moonbuggy

He was doing so well, until he came to such a sudden stop.

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`Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki proposed to President George W. Bush in November to withdraw US troops from Baghdad and let the Iraqi government take over security in the capital, a US newspaper reported.

Citing interviews with several unnamed administration officials, the Washington Post wrote that Maliki made the suggestion in a presentation to Bush on November 30 in Amman, Jordan.

But soon after, Bush rejected the idea, the paper said.

Instead, the president opted for a strategy announced this month to deploy an additional 21,500 US troops to Iraq, focusing on quelling sectarian violence in Baghdad and the western al-Anbar province.’

People are funny. :)

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`A man who tried to commit suicide by throwing himself onto the tracks of the Mexico City subway was later beaten to death by police, prosecutors said Saturday.

Mexico City attorney general’s office announced in a press statement that two city policemen who took custody of the man after he was removed from the tracks have been charged with homicide for allegedly beating him to death later in a patrol car. [..]

A forensic report showed the man died of blows to the chest and head that were not caused by his jumping onto the tracks.’

This is the third bad fuckup of hers I’ve seen in the past month or so.

Crazy bitch.

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`There are ‘bare bones’ kits from some manufacturers, but you are still expected to pay through the nose. To have one designed around standard Mini-ITX components would be great for the kind of people who do not want a laptop that we can fit in an envelope, rather a unit that we can use all around the house for a decent price.

I decided to create a laptop that at any point, I could upgrade every component as they grew too old. For very little money, I have created a 2GHz processor laptop with 1GB Ram, and an ATI Radeon 9200 128MB graphics card. OK, so it is a PCI graphics card and could be faster, but everything is upgradable – I could slot in a motherboard with PCI Express in the future.’

Chopper Read manages to put up a pretty good argument for why you shouldn’t beat up women.

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`GDAY CUNTS! MY NAME IS SHANE SKILLZ – I AM THE MOST GANGSTA CUNT ON MYSPACE AND I RECKON ONE OF THE BEST EVR RAPPERZ IN AUSTRALIA. I LUV REPRESENTIN AND BASHIN THE FUCK OUT OF WACK CUNTS WHO DESERVE IT. MY FIRST EVR SONG (I FUCKEN REPRESENT CUNT) IS A NUMBER ONE HIT THAT EVERYONE IN AUSTRALIA LOVES AND I AM WORKIN ON MY DAYBUE ALBUM RIGHT NOW. I ALSO LOVE ROOTIN HOT BITCHES AND DRINKIN MELBOURNE BITTER AND DOIN DOPE PIECES ON DUNNY BLOCKS. MY CREW IS CALLED SKILL UNIT AND INCLUEDS DJ SCREWY AND PC WHO IS A TUFF CUNT THAT CAN FUCK YOU UP. I GET A LOT OF FAN MAIL SO DONT GET PISSED IF I CANT GET BACK TO YOU. HATERZ CAN SUCK A CHODE.. WERD. SHANE SKILLZ I FUCKEN REPREZENT CUNTS!’

I quite like the song. :)

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‘A guy has taught his six month old baby how to balance on one foot. To make it even cooler the little guy is able to balance while his dad holds him on one hand!’

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‘A Ukrainian couple have killed and eaten their neighbor who popped in for a drink, the Gazeta-po-Ukrainsky (Newspaper in Ukrainian) reports.

The accident took place in the town of Makeyevka. A 36-year old resident of the city and his 34-year-old girlfriend invited their 48-year old neighbor for a drink. After the party that lasted several hours the two men entered started argument that developed into a fight. Eventually, the couple killed their neighbor with a knife and a hammer.

At first, the killers wanted to get rid of the body, but the woman persuaded her partner to eat the meat, so they cut off the tender parts of the body and put them in the fridge. Then, they carried what was left of the cadaver out of their home and dumped it in a sewage well.’

It seems that Ukrainian newspapers have no qualms about publishing full colour pictures of mutilated/partially consumed corpses. And, neither do I. :)

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This is a pretty crazy home aquarium, but it’s cool.

Lots of places it could leak from, by the looks of things. That would suck.

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`Earlier this afternoon, a reader sent in an image highlighting what he claimed was the Silver Surfer’s chromy nut sack. He said this screen grab came from the currently posted trailer for FANTASTIC FOUR: RISE OF THE SILVER SURFER.

Initially, I had my doubts — who wouldn’t? It HAD to be fake. I mean, the notion of Surfer cruising around with his metallic junk swinging in the wind just didn’t make a whole lot of sense.

Finally, curiosity got the best of me (it wasn’t the homo-erotic kind of curiosity…not that there’s anything wrong with that), so I jumped to the QuickTime HD version of the trailer and started frame-by-framing through the scene in question.

And, sure enough, there it was…the Silver Surfer’s shiny package!’

`Eleven employees of a West Seattle automobile dealership allegedly were involved in a plot that resulted in the theft of more than $100,000 from a mentally ill man, King County Prosecutors say.

First, salesmen sold the man a high-priced truck, then they broke into his home to steal more cash, say prosecutors and Seattle Police. They also allege that one salesman then talked the man — by then committed to a mental health unit at Harborview Medical Center — into selling the truck to him at a fraction of its value.’

‘During a soccer game in South America sudden gusts of winds blew signs off the stadium and at the players. Check out the guys dodge these 200-300 lb signs.’

