`A 12-year-old visitor to the Detroit Institute of Arts stuck a wad of gum to a $1.5 million painting, leaving a stain the size of a quarter, officials say.
The boy was part of a school group from Holly that visited the museum on Friday, officials say. They say he took a piece of Wrigley’s Extra Polar Ice gum out of his mouth and stuck it on Helen Frankenthaler’s “The Bay,” an abstract painting from 1963.
The museum acquired the work in 1965 and says it is worth about $1.5 million.’
`A relative discovered a 23-year-old man dead in the front seat of a car Friday still embracing a dead 17-year-old girl.
Their nude bodies were inside a closed garage in the front seat of a 1978 Cutlass. They had apparently been having sex when they were overcome by carbon monoxide, 12 News reported.
The medical examiner said the deaths appear accidental.’
`Observations by astronomers tracking near-Earth asteroids have raised a new object to the top of the Earth-threat list.
The asteroid could strike the Earth in 2102. However, Don Yeomans, manager of NASA’s Near Earth Object Program at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, US, told New Scientist: “The most likely situation, by far, is that additional observations will bring it back down to a zero.”
He adds: “We’re more likely to be hit between now and then by an object that we don’t know about.” ‘
`RCMP officers in Montreal have dismantled an international operation that they allege was selling marijuana seeds over the internet.
Investigators claim they seized 200,000 seeds, enough to run 500 grow operations if planted and nurtured correctly.
That many plants would have the potential to generate about 42 million joints, reporters were told as police displayed the seized material Tuesday.’
`A mystery is deepening around a report about the emergence of a virus that can pass from a PC to a mobile device, with some antivirus vendors saying they have not seen the code to confirm it.
The Mobile Antivirus Researchers Association (MARA) said Monday it anonymously received the code, named “Crossover.” Microsoft Corp., whose software the virus reportedly affects, said Wednesday it is investigating the reports but has not heard of any customer complaints. [..]
At the moment, the antivirus community only has MARA’s word that the virus exists, [a technology consultant] said.’
`The Bruichladdich distillery on the Isle of Islay, off Scotland’s west coast, is producing the quadruple-distilled 184-proof – or 92 percent alcohol – spirit “purely for fun,” managing director Mark Reynier said. [..]
n 1695, travel writer Martin Martin described it as powerful enough to affect “all members of the body.”
“Two spoonfuls of this last liquor is a sufficient dose; if any man should exceed this, it would presently stop his breath, and endanger his life,” Martin wrote.
Reynier put Martin’s test to the claim and consumed three spoonfuls.
“I can tell you, I had some and it indeed did take my breath away,” Reynier said.’
This guy wins a car in a lottery, then a TV crew asks him to reenact the purchasing of the ticket on camera. Turns out, it wasn’t a reenactment at all. :)
(1.2meg Windows Media)
`In dramatic and sometimes agonizing terms, federal disaster officials warned
President Bush and his homeland security chief before Hurricane Katrina struck that the storm could breach levees, put lives at risk in New Orleans’ Superdome and overwhelm rescuers, according to confidential video footage.
Bush didn’t ask a single question during the final briefing before Katrina struck on Aug. 29, but he assured soon-to-be-battered state officials: “We are fully prepared.”
The footage — along with seven days of transcripts of briefings obtained by The Associated Press — show in excruciating detail that while federal officials anticipated the tragedy that unfolded in New Orleans and elsewhere along the Gulf Coast, they were fatally slow to realize they had not mustered enough resources to deal with the unprecedented disaster.’
`Yo bitch, Ghettoman is here..’
(9.7meg Quicktime)
`A car that can go from zero to 60 in four seconds and get more than 50 miles to the gallon would be enough to pique any driver’s interest. So who do we have to thank for it. Ford? GM? Toyota? No — just Victor, David, Cheeseborough, Bruce, and Kosi, five kids from the auto shop program at West Philadelphia High School
The five kids, along with a handful of schoolmates, built the soybean-fueled car as an after-school project. It took them more than a year — rummaging for parts, configuring wires and learning as they went. As teacher Simon Hauger notes, these kids weren’t exactly the cream of the academic crop.’
`Thai transsexual boxer Nong Tum returns to the ring and wins her first fight.
