`After a night of drinking in June 2004, Lisa Merola and her boyfriend hooked up with Michael Trammell and his wife for a “swinger’s party” in Trammell’s tiny room at a Boynton Beach motel.
Merola disappeared the following day, prosecutor Aleathea McRoberts said, after her boyfriend reported last seeing her in Trammell’s vehicle. Merola’s partially nude body — covered with Trammell’s DNA — was found in Gulfstream Park near Boynton Beach on June 13, 2004. Authorities say Trammell strangled her. A Palm Beach County jury began hearing the second-degree murder case on Thursday.
Trammell, 34, claims that the couples engaged in various sex acts for hours that night, until Merola’s boyfriend, Greg Winterbottom, wanted to leave, McRoberts said. Winterbottom said the party ended after a brief period, when Merola became visibly repulsed by the then 460-pound Trammell, according to McRoberts.’
`A full 2′ long, this unique robotic shark has a full-range of motion to replicate the smooth, sleek swimming of one of nature’s most efficient predators. It is able to gracefully maneuver up, down, left, right, and even backwards through water, in depths up to 9′. The shark can swim up to 40′ from its handheld remote unit which is also submersible, allowing you to swim with your shark.’
This would be so cool.. For 15 minutes or so then I’d be too lazy to recharge the batteries. :)
Fucked if I know.. [shrug]
`A British man who kept his $2.5 million Lotto win a secret from his wife has blown the fortune on gold-digging women. [..]
“These women must see me coming,” he told his mates. [..]
The news isn’t all bad for the Lotto loser, who put some money is trust for his two sons, but the bulk of it has flown the coop.
The lovelorn former millionaire’s search for romance continues as he spends $750-a-month on internet dating services.’
`Scientists have discovered a huge crater in the Saharan desert, the largest one ever found there.
The crater is about 19 miles (31 kilometers) wide, more than twice as big as the next largest Saharan crater known. It utterly dwarfs Meteor Crater in Arizona, which is about three-fourths of a mile (1.2 kilometers) in diameter.
In fact, the newfound crater, in Egypt, was likely carved by a space rock that was itself roughly 0.75 miles wide in an event that would have been quite a shock, destroying everything for hundreds of miles. For comparison, the Chicxulub crater left by a dinosaur-killing asteroid 65 million years ago is estimated to be 100 to 150 miles (160 to 240 kilometers) wide.’
`Scientists who study the sun, moon, planets and stars on Thursday protested the Bush administration’s plan to send humans back to the moon and on to Mars.
They say the president’s two-year-old Vision for Space Exploration program is gobbling up billions of dollars that they think could be better used for less expensive projects, including new telescopes and unmanned robots such as the twin rovers on Mars.
NASA has cut more than $3 billion from what it had promised for Earth and space science programs to make room for the moon-Mars exploration missions and 16 more shuttle flights to the half-finished International Space Station.
Partly as a result, the launch of the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope has been delayed until 2013, the search for Earthlike planets around other stars has been deferred indefinitely and the budget for the “astrobiology” program – the quest for life on other worlds – has been slashed by 50 percent.’
`The owner of a bakery in Romania addressed to his workers with rather an unusual request. He suggested that they should all shave their heads.
The baker had an intention to create an easily recognizable bakery brand. Shaved heads would probably attract everyone’s attention, the man thought. To his mind, that would put the enterprise above all competitors and, moreover, make the bread production process more sterile. [..]
“I think, this step will make our production more hygienic while the appearance of the staff will become a peculiar brand. Especially now, when similarity between the shaved heads and the bread that they bake is so evident”, – the owner of the bakery said.’
`A small-town police chief was accused in a federal lawsuit Thursday of stopping a would-be rescuer from performing CPR on a gay heart attack victim because he assumed the ailing man had HIV and posed a health risk. [..]
The lawsuit accuses Bowman of pulling off Green’s friend Billy Snead as Snead was performing chest compressions on the man. Snead was a passenger in Green’s pickup truck when Green collapsed; Snead had managed to pull over the vehicle.
