`Dragging clouds through the sky. That’s the most exciting activity you can do in Cloud, a new computer game where you play a young boy who flies through the air above a small group of islands.
Add in slow melodic piano music and beautiful water-colour graphics, and Cloud becomes the only relaxing game I can ever recall playing.
The game goes beyond the usual, hopelessly basic, range of emotions elicited by computer games: anger, frustration and aggressiveness.
“People have written to us and said they cried when they played the game,” [some woman associated with the game] says.’
I’m gonna download it and see if it drives me to tears. :)
`Twin brothers sneaked out of their 18th birthday party to rob and kill their grandmother, a court heard yesterday. [..]
The pair thought she had thousands of pounds, it is claimed. They are said to have ransacked the 74-year-old widow’s house while their 19-year-old pal Dwane Johnston, who had just been released from jail, punched then strangled her.’
I’d probably be filled with a murderous rage myself if fate had dealt me the double dose of ugly that these twins have. They probably blamed their grandmother for giving them the dodgy genes.
`Tyrone Jones is serving a life sentence, in part because of a microscopic particle that Baltimore police found on his left hand. At his trial for murder in 1998 the crime-lab examiner gave evidence that the particle was residue from a gunshot. He claimed Jones must have held or fired a gun shortly before his arrest.
Jones denies this and still protests his innocence. His defence team is appealing the conviction, claiming that the science of gunshot residue (GSR) analysis is not as robust as the prosecution claims.
Now, a New Scientist investigation has found that someone who has never fired a gun could be contaminated by someone who has, and that different criminal investigators use contradictory standards. What’s more, particles that are supposedly unique to GSR can be produced in other ways.’
Yet another reason why the death penalty is horribly flawed.
Includes:
How To Survive and Airplane Crash
How To Find Your Way When Lost In The Woods
How To Survive a Volcanic Eruption
and, most importantly:
How To Control a Runaway Camel
`Copies of a high school’s student newspaper were seized by administrators because the edition contained stories about birth control and tattoos, stirring a First Amendment debate. [..]
The Oak Leaf’s birth control article listed success rates for different methods and said contraceptives were available from doctors and the local health department. Superintendent Tom Bailey said the article needed to be edited so it would be acceptable for the entire school.
The edition also contained a photo of an unidentified student’s tattoo, and the student had not told her parents about the tattoo, said Superintendent Tom Bailey.’
`Albert Swank Jr., a 55-year-old civil engineer in Anchorage, Alaska, is a man with a mission. He wants to install a nuclear particle accelerator in his home.
But when neighbors learned of plans to place the 20-ton device inside the house where Swank operates his engineering firm, their response was swift: Not in my backyard.
Local lawmakers rushed to introduce emergency legislation banning the use of cyclotrons in home businesses. State health officials took similar steps, and have suspended Swank’s permit to operate cyclotrons on his property.’
`In a local manifestation of a dangerous fad, students at Alamo Heights Junior School were caught playing the “choking game,” according to a note sent home to parents this week.
The game’s goal is a fleeting “high” that follows a lack of oxygen to the brain and has teens across the nation throttling themselves with belts and ropes, choking each other with bare hands or pulling plastic bags over their heads until they nearly pass out.
Also called “space monkey” and “flatline,” the risky diversion is thought to have killed at least five children in four states since September and has garnered widespread media attention.’
This is what happens when you declare war on drugs. Instead of wholesome marijuana-related activities, kids are strangling themselves half to death with belts for shits and giggles.
`A senior al-Jazeera executive is in the UK to demand publication of a memo in which George Bush allegedly discusses bombing the TV station’s HQ.
Wadah Khanfar, al-Jazeera’s director general, is hoping to meet UK government officials to press its case. [..]
Mr Khanfar told La Stampa: “We want to know whether Bush really did want to attack al-Jazeera last year and was dissuaded from doing so by the British prime minister, as the British press has claimed.
“We will be silent only when we get the truth.”‘
`A senior telecommunications executive said yesterday that Internet service providers should be allowed to strike deals to give certain Web sites or services priority in reaching computer users, a controversial system that would significantly change how the Internet operates.
William L. Smith, chief technology officer for Atlanta-based BellSouth Corp., told reporters and analysts that an Internet service provider such as his firm should be able, for example, to charge Yahoo Inc. for the opportunity to have its search site load faster than that of Google Inc.’
`A man who approached a plainclothes police officer was arrested after asking the officer “what’s up?” Officer Patrick Hickey was checking license plates in an alley as part of a recent drug investigation when a man asked him “what’s up?”
Hickey responded by asking the man “what’s up?” The man asked Hickey the same question again, to which Hickey again replied “what’s up?”
