‘Fifteen students were left with permanent scars after branding themselves with heated coat hangers at a house party, it emerged today.
The ‘group challenge’ saw each student brand themselves with the initial of the hall they lived in last year.
Participants held a reshaped metal coat hanger to heat on a hot stove for 30 seconds. [..]
After visiting hospital, at least three of the students were given antibiotics to fight infection.
A burns specialist also warned they will have permanent scarring, following the incident on September 20 at a private house party for students at Exeter University. [..]
Onlookers said large amounts of alcohol were consumed at the party, but another unnamed student added there was no coercion involved.
He said: ‘No one was pinned down. It was all optional, everyone just stood there and did it.”
‘Eric Williamson, from Springfield, Virginia, was brewing coffee in his kitchen when a woman and a seven-year-old boy walked past the window and saw him.
The woman complained to police who arrested Williamson shortly after the incident on Monday morning.
Williamson, 29, insisted he did nothing wrong and that any exposure of his private parts were accidental.
“Yes I wasn’t wearing any clothes but I was alone, in my own home and just got out of bed. It was dark and I had no idea anyone was outside looking in at me,” he said. [..]
A spokesman for Fairfax county police, Mary Ann Jennings, said Williamson was arrested because officers believed he wanted to be seen naked by the public.
The 29-year-old faces up to a year in jail and a $2,000 fine if he is convicted. He is fighting the charge and seeking damages from police.’
‘A Coatesville mother made her 6-year-old daughter drive a car because “[mom] was sleepy” after smoking “that stinky stuff,” according to police. [..]
Officer Robert Keetch said he had to do a double take after seeing the little girl driving. “There were two white knuckles and a little head popping over the stearing wheel,” he said.
The woman, Lakisha Hogue, was sitting in the passenger seat, laughing, when a patrol officer pulled her over, said police. Hogue told the Officer Keetch that she was teaching her daughter how to drive.
“Mom made me drive because she was sleepy,” the girl told police.
Then police say the aunt asked her niece, “Was your mom smoking that stinky stuff again?” The girl replied “yes,” say police.’
‘The operator of the Australian discussion forum ZGeek has been named as a defendant in a defamation suit for material posted by ZGeek users to a thread about a 9/11 conspiracy theory. Another forum is apparently also named as a defendant in the claim.
The plaintiffs are apparently seeking $42 Million in consequential damages, claiming that they lost a film deal as a result of criticism of the conspiracy theory in the discussion fora.
What makes this claim stranger is that the owner of the site states that he complied with earlier takedown notices sent by the plaintiffs’ lawyers about the alleged defamatory material.
These types of claims are very worrying for the high levels of uncertainty that they impose on forum operators. In the US, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act essentially immunises forum operators from defamation claims like this one, but no such strong protection exists in Australia. This lack of certainty effectively provides an incentive for those who feel aggrieved by posts on a public forum to seek damages against the operators of the forum, even where the operators have complied by removing the allegedly defamatory material.’
‘A South Australian police officer has been charged with trying to perform an exorcism on a teenager at a church youth camp.
The 28-year-old off-duty senior constable and two other adults have been charged following a camp run by the Lutheran church in the Barossa Valley in April, Adelaide’s The Advertiser reports on Tuesday.
It’s alleged the three restrained the boy after he complained of stomach pains in an incident that allegedly went for about 12 hours.
The police officer has been charged with false imprisonment and aggravated assault, and suspended pending the outcome of the charges.’
‘A telephone prankster posing as a sprinkler company employee caused havoc Saturday morning at an Arkansas Holiday Inn when he convinced an employee to set off the hotel’s fire alarm, smash windows, shut down electricity, and break a sprinkler head that flooded the building lobby. [..]
The man told Bergmann that there was a problem with the hotel’s fire sprinklers and that she “needed to pull the fire alarm to reset them,” cops reported. “Bergmann proceeded to pull the fire alarm at this point, causing the audible alarm.” Bergmann, aided by a hotel guest, would subsequently follow a series of directions from the caller that would result in about $50,000 in damages to the hotel’s windows, carpets and electrical system.’
‘Every scientist dreams of a world without ethics. Whenever a scientist sees a set of twins, he or she secretly wonders what would happen if you surgically swapped their faces. They already have a chamber set up to harness the power of their screams as they gradually realize what has happened. Every day, ethics barely prevent experiments like this from being carried out.
But what if we didn’t have these ethics? When Nazi doctors were let loose during WWII, the incredible rate of their discoveries were matched only by the inadequacy of words to atone for them. They might have been monsters, but without them, we never would have discovered the yield elasticity of the elderly, or learned what part of a prisoner’s tongue detects the taste of angel meat.
