‘US Republican John McCain has threatened to get his 95-year-old mum on to actor Chuck Norris for saying he is too old to be president.
“I’m going to send my 95-year-old mother to just go over and wash Chuck Norris’ mouth out with soap,” Senator McCain said at a new conference.
The Arizona senator, 71, spoke when asked about a claim by Norris, a 67-year-old Hollywood action star who is campaigning for rival Mike Huckabee, that he is too old to handle the pressures of the White House. [..]
Senator McCain, a white-haired former fighter pilot, would be the oldest first-term president ever if elected.’
Or, atleast attempting to before things take an unexpected turn. 🙂
(2.7meg Flash video)
see it here »
‘A man wielding a chain saw and a knife attacked residents at a homeless shelter where he was staying, leaving two people in critical condition and injuring two others, police said Sunday.
Matthew Watkins, 28, was charged with four counts each of first-degree assault and armed criminal action for the attack Saturday at the Mid-America Care Center, the Callaway County sheriff’s office said.
Sheriff Dennis Crane said two victims were cut by a chain saw and two others by a knife. Authorities said the victims injured by the chain saw were in critical condition, while the other two were treated and released.’
‘A Berlin burglar’s break-in took an unexpected turn when he stumbled upon a corpse and felt compelled to call the police.
“He called to say he’d just broken into a flat and found a dead body,” said a spokeswoman for Berlin police Thursday. “He gave the address of the place and then hung up.”
Officers discovered the 64-year-old resident of the flat dead in his bedroom. The man had passed away about two weeks ago, and authorities are not treating the death as suspicious.
The burglar has not been heard of since. Local media said he fled the apartment empty-handed, but police could not confirm this.’
‘A former warlord known as General Butt Naked has confessed to Liberia’s post-conflict reconciliation commission that his men killed 20,000 people during the country’s civil war.
The commander earned his nom de guerre for charging into battle dressed only in his boots
The feared rebel commander earned his nom de guerre for charging into battle dressed only in his boots, at the head of a gang of fighters known as the Butt Naked Battalion.
The nude gunmen became known for terrorising villagers and sacrificing children whose hearts they would eat before going into battle during Liberia’s 14-year on-off civil war which ended in 2003. [..]
Mr Blayee returned from exile in Ghana, where he is now an evangelical Christian preacher, to face Liberia’s truth and reconciliation commission last week.’
Things aren’t good when you smack your head hard enough to have seizures.
(6.1meg Flash video)
see it here »
‘Honolulu police said they are investigating the death of a baby on the H-1 Freeway.
Witnesses said that they saw a man throw the infant from the Miller Street pedestrian overpass, but police said they are not sure if the child was alive or dead when the man threw the child. It appears the child was hit by at least two cars, officials said. [..]
The man was wearing hospital scrubs. Officials from Queen’s Medical Center, which is located near the scene, said he is not a patient.
As the man was taken away by police, he yelled, “Thank you for everything” to KITV camera crews. [..]
Police said they are not sure where the infant came from, and they are checking local day care facilities in the area to see if anyone is missing a child.’
‘In 2006 Sean Paul’s “Temperature” was hot, rising to the top of the Billboard charts. But the pop song had a much more chilling effect on 25-year-old Stacey Gayle.
Gayle, a customer service employee at a bank in Alberta, Canada, was suffering as many as 10 grand mal seizures a day, despite being treated with medications designed to control them. The condition became so bad she eventually had to quit her job and leave the church choir where she sang.
Appearing on CBS’ The Early Show, Gayle told co-anchor Harry Smith that she was 21 when she first started having seizures, but it was in the summer of 2006 when she began to suspect a possible trigger.
She recalled, 18 months ago, being at a barbecue and collapsing when the Jamaican rapper Sean Paul’s music started playing, and then remembered having a previous seizure when she had heard his music. “I would get that aura before that song would come on,” she said.’
‘I wanna make sure I don’t get hit, so I’m backin’ up..’
(4.6meg Flash video)
see it here »
‘A soldier has been arrested in the Zimbabwean town of Chitungwiza for beheading his five-year-old son, clubbing his mother-in-law to death and attempting to kill his stepdaughter, reports said. [..]
He is reported to have had an argument with his wife in the early hours of the morning. She ran out of their bedroom and the soldier then turned on other members of the family.
“Sibanda allegedly took a hoe, which he used to slay his mother-in-law. He proceeded to chop off his son’s head using the same hoe,” police spokesman Andrew Phiri said.
“We shot him in the leg after he slit and pulled out his dead son’s intestines,” Phiri told the Sunday Mail.’
‘The mother of an 8-year-old girl has been charged with two misdemeanor counts of child abuse in connection with a case involving a man accused of drinking her daughter’s urine. [..]
According to the a report in the Boulder Daily Camera, the girl’s mother told a teacher that her daughter is a child of the sun and can’t get up when it is dark outside. An arrest warrant obtained by the newspaper indicated the mother also said the girl’s eyes get “close-up X-ray vision” every night at midnight, which allows her to diagnose herself with sickle cell anemia, the warrant states. [..]
