moonbuggy

‘Scientists believe they have for the first time identified an ancient graveyard for gladiators.

Analysis of their bones and injuries has given new insight into how they lived, fought and died. [..]

“I’ve looked at quite a few hundred Roman skeletons. I’ve seen examples of head injuries, healed and unhealed. I’ve seen evidence of decapitations,” she says.

“But this (new find) is extremely significant; there’s nothing been found in the world at all like it. They’ve really dispelled quite a lot of myths about gladiators and how they fought.”‘

Was he aiming for the head?

(2.2meg Windows media)

see it here »

‘Question: What is one horsepower? Answer: One horsepower is the amount of energy it takes to drag a horse 500 feet in one second.

The law of gravity says it’s not fair jumping up without coming back down.

Most books now say our sun is a star. But it still knows how to change back into a sun in the daytime.

Vacuums are nothings. We only mention them to let them know we know they’re there.

Some oxygen molecules help fires burn while others help make water, so sometimes it’s brother against brother.

We say the cause of perfume disappearing is evaporation. Evaporation gets blamed for a lot of things people forget to put the top on.

Water vapor gets together in a cloud. When it is big enough to be called a drop, it does.

We keep track of the humidity in the air so we won’t drown when we breathe.

The wind is like the air, only pushier.’

‘This is a bold statement, but I think we can go so far as to say that this is the silliest, and doubtless the most tasteless piece of desk paraphernalia that we have encountered here at IWOOT. Two attributes of course that make showing it to you an absolute necessity. Introducing the Cat’s Arse Sharpener. Sigh. There are no words that readily spring to mind to soften the blow. It’s a cat, you stick your pencil in its derrière, it meows, and it sharpens your pencil. Your feline friend stands in his own litter tray that catches your pencil shavings. Of course not many people use pencils much these days, but this is perhaps the best reason there has ever been for going out and buying one right now.’

‘Hundreds of people are flocking to a remote village in eastern India to catch a glimpse of an old man who has spent six years lying inside his own grave waiting to die as he mourns for his wife, officials said.

Basanta Roy claims he is 103 and spends his day clearing weeds from the grave and lying in it. Belonging to a Hindu caste who bury their dead, Roy dug his grave close to his wife’s after she died in the late 1990s.

“He cleans his grave every day and waits for his death, which seems to be eluding him,” said Shyam Narayan Ram, a senior government official from Jharkhand state.’

‘A friendship-building football match between Muslim and Christian clergy in Norway was called off after a row over the participation of women players.

Muslim Imams had refused to play against women because it went against their beliefs about close physical contact with the opposite sex.

But when the church decided to drop its women players, the priests’ team captain walked out in protest.

The game was meant to be an enjoyable end to a day-long conference in Oslo.’

‘Roll up, roll up and prepare to be dazzled – unless you’re a car-hating arachnophobe. It’s the Spidercar.

Costing $15,000 and twice that amount in work hours, this novel creation took three months to design and six months to build.

Yes, there are some bugs – it’s not the smoothest of rides at the moment and it can only do a top speed of about 5mph.’

see it here »

‘A man and a woman killed themselves “for love” with a bomb that exploded in a hotel room in China’s southwestern province of Yunnan.

Local police think the pair had an adulterous affair and chose to die together rather than live apart, the official Xinhua news agency reported.

The bomb went off early Thursday evening at the Jindi Hotel in Jinggu county, injuring another two people and littering the streets outside with shards of broken glass.’

‘A British man with Autism flies over Rome once in a helicopter and is able to recreate a huge, near-perfect panorama of the city. It takes him three days to complete his drawing.’

(18.1meg Windows media)

see it here »

‘Federal Labor MP Kelly Hoare allegedly sexually harassed a Government car driver taking her home, The Sunday Telegraph can reveal.

The driver lodged an official complaint with the Department of Finance and Administration, which led to Ms Hoare being counselled by ALP officials.

The incident happened one night in Sydney last month. According to informed sources, Ms Hoare, 43, allegedly asked the driver: “Why don’t you come inside and fuck me.”

The driver, who works for the Government’s Comcar service, refused her invitation.’