To that, the man said “I’ll show you what’s up” and went inside a nearby house and came out with a .38-caliber handgun, police said.’
`Rendon is one of the most influential of the private contractors in Washington who are increasingly taking over jobs long reserved for highly trained CIA employees. In recent years, spies-for-hire have begun to replace regional desk officers, who control clandestine operations around the world; watch officers at the agency’s twenty-four-hour crisis center; analysts, who sift through reams of intelligence data; and even counterintelligence officers in the field, who oversee meetings between agents and their recruited spies. According to one senior administration official involved in intelligence-budget decisions, half of the CIA’s work is now performed by private contractors — people completely unaccountable to Congress. Another senior budget official acknowledges privately that lawmakers have no idea how many rent-a-spies the CIA currently employs — or how much unchecked power they enjoy.’
‘A blogger named Gerard Jones has posted the email addresses of thousands of agents, producers and executives on a site called EveryoneWhosAnyone.com, breaking down the iron curtain between practicing Hollywoodites and the rabble that aspire to knock them off their respective blocks. Screenwriters and other budding creatives have apparently been flooding the agents and execs on the list with email inquiries. Now Universal (predictably, if baselessly) is crying “spam attack”, and is trying to get Jones’ domain host to force him to remove the information. [..]
His full exchange with Universal’s counsel is posted here, and it’s great. “”If your Gestapo tactics succeed in getting my website shut down,” Jones warns, “GE and its subsidiaries will be the laughing stock of generations of freedom loving Americans. “Imagination at work.” Ha! Good luck.” He then slags Universal’s counsel off as “some corporate chick lawyer” and accuses her of living in “a solipsistic tree fort”.’
`A drug which makes users feel superhuman is being taken by rebel fanatics before they launch attacks against UK troops in Iraq.
The pill – filled with addictive stimulant methamphetamine – is given to insurgents so they have no fear of taking on heavily-armed Coalition forces.
Now senior British officers fear the courage drug, which is known as a “pinky”, is flooding Basra where it could help fuel a second armed uprising.’
`Believe it or not, getting yelled at and berated by Mr. T actually becomes boring pretty quickly.
Everything he tells you to do — everything — starts with “Hey, Fool!” That’s true even when he’s telling you to do something dumb, like drive onto the lower level of the Queensboro Bridge when the upper level is the one you need.
California company NavTones has contracted with Mr. T and the actors Burt Reynolds and Dennis Hopper to record voices that can be loaded into navigation systems, giving your driving directions a little extra personality. More voices are coming, the company said.’
`The surprise best-seller in the U.S. is a calendar recording “The Very Curious Language of President George W. Bush.” The 2005 calendar boasts all new quotes, with a comical Bushism for every day of the year. [..]
While George Bush Senior was in office, his Vice-President, Dan Quayle, was endlessly mocked for his illiteracy. Critics laughed when Quayle mistakenly corrected a child’s spelling of potato to potatoe. Speaking in Latin America, he bemused Spanish-speaking Mexicans by telling them he wished he’d kept up Latin at school.
But George “Dubya” Bush makes Quayle seem like a linguistic genius.’
With lots of hilarious Bush quotes.
`What had to come, has come. The question is no longer if American forces will be withdrawn, but how soon — and at what cost. In this respect, as in so many others, the obvious parallel to Iraq is Vietnam. [..]
[..] A withdrawal probably will require several months and incur a sizable number of casualties. As the pullout proceeds, Iraq almost certainly will sink into an all-out civil war from which it will take the country a long time to emerge — if, indeed, it can do so at all. All this is inevitable and will take place whether George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Condoleezza Rice like it or not.’
A 9 year old kid arguing with his mother about chocolate milk whilst playing some Xbox game on the internet and forgetting to turn his microphone off.
`You said you’d get me a drink and you lied!’
`I want some motherfucken chocolate milk!’
Quite a mouth on him for a 9 year old. :)
see it here »
`As part of an information offensive in Iraq, the U.S. military is secretly paying Iraqi newspapers to publish stories written by American troops in an effort to burnish the image of the U.S. mission in Iraq.
The articles, written by U.S. military “information operations” troops, are translated into Arabic and placed in Baghdad newspapers with the help of a defense contractor, according to U.S. military officials and documents obtained by the Los Angeles Times. [..]
Iraqi newspaper editors reacted with a mixture of shock and shrugs when told they were targets of a U.S. military psychological operation. [..]
[One editor] said that if his cash-strapped paper had known that these stories were from the U.S. government, he would have “charged much, much more” to publish them.’
`The powerful ocean current that bathes Britain and northern Europe in warm waters from the tropics has weakened dramatically in recent years, a consequence of global warming that could trigger more severe winters and cooler summers across the region, scientists warn today. [..]
