moonbuggy

`”There isn’t enough police presence, drugs are permitted and tolerated and there are bums all over the place. If you allow lawlessness, it’ll lead to decay. Ever since I became a religious person, I’ve noticed how much our country is deteriorating. We’re more worried about trees and rivers than about people. How can people who are so concerned about the environment allow a porn shop? The answer is easy. We stare at our constitution, which is so full of rights that everything gets mixed up and there are no more limits. For example, if one state after another allows gay marriage, maybe it’ll be legal for a father to marry his daughter in ten years. What’ll happen next? Can a woman marry her German Shepherd dog? Twenty years ago, the US mainstream considered gay marriage just as wrong and misguided as a woman marrying her dog. Where is all this going?”‘

`An 18-year-old has pleaded guilty to animal cruelty for a videotaped incident in which he and two friends lit a turtle on fire and danced around it.

Joel Charles Ross of Hawley admitted they set the large snapping turtle on fire. He said they did it not once, but twice, and dressed up differently because they wanted to make their video “more funny and exciting.”’

`A North Texas man in jail on charges of impersonating a police officer and robbery said he did it to save lives.

Micheal Reilley said he saw someone driving a pickup truck erratically on Interstate 30 in Dallas Sunday morning.

Reilley, thinking the driver of the truck was under the influence, called 911 and said he was an Arlington officer in need of assistance. [..]

Before Dallas police arrived, the driver of the pickup truck, Carlos Lopez, pulled over.

Reilley, still claiming to be a police officer, also pulled over. The two men started fighting after Reilley identified himself as a officer and asked for Lopez’s wallet. Reillen then shot Lopez 10 times with a Taser gun, police said.’

`The Bush Administration has drafted amendments to a war crimes law that would eliminate the risk of prosecution for political appointees, CIA officers and former military personnel for humiliating or degrading prisoners of war, US officials say.

The amendments would alter a US law passed a decade ago that made violating the Geneva Conventions a criminal offence they said. The conventions generally ban the cruel, humiliating and degrading treatment of wartime prisoners without spelling out what all those terms mean.’

`India’s highest court yesterday demanded that Coca-Cola should reveal its secret formula for the first time in 120 years.

The Supreme Court ordered the US soft drinks maker, along with its rival PepsiCo, to supply details of the chemical composition and ingredients of their products after a study released this week claimed that they contained unacceptable levels of insecticides. [..]

Coca-Cola’s original recipe, according to company policy, is kept in a bank vault in Atlanta where only two executives — banned from travelling on the same aircraft — know it.’

‘A guy mistakenly picked up a hot iron while trying to answer a telephone call.’

(1.1meg Windows media)

see it here »

`A few of us at work have been pranked one too many times by a certain coworker by the name of Mike. He was out of town for a few days and we had some extra cardboard laying around. This is what happens when you push creative IT workers too far! Enjoy your new office Mike!’

`A Brazilian man died when he tried to open what police believe was a rocket-propelled grenade with a sledgehammer in a mechanical workshop on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro.

Another man who was in the workshop at the time of the explosion was rushed to a hospital with severe burns, a police officer told Reuters.

The workshop was destroyed and several cars parked outside caught fire.’

‘A man who sued the city for entering his apartment without a search warrant after he was mauled by his 450-pound pet Siberian tiger demonstrated a lot of nerve in taking the city to court, a judge said as he threw the lawsuit out. [..]

Police removed the 10-foot-long tiger, Ming, and an alligator, Al, from Yates’ East Harlem apartment. Yates served 3 1/2 months in jail after pleading guilty to reckless endangerment. [..]

Police determined that the situation was an emergency because there was a large tiger that had recently mauled a man roaming around inside an apartment, the judge said.’

‘It all started when my friend Jesse told me that if you get a strobe light fast enough, you can make it look like dripping water is going in slow motion or even backwards. This phenomenon happens because strobe lights can ‘capture’ an instant in time and allow your eyes to see it as lasting longer than an instant.

So if the strobe light captures consecutive instants of time just out of sync with a periodic occurrence such as dripping water from a faucet, it can appear that the drops are moving slowly or even backwards.’

see it here »

‘This guy just pulled a Munson. If he knocks over all the pins on his next shot does he still get a spare?’

(640kB Windows media)

see it here »

A few funny moments in various sports. The wrestling seems a bit gay. :)

see it here »

`The kicker misses the ball and instead trys to launch the ball holders head.’

(4.6meg Windows media)

`Do you believe in Iraqi “WMD”? Did Saddam Hussein’s government have weapons of mass destruction in 2003?

Half of America apparently still thinks so, a new poll finds, and experts see a raft of reasons why: a drumbeat of voices from talk radio to die-hard bloggers to the Oval Office, a surprise headline here or there, a rallying around a partisan flag, and a growing need for people, in their own minds, to justify the war in Iraq.

People tend to become “independent of reality” in these circumstances, says opinion analyst Steven Kull.’