‘The language you speak can affect how you see the world, a new study of colour perception indicates. Native speakers of Russian – which lacks a single word for “blue” – discriminated between light and dark blues differently from their English-speaking counterparts, researchers found.

The Russian language makes an obligatory distinction between light blue, pronounced “goluboy”, and dark blue, pronounced “siniy”. Jonathan Winawer at MIT in the US and colleagues set out to determine whether this linguistic distinction influences colour perception. [..]

Russian speakers, by comparison, were 10% faster at distinguishing between light (goluboy) blues and dark (siniy) blues than at discriminating between blues within the same shade category.’

‘Brazilian and US scientists are looking into using spider venom as a possible treatment for male impotence.

Their investigation follows reports that men bitten by the Phoneutria nigriventer experienced priapism – long and painful erections.

A two-year study has found that the venom contains a toxin, called Tx2-6, that causes erections.

Further tests are being carried out in the US before the substance can be approved for human use.’

All you need is an empty box of matches and fingers.

(7.6meg Windows media)

see it here »

‘Is somebody getting taken to the cleaners?

A $10 dry cleaning bill for a pair of trousers has ballooned into a $67 million civil lawsuit.

Plaintiff Roy Pearson, a judge in Washington, D.C., says in court papers that he’s been through the ringer over a lost pair of prized pants he wanted to wear on his first day on the bench.

He says in court papers that he has endured “mental suffering, inconvenience and discomfort.”

He says he was unable to wear that favorite suit on his first day of work. ‘

‘A 13-year-old boy who lives with his gran has been exposed as one of Britain’s biggest internet conmen.

The boy earned more than £250,000 ($607,000) by posing as the boss of several multinational companies selling vacuum cleaners, stationery and office supplies.

Many goods weren’t sent, but he used the cash to revel in a luxury lifestyle way beyond his years: he wore designer suits, drank vintage champagne and travelled by chauffeur-driven limousine.

He even employed a personal bodyguard, flew abroad on business trips and claimed he was going to buy a private jet.’

‘In praise of the opaque green liqueur beloved by his creative contemporaries, Oscar Wilde once posed the rhetorical question, “What difference is there between a glass of absinthe and a sunset?”

The prosaic answer, at least for Americans, has long been one of legality: sunsets can be freely enjoyed, but absinthe was forbidden because it contained thujone, a potentially toxic compound.

Intrepid drinkers have worked around the ban by ordering imported bottles off the Internet or smuggling them back from Eastern Europe. Now they have a third, less dodgy option: Lucid, which is being marketed as the first legal, genuine American absinthe in nearly a century.’

‘Canoeist Dennis Bohrn and his companions were stunned when they saw a woman jump off the Perrine Bridge, her body landing near them in the Snake River. Many in the group were crying by the time they managed to reach the woman and paddle her body to shore.

So Bohrn was shocked when an officer walked up and instead of thanking or comforting the group last Sunday, wrote out a couple of $85 tickets for failing to have life jackets on board either of the two canoes.

“The body was right there,” said the 58-year-old Twin Falls resident. “A girl deputy was trying to console everybody. Then a sergeant walked up. He said, ‘I see you don’t have any life jackets so I am going to give you a citation.’ It seemed a little cold.”‘

‘In some ways, Hiasl is like any other Viennese: He indulges a weakness for pastry, likes to paint and enjoys chilling out watching TV.

But he doesn’t care for coffee, and he isn’t actually a person—at least not yet.

In a case that could set a global legal precedent for granting basic rights to apes, animal rights advocates are seeking to get the 26- year-old male chimpanzee legally declared a “person.”

Hiasl’s supporters argue he needs that status to become a legal entity that can receive donations and get a guardian to look out for his interests.’

‘Celebrity heiress Paris Hilton has been jailed for 45 days after being found guilty of violating her probation for a drink-driving conviction.

A Los Angeles judge ruled she must start her sentence on 5 June and has no prospect of an early release.

Ms Hilton told the judge she was very sorry and that she would “pay complete attention to everything” from now on.

The socialite said she did not know her licence had been suspended when caught driving without headlights in February.’

Followup to Paris Hilton May Have Probation Revoked.