Transsexual boxer Nong Tum, famous in her native Thailand as the “beautiful boxer”, has returned to the ring after a long hiatus.
Nong Tum, or Parinya Charoenphol (pronounced Pa-rin-ya Ja-roen-pol), 25, made her comeback after an absence of nearly three years at Nong Tum Fairtex Gym, newly named in her honour.
Her first opponent in the 135-pound contest was Japanese male Kenshiro Lookchaomaekhemthong (pronounced : Ken-shi-ro Look-chao-mae-kem-tong).’
A compilation of all sorts of pinata silliness.
(2.4meg Windows Media)
`i was just on the bus. doing typical travel things. you know, listening to my ipod, staring out the window, day dreaming about ice cream and puppy dogs. a few stops before mine, a sheriff’s car pulls in front of the bus with its lights on. he gets on, moves to the back and an undercover informs a woman that she’s being cited for wearing headphones. apparently, having both headphones on while in a bus is a crime. they take her info. they are about to leave when the undercover notices me with my ipod. do you have your id, he rudely asked. i asked why. he informs me that what i’m doing is illegal. that i can only have one earphone in at a time. i was looking at him completely dumbfounded. shaking, i looked through my bag for my id then he took down all of my info. when he saw that my id was from canada, he asked why i was in the country.’
`Most people have a poor understanding of probability. One major difficulty is in appreciating how unlikely simple events become when several independent outcomes must all line up. This is one reason that lotteries are popular: people overestimate their chances of winning. [..]
In the demonstration below, the average state lottery is simulated to show exactly how unlikely it is that you will match all 6 numbers. In this simulation, you try to match 6 numbers between 1 and 50. You get a prize for matching 3 or more numbers. The simulation assumes there is 1 drawing per week, tickets cost $1, and that you purchase 1 ticket for each drawing.
It also shows you what would happen if you put the $1 away each week in an investment that earned you 5% compounded daily.’
`Forces brewing deep beneath Yellowstone National Park could be making one of the largest volcanoes on Earth even bigger, a new study reveals.
In the past decade, part of the volcano has risen nearly five inches, most likely due to a backup of flowing molten rock miles below the planet’s crust. [..]
Radar observations from the European Space Agency’s ERS-2 satellite reveal that the jellybean-shaped Yellowstone caldera—a giant depression caused by past volcanic explosions—began to rise in 1995.
Although the caldera floor started to sink in late 1997, part of the north rim, called the north rim uplift anomaly (NUA) continued rising until 2003.’
`A phone repair worker who is in transition from male to female said Tuesday that she was arrested three times by transit police in the last six months for using the women’s restroom at Grand Central Terminal.
Helena Stone, 70, said an officer called her “a freak, a weirdo and the ugliest woman in the world” and warned her, “If I ever see you in the women’s bathroom, I’m going to arrest you.”
“I said, ‘That’s the only bathroom I use,'” Stone said at a rally and news conference. “‘That’s who I am.'”‘
`Microsoft will introduce a search engine better than Google in six months in the United States and Britain followed by Europe, its European president said on Wednesday.
“What we’re saying is that in six months’ time we’ll be more relevant in the U.S. market place than Google,” said Neil Holloway, Microsoft president for Europe, Middle East and Africa.
“The quality of our search and the relevance of our search from a solution perspective to the consumer will be more relevant,” he told the Reuters Global Technology, Media and Telecoms Summit.’
Brought to you by the Mississippi Criminal Sex Offender Information website.
`The Bunker is situated on 18 acres of land and surrounded by concertina wiring in Kent, England. It is an impregnable fortress, sitting 30 metres below ground. It has concrete walls three metres thick, steel doors weighing over two tons that protect the servers and digital storage units within.
Layered on top of this physical inaccessibility is a 24-hour watch with guard dogs, CCTV and a series of sophisticated access controls that offer the ultimate in protection from a myriad of attacks, including crackers, terrorist attack, electro-magnetic pulse, electronic eavesdropping, HERF weapons and solar flares.’
A little quiz to see how you’d survive various situations.
I think I got 10 out of 17, which means I can survive the world pretty well but I’m likely to end up with serious injuries along the way. :)
`Have you ever hit “Send” on a text message on your mobile phone before addressing it? Ever wondered where all those lost SMS text messages go? If so, you might want to speak with Stan Bubrouski, whose cell phone has been channeling wayward text messages from across the country for years.