The Sims 3 is computer game based on these Nazi scientists that offers us a world of moral ambiguity, free to perform psychological experiments away from the leering eye of ethics. Which is exactly what I did. Here are the results of my findings.’
‘I entered your fine eatery alone today. You greeted me with a great big smile and I was smitten immediately. You are gorgeous and exactly my type, down to the perfume you so delicately shared with me as you passed by. I’m really a normal guy and I’d like to explain myself. Perhaps we can put today’s unfortunate events aside and start over in a few weeks, should I be lucky enough you read this.
Men are pigs. This is a simple fact of life. I’ll be the first to admit it. That said, I was admiring you work for a while and was becoming more and more attracted to you. The more I watched, not all stalker like mind you, the more I was sure you were in fact as beautiful as I had first observed. When you came back to my table and offered to top off my coffee, I was so focused on being close to you, so enamored, I failed to recognize what was going on in my pants. I could not be more sorry.
What I FELT was something foreign moving in my pants. What was ACTUALLY happening was, I was getting an erection. My first gut reaction was to immediately, without hesitation, rain death down upon this uninvited intruder. Kill it before it killed me. [..]’
‘An Australian woman accused of setting her husband’s genitals on fire because she thought he was having an affair has been charged with murder.
Prosecutors said 44-year-old Rajini Narayan confessed to neighbors that she set her husband on fire on Dec. 8, 2008, after she saw him hug another woman.
She was initially charged with endangering life and arson but the charges were upgraded to murder after her 47-year-old husband, Satish Narayan, died from his injuries last week. [..]
Boord quoted Narayan allegedly saying: “I just wanted to burn his penis so it belongs to me and no one else. … I didn’t mean this to happen.”‘
‘It was a little before 8 at night when the breaker went out at Emily Milburn’s home in Galveston. She was busy preparing her children for school the next day, so she asked her 12-year-old daughter, Dymond, to pop outside and turn the switch back on.
As Dymond headed toward the breaker, a blue van drove up and three men jumped out rushing toward her. One of them grabbed her saying, “You’re a prostitute. You’re coming with me.”
Dymond grabbed onto a tree and started screaming, “Daddy, Daddy, Daddy.” One of the men covered her mouth. Two of the men beat her about the face and throat.
As it turned out, the three men were plain-clothed Galveston police officers who had been called to the area regarding three white prostitutes soliciting a white man and a black drug dealer.’
‘The Oppau explosion occurred on September 21, 1921 when a tower silo storing 4,500 tonnes of a mixture of ammonium sulfate and ammonium nitrate fertilizer exploded at a BASF plant in Oppau, now part of Ludwigshafen, Germany, killing 500–600 people and injuring about 2,000 more.
The plant began producing ammonium sulfate in 1911, but during World War I when Germany was unable to obtain the necessary sulfur, it began to produce ammonium nitrate as well. Ammonia could be produced without overseas resources, using the Haber process.
Compared to ammonium sulfate, ammonium nitrate is strongly hygroscopic, so the mixture of ammonium sulfate and nitrate clogged together under the pressure of its own weight, turning it into a plaster-like substance in the 20 m high silo. The workers needed to use pickaxes to get it out, a problematic situation because they could not enter the silo and risk being buried in collapsing fertilizer.
To ease their work, small charges of dynamite were used to loosen the mixture. [..]’
There are a few stories of Thomas Edison’s adventures. Science was extremely dodgy in the past.
For example:
“I had read in a scientific paper the method of making nitroglycerine, and was so fired by the wonderful properties it was said to possess, that I determined to make some of the compound. We tested what we considered a very small quantity, but this produced such terrible and unexpected results that we became alarmed, the fact dawning upon us that we had a very large white elephant in our possession. At 6 A.M. I put the explosive into a sarsaparilla bottle, tied a string to it, wrapped it in a paper, and gently let it down into the sewer, corner of State and Washington Streets.”
‘The Australian Federal Government is pushing forward with a plan to force Internet Service Providers [ISPs] to censor the Internet for all Australians. This plan will waste tens of millions of taxpayer dollars and slow down Internet access.
Despite being almost universally condemned by the public, ISPs, State Governments, Media and censorship experts, Communications Minister Stephen Conroy is determined to force this filter into your home.’
There are contact details for the fool behind this nonsense. If you’re annoy by all this, you should let them know.
‘As his father raised his camera, an 8-year-old boy aimed an Uzi at a pumpkin set up at a shooting event. Before his father could focus, the third-grader from Connecticut squeezed the trigger, and the high-powered weapon recoiled and fatally shot the boy in the head.
The death of Christopher Bizilj at the Westfield Sportsman’s Club Sunday has raised questions about how someone so young could be allowed to shoot an automatic weapon, which can fire hundreds of rounds in a minute. [..]
State Representative Michael Costello, the Newburyport Democrat who co-chairs the Joint Committee on Public Safety and Homeland Security, said yesterday that he plans to draft a bill that would ban anyone younger than age 21 from firing an automatic weapon.
“This isn’t a knee-jerk reaction; it’s a common sense reaction,” he said. “We should take swift action to provide some reasonable restrictions on this type of unreasonable practice. It’s almost indescribable that within a year of leaving a booster seat, an 8-year-old can be holding a submachine gun.”‘
‘British authorities say a vicar stands accused of allegedly sending herself a dead hedgehog and dog feces to prove herself a crime victim.
The Rev. Janet Magee, 62, a Methodist minister, also claimed she was the victim of threatening phone calls and hate mail, which police determined she allegedly made and sent herself, the Daily Mail reported Monday.
Police reached their conclusions after secretly installing a closed circuit television camera in her home, the Mail reported, noting Magee is in on trial in Grimsby Crown Court for making false claims to police.
Magee, who allegedly tried to portray the hedgehog, dog feces, phone calls and hate mail as the work of people in her church, has been suspended as minister in charge of seven parishes on the Brigg and Barton-upon-Humbler Methodist Circuit, the Mail reported, noting Magee has pleaded innocent.’
I’ve been playing with an artificial intelligence bot lately. It sits in IRC all day long, learns how to use words, and then pretends to be a person. It’s not very clever yet.
To give you an idea of how intelligent it is, today I’ve had the most sensible conversation with it that it’s ever had:
<moonbuggy> moonb0rg, what do you think about donkeys?
<moonb0rg> fucking donkeys?
<moonbuggy> moonb0rg, well, donkeys in general.
<moonb0rg> its all about donkeys digressin
<moonbuggy> moonb0rg, you think donkeys often digress?
<moonb0rg> sir, you fuck donkeys
Fun stuff. 
‘I originally wrote this story as a reply in one of those “funny drinking stories” threads a couple of months ago. It is a very embarrassing story about me when I was a stupid teenager, not that much different from a lot of people’s drinking stories, but with a twist of lemon. Lots of people seemed to like it, so I thought I would illustrate and narrate the story in its own thread for maximum hilarity.
This all happened when I was 18 years old. I had dropped out of highschool twice by this point, ditched a lot of my friends because I was a selfish idiot and generally didn’t give a gently caress about anything. I hardly ever ate anything and was skinny as gently caress, showered maybe once every three days, took a poo poo load of drugs and smoked like a chimney. I didn’t have any prospects for the future. I just followed every impulse I had. I stole hundreds of dollars of stuff from the gas station I worked at. I stole poo poo from my parents. I shop lifted. I’m sure lots of people have been through a phase like this and I feel very sorry for all of you.’
‘I’m making a gang. It’s going to be called the “Regulators.” It’s a popular name but I don’t know of any with that name in my area so I’m going to use it. You must live in downtown DC. You must be at least 5′8. You can be smaller but you have to prove yourself to join. You don’t have to get beat up to get initiated into the gank. You should have to be down for the cause. If you’re not loyal though, I will cock glock and lay you out. That’s real talk. [..]’
‘Two “modern day Ninjas” calling themselves Shinobi Warriors on a quest to rid the area of drug users and drug dealers have been put out of business by police.
On Wednesday at 2:35 a.m. police officers approached a car parked in the left lane of Route 46 east and found two Clifton men dressed in black claiming to be Ninjas. The men were wearing tactical vests and armed with knives in sheaths at their waists along with Ninja throwing knives, Chinese throwing stars, four-pointed tacks, swords, bows and arrows and nunchucks, said detective Capt. Robert Rowan.
The two men, Jesse Trojaniak, 19, and Tadieusz Tertkiewicz, 20, told police they were “modern day Ninjas” also called Shinobi Warriors on their way to deliver warning letters to known drug dealers and drug users to stop their “impure” activities. They told police they planned to leave the letters on the front doors of these individuals they had singled out.
Their weapons, Rowan said, were to be a precaution in case they were confronted by the drug dealers.
The officers located five envelopes decorated with red Chinese designs containing the letters to be delivered. Reports show the two men had already delivered one such letter to Tertkiewicz’ 16-year-old ex-girlfriend in Clifton. Police contacted the teen and her mother and alerted them to the situation. Tertkiewicz was charged with harassment, both were charged with weapons possession.’
‘James Robinson is a retired Air National Guard brigadier general and a commercial pilot for a major airline who flies passenger planes around the country.
Eight-year-old James Robinson isn’t sure what “terrorist” means, but he’s on the government list, too.
He has even been certified by the Transportation Security Administration to carry a weapon into the cockpit as part of the government’s defense program should a terrorist try to commandeer a plane.
But there’s one problem: James Robinson, the pilot, has difficulty even getting to his plane because his name is on the government’s terrorist “watch list.”
That means he can’t use an airport kiosk to check in; he can’t do it online; he can’t do it curbside. Instead, like thousands of Americans whose names match a name or alias used by a suspected terrorist on the list, he must go to the ticket counter and have an agent verify that he is James Robinson, the pilot, and not James Robinson, the terrorist.
“Shocking’s a good word; frustrating,” Robinson — the pilot — said. “I’m carrying a weapon, flying a multimillion-dollar jet with passengers, but I’m still screened as, you know, on the terrorist watch list.”‘
‘A man was arrested Monday night after he allegedly threatened to kill his brother during an argument over a ladder.
Benjamin Brunson, 71, told police he was upset with his 60-year-old brother, Jesse, because Jesse used a ladder. Benjamin Brunson admitted he told his brother, “I will kill you,” to “get him scared of me, make him cool off,” a police report states.
When police arrived at the brothers’ home in the 800 block of North 10th Street shortly after 6:30 p.m., Jesse Brunson confirmed that the disagreement was about a ladder, according to the report. Jesse Brunson told police he feared that his older brother was capable of carrying out the threat.
While police were there, the two men kept arguing and officers felt that a fight was imminent, the report states.’
‘A Cambodian father and mechanic learned the hard way not to inflate children when he inserted an air hose designed to fill car tyres into his five-year-old son’s anus and blew him up, local media reported on Thursday.
The Khmer-language Rasmei Kampuchea daily reported Try Sienghym was “playing” with his son Sok Sambo when the incident took place.
The paper said the child’s stomach became distended and his concerned mother rushed him to hospital, where he remains in a stable condition and is expected to make a full recovery.
“The father very much regrets playing like this now,” the paper quoted a family member as saying.’
Hooray for automatic profanity filters.
I assume they’re trying to raise money for retarded aeroplane pilots or something.
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see it here »
‘An evil mother driven by rage and jealousy killed her five-year-old son to spite his father, a horrified coroner heard yesterday.
Emma Hart, 27, force-fed Lewis Dangerfield a lethal cocktail of painkillers and antidepressants at their home, then fled to her mother’s flat nearby and ended her own life by slashing her wrists.
In a note to Lewis’s father, Shaun Dangerfield, which she left by the boy’s body, she wrote: ‘I told you I would make you pay, enjoy your life now, nothing is stopping you, ha ha ha. Just remember it’s all your fault.’
Coroner Robin Balmain described the case as the most distressing he had ever dealt with in 25 years of inquests. ‘I can’t imagine something quite so evil as a mother who is prepared to do that.
‘Her actions were simply spite - she was prepared to kill her son to spite Mr Dangerfield. I find it difficult to believe how anybody could do that.”
‘A Territory man filmed himself speeding at 150km/h while masturbating at the wheel of his drug-laden car, a court heard.
His Holden SV6 was allegedly laden with 5kg of drugs, including two cannabis plants resting on the back seat, the court was told.
Brendon Alan Erhardt, 39, was granted bail so he could marry his girlfriend of six months before he goes to jail.
Prosecutor Sergeant Melinda Edwards said in court the father-of-three told police he “had masturbated while driving” just before he was stopped for speeding on the 130km/h stretch of the Stuart Hwy.
“(He) also video recorded himself masturbating while travelling at a speed of 150km/h.”
Sgt Edwards said Mr Erhardt — who was disqualified from driving — also told officers his act was “not dangerous” as the “only person he could hurt was himself”.’
Have a drumstick and your brain starts clickin’..
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‘Katie Holmes has been wearing gloves and long sleeve shirts with the sleeves pulled down over her hands, in order to cover their freakish purple coloration.
It’s rumored that Katie may have taken part in a Scientology purification ritual that caused her hands to turn purple.
According to reports, the purification ritual is called the Purification Rundown or Purif, which is the process of taking ‘vitamin bombs’ to get ‘toxins’ out of their bodies.
It’s reported that in almost every single case, Scientology founder Hubbard recommends dosages in his teachings that are well above the safe limits, in some cases as much as 142 times more than the toxic level. The side effects of such huge overdoses range from liver damage, hair loss, brain swelling and nausea up to fatal heart and respiratory failure.’