According to Cardillo’s arrest affidavit, the girl’s mother said she knew about the nudity and urine drinking, but told investigators that it wasn’t hurting anyone and she knew other people who drink urine. She said both she and Cardillo are nudists.’
‘A 480-pound Martin County woman has died after emergency workers tried to remove her from the couch where she had remained for about six years.
Gayle Laverne Grinds, 40, died Wednesday, after a failed six-hour effort to dislodge her from the couch in her home. Workers say the home was filthy, and Grinds was too large to get up from the couch to even use the bathroom. [..]
Emergency workers had to remove some sliding glass doors and lift the couch, with Grinds still on it, to a trailer behind a pickup truck. Removing her from the couch would be too painful, since her body was grafted to the fabric. After years of staying put, her skin had literally become one with the sofa and had to be surgically removed.
She died at Martin Memorial Hospital South, still attached to the couch.’
‘Researchers from the University of Tokyo have teamed up with members of the Japan Origami Airplane Association to develop a paper aircraft capable of surviving the flight from the International Space Station to the Earth’s surface.
The researchers are scheduled to begin testing the strength and heat resistance of an 8 centimeter (3.1 in) long prototype on January 17 in an ultra-high-speed wind tunnel at the University of Tokyo’s Okashiwa campus (Chiba prefecture). In the tests, the origami glider — which is shaped like the Space Shuttle and has been treated to withstand intense heat — will be subjected to wind speeds of Mach 7, or about 8,600 kilometers (5,300 miles) per hour.
A large spacecraft such as the Space Shuttle can reach speeds of up to Mach 20 (over 15,200 mph) when it re-enters the Earth’s atmosphere, and friction with the air heats the outer surface to extreme temperatures. The much lighter origami aircraft, which the researchers claim will come down more slowly, is not expected to burn up on re-entry.’
A short clip from a documentary about ants, talking a bit about nest construction.
Actually, it’s not so much talking, it’s mainly pouring 10 tons of concrete down into an ants nest and excavating the result. 🙂
I wish I lived underground.
(15.4meg Flash video)
see it here »
‘Scientists at a California company reported yesterday that they had created the first mature cloned human embryos from single skin cells taken from adults, a significant advance toward the goal of growing personalized stem cells for patients suffering from various diseases.
Creation of the embryos — grown from cells taken from the company’s chief executive and one of its investors — also offered sobering evidence that few, if any, technical barriers may remain to the creation of cloned babies. That reality could prompt renewed controversy on Capitol Hill, where the debate over human cloning has died down of late.
Five of the new embryos grew in laboratory dishes to the stage that fertility doctors consider ready for transfer to a woman’s womb: a degree of development that clones of adult humans have never achieved before.’
‘First I got 3 dead harddisks. A small one that used to be my Amiga’s, a normal sized one, and a bigass ancient one. I did this just for the fun of saying I have a harddisk sound system with woofer, midrange, and tweeter drivers ;). I ripped the drives apart. I took sound (in electrical signal form) from the output jack of my sound card. I fed it through a Velleman 30 watt audio amplifier that I bought from Parts Express here and soldered together. I took the amplified signals and fed them through the coil that controls the movement of the HD drive heads. I also connected the amplified signals to the platter motors of the ‘midrange’ and ‘tweeter’ drives, so you can actually see the platters spin sometimes. I determined which places to connect the wires by studying the drives and poking wires around in random places. Hey… they were dead anyway. Anyways, the sound that is being produced is from the rapid vibrations of the heads/platters due to the ‘sound’ signals passing through them. With lower frequency sounds being passed through the drives, you can see the heads move quite a lot. For the high frequency ones, its invisible to our inferior human eyes. This kind of fun isn’t just limited to harddisks… I also got low frequency sounds to come out of an electric motor, and even standard cooling fans will make some sound. Girls can try even making music come out of their vibr… *cough*… The 3 harddisks are connected to the amp in parallel. It’s like ghetto raid with groove ;)’
‘An Eastern Kentucky man has filed a lawsuit against the Bourbon County Sheriff’s Department, claiming two deputies shot him because they believed his prosthetic leg was a weapon.
Robert Shane Brewer Jr. alleges he was sitting under a tree on a farm near his home in Bourbon County on the night of Sept. 20, with his leg propped against a tree, when two deputies approached him on a trespassing call.
The lawsuit, which was filed Wednesday in U.S. District Court in Lexington, claims the deputies told Brewer to “get out from under the tree” and “drop his weapon.”
Brewer said he told the deputies he didn’t have a weapon and crawled around the tree to face them, when they opened fire without warning, shooting Brewer twice in the neck and chest.
Brewer claims he never threatened or provoked the deputies and that after paramedics arrived, one of the deputies said, “Oh my God, I can’t believe we shot Robbie Brewer.”‘
children waiting for the day they feel good.. happy birthday..
(6.4meg Flash video)
see it here »
‘In American pop culture, the face of abortion is often a frightened teenager, nervously choosing to terminate an unexpected pregnancy. The numbers tell a far more complex story in which financial stress can play a pivotal role.