Snead said in an interview that he didn’t realize at first it was Bowman giving the order and continued working on his friend. Bowman repeated his command to get away, saying that Green was HIV positive, then grabbed Snead by the shoulders and told him to sit on the curb, Snead said.’
`Katherine Albrecht is on a mission from God.
The influential consumer advocate has written a new book warning her fellow Christians that radio frequency identification may evolve to become the “mark of the beast” — meaning the technology is a sign that the end-times are drawing near.
“My goal as a Christian (is) to sound the alarm,” said Albrecht, in a conversation over tea at a high-end grocery store. [..]
If the VeriChip becomes a common payment device similar to the “contactless” payment system in the Exxon Mobil Speedpass, all who wish to buy and sell goods will be compelled “to receive a mark on their right hand or on their foreheads,” as it says in Revelation, the Spychips Threat authors contend.
Another passage in Revelation describes a vision in which “a foul and loathsome sore came upon the men who had the mark of the beast and those who worshiped his image.” Albrecht and McIntyre write, “Interestingly, an implanted RFID device like the VeriChip could potentially cause such a tormenting sore if it is subjected to a strong source of electromagnetic radiation,” such as a directed energy weapon.’
`Film star Jessica Alba demanded that Playboy magazine pull its March issue, saying Thursday that its editors made her an unwitting cover girl and misled readers into thinking they could see her nude inside.
Lawyers for Alba sent Playboy a letter threatening to sue if it did not remove the issue — which features a publicity photo of the bikini-clad actress on the front — from the stands and pay for damages to her reputation and career.’
`The cone moves 6 inches peak to peak under full-tilt output.
The actual cone diameter is 54 inches, with the 3 inch wide surround on the outside of that. The radiating surface area is 2,290 square inches. That yields a one way displacement of 6,871 cubic inches. That is equivalent to the displacement of 161 ten inch woofers that move 1.5 inches peak to peak.
The motor is capable of producing 6,000+ pounds of linear force, which is necessary when considering the very large surface area and displacement volume required to produce high SPL levels.
The woofer was designed with the capability to produce SPL levels of 188 dB, which are entirely possible, given an appropriately built vehicle. It is simply a matter of displacement and containment.’
`A Framingham man arrested in May on gun charges after police found an exact tattoo of the weapon, down to the serial number, on his hip was sentenced to five years in prison after he pleaded guilty to 10 charges. [..]
Breakspear originally pleaded not guilty at his arraignment in Middlesex Superior Court on July 19, but changed his plea to guilty on all charges. He pleaded guilty to two counts of the illegal possession of a machine gun, second offense, two counts of illegal possession of a firearm without an FID card and two counts of improper storage of a large capacity firearm. [..]
At first he denied the guns were his, but the tattoo convinced police otherwise.’
`Having obviously woken up to the fact that nobody is writing any decent films for him these days, John Travolta has put pen to paper himself in the hope of coming up with something a little more graciously cinematic.
“I don’t get the kind of roles offered that I would like, so here is my answer”, the Qantas spruiker tells Sky News.
Travolta has written a romantic-comedy, which he tells the site, will film in the U.K.
“It’s a tear-jerker. Fans will love it, but there’s a love theme throughout”, he says, adding that he also plans to sing the movie’s theme song.’
`A renowned psychiatrist from UC Irvine was duped into squandering at least $1.3 million of his family’s fortune on a Nigeria Internet scam, according to a lawsuit recently filed by his son.
The son, also an Orange County doctor, said his father — Dr. Louis A. Gottschalk — gave as much as $3 million over a 10-year period in response to an Internet plea that promised the doctor a generous cut of a huge sum of cash trapped in African bank accounts in exchange for money advances.
The court documents, filed last month in Orange County Superior Court, allege Gottschalk even traveled to Africa to meet a shadowy figure known as “The General.”‘
`Pope Benedict XVI got an iPod on Friday, thanks to a group of workers at Vatican Radio.
According to a Catholic News Service story, the pontiff got a 2GB white Nano, loaded with, among other things, the radio station’s programming in English, Italian and German, as well as classical tunes from Mozart, Chopin and Stravinsky.’