Bubrouski, a computer science major at Northeastern University in Boston, is the proud owner of ‘Null@vtext.com,’ an account on the popular Verizon text messaging service that allows Internet users to send e-mail and IM messages directly to his cell phone as SMS text messages.’
`The technologies which have had the most profound effects on human life are usually simple. A good example of a simple technology with profound historical consequences is hay. Nobody knows who invented hay, the idea of cutting grass in the autumn and storing it in large enough quantities to keep horses and cows alive through the winter. All we know is that the technology of hay was unknown to the Roman Empire but was known to every village of medieval Europe. Like many other crucially important technologies, hay emerged anonymously during the so-called Dark Ages. According to the Hay Theory of History, the invention of hay was the decisive event which moved the center of gravity of urban civilization from the Mediterranean basin to Northern and Western Europe. The Roman Empire did not need hay because in a Mediterranean climate the grass grows well enough in winter for animals to graze. North of the Alps, great cities dependent on horses and oxen for motive power could not exist without hay. So it was hay that allowed populations to grow and civilizations to flourish among the forests of Northern Europe. Hay moved the greatness of Rome to Paris and London, and later to Berlin and Moscow and New York.
Freeman Dyson Infinite in All Directions, Harper and Row, New York, 1988, p 135.’
`Nearly 400 years after Galileo determined the wispy Milky Way actually comprises myriad individual stars, scientists using NASA’s Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer have done the same for the “X-ray Milky Way.”
The origin of this X-ray counterpart to the Milky Way, known to scientists as the galactic X-ray background, has been a long-standing mystery. Scientists have determined the background is not diffuse, as many have thought. Rather, it emanates from untold hundreds of millions of individual sources dominated by a type of dead star called a white dwarf, along with stars with unusually strong coronas.’
`A team of Russian pilots will reportedly fly fighter jets through a narrow cave in central China in a tourist stunt that will cost people up to 840 dollars to watch.
The Russian air force jets, including advanced Sukhoi Su-30s and Su-27s, will fly through the famed Tianmen Cave in central Hunan province on March 17-18, the Hunan Daily said.
The cave, which resembles a rock archway, is only 57 meters (188 feet) wide at its widest point and 28 meters wide at its narrowest, it said.
The cave is about 280 meters long and 130 meters high, and according to the China Daily, “is the highest water-eroded cave in the world”.’
It’s kinda freaky to see such a well animated face on a strange robot stumbling about the place.
(7.2meg Windows Media)
`The deadly strain of bird flu has been found in a cat in Germany, officials said Tuesday, the first time the virus has been identified in an animal other than a bird in central Europe.
Health officials urged cat owners to keep pets indoors after the dead cat was discovered over the weekend on the Baltic Sea island of Ruegen, where most of the more than 100 wild birds infected by the H5N1 strain have been found.
The cat is believed to have eaten an infected bird, said Thomas Mettenleiter, head of Germany’s Friedrich Loeffler Institute. That is in keeping with a pattern of disease transmission seen in wild cats in Asia.’
`SAS troops were last night poised to storm into Afghanistan and capture Osama bin Laden.
Special forces have “good intelligence” the al-Qaeda boss or a senior henchman is holed up in a Taliban enclave.
Two squadrons are on stand-by waiting for the go-ahead from reconnaissance troops on the ground in Afghanistan.
Specialist counter-terrorist soldiers in the rapid-deployment group are on high alert at the SAS’s Hereford base.
The other team consists of troops serving around the world.’
`Why do so many people using DMT see insects? The DMT insect race comprises “larval beings,” “alien space insects,” praying-mantis entities and so forth. Why so many visions of insects?
“Something in the insect seems to be alien to the habits, morals, and psychology of this world, as if it has come from some other planet, more monstrous, more energetic, more insensate, more atrocious, more infernal than our own.” — Maurice Masterlinck, Belgian playwright, 1862-1949 ‘
‘If you’re going to ride your bike down the side of a mountain, lets hope you remembered to tighten all the bolts when you put the bike back together the night before your big ride.’
Especially if you’re doing ~170km/hr.
see it here »