Half of the roughly 1.2 million U.S. women who have abortions each year are 25 or older. Only about 17 percent are teens. About 60 percent have given birth to least one child prior to getting an abortion.
A disproportionately high number are black or Hispanic. And regardless of race, high abortion rates are linked to hard times.
“It doesn’t just happen to young people, it doesn’t necessarily have to do with irresponsibility,” said Miriam Inocencio, president of Planned Parenthood of Rhode Island. “Women face years and years of reproductive life after they’ve completed their families, and they’re at risk of an unintended pregnancy that can create an economic strain.”‘
‘The arrest of a man named Steven Howards in June 2006 after he approached Vice President Dick Cheney at a Colorado ski resort and denounced the war in Iraq might have seemed, at the time, no more than a blip on the vice president’s schedule.
But now the blip has become a blowup, with Secret Service agents — under oath in court depositions — accusing one another of unethical and perhaps even illegal conduct in the handling of Mr. Howards’s arrest and the official accounting of it.
The revelations arise from a lawsuit Mr. Howards filed against five Secret Service agents, accusing them of civil rights and free-speech violations. They offer a rare glimpse into the inner workings of the Secret Service, which usually wears the standoffish, plainclothes cool of its mission like a cloak of invisibility.’
Followup to Criticizing Cheney to His Face Is Assault?.
‘The locking DVD case is a ubiquitous fixture in libraries and video rental
stores across the country. It uses a magic yellow tab to keep you from
opening the case. A gizmo mounted to the checkout counter can open the case
easily by sliding the DVD across its slot.
Ever wonder how it works?
The secret is two very powerful magnets. From reading the sales literature
for the locks, these magnets are supposedly only available to sooper-seekret
authorized personnel. What they don’t tell their customers is that these
magnets are also available inside every junk 3.5″ hard disk drive made in the
last 15 years. They are part of the head seeking motor.’
‘We wanted to make a catapult that could destroy a car with bowling balls from at least 80 feet away, throw fireballs, and be controlled through a computer vision system so it could be aimed from a laptop. Result? Success.’
(9meg Flash video)
see it here »
‘Didn’t get a chance to watch the terrifyingly creepy Tom Cruise video yesterday before Scientologists pulled it off YouTube? Well, we’ve managed to get our hands on a copy and now we’d like to invite you to watch in all its technicolor glory. Nevermind the orgs, nevermind the SPs and nevermind David Miscaviage, Defamer won’t hesitate to put our ethics on ANYONE! Don’t miss out, over one billion earth humans have been served. KSW and KFC forever (or something). This is must-see. Do not pass go without watching this video.’
The video might aswell be titled “How to talk for 9 minutes without saying anything intelligent”. God effort. 🙂
(23meg Flash video)
Far2Paranoid: Knew this guy in HS
Far2Paranoid: Built a box with 2x 350Mhz Pentium2, back in ’98
Far2Paranoid: The trick was, filled his bathtub w/ glycerin
Far2Paranoid: Took apart a mini-fridge and used the coils to cool the glycerin to ~40F
Far2Paranoid: Then sunk the box so he could OC the CPUs to 1.3Ghz
Far2Paranoid: Coolest shit I’ve ever seen.
AlbinoChpmnk: If this was sitting in his tub, how did he shower?
Far2Paranoid: After what I just said, what makes you think he showered?
I don’t know what they’re saying, but the sign speaks for itself, I s’pose. 🙂
(3.9meg Flash video)
see it here »
‘John and Martha Hucko were found dead in their Colonial Park Drive home on Tuesday night. Police said the couple had intravenous lines with a barbiturate hooked to their ankles, and Demerol was found near the bodies.
Police said the couple’s daughter called them after receiving a suicide note from her father.
The case is being treated as murder-suicide or double-suicide, pending the results of autopsies and toxicology tests, police said.
John Hucko was a dentist and a former anesthesiologist. He had a dental office on Brownsville Road, and his wife worked there as an assistant.’
‘Diseases carried to North America by Spanish explorers killed millions of the continent’s original inhabitants, but the trip cut both ways: scientists say Christopher Columbus took syphilis back to Europe.
In a study published in the January 14 issue of the journal Public Library of Science Neglected Tropical Diseases, Emory University geneticists studied 26 strains of treponema, the bacterial genus to which the infamous venereal disease belongs. After comparing their differences and evolutionary history, they decided that modern syphilis-causing strains most closely resembled those found in South America.
The findings give ammunition to adherents of the so-called Columbian theory of syphilis, which holds that the disease arrived in Europe with Columbus. Their opponents point to earlier European evidence, especially syphilitic lesions in skeletons from a 14th century English monastery, as absolving the notorious explorer of this particular scourge.’
There’s a lot of strange and cool stuff to look at.
When I build my time machine I’m gonna go be a doctor in the past for a while. Medicine was classy back then. They don’t make urethral dilators out of ivory in this day and age, that’s for sure. 🙂