`A sticker on a bicycle that said “this bike is a pipe bomb” caused a scare Thursday at Ohio University that shut down four buildings before authorities learned the message was the name of a punk rock band, a university spokesman said. [..]
Police blocked streets around the restaurant and the Columbus police bomb squad came from about 65 miles away.
The bomb experts hit the bike with a high-pressure spray of water, then pried it apart with a hydraulic device normally used to rescue accident victims trapped in cars, acting Athens Fire Chief Ken Gilbraith said. Once they had it open, they saw there was no bomb.
The buildings, including some classroom facilities, were reopened after a couple hours.’
`In the mid 1990s, Tom Katt began regularly appearing in gay porn videos. The versatile bodybuilder made at least 15 sex flicks in his first two years. Handsome and talented, he started earning a lot of money. And for what it’s worth, Tom Katt became famous — in the world of erotica.
Over the years, steroids and growth hormones augmented his physique. Cocaine and pot made the good times seem happier, but the party train kept crashing. Inside, he felt something was missing. And in 2003, he walked away from the biz. Katt, who now goes by his birth name, David Papaleo, had found God.
Last month, Papaleo appeared on “The Gravedigger Show,” an Atlanta-based Christian TV program where he renounced the adult video world and said he was heterosexual.’
`A group of German scientists has deciphered the meaning of one of the most spectacular archeological discoveries in recent years: The mystery-shrouded sky disc of Nebra was used as an advanced astronomical clock.
The purpose of the 3,600 year-old sky disc of Nebra, which caused a world-wide sensation when it was brought to the attention of the German public in 2002, is no longer a matter of speculation.
A group of German scholars who studied this archaeological gem has discovered evidence which suggests that the disc was used as a complex astronomical clock for the harmonization of solar and lunar calendars.
“This is a clear expansion of what we knew about the meaning and function of the sky disc,” said archeologist Harald Meller.’
`While many teenagers who use the myspace website boast about using drugs, one 16-year-old from Bensalem actually showed them.
He posted pictures on the popular website of him posing with a gun, and various drugs, while bragging he made 250,000 dollars a year by selling them. Police found the Bensalem High school student after a lengthy investigation.
“One of our detectives saw this guy and thought he seemed a little bit more real than the next kid and it was enough to launch an investigation,” said Harran.
The teenager has since been charged with possession and many of those who knew him at the high school are shocked.’
`Lawyers in South Korea have filed a class action lawsuit on behalf of more than 230,000 victims of identity theft in an online game.
The suit will claim damages of about $1,000 for each plaintiff whose identity was used to register new accounts in NCsoft’s popular games, Lineage and Lineage 2, according to media reports.
Most of the identify thefts took place over the past six months as underground gaming syndicates stole victims’ official Korean ID numbers in hacking attacks and used them to register hundreds of thousands of Lineage accounts.’
`The US Department of Justice has opened an investigation into the online music pricing of the world’s major music labels, sources say.
The probe closely tracks a similar investigation by New York State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer into the pricing of digital music downloads, sources familiar with the matter said. One music industry source said some subpoenas may have been issued already in connection with the probe, while other labels had been tipped off that subpoenas would likely be coming in the next few days. It appeared that Sony BMG had already received a subpoena. The major record labels include Warner Music Group, EMI, Universal Music Group and Sony BMG, a joint venture of Sony and Bertelsmann.’
`Google Inc. is switching its servers to run on Advanced Micro Devices Inc. chips instead of those made by Intel Corp., according to a Morgan Stanley report.
Google, which has more than 200,000 servers, has started to buy Advanced Micro’s Opteron processors with almost all new purchases, Morgan Stanley analyst Mark Edelstone said. He raised his earnings estimates for Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Advanced Micro.’
`A Danville high school student faces a felony charge of furnishing marijuana after allegedly feeding half a marijuana-laced cookie to a 4-year-old boy, a Contra Costa County sheriff’s spokesman said today.
The 17-year-old Monte Vista High School senior allegedly gave the piece of cookie to the boy during a daycare class at the high school on Feb. 21, spokesman Jimmy Lee said.
Lee couldn’t release the suspect’s name because he is a juvenile. [..]
The maximum penalty for the charge of furnishing marijuana is four years in prison, Lee said.’
