moonbuggy

With your own blood as ink and a liitle gearbox to pump the syringe, you pretty much can’t go wrong with this pen. 🙂

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‘It sounds like a freakish ailment from a horror movie: Sores erupt on your skin, mysterious threads pop out of them, and you feel like tiny bugs are crawling all over you. Some experts believe it’s a psychiatric phenomenon, yet hundreds of people say it’s a true physical condition. It’s called Morgellons, and now the government is about to begin its first medical study of it. [..]

Morgellons sufferers describe symptoms that include erupting sores, fatigue, the sensation of bugs crawling over them and – perhaps worst of all – mysterious red, blue or black fibers that sprout from their skin. They’ve documented their suffering on Web sites.

Some doctors believe the condition is a form of delusional parasitosis, a psychosis in which people believe they are infected with parasites.’

If you thought Technoviking knew how to dance, then you haven’t seen his grandmother yet. 🙂

Also, there’s the original Technoviking With Captions.

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‘Hands cuffed at his waist and a defeated expression on his face, O.J. Simpson listened to a judge blister him Wednesday for “arrogance or ignorance or both” for breaking bail terms in a robbery case.

“I don’t know, Mr. Simpson, what the heck you were thinking, or maybe that’s the problem – you weren’t,” Clark County District Judge Jackie Glass lectured as she doubled his bail to $250,000. [..]

“I don’t know if it’s just arrogance. I don’t know if it’s ignorance,” she said. “But you’ve been locked up at the Clark County Detention Center since Friday because of arrogance or ignorance – or both.”

Simpson, wearing shackles and a dark jail shirt and pants with orange slippers, grimaced as Glass announced she was doubling his bail. He spoke only when asked if he understood the terms.

“Yes, your honor,” the graying football star said evenly.’

‘A couple of weeks ago, Sabian Lucas, 9, and her Edna Sosa, 8, were having a sleepover. While playing and eating, Edna began choking on an apple.

“I was like, ‘Are you choking?'” Sabian recalled. [..]

KMBC’s Marcus Moore reported that Sabian ended up performing the Heimlich maneuver on Edna.

“I never did it on a person because I was tiny. So I did it for the first time and I was like, ‘OK, I’ll try to do this,'” Sabian said. [..]

“She saved my life. Now I have to be really, really, really nice to her,” Edna said.

“She doesn’t really have to do anything. All she has to do is be my best friend for life,” Sabian said.’

‘A construction worker claimed in a lawsuit that when he went to a hospital after being hit on the forehead by a falling wooden beam, emergency room staffers forcibly gave him a rectal examination.

Brian Persaud, 38, says in court papers that after he denied a request by NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital emergency room employees to examine his rectum, he was “assaulted, battered and falsely imprisoned.”

His lawyer, Gerrard M. Marrone, said he and Persaud later learned the exam was one way of determining whether he had suffered spinal damage in the accident.

Marrone said his client got eight stitches for a cut over his eyebrow.

Then, Marrone said, emergency room staffers insisted on examining his rectum and held him down while he begged, “Please don’t do that.” He said Persaud hit a doctor while flailing around and staffers gave him an injection, which knocked him out, and performed the rectal exam.’

‘A long-awaited final report from the Food and Drug Administration concludes that foods from healthy cloned animals and their offspring are as safe as those from ordinary animals, effectively removing the last U.S. regulatory barrier to the marketing of meat and milk from cloned cattle, pigs and goats.

The 968-page “final risk assessment,” not yet released but obtained by The Washington Post, finds no evidence to support opponents’ concerns that food from clones may harbor hidden risks.

But, recognizing that a majority of consumers are wary of food from clones — and that cloning could undermine the wholesome image of American milk and meat — the agency report includes hundreds of pages of raw data so that others can see how it came to its conclusions.’

‘An ugly confrontation between Greek tennis fans and police — in which about 30 people, including children, were affected by capsicum spray — marred the second evening of the Australian Open in Melbourne last night.

The incident occurred during a match between Greek player Konstantinos Economidis and highly ranked Chilean Fernando Gonzalez about 8.30pm.

Play was stopped for eight minutes after police discharged capsicum spray in a Greek section of the crowd at the outdoor Margaret Court Arena. The spray drifted across the court and affected the players.

“It was unpleasant for us,” said Economidis, who eventually lost the match. He said the arena “was full of people who were cheering and looked like they were enjoying the tennis and it was a really nice atmosphere”.

Gonzalez said the crowd was noisy but not offensive.

Australian Open director Craig Tiley last week announced plans for zero-tolerance policing.’

‘Bad news for Coco and Blinko — children don’t like clowns and even older kids are scared of them.

The news that will no doubt have clowns shedding tears was revealed in a poll of youngsters by researchers from the University of Sheffield who were examining how to improve the decor of hospital children’s wards.

The study, reported in the Nursing Standard magazine, found all the 250 patients aged between four and 16 they quizzed disliked the use of clowns, with even the older ones finding them scary.

“As adults we make assumptions about what works for children,” said Penny Curtis, a senior lecturer in research at the university.

“We found that clowns are universally disliked by children. Some found them quite frightening and unknowable.”‘

‘Gravity: Doesn’t exist. If items of mass had any impact of others, then mountains should have people orbiting them. Or the space shuttle in space should have the astronauts orbiting it. Of course, that’s just the tip of the gravity myth. Think about it. Scientists want us to believe that the sun has a gravitation pull strong enough to keep a planet like neptune or pluto in orbit, but then it’s not strong enough to keep the moon in orbit? Why is that? What I believe is going on here is this: These objects in space have yet to receive mans touch, and thus have no sin to weigh them down. This isn’t the case for earth, where we see the impact of transfered sin to material objects. The more sin, the heavier something is.’

I could feel his mind decaying, only inches away from me..

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You can come as you are, but pay as you go..

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‘The Sixties were an era of extreme reality. I miss the smell of tear gas. I miss the fear of getting beaten.’

‘Marcos Gomez-Romero told sheriff’s detectives he wanted a son.

Every time he looked at his baby girl, Gomez-Romero said he grew annoyed and angry because she was not the boy he had hoped for.

Gomez-Romero told detectives that abusing his daughter, Ariana Lizeth Rodriguez-Romero, became such a “habit” that he slapped her while she slept.

Ariana died Christmas Day. She was 4 months old. [..]

“Gomez-Romero made it clear that his anger and hostility towards his daughter was due to the fact that she was a girl and he had wanted a son,” the sheriff’s report said.’

‘A married couple who died in the Central Australian outback used the last of their water on a leaking car radiator, the sole survivor of the tragedy has told police. [..]

A ground search had been mounted to find the man and his two companions after a report was made to police about 9pm (CST) on Sunday that an overdue party was missing after setting off from the Aboriginal community of Kintore.

The man, believed to be aged between 60 and 70, told police that the Pajero station wagon they had been travelling in broke down 116km from Nyirripi two days earlier.

The group then ran out of water after using it to fill up a leaking radiator, he said.’

‘North Vietnamese made hoax calls to get the US military to bomb its own units during the Vietnam War, according to declassified information that also confirmed US officials faked an incident to escalate the war. [..]

During the war, North Vietnamese intelligence units sometimes succeeded in penetrating US communications systems, and they could monitor American message traffic from within, according to the report “Spartans in Darkness.”

On several occasions “the communists were able, by communicating on Allied radio nets, to call in Allied artillery or air strikes on American units,” it said. [..]

But he said that probably the “most historically significant feature” of the declassified report was the retelling of the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident. [..]

The author of the report “demonstrates that not only is it not true, as (then US) secretary of defense Robert McNamara told Congress, that the evidence of an attack was ‘unimpeachable,’ but that to the contrary, a review of the classified signals intelligence proves that ‘no attack happened that night,'” FAS said in a statement.’

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‘A pet dog missed the family’s dead cat so much that he dug up his grave and brought the body back into the house.

When Oscar’s owners woke up the next morning they discovered the dog curled up beside Arthur, the late cat, in his basket.

His owners, Robert Bell, 73, and his wife, Mavis, of Wigan, Greater Manchester, believe that the dog had licked the cat clean before falling asleep. [..]

Oscar, an 18-month-old Lancashire Heeler, had watched Mr Bell dig a grave in the garden and then lower the cat into the hole.Mr Bell said: “He had managed to climb out through the cat flap in the night, obviously with the intent to get Arthur back. Bearing in mind that Arthur was a huge cat, Oscar must have used all the strength he could muster.’

‘A German man in the northeastern town of Gross Godems was being treated for serious burns Monday after accidentally setting his apartment ablaze when he mixed up a bottle of gasoline with alcohol, police said.

The 56-year-old apparently grabbed the wrong bottle and took a swig from the gasoline flask, then spat it out when he realized his mistake.

The gas hit a lit cigarette, sparking the fire, police said.

The man’s name was not released.’

‘National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell is drawing up plans for cyberspace spying that would make the current debate on warrantless wiretaps look like a “walk in the park,” according to an interview published in the New Yorker’s print edition today. [..]