A flight simulator using maps from Google. I just blew up some cars in London. Fun. :)

‘When NASA announced its “Galileo into Jupiter” option, among those to publish immediate, serious objections (and later to repeat them on “Coast to Coast AM”) was an engineer named Jacco van der Worp. Van der Worp claimed that, plunging into Jupiter’s deep and increasingly dense atmosphere, the on-board Galileo electrical power supply — a set of 144 plutonium-238 fuel pellets, arrayed in two large canister devices called “RTGs” (Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generators — see image and schematic, below) — would ultimately “implode”; that the plutonium Galileo carried would ultimately collapse in upon itself under the enormous pressures of Jupiter’s overwhelming atmosphere —

Triggering a runaway nuclear explosion!’

`A six-metre snake and its 3m mate have turned the roof of a north Queensland residence into their own home. [..]

Mr Kinniburgh said he was told by wildlife officers there was little they could do to remove the snakes due to the small ceiling space and no manhole in the roof.

“That night I heard it on the roof, then on the back verandah, then I saw it trying to poke its head through a hole in the flyscreen,” Mr Kinniburgh told the Cairns Post.

“I sat there shitting myself. [..]’

`Authorities in Orlando, Fla., continued a search Friday for several men who threatened to kill some restaurant employees unless they dropped their pants during a robbery, according to a Local 6 News report.

Orlando police said the unidentified men forced employees into a room with a safe at the Wing House restaurant located on Kirkman Road Wednesday and forced them take off their pants.

The culprits escaped with nearly $3,000 in cash, police said.’

`Serb Ratko Dankovic, 23, had been drinking Rakia with mates while watching a magician perform a sword swallowing trick on the television.

They then started arguing over how the trick was done, and when Dankovic told mates that sword swallowing was easy and anyone could do it – they challenged him to prove it.

But he had to be rushed to the local hospital after swallowing a knife with an eight inch blade, eight nails, two spoons and a couple of clothes pegs to win the ten pound bet.’

`Britain’s biggest theme park has called off the country’s first National Muslim Fun Day because of lack of interest, the park said.

Alton Towers in central England was to open on September 17 for Muslims – with halal food, a strict dress code and prayer areas.

Music, gambling and alcohol were to be banned for the day and theme park rides such as Ripsaw, Corkscrew and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory all segregated by gender.

But the park said the event’s organisers, Islamic Leisure, who rented the park for the day and were marketing the event, had called it off due to “insufficient ticket sales”.’

`A court in Bangladesh trying suspected Islamic militants was thrown into panic when five live bombs were produced as exhibits during the hearing of a case.

The discovery prompted the presiding judge to order a hasty adjournment as the court was evacuated. [..]

Officials blame police for not defusing the devices before coming to court. The police say they were not asked to. [..]

“It was fortunate we were not all blown to smithereens,” one officer was reported as saying.’

`Canadians who spend more than an hour a day on the Internet devote less time to socializing with their spouses and children and less time doing household chores, according to a study released by Statistics Canada on Wednesday.

The report, which relied on data from a 2005 general social survey on time use, found that, on average, heavy Internet users (those who spend more than an hour a day in their personal time on-line) each spend five weeks a year surfing the web.

The study also found that these frequent users spend nearly 30 minutes less each day with their partner and kids than non-users (those who spend less than five minutes on-line a day).

“Heavy Internet users lead a very different lifestyle than non-Internet users in terms of their work and domestic lives,” said Ben Veenhof, who authored the study.’

`”Catch me if you can.”

Those were the parting words of a taunting missive containing a white power sent to a police station earlier this week.

Police had no trouble finding their suspect: He signed the letter and included his return address on the envelope.

Abdullah Date, 18, was charged with sending the threatening letter to the 73rd Precinct in Brooklyn’s East New York section, and ordered held without bail, according to a criminal complaint unsealed Thursday in Brooklyn federal court. The white powder turned out to be harmless.’

`A woman trying to conquer her fear of heights by skydiving has died after the plane she was to jump from crashed.

Victoria Delacroix, 22, from Beckenham, London, was killed with five others on Saturday in Dittmer, Missouri, US.

The twin-engine light aircraft carrying the skydiving group nose dived and crashed soon after take-off.’

`A woman with a fake bomb strapped to her stomach forced the evacuation of two city blocks in Daytona Beach on Wednesday morning. The woman claimed she was forced to strap a bomb to herself by a man with a knife.

It turns out it was all a ploy for the woman to get her hands on some prescription drugs. [..]

With a suspicious bulge she called a bomb strapped to her stomach, 23-year-old Maria Gonzalez brought Mason Avenue to a halt. She had gone into Steve’s Pharmacy earlier, demanding prescription drugs or she’d blow up.’

`For two months, from mid-November 2004 to mid-January 2005, Odd languished in the Curran-Fromhold Correctional Facility, trying to figure out why he was there, and desperately trying to convince somebody – anybody – to set him free.

Odd, 42, was jailed at the request of a Philadelphia assistant district attorney – not as punishment for a crime, but to ensure his testimony as a witness in a murder case.

Yet, even after the murder charges were dismissed, no one bothered to release Odd from prison.’

`According to the Health Department, lab tests have confirmed both viral and bacterial infections in about a dozen camp-goers, including nine cases of norovirus, six cases of Campylobacter jejuni, a bacterial infection; three people were found to have both.

That may be just the tip of the iceberg. More than 100 people have reported some sort of gastrointestinal illness related to the camp, including 88 people who attended the camp, and another 20 who had a family member at the camp.