Disruption of the conveyor-belt current was the basis of the film The Day After Tomorrow, which depicted a world thrown into chaos by a sudden and dramatic drop in temperatures. That scenario was dismissed by researchers as fantasy, because climate models suggest that the current is unlikely to slow so suddenly.
Marec Srokosz of the National Oceanographic Centre said: “The most realistic part of the film is where the climatologists are talking to the politicians and the politicians are saying ‘we can’t do anything about it’.”‘
`Human Upgrades would have never been at the top without precise keeping its philosophy which is TOP QUALITY, TOP SERVICES and TOP EXPERTS. Human Upgrades does not take any compromises or anything which is not the best. For every person in Human Upgrades there is just one level of quality and it is the top one.’
I can’t decide between the Palmclit or the Multinipple. Definately don’t want the Cuntongue tho. :)
`A giant brothel set to cater for tens of thousands of football fans at next year’s World Cup in Germany is opening its doors in Berlin.
Built just yards from the main stadium, its owner believes the three-storey Artemis brothel will be a big hit with World Cup visitors.
Norman Jacob, lawyer for the private investor who wishes to remain anonymous, said: “Football and sex go together extremely well.”‘
`So you’re likely wondering what swanksigns is about. Well, it’s really quite simple. See, I have a fairly strange love of odd and off-kilter street signs, which are just begging to be mocked. Some of the signs in the site are downright bizarre – they certainly make you wonder what was going on in the minds of those people designing these signs.
swanksigns is nothing more than a huge gallery of these oddities.’
`A Canadian man has been acquitted of raping a woman after the judge ruled that he was asleep during the attack. [..]
He was charged with sexual assault, but at the trial, sleep experts and psychiatrists testified he suffered from sexsomnia.
Similar to sleepwalking, sexsomnia is when a person has sex while they are still asleep.
The judge accepted the argument.’
`Unsettling times are boom times. The government is spending billions of dollars subsidizing R&D for technologies that both threaten privacy, like video surveillance and data mining, and those that protect it, like encryption, network security, and anonymization applications. VCs and Wall Street are spending billions more. Private corporations, increasingly concerned for the safety of their operations and data (think about those empty office towers in downtown New Orleans) have joined the security frenzy. Spending projections echo the dotcom predictions that once poured forth so liberally from research firms like Forrester and Jupiter: a $400 million-security sensor market for 2005; an $800 million video analysis market by 2009; $10 billion for biometrics and $36 billion for physical security technology (such as body armor and explosives screening) by 2007. The industry is thought to be worth up to $200 billion today.’
`One British man in 11 has paid for sex, according to a study that appears today in Sexually Transmitted Infections, a specialist journal.
The findings are based on two national surveys on sexual habits, conducted among 6000 British men aged 16-44 in 1990 and among 4700 in 2000.
In 1990, 5.6 per cent of the men said they had paid for sex at some point during their lives, with 2 per cent saying they had done this within the previous five years, and 0.5 per cent within the previous year.
A decade later, the comparable figures were nearly double.’
The translation is `Undressed With Car’.
Those crazy Germans. :)
`Convicted Australian drug trafficker Van Tuong Nguyen showed courage going to his death at the gallows in Singapore, his lawyer Lex Lasry, QC, said today. [..]
The 25-year-old was hanged at Changi at 6am local time (9am AEDT), while his mother Kim grieved with friends and relatives at a nearby church at the scheduled time of the hanging. [..]
Prime Minister John Howard criticised the Singapore Government’s “clinical” refusal to let Nguyen’s mother hug her son one last time before his execution.’
`Nipple warmers are a wonderful novelty gift that will be talked about for ever more. Made in New Zealand from real Eco Fur – as seen in Playboy Magazine and discussed in “New Scientist”. See Below. Possum Fur Nipple warmers are a functional luxury… or a fun novelty. (place them inside bra, fur towards nipple- toasty and warm) and these are a great novelty no matter what climate you live in.’
`Collection of 50+ free file hosting from 10MB to 2GB that do not require registration, with detailed of file size limit, download limit and file life. Keep it for future reference.’
This is where I am keeping it for future reference. Right here. :)
`Squirrels have bitten to death a stray dog which was barking at them in a Russian park, local media report.
Passers-by were reportedly too late to stop the attack by the black squirrels in a village in the far east, which reportedly lasted about a minute.
They are said to have scampered off at the sight of humans, some carrying pieces of flesh.’
I don’t know why they’ve put quote marks around ‘kills dog’ in the title. The dog was definately killed, since it says further down the page:
`They literally gutted the dog’.