Although, you could probably read “dodge” as “get hit in the head by” in some cases. :)

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`Jeffrey Sanger picked the optimal place to have a heart attack: his Fire Department paramedic class. [..]

The drama started when he felt chest pains as about a dozen paramedics prepared to begin a training session at the Emergency Medical Service Training Center in Fort Totten, Queens. He suspected it was just indigestion, and stayed in the locker room.

But his instructors followed him, worried that he was experiencing the typical symptoms of a heart attack.

Sanger at first protested that he was all right, but collapsed within minutes and stopped breathing.’

`Smithfield Foods actually faces a more difficult task than transmogrifying the populations of America’s thirty-two largest cities into edible packages of meat. Hogs produce three times more excrement than human beings do. The 500,000 pigs at a single Smithfield subsidiary in Utah generate more fecal matter each year than the 1.5 million inhabitants of Manhattan. The best estimates put Smithfield’s total waste discharge at 26 million tons a year. That would fill four Yankee Stadiums. Even when divided among the many small pig production units that surround the company’s slaughterhouses, that is not a containable amount.’

Long article, but interesting. I didn’t realise pig shit turned ponds pink. :)

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‘A charter school alerted authorities to a 29-year-old sex offender who tried to enroll there, pretending he was just 12, in what sheriff’s officials said Friday may have been an attempt to lure children into sexual abuse.

The Yavapai County sheriff’s office also said Neil Havens Rodreick II conned two men he was living with and having sex with into believing he was a young boy. One of them, 61-year-old Lonnie Stiffler, called himself Rodreick’s grandfather when he tried to enroll him at Mingus Springs Charter School as “Casey Price.”

“This is the weirdest case I’ve seen in 18 years,” sheriff’s spokeswoman Susan Quayle said. “If it wasn’t so sad it would be funny.”‘ [..]

Stiffler and Robert James Snow, 43, “were very upset when the detectives told them they had been having a sexual relationship with a 29-year-old man and not a pre-teen boy,” Quayle said.’

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This guy has had his Xbox 360 break twice. The first time Microsoft sent him out a box to ship it back to them in for repairs. Apparently they’ve changed their policy now and the customer has to provide the box and ship it to Microsoft, and Microsoft will ship it back in the same box.

Unfortunately, this guy isn’t particularly happy about not getting a free box, so he’s soliciting donations to buy the biggest box possible [a cargo shipping container, basically] just so Microsoft will have to pay to ship it back to him.

`Since 2002 Skyacht Aircraft, Inc. has been developing a new type of aircraft called the Personal Blimp. The goal of this work has been to create an aircraft capable of quiet, steerable, sustained, and affordable flight. When the first Personal Blimp, named the Airship Alberto, made its first flight on October 27, 2006, it became the first and only aircraft to meet this seemingly straightforward goal.

The Personal Blimp uses hot air (rather than Helium) for lift and virtually silent electric motors for propulsion. To put it another way: the Personal Blimp is a hot air balloon that can be maneuvered about in nearly perfect quiet. Passengers in a Personal Blimp have a serene experience of flight unavailable in any other type of aircraft.’

‘We got activity out here but I don’t think we need to report it.. It appears to be fornication.. We’re taping it..’

Hooray for FLIR, I suppose. :) The guys on the radio back at base seem pretty keen to make sure they get a copy of the tape made.

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`Let me tell you why they are so cool.’

`The thing is, if you carefully construct an example document, you can get a compression ratio much higher. How much higher? MUCH, MUCH higher. For example, if you created a PNG image containing just one colour repeated over and over then you could easily get a 1000:1 ratio. For a text document containing 1 character repeated over and over, it’s possible to shrink 100Gb to about 6k. Think about that, it is a huge difference: 1.7e7:1.

That’s all well and good as an interesting experiment, but what does it mean for an average user? Imagine I had constructed one of those zip files that had shrunk 100Gb down to 6k and I sent you that file. If you trusted me, you might try to open it. Therein lies the problem [..]’

`The graph shown above relates the arithmetic mean IQ measured in various country’s populations, to the fraction of each country’s population that believes religion is very important.

The green diamonds represent individual countries; the yellow line is a linear regression (y = mx + b), calculated by the least squares method. The United States data point is circled in red.’

The gist is that religiosity is inversely proportional to intelligence. I’m not all that surprised. [shrug] :)

Stephen Colbert describes the recent renaming of Cingular to AT&T and gives a summary of the current telecommunications industry in the US.

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`A California man faces up to 101 years in federal prison after a jury found him guilty of sending out e-mail scams as well as related crimes. [..]

Goodin, who was arrested last year, was found guilty of operating a sophisticated phishing scheme, the prosecutors said in the statement. As part of the scam, he sent e-mails posing as AOL’s billing department to trick people into giving up their credit card information, according to the statement. He then used the credit card data to make purchases, prosecutors said Tuesday.’

`You don’t find fans of Cartman and Kenny on the Parks and Recreation Commission in the central Ohio city of Marysville. The panel has decided it’s time to rename a local park that has come to be known as “South Park.”

City administrator Kathy House says having a park with the same name as the popular but often controversial cartoon show has become inappropriate.

One member of the parks commission says they wanted to get away from “South Park” — far away.’