`When Ashlee Simpson tops the charts while a critically acclaimed ex-Beatle’s album fails to crack the top 200, eyebrows go up in the marketing world.
So what makes a hit?
A new study reveals that we make our music purchases based partly on our perceived preferences of others. [..]
Researchers found that popular songs were popular and unpopular songs were unpopular, regardless of their quality established by the other group. They also found that as a particular songs’ popularity increased, participants selected it more often.
The upshot for markerters: social influence affects decision-making in a market.’
`Desert bus is probably one of the best games ever. Unfortunately the game was never released, until now. 11 years after the planned release date Waxy is hosting a torrent for this mythical game. The game is part of a long-lost Penn and Teller videogame.
The goal of the game is pretty straightforward. You have to drive a Bus through the desert from Tucson, Arizona to Las Vegas. The hard part is that the whole trip is in real-time, so it takes 8 hours at least. And it gets even better:
There is no scenery or even other cars on the road, just plain desert, for 8 hours. Oh, and your bus veers to the right just slightly, so it’s impossible to just tape down a button and go do something else. Rumor has it that if you make it to Vegas, you score one point.‘
`Iran’s radical President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad declared on Thursday in Malaysia that Islam will be the dominant power in the “near future”, the official state news agency reported.
“The near future will be in the hands of Islam”, Ahmadinejad said after a meeting in Kuala Lumpur with the King of Malaysia. He cited the victory of the Islamist group Hamas in the recent Palestinian elections as a sign of the rise of Islamism in the world.
“History has shown that when Muslims become powerful, they do not use their power to the detriment of others, but use it in the service of peace and tranquillity”, Ahmadinejad said.’
`It certainly was not part of Britain’s plans to win the hearts and minds of the people of Iraq. But the Foreign Office has been apparently paying for an adult sex chatline in a Baghdad street for 17 months without knowing it.
The Foreign Office has had to tell MPs that an investigation into how a diplomat lost two satellite phones in Iraq has nothing to do with terrorism but more to do with a budding entrepreneur and a telephone porn network.
FO officials had already admitted that the lost phones had cost them £594,000 in unauthorised phone bills but it is now bracing itself for an extremely critical report from the Commons public accounts committee on how it came to pay phone bills, which at one stage hit £212,000 in one month, without asking questions.’
`Russia plans to hit a golf ball into Earth orbit from the International Space Station. If NASA approves the plan, the ball would set records for the longest drive ever made – but some experts warn that a mishap could cause “catastrophic” damage to the station.
The plan is part of a commercial deal between the Russian space agency and Element 21 Golf Company, based in Toronto, Canada. In the plan, the station’s next crew members, due to launch to the station on 29 March, will try for the record-breaking swing during one of three planned spacewalks by September 2006. [..]
In a worst-case scenario, the ball would remain at the same altitude long enough that its orbital plane shifted until it could hit the station side-on, says J C Liou, an orbital debris expert at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, US. “Then you could potentially have something similar to a head-on collision with an impact speed of about 9.4 kilometres per second,” Liou told New Scientist.
The force of such a collision would be equivalent to that of a 6.5-tonne truck moving at nearly 100 kilometres per hour. “So the outcome of the worst-case scenario could be quite catastrophic,” he says. But he adds that such a dire scenario is “highly unlikely” to occur.’
She gives some good advice.
(8.6meg Windows Media)
`The intrusion of cellular phone rings into theaters, schools and nearly every other nook and cranny of modern life may soon hit a wall.
Playing to the backlash against ubiquitous communication, a company called NaturalNano is developing a special high-tech paint that relies on the wizardry of nanotechnology to create a system that locks out unwanted cell phone signals on demand. [..]
His firm has found a way to use nanotechnology to blend particles of copper into paint that can be brushed onto walls and effectively deflect radio signals.
The copper is inserted into nanotubes, which are ultra-tiny tubes that occur naturally in halloysite clay mined in Utah. The nanotubes are about 20,000 times thinner than a piece of paper, too small to be seen with even a conventional microscope. At this size, which is near the molecular scale, materials have different physical properties than they normally do.’