(9.3meg Flash video)

see it here »

‘One compound, cannabidiol, or CBD, made people more relaxed. But even small doses of another component, tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, produced temporary psychotic symptoms in people, including hallucinations and paranoid delusions, doctors said.

The results, to be presented at an international mental health conference in London on Tuesday and Wednesday, provides physical evidence of the drug’s damaging influence on the human brain.

“We’ve long suspected that cannabis is linked to psychoses, but we have never before had scans to show how the mechanism works,” said Dr. Philip McGuire, a professor of psychiatry at King’s College, London.

In analyzing MRI scans of the study’s subjects, McGuire and his colleagues found that THC interfered with activity in the inferior frontal cortex, a region of the brain associated with paranoia.

“THC is switching off that regulator,” McGuire said, effectively unleashing the paranoia usually kept under control by the frontal cortex.’

‘[..] That dogma went unquestioned until researchers actually looked at oxygen-starved heart cells under a microscope. What they saw amazed them, according to Dr. Lance Becker, an authority on emergency medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. “After one hour,” he says, “we couldn’t see evidence the cells had died. We thought we’d done something wrong.” In fact, cells cut off from their blood supply died only hours later.

But if the cells are still alive, why can’t doctors revive someone who has been dead for an hour? Because once the cells have been without oxygen for more than five minutes, they die when their oxygen supply is resumed. It was that “astounding” discovery, Becker says, that led him to his post as the director of Penn’s Center for Resuscitation Science, a newly created research institute operating on one of medicine’s newest frontiers: treating the dead.’

‘A gang stripped a South African man before supergluing him to an exercise bicycle while they ransacked his house, according to a report Thursday.

SAPA news agency said the attackers, dressed in suits, hijacked a man in his 50s and forced him at gunpoint to take them to his home in Johannesburg.

“The victim was then forced to strip, after which he was superglued to the seat of an exercise bicycle, his hands were superglued, as were his feet and then his mouth was superglued shut,” SAPA quoted Mark Stokoe, a spokesman for emergency services Netcare 911, as saying.’

‘This is the video taken by Taylor the sixteen year old daughter of David Hasselhoff which shows the actor extremly drunk.’

(1.7meg Windows media)

see it here »

‘A new study by Indiana University media researchers finds that Fox News host Bill O’Reilly calls “a person or a group a derogatory name once every 6.8 seconds, on average, or nearly nine times every minute during the editorials that open his program each night.”

The study documented six months worth, or 115 episodes, of O’Reilly’s “Talking Points Memo” editorials “using propaganda analysis techniques made popular after World War I.” Researchers found that O’Reilly “was prone to inject fear into his commentaries and quick to resort to name-calling. He also frequently assigned roles or attributes — such as ‘villians’ or downright ‘evil’ — to people and groups.’

‘A disgruntled wife has admitted feeding her estranged husband a curry containing dog excrement after their relationship broke down.

Jill Martin, 47, pleaded guilty at Paisley Sheriff Court to culpable and reckless conduct against husband Donald Martin. [..]

Depute Fiscal Margaret Dunnipace told the court that on 13 March, after placing the dinner in front of her husband Donald and watching him start to eat it, Martin had burst out laughing. [..]

The couple have now begun divorce proceedings.’

‘American soldiers discovered a girls school being built north of Baghdad had become an explosives-rigged “death trap,” the U.S. military said Thursday.

The plot at the Huda Girls’ school in Tarmiya was a “sophisticated and premeditated attempt to inflict massive casualties on our most innocent victims,” military spokesman Maj. Gen. William Caldwell said.

The military suspects the plot was the work of al Qaeda, because of its nature and sophistication, Caldwell said in an interview with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer.

The plot was uncovered Saturday, when troopers in the Salaheddin province found detonating wire across the street from the school. They picked up the wire and followed its trail, which led to the school. Once inside, they found an explosive-filled propane tank buried beneath the floor. There were artillery shells built into the ceiling and floor, and another propane tank was found, the military said.’

Hey, I’m the king of the world. You ought to hear my song.

You come on and measure me, I’m 20 inches long.

see it here »

There are apparently images of break dancers, taken to make it appear as if they’re falling.