‘The mail-order minister of a Hollywood church that burns marijuana during services and allegedly sells it to members says that’s protected under federal law because the drug is a religious sacrament.
But Judge Mary Strobel has ruled that the Reverend Craig X. Rubin can’t use federal law as a defense because he faces only state charges.
Rubin, who’s representing himself at his drug trial, says members of his Temple 420 believe that marijuana is the tree of life mentioned in the Bible. [..]
The 41-year-old Rubin has no legal experience, and says he spent last weekend praying and smoking marijuana with Indians in a sweat lodge at the bottom of the Grand Canyon.’
‘It’s four thirty a.m. and the house is asleep.
I. . . am not asleep.
I am crouched in the bathtub in a frog-like stance, small puddles of urine and liquid shit at my feet. I’m leaning forward, gripping the side of the tub and biting my knee, overwhelmed by a mixture of pain and pleasure as I piston a dildo in and out of my ass.
You see, I really love anal masturbation.
Ever try it? No? You should.’
‘Using marijuana increases the risk of one day developing a psychotic illness such as schizophrenia, according to a study that provides some of the strongest evidence yet linking the drug to a mental disorder.
Marijuana is one the most commonly used illegal substances in many countries with up to 20 percent of young people in places like Britain reporting either some use or heavy use, British researchers said, citing government statistics.
Many consider it on par with alcohol or tobacco but the results shows marijuana poses a danger many smokers underestimate, said Stanley Zammit, a psychiatrist at Cardiff University and the University of Bristol, who worked on the study.’
‘An oral surgeon who temporarily implanted fake boar tusks in his assistant’s mouth as a practical joke and got sued for it has gotten the state’s high court to back up his gag.
Dr. Robert Woo of Auburn had put in the phony tusks while the woman was under anesthesia for a different procedure. He took them out before she awoke, but he first shot photos that eventually made it around the office.
The employee, Tina Alberts, felt so humiliated when she saw the pictures that she quit and sued her boss.
Woo’s insurance company, Fireman’s Fund, refused to cover the claim, saying the practical joke was intentional and not a normal business activity his insurance policy covered, so Woo settled out of court. He agreed to pay Alberts $250,000, then he sued his insurers.’
‘Police marksmen have shot dead one heifer, but a second remains on the loose after the pair escaped from a Darlington cattle market.
Officers are searching the market town for the remaining animal described as “extremely dangerous”.
Commuters and shoppers have been warned to be on their guard as police say the heifer, weighing about half a ton, will attack anyone it sees. [..]
A spokesman for Durham Police said: “We cannot stress too highly how dangerous this animal is.
“It will attack anyone it sees and the public must not approach it in any circumstances.’
‘People dont realize that being in handcuffs greatly reduces your ability to scratch an itch. While that isn’t a major problem for a lot of people, it is for this guy.’
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‘Whether it’s screaming brats at the pool, impossibly long lines, or stolen luggage, summer vacations rarely deliver the stress-free escape you’ve been hoping for. But stop your bitching. It could be much worse. From Salmonella smeared BBQ pits to amusement park rides that sever limbs (as one did in June to a 13-year-old girl at Six Flags), the season is full of perils most of us are lucky enough to avoid. Then again, the most rewarding experiences always come with a little risk. If you’re tired of the same old sanitary, injury-free, cookie-cutter holiday routine, we recommend the following itinerary from hell. Strap yourself in. It’s going to be a terrible trip.’
‘NASA is investigating sabotage of a noncritical computer due to be flown to the International Space Station aboard the space shuttle Endeavour, which was cleared to lift off on August 7, the U.S. space agency said on Thursday.
NASA revealed the sabotage a day ahead of releasing studies that the publication Aviation Week reported had found astronauts were allowed to fly on at least two occasions despite warnings they were so drunk they posed a flight risk.
The damage to wiring in an electronics box was intentional and obvious, NASA’s associate administrator for space operations, Bill Gerstenmaier told reporters at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.’
‘A Plymouth Township police officer was threatened by three 8-year-old boys, and one even came at him with an ax, according to police.
“He said he was going to kill him. He made a threat toward the officer,” Plymouth Township Deputy Chief Joseph Lawrence said. [..]
“They’re only 8 years old so the officer is in a real bad situation because they’re children, they’re 8 years old. They can harm you as much as an adult can,” Lawrence said.
In fact, police said they repeatedly asked the boy to put down the ax, but instead he hurled it at the officer, missing him, but hitting the police cruiser.’
‘You can have a sofa-bed in your living room, OR, you can have a MobelForm “Transformer” furniture.’
There’s quite a few short, interesting and amusing sci-fi stories on this site. Most of them are pretty good.
The Ed stories are some of my favourites.
‘Oscar the cat seems to have an uncanny knack for predicting when nursing home patients are going to die, by curling up next to them during their final hours.
His accuracy, observed in 25 cases, has led the staff to call family members once he has chosen someone. It usually means they have less than four hours to live.
“He doesn’t make too many mistakes. He seems to understand when patients are about to die,” said Dr. David Dosa in an interview. He describes the phenomenon in a poignant essay in Thursday’s issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.’
‘After seeing the “plumpho” captcha on Digg last week I did some searching and came up with the Top 11 most insulting captchas. Most people hate captchas whether they are insulting or not, lets hope a better solution comes along soon.’
‘My brother is in his early twenties and while we don’t live at home anymore, our bedrooms are pretty much the same for if we return home in the holidays to visit. My brother does return home a fair bit whereas I work and therefore don’t have the same freedom to leave for a few weeks. My Mum likes to keep our rooms clean for us, and recently my mother was tidying up my brother’s room and lifted up the mattress to clean underneath and discovered a pile of DVD’s. These DVD’s were blank, with titles written on them, so they had obviously been burned, not bought.
Mum inspected them.
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Bad Boys and Bad Boys II.
Her eyes grew wide.’
‘It’s safe to make love while parked in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. Police officers aren’t allowed to walk up and knock on the window. Any suspicious officer who thinks that sex is taking place must drive up from behind, honk his horn three times and wait approximately two minutes before getting out of his car to investigate. [..]
Biting someone with your natural teeth is “simple assault,” while biting someone with your false teeth is “aggravated assault” in Louisiana. [..]
Women aren’t allowed to wear patent-leather shoes in Cleveland, Ohio – a man might see the reflection of something “he oughtn’t!” [..]
You can’t use elephants to plow cotton fields in North Carolina. [..]
In the quiet town of Connorsville, Wisconsin, it’s illegal for a man to shoot off a gun when his female partner has an orgasm. [..]
A law to reduce crime states: “It is mandatory for a motorist with criminal intentions to stop at the city limits and telephone the Chief of Police as he is entering the town in the state of Washington.”‘
I don’t know why this amuses me, but it does.
‘Following textbook instructions in performing chemical experiments at home may be conducive to safety, but the real thrills of research come from those experiments which you work out for yourself.
Certain chemicals just do not get along well together, and can misbehave in a manner which may cause acute embarrassment—and pain. To avoid accidents, keep the following list of chemical tricksters in mind whenever you venture into free-lance experimenting. [..]’
And you could have it all.
Followup to Sad Kermit – Hurt.
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‘At the height of the cold war, amidst talk of radical changes in transportation, a battle cry could be heard from our Soviet neighbors: “We’re Russian, we don’t need no stinking bullet train … we have a jet plane instead” [..]’
‘A man who drowned trying to save his two sons trapped in a rip current could have been helped by tourists passing by from a parasailing trip, according to a captain who jumped in to save the boys.
Police say 38-year-old Renald Charles of Fruitland died Sunday while attempting to rescue his sons, 10 and 13. The boys and their father were spotted by Michael Andrew, owner of a 31-foot boat that was taking tourists to shore from a parasailing trip.
Andrew and one of his crew members jumped in, but the tourists videotaped the drowning instead of helping Charles, Andrew told The (Salisbury) Daily Times.
“I mean, c’mon, who are these people?” Andrew said.’
‘Some years ago, I (GLS) was snooping around in the cabinets that housed the MIT AI Lab’s PDP-10, and noticed a little switch glued to the frame of one cabinet. It was obviously a homebrew job, added by one of the lab’s hardware hackers (no one knows who).
You don’t touch an unknown switch on a computer without knowing what it does, because you might crash the computer. The switch was labeled in a most unhelpful way. It had two positions, and scrawled in pencil on the metal switch body were the words ‘magic’ and ‘more magic’. The switch was in the ‘more magic’ position.
I called another hacker over to look at it. He had never seen the switch before either. Closer examination revealed that the switch had only one wire running to it! The other end of the wire did disappear into the maze of wires inside the computer, but it’s a basic fact of electricity that a switch can’t do anything unless there are two wires connected to it. This switch had a wire connected on one side and no wire on its other side.’
‘The social networking website MySpace has reported a four-fold increase in the number of convicted sex offenders using its service.
The company found more than 29,000 convicted sex offenders in the United States had profiles on MySpace – up from a figure of 7,000 given in May.
MySpace said it was pleased it had identified and removed the profiles of the offenders.
Critics of MySpace call for new laws to make such sites safer for children.’
‘Workers at a water park in central Russia have found the body of a 14-year-old boy in a swimming pool pump chamber three weeks after he went missing, Russian newspapers reported today.
Staff at the amusement park in the city of Kazan checked the pump on Saturday evening because it had been spewing out cloudy water and not working as normal, the Kommersant newspaper said. Inside the pump chamber, workers found Sergei Matveyev’s body.’
‘The head of PC maker Acer, Gianfranco Lanci, has hit out at Microsoft’s Windows Vista operating system, saying that the “entire industry” was disappointed by it.
Microsoft Windows Vista
“The entire industry is disappointed by Windows Vista,” the head of the world’s fourth-biggest PC maker told the Financial Times Deutschland in its online edition on Monday.
Never before had a new version of Windows done so little to boost PC sales, he said.
“And that’s not going to change in the second half of this year,” Mr Lanci said.
“I really don’t think that someone has bought a new PC specifically for Vista.” [..]
“Stability is certainly a problem,” he said.’
I blame terrorist footpaths.
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