a child. [..]

Lewis told the deputy that Middlesworth had died about two months earlier, but that God told her Middlesworth would come to life if she prayed hard enough.

She said she couldn’t say anything more until she spoke with her “superior”—Bushey, 57, also known as Bishop John Peter Bushey.’

‘A 13 year old from Texas who stole his Dad’s credit card and ordered two hookers from an escort agency, has today been convicted of fraud and given a three year community order.

Ralph Hardy, a 13 year old from Newark, Texas confessed to ordering an extra credit card from his father’s existing credit card company, and took his friends on a $30,000 spending spree, culminating in playing “Halo” on an Xbox with a couple of hookers in a Texas motel.

The credit card company involved said it was regular practice to send extra credit cards out as long as all security questions are answered.

The escort girls who were released without charge, told the arresting officers something was up when the kids said they would rather play Xbox than get down to business. [..]

Ralph’s ambition is to one day become a politician.’

‘alright, i got a computer that used to be networked onto a server with classlinks in school or whatever., well i got it home thinking i could reformat the hard drive, yeah…no. they set up a password on the computer so when i go to the utility options or whatever, and it has a password as soon as it opens. and to let you know nothing boots. i tried installing XP but im almost 100% sure that that password is blockin the coputer from accessing it, bc when i go to install XP it says no mass storgae device found. So how do i over ride this password. i changed the RAM and switched out the hard drives, then i took out that little battery for 10 min or so..no luck, Somone please help me.’

‘Regardless of marital status, income or church attendance, right-wing individuals reported greater life satisfaction and well-being than left-wingers, the new study found. Conservatives also scored highest on measures of rationalization, which gauge a person’s tendency to justify, or explain away, inequalities. [..]

To justify economic inequalities, a person could support the idea of meritocracy, in which people supposedly move up their economic status in society based on hard work and good performance. In that way, one’s social class attainment, whether upper, middle or lower, would be perceived as totally fair and justified.

If your beliefs don’t justify gaps in status, you could be left frustrated and disheartened, according to the researchers, Jaime Napier and John Jost of New York University. They conducted a U.S.-centric survey and a more internationally focused one to arrive at the findings.’

During an infomercial for some car jumper leads the women doing the presenting decides to switch the jumper cable connections to the battery. Intentionally, for no good reason.

Silly.

(2.8meg Flash video)

see it here »

‘Carl McCunn (1946 - 1981) was a Texan who, in March 1981, paid a bush pilot to drop him at a remote lake near the Coleen River in Alaska, on the southern margin of the Brooks Range, to photograph wildlife.

McCunn flew in with 500 rolls of film, 1,400 pounds of provisions, two rifles and a shotgun, but had not arranged for the pilot to pick him up again in August. He prematurely disposed of boxes of shotgun shells in the river; used the wrong emergency hand signals to a plane that had spotted him and waved the plane off; and waited too long in the season to attempt to walk out.

In February 1982 Alaska State Troopers found his body, emaciated and frozen as hard as stone, along with a 100-page diary that documented his demise. He wrote “I think I should have used more foresight about arranging my departure.” Rather than starve, McCunn had shot himself in the head.’

‘In my previous life as a fed agent I was often asked to assist with some “undercover” sting operations all over the Northeast US. One of the most memorable was a op in northern Maine. I was to play the brother-in-law of our source who’s co-worker had recently asked him if he knew of any good dealers of crack.

Long story short they brought me in to sell him crack. We met the “Client” as planned and you should have seen this kids eyes when I pulled out this giant bag of crack we had obtained from a previous bust. He looked like he was going to start crying, like he had just come to know Jesus or something… anyway he wanted to buy it all, every last gram of it, but he had only brought $150.00 bucks with him. I thought for a second and asked him if had his checkbook on him and he did. [..]’

‘A teenager reportedly ended up with a cabinet instead of a taxi because she asked directory inquiries for a “cab, innit”.

According to The Sun, the Londoner, 19, wanted a taxi to take her to Bristol airport, and first used the Cockney rhyming slang “Joe Baxi”.

When the operator told her she couldn’t find anyone by that name, the teen replied: “It ain’t a person, it’s a cab, innit.”

The operator then found the nearest cabinet shop, Displaysense, and put the girl through.

She then spoke to a bemused saleswoman and eventually demanded: “Look love, how hard is it? All I want is your cheapest cab, innit. I need it for 10am. How much is it?”

The sales adviser said it would be £180 and the girl gave her address and paid with a credit card. The next morning, an office cabinet was delivered to her South London home.’

‘The teen accused of masterminding a videotaped “animalistic” attack against a fellow teenage classmate is out on bond, and she has celebrity talk show host Dr. Phil McGraw to thank for it, according to a bail bondsman.

The bondsman told media gathered at a Polk County jail Friday that Dr. Phil posted Mercedes Nichols’ $30,000 bond.

When Nichols was released from jail, a man arrived and idenfitied himself as a Dr. Phil producer and ordered local media to leave the area because the Dr. Phil Show had exclusive rights to the story, according to reporters on scene.’