‘A drunken barrister accused of exposing himself to bridesmaids before battering a guest at a wedding told his victim he would ‘seriously beat him up’, a court has heard.
Best man Christopher Dunn, 40, so offended women and children guests at the country hotel reception, that David Baird-Dean stepped in to drag him away.
Dunn was threatened with police being called but guests relented when he offered an abject apology and pleaded as a barrister he would be in trouble if arrested, Preston Crown Court heard.
But hours later the heavily built lawyer allegedly beat his victim until he was unconscious after ushering him onto a sun terrace outside the venue, Harefield Hall Hotel in Pateley, Bridge, North Yorkshire. [..]
Its alleged the trouble began when Dunn was asked if he had a tattoo of a white rose, to which he replied, “I’ll show you a white rose” – then unzipped his trousers and pulled out his penis.’
‘Starting your lawn mower can be trouble enough.
But Danny Fendley, of Johns Creek, started more than just his mower Tuesday afternoon when he tugged at the pull cord.
The mower “exploded,” starting a fire that soon consumed Fendley’s home.
“It’s a goner,” said Fulton County Fire Lt. Gregory Chambers, at the scene of the blaze. “There’s not even one brick standing.” [..]
As Fendley struggled with the blaze, he said his wife tried to toss a can of gasoline out a window. She missed.
“Gas spilled everywhere,” he said.’
‘A British clown has had the smile wiped off his face after being told he couldn’t use balloons in his act because children might be allergic to latex.
Barney Baloney said he was told by bosses at a supermarket where he was booked to appear that he should leave his balloons at home because of the potential for allergic reactions.
The 47-year-old entertainer, also known as Tony Turner, has previously had to ditch his bubble-making machine because he could not get public liability insurance as companies assessed that youngsters might slip and hurt themselves.
He said he was also told by one venue he could not twist balloons into the shape of guns for fear of encouraging youngsters to commit violence, although swords were deemed acceptable.’
Apparently this Tesla coil is 15 feet tall, runs at 33 kW and throws lightning 26 feet.
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‘A 23-year-old St. Augustine man who told deputies he was “angry with God” and intentionally drove his pickup truck into a Catholic church Tuesday morning, according to the St. Johns County Sheriff’s Office. [..]
Just before 3 a.m., deputies responded to a report of a crash at St. Anastasia Catholic Church in the 5200 block of state Road A1A South. They said they found Thomas Kyle Nursey still in the driver’s seat of his Ford F-150 pickup that had crashed into the door of the church, according to WJXT-TV.
Deputies reported damage to the door and north wall of the church, but an estimate of damages was not immediately available.
The church would not comment on the crash.’
‘The idea that the exclusion zone around the Chernobyl nuclear power plant has created a wildlife haven is not scientifically justified, a study says.
Recent studies said rare species had thrived despite raised radiation levels as a result of no human activity.
But scientists who assessed the 1986 disaster’s impact on birds said the ecological effects were “considerably greater than previously assumed”. [..]
The study, which recorded 1,570 birds from 57 species, found that the number of birds in the most contaminated areas declined by 66% compared with sites that had normal background radiation levels.’
‘A monkey that freed himself two weeks ago from a Mississippi zoo has escaped again, zoo officials said. Tupelo Buffalo Park and Zoo Manager Kirk Nemecheck and other employees noticed the white-faced capuchin’s cage open and lock on the ground around 8:30 a.m. Monday.
Oliver and another capuchin named Baby were found wandering nearby. Workers easily captured Baby, but Oliver fled the park headed in the direction of the Tupelo Country Club, Nemecheck said.
“This is the craziest thing I have ever seen,” Nemecheck said. “I have heard of chimps and orangutans that can pick locks. I’ve also heard a guy who swears his raccoon can pick a lock, but I’ve never heard of a monkey who can pick a lock.”‘
Followup to Tupelo Zoo Searches For Escaped Monkey.
‘A diplomatic incident of some kind is perhaps foreseeable when four young Liverpudlians arrive in a land they’ve never seen before to meet legions of screaming, weeping young women. That might be what Harold Wilson had in the back of his mind when, as Prime Minister, he ensured that a visit to the British embassy in Washington was on the Beatles’ itinerary when they travelled to the US in February 1964.
If that was the case, then Wilson had evidently not anticipated quite how enthusiastically the Fab Four would actually be received by the likes of Lord Harlech, British ambassador of the day, and his wife Lady Sylvia Ormsby-Gore. [..]
John Lennon was pushed and pulled by a “rugby scrum of young Foreign Office officials” while George Harrison was grappled into a corner by dozens of autograph hunters in formal dress. But Ringo had the worst of it. “Someone just cut off a piece of my hair. I’m ruddy mad. This lot here are terrifying,” he said. “Much worse than the kids.”‘
‘For months, Shira Barlow’s cell phone was flooded with wrong-number calls and text messages, mostly between 2 and 4 a.m. on weekends. Told they had reached a college student, callers refused to believe it.
“Baby girl, how are you?” one man purred in a foreign accent. “Why are you doing this?” a woman asked. “This is so rude.” And there were several seemingly random references to “Paris.”
As in Paris Hilton. [..]
Barlow had been given a recycled phone number that used to be Hilton’s. The practice stems from efforts to conserve phone numbers to minimize area-code splitting. [..]
Barlow plans to keep the number because she says it has been a greater source of amusement than a hassle.’
‘Cape York stockman David George has spent seven nights up a tree in a crocodile-infested swamp, bleeding and with little food – and lived to tell the tale.
The father-of-one and co-manager at Silver Plains cattle station yesterday told his remarkable tale of survival and rescue by chopper in rugged bushland near Coen, in the state’s remote far north.
“Every night I was stalked by two crocs who would sit at the bottom of the tree staring up at me,” Mr George recalled yesterday.
“All I could see was two sets of red eyes below me and all night I had to listen to a big bull croc bellowing a bit further out.
“I’d yell out at them, ‘I’m not falling out of this tree for you bastards’.”‘
‘California ground squirrels have learned to intimidate rattlesnakes by heating their tails and shaking them aggressively.
Because the snakes, which are ambush hunters, can sense infrared radiation from heat, the warming makes the tails more conspicuous to them _ signaling that they have been discovered and that the squirrels may come and harass them, explained Aaron Rundus, lead author of a study in this week’s online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The tail “flagging” places the snakes on the defensive, he said.
Adult squirrels are not the snakes’ prey, Rundus said in a telephone interview. The adults have a protein in their blood that allows them to survive the snake venom, and they have been known to attack and injure snakes, biting and kicking gravel at them.’
‘A North Las Vegas judge has been sacked after telling MySpace readers that his interests include physically beating prosecutors – or words to that effect.
In a post to his public MySpace page, The Associated Press reports, substitute judge Jonathan MacArthur laid out his attitude towards prosecutors using a certain graphic phrase that he claimed was common “among blacks, people who associate with blacks or in a sports context.”
The AP wouldn’t actually quote the phrase and the MySpace page has since been made private, but The Reg can confirm that MacArthur told internet users everywhere that his interests include “breaking my foot off in a prosecutor’s ass” and “improving my ability to break my foot off in a prosecutor’s ass.”
MacArthur is also a criminal defense attorney, but in describing his role as a pro tem judge with the North Las Vegas Justice Court, he said that he was a lot like a substitute teacher in a black choir robe with a disconcerting amount of authority.’
‘Laughter might be unexpected in a liquor store where a robbery just occurred. But that’s how employees responded to the “Duct Tape Bandit” who hit Shamrock Liquors in Ashland and fled nearly empty handed.
A man who had his head wrapped in duct tape to conceal his identity walked into the store last Friday, police said.
Store manager Bill Steele had some duct tape of his own, but his was wrapped around a wooden club that sent the robber fleeing, according to a report by WSAZ-TV in Huntington, W.Va.
Store employee Craig Miller said he chased the man to the parking lot, tackled him and held him in a choke position until police arrived, the station reported. An unidentified customer also helped, police said.’
Also with a video interview with the man from the jail.
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An advertisement focussed on people with a disability.
The question is, which disability? :)
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‘A 12-year-old Indian girl was beaten and then hanged by her mother for demanding she be sent to school, the Hindustan Times newspaper reported today.
The girl was beaten unconscious with a rolling pin by her mother in a village in Jodhpur district in the western desert state of Rajasthan this month.
“The mother thought she had killed the girl and, in panic, decided to make it appear like a suicide,” a police officer was quoted as saying.
“She allegedly tied a rope around the girl’s neck and hung her from the ceiling.”
The woman has been arrested.
The girl’s father, a labourer, said he and his wife could not afford a bicycle to send their daughter to school a few miles away.’
‘A Japanese biker failed to notice his leg had been severed below the knee when he hit a safety barrier, and rode on for 2 km (1.2 miles), leaving a friend to pick up the missing limb.
The 54-year-old office worker was out on his motorcycle with a group of friends in the city of Hamamatsu, west of Tokyo, on Monday, when he was unable to negotiate a curve in the road and bumped into the central barrier, the Mainichi Shimbun said.
He felt excruciating pain, but did not notice that his right leg was missing until he stopped at the next junction, the paper quoted local police as saying.
The man and his leg were taken to hospital, but the limb had been crushed in the collision, the paper said.’
‘Parents concerned about knife crime are getting “slash-proof” school uniforms for their children.
A company is offering to modify blazers and jumpers by lining them with knife-resistant Kevlar.
Bladerunner in Romford, east London, said it has been contacted by the parents of five local pupils about the £130 adaptation.
But the government said stabbings in schools were very rare and accused the firm of scaremongering for profits.’
‘An Italian doctor has reconstructed vaginas for two women born with a rare congenital deformation, using their own cells to build vaginal tissue in the lab for the first time.
Dr. Cinzia Marchese of Rome’s Policlinico Umberto I hospital, giving details of the operations on Wednesday, told Reuters a 28-year-old woman who underwent the first such operation a year ago now has a healthy vagina.
“She has got married and is living a normal life,” said Marchese, whose study has been published in the journal Human Reproduction. [..]
The two women had a condition called Mayer-Von Rokitansky-Kuster-Hauser Syndrome, or MRKHS for short, which affects an estimated one in 4,000 to 5,000 female infants.
Girls with the syndrome are born with no vagina. The patient often has a normal uterus, ovaries and external secondary sexual organs such as breasts, but cannot have sexual intercourse or give birth.’
It’s funny because it’s true.
This is a site run by an apartment complex manager, with lots of interesting and amusing stories about her dealings with tenants. For example, a letter to a tenant:
‘Dear Mr. Levert,
I understand that it’s quite frustrating to receive many upon many late rent notices when you seem pretty convinced you brought the cheque on the first of the month. I also understand that you’re a very busy man and “don’t have time for this shit”, and that I should just, as you eloquently put it, “fucking fix it.” [..]
But it’s all okay, because calling you and getting screamed at that you don’t have time to fix our fuck-up and that we better stop sending late rent notice makes me feel quite special, especially as the eviction date draws closer (and I love nothing more than having TWO pending evictions in one month). [..]’
‘Every once in a while you’ll stumble upon a forum or an online community that is so specific, so insane, so completely ridiculous that you are forced to conclude that you have reached the end of the Internet. Sure, you may continue on your merry clicking way, but you do so with the deep-seated feeling that there is nowhere else to look; you have seen everything the Internet could possibly hope to provide. Here are the eight online communities that killed our adventurous spirit, made us sure that we’d seen everything the online world has to offer, and even more certain that we didn’t want to try to find anything more depressingly fascinating.’
I don’t think I’d seen the #1 strangest community before. It’s rare, these days, to come across a strange fetish I’ve never heard of before. But, that’s the internet for you. Strange. :)
They’re gonna break their elbows, surely.
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‘The blood that stained the courtyard of the modest Thousand Oaks apartment complex had been washed away by Monday morning. In its place stood a makeshift memorial: A teddy bear and a few balloons. A Winnie-the-Pooh baby blanket. And a single rose for every year the young victim had lived.
Sev’n Molina, age 6, was hacked to death with a meat cleaver Sunday night, as his mother fought to save his life, terrified neighbors called 911 and the bravest among them tried to intervene in the grisly struggle. [..]
After the boy burst from the apartment into the communal courtyard, witnesses said, Sharp followed him, wielding the cleaver, and began hