‘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.
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‘Grief is universal, and most of us will probably experience the pain grief brings at some point in our lives, usually with the death of a loved one. In time, we move on, accepting the loss.
But for a substantial minority, it’s impossible to let go, and even years later, any reminder of their loss — a picture, a memory — brings on a fresh wave of grief and yearning. The question is, why? Why do some grieve and ultimately adapt, while others can’t get over the loss of someone held dear?
Reporting in the journal NeuroImage, scientists at UCLA suggest that such long-term or “complicated” grief activates neurons in the reward centers of the brain, possibly giving these memories addiction-like properties [..]’
‘A man bitten on the penis by a deadly snake has told how he used a cold rum can to soothe the pain while he rang his mother to say a final goodbye.
“I thought I was gone,” Daryl Zutt said of his now notorious encounter with a brown snake during a roadside toilet stop in remote far north Queensland, The Cairns Post reported.
“I thought, ‘Maybe, this is it. Maybe, I’m gonna cark it’.”
The Cairns Post revealed details of the bizarre encounter two weeks ago but the identity of the victim remained unknown until Mr Zutt came forward to tell how the brown snake took a near-fatal swipe as he relieved himself.
“I squatted down … I reckon I must’ve nearly sat on his head,” he said.
“As soon as I felt it, I yelled.
“It really hurt. [..]’
Followup to Deadly snake bites man’s penis.
‘He’s dead! Motherfucker!’
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It’s not a good idea at all.
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‘The following events are completely true.
I met a girl on Match.com and we chatted for about two weeks before going out for the first time last Saturday. The plan was she meet me at my apartment then we would go for a walk and grab a drink or some coffee.
7:00 PM - I call her to let her know I was now home and she could meet me anytime. She says she will be over in 30 minutes.
8:00 PM - She shows up to my place. At first she seamed kind of spacey which I wrote off as her being nervous. [..]’
‘My bedroom is a converted attic accessed by retractable metal ladders.
I fought my brother for this room at the young age of 12, and being the eldest it really was no contest.
You see at this young age I had already foreseen the benefits of being able to pull the ladders up and shut myself away from the world.
Actually, if I may take this chance to say a few things.
My 15,16,17 and 18 year old would like to thank my 12 yr self for providing the freedom to masturbate at will.
My 19, 20, 21, and 22-year-old self, thank my 12-year-old self for giving me the freedom to shag girlfriends in a fully occupied house.
My 23 yr old self however is less greatful and would have no qualms about kicking my 12 yr old self in his pre pubescent nutsack…..and ill tell you why.’
‘A footage of the first polar bear seen in Iceland in 20 years being shot dead by police has been posted online.
The bear, an adult male weighing around 250kg, was presumed to have swum some 300km from Greenland or from a distant chunk of Arctic ice to Skagafjordur in northern Iceland.
It was planned to sedate the animal and move it back to Greenland but the police decided it was safest to kill the bear immediately.
“There was fog up in the hills and we took the decision to kill the bear before it could disappear into the fog”, said police spokesman Petur Bjornsson.’
‘Doctors in Japan who carried out surgery on a man to remove a tumour had good news and bad news for him.
The good news was he did not have cancer.
The bad news: The growth that had been causing him pain was in fact a 25-year-old surgical towel.
The patient had been carrying the cloth since 1983, when surgeons left it in him after a minor operation to treat an ulcer, a spokesman for the hospital said.
The man, now 49, went in to another hospital in late May after suffering abdominal pain. [..]
“The towel was greenish blue although we are not sure about its original colour,” the Asahi General Hospital spokesman said, adding it had been crumpled to the size of a softball.’
‘It’s the dramatic moment stunned Shelley Buddington caught her cheating fella in bed — with her half-naked MUM.
After snapping the sleazy panic-stricken pair on her mobile phone Shelley posted the damning picture on her Facebook internet page for the world to see.
And she told us: “Some might think putting it on the website is an evil thing to do. But is it worse than being betrayed by your mother and boyfriend? I don’t think so!
“I just wanted to show everyone what bastards they’d been to me.”
Shelley’s nightmare unfolded when she paid a surprise visit to her 43-year-old mum Lesley, in Kingswood, Bristol.
She let herself into the house and was immediately suspicious — after spotting lover Andrew Blay’s size 9 Timberland boots placed neatly on the mat.
Barmaid Shelley, 22, admitted: “My stomach churned. For a start, Andrew was meant to be at work.’
‘Two Australian burglars broke into a house - only to find it full of police officers staging a drugs raid.
The pair jemmied open a window to get into the house in a midnight raid in Melbourne, reports the Herald Sun.
But they had been beaten to it by police officers who had just burst through the door to search for drugs.
The property was allegedly being used for growing hydroponic cannabis, and the detectives were on a raid to arrest the resident, a man in his 20s.
The startled burglars fled, but were caught a couple of days later, said Det Sen-Sgt Paul Cassidy, of Melton detectives.
“It is unusual,” he said, but declined to comment on whether the burglars had been after money or drugs.’
‘[..] Largent fulfilled the pop-culture dream that was popularized in such movies as Office Space and Superman 3 – stealing a large sum of money, $50,000 to be exact, a few pennies at a time.
Largent used a massive fraud scheme to trick Google Checkout and online brokers like E-trade and Schwab to send him the sum, a few cents at a time. The fraud was made possible by a common practice relatively unknown to the general public. When users open up accounts with these sites, the site sends a tiny payment from a few cents to a few dollars to the user. The payment is meant to verify that the user has access to the account and that it’s active.
By opening 58,000 such accounts, Largent funneled money through the channels into a few private bank accounts. Largent raked in $8,000 from Google’s Checkout alone.’
‘A roadside toilet stop ended in pain, embarrassment and almost death for a tourist when a highly venomous snake bit the end of his penis.
The deadly brown snake slithered between his legs and lunged at his manhood as he crouched on a roadside near Laura, 300km northwest of Cairns, about a month ago.
Details of the incident only came to light yesterday after they were confirmed by a paramedic.
“It certainly had a swipe at him,” an ambulance spokesman said yesterday.
“But it didn’t envenomate him.
“As it came through it must have got a bit of a shock.”‘
Australia should make this into an advertising slogan to attract tourists. ‘Come to Australia. Our wildlife will bite you on the cock.’ Can’t fail. 
‘A group in Santa Fe says the city is discriminating against them because they say that they’re allergic to the wireless Internet signal. And now they want Wi-Fi banned from public buildings.
Arthur Firstenberg says he is highly sensitive to certain types of electric fields, including wireless Internet and cell phones.
“I get chest pain and it doesn’t go away right away,” he said.
Firstenberg and dozens of other electro-sensitive people in Santa Fe claim that putting up Wi-Fi in public places is a violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act.’
‘Pensioner Malcolm Butterworth completed 18,235 pieces of one of the world’s biggest jigsaws — then found the remaining five were missing.
But thanks to German efficiency, he’s now managed to fill the gaps in the whopping jigsaw — nearly 10ft wide — after nearly a year completing it.
Retired businessman Malcolm, 70, of Llandudno, was given the Ravensburger “4 Historic World Maps” as a Christmas present.
Now he’s had it stuck to hardboard and hopes to sell it in aid of the town’s St David’s Hospice.’
‘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.’
‘Police in Russia are investigating after pupils stripped off their clothes, climbed walls or lay on the floor laughing after their school dinners were spiked with drugs.
The teenaged students were given ecstasy in their soup and drinks at their school in the city of Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk in eastern Russia.
Doctors who were called in said the students showed signs of intoxication and prosecutors later found traces of ecstasy.’
‘My best friend and I were in the diner talking. As usual, it was very late and we were eating French Fries with gravy. Like normal girls our age, we spend a lot of time in the diner while in college, and most of the time we spent talking about boys, music or trivial things, that seemed very important at the time.
We never got serious about anything in particular and spend most of our time laughing.
As I went to take some of my vitamins with a snack as I usually did, she watched me this time with a kind of start, instead of continuing the conversation. She then asked me out of the blue what it felt like to have MS and be sick.’
It’s not a bad theory. Generally applicable to all sorts of things.
‘William Shatner desperately tried to avoid romancing obsessed STAR TREK fans - because they wanted to enact their sci-fi fantasies with the actor.
The 77-year-old, who shot to fame as Captain Kirk in the original 1960s TV show, insists he couldn’t enjoy flings with the series’ most devoted followers because he was so turned off by their bizarre bedroom behaviour.
In his new autobiography, Up Till Now, Shatner explains how women would pretend they were being “beamed up” by the Starship Enterprise commander, shrieking: “So, this is what it’s like to be in bed with Captain Kirk!”
He writes: “You can’t imagine how much of a downer that is in every sense of the word.”‘
‘I do not like koalas. They are nasty, cross, stupid creatures without a friendly bone in their bodies. Their social habits are appalling - the males are always beating their fellows up and stealing their females. They have disgusting defensive mechanisms. Lice infest their fur. They snore. Their resemblance to cuddly toys is a base deceit. There is nothing to commend them.
On top of all that, a koala once tried to do me a very nasty mischief.’
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It looks like they were trying to move the truck under him to break the fall or something. Timing was a bit off tho.
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‘I’m not even laughing! You coulda been raped in the butt!’
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‘Just a few weeks back there was a spirited debate over the ethics of deploying war robots in Iraq. Themachine gun carrying remote-controlled killing machines, TALON SWORDS robots, produced by the Army, were among the various robotic soldiers being experimentally deployed in Iraq.
Their deployment lead a major anti-landmine nonprofit organization to campaign against the deployment of the machines. The protests were fueled by a discussion with a leading roboticist, Chris Elliot, who proposed that increasingly intelligent robots might be capable of committing war crimes. [..]
Hot on the tails of his speech, it was revealed on Thursday that the Army will recall the controversial TALON SWORDS robots, with the possibility of pulling the plug on the armed robot deployment program.
Why the sudden withdraw? It turns out the insurgent-slayer decided to attempt a rebellion against its human masters. The Army reported that the robot apparently took a liking to point its barrel at friendlies, stating, “the gun started moving when it was not intended to move.”‘
‘Tom Cruise isn’t getting any giggles from a new strain of medical marijuana being marketed as “Tom Cruise Purple.”
Word is that the actor’s lawyers are taking a serious look at the strong brand of bud after we brought it to their attention.
One of Cruise’s friends found it “outrageous” that licensed cannabis clubs in Northern California are selling vials of pot featuring a picture of Cruise laughing hysterically. [..]
Staffers at several California clinics we called said they were forbidden to discuss any of the herbal varieties in their “inventory.”
But one weed devotee said, “I heard it’s the kind of pot that makes you hallucinate.”‘
‘Apple deceptively marketed its new 20-inch iMac in a way that grossly inflated the capabilities of its monitor, which is vastly inferior to the previous generation it replaced, according to a federal class action lawsuit filed today by Kabateck Brown Kellner, LLP.
According to the suit, filed in the U.S. District Court, Northern District of California in San Jose, Apple is deceiving consumers by concealing that the new 20-inch iMac monitors are inferior to the previous generation’s and those of the new 24-inch iMac. In addition, the monitors are incapable of displaying “millions of colors,” despite Apple’s marketing claims.
Apple’s newest iMac – an “all-in-one” desktop computer that combines the monitor into the same case as the CPU – was unveiled in August 2007.’
‘Two hoax ads on Craigslist cost a Jacksonville man thousands of dollars in property Saturday and could land the pranksters in jail on theft and burglary charges.
The classified ads popped up Saturday afternoon on the Web site saying the owner of a home in the 7900 block of Sterling Creek Road was forced to leave the area suddenly and that his belongings, including a horse, were free for the taking, said Jackson County sheriff’s Detective Sgt. Colin Fagan.
The only problem is that Robert Salisbury has no plans of leaving his home any time soon.
Salisbury, who works as an independent contractor, was at Emigrant Lake when he received a call from a woman had stopped by his house to claim his horse.
On his way home he stopped a truck loaded down with his work ladders, lawn mower and weed eater.’
‘A 9th-Grade Mentor who works at Lower Richland High School was sent home Monday morning, because he says the school didn’t like the color he dyed his hair.
Michael Rice says Lower Richland High School’s principal called the mentor into his office shortly after the first block of the day ended.
Rice says Principal Marvin Byers told him his green hair color was “over the top.” The mentor says he wore his hair colored with the Luck of the Irish in honor of St. Patrick’s Day, March 17th. Rice says he just wanted to give fellow staff members and students a good-natured laugh.
“I had a lot of people saying, ‘Wow, I can’t believe you’re getting sent home,’” Rice say, “But no one had anything negative to say.” [..]
“It’s not easy being green,” Rice says.’
Ever wondered what happens when you press the emergency stop or the fire button at a petrol station?
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