McConnell is developing a Cyber-Security Policy, still in the draft stage, which will closely police Internet activity.

“Ed Giorgio, who is working with McConnell on the plan, said that would mean giving the government the autority to examine the content of any e-mail, file transfer or Web search,” author Lawrence Wright pens.

“Google has records that could help in a cyber-investigation, he said,” Wright adds. “Giorgio warned me, ‘We have a saying in this business: ‘Privacy and security are a zero-sum game.'”‘

‘Holy shit!’

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‘Without warning or reports of turbulence, an Air Canada flight en route to Toronto dipped and rotated violently, on early Thursday morning, causing injuries and confusion among passengers and the crew. Strangely enough, flight experts are still unsure about what caused the accident.

“What happened aboard Air Canada flight 190,” said a reporter on CBC’s The National, “can best be described as chaos.”

According to passenger accounts, the Airbus aircraft bucked and rolled side to side abruptly, hurling dishes and people through the air. “It was weird,” one passenger told the CBC. “The plane actually turned upside down without actually feeling it. There were people on the roof. Coffe and shit [was] flying all over the plane.”‘

‘A 20-year-old man is in hospital after almost losing an arm in a traffic incident at Bunbury in Western Australia.

Police say the man was a passenger in a utility when his left arm was sideswiped by a passing vehicle at the intersection of Blair Street and Sandridge Road.

The man had been waving to two girls who were washing a car at a local car wash.

Police are appealing for witnesses to the incident which occurred around 8:30pm AWDT.’

Also: Surgeons save ‘waving man’s’ arm

‘A father sodomized his 18-year-old stepson to avenge the teenager’s alleged rape of the man’s 8-year-old daughter, police said.

The father, 32, turned himself into to authorities on Friday and was released from jail Saturday after posting a $17,500 bond. He faces a charge of aggravated sexual assault.

The stepson was arrested Jan. 2 and charged with suspicion of aggravated sexual assault. Police say the father caught him assaulting his daughter, and a subsequent examination at a hospital revealed the girl had been sodomized. [..]

“This is a very unique case, but we have a criminal justice system in place, and no one can take the law into their own hands,” Johnson said.’

‘#xkcd has had about 250 chatters these days. Large communities suck. This problem is hard to solve, but we’ve come up with a fun attack on it — enforced originality (in a very narrow sense). We’ve put together an auto-moderation system in an experimental channel, #xkcd-signal, and it seems to work well, so we invite you all to take part. [..]

I was trying to decide what made a channel consistently enjoyable. A common factor in my favorite hangouts seemed to be a focus on original and unpredictable content on each line. It didn’t necessarily need to be useful, just interesting. I started trying to think of ways to encourage this.

And then I had an idea — what if you were only allowed to say sentences that had never been said before, ever? A bot with access to the full channel logs could kick you out when you repeated something that had already been said. There would be no “all your base are belong to us”, no “lol”, no “asl”, no “there are no girls on the internet”. No “I know rite”, no “hi everyone”, no “morning sucks.” Just thoughtful, full sentences.’

‘Shinzo Abe would like the world to know that he did not resign last year because of failed policies or election losses. The real reason reason for his resignation was crippling diarrhea that forced him to go to the toilet 30 times a day:

Abe said he has been struck by ulcerative colitis, a bowel illness caused by ulcers, at least once a year since he was 17. [..]

“To mention an indelicate matter, I rushed to the lavatory after having keen abdominal pains and saw the basin all red with tremendous bleeding,” he said.

“Bleeding causes slight anaemia. More than anything else, though, you feel depressed as you see fresh blood every time you go to the toilet,” he said in an article contributed to the major conservative monthly Bungei Shunju.

Abe said the illness usually made him “feel the need to relieve my bowels every 30 minutes.” [..]

“The need to go to the toilet many times a day hampers election and other political activities very much,” he said, adding his wife, Akie, once made a tearful plea to him to quit his political career.’

‘Cause your friends don’t dance, and if they don’t dance, well, they’re no friends of mine.

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‘Scientists at the University of Minnesota have taken a big step toward making replacement organs with the recipients’ cells. In experiments performed on rats and pigs, the researchers stripped donor hearts of their cells to create scaffolds on which the recipients’ cells were grown. The hope is that a similar approach might someday prove useful to human patients with end-stage heart disease. In theory, these novel hearts could prove to be better than traditional donor hearts because they are less likely to cause an immune response.

“It’s an audacious, gutsy, exciting piece of work,” says Buddy Ratner, a professor of bioengineering and chemical engineering at the University of Washington, who was not involved in the research. Still, substantial hurdles remain before the approach might be applicable to human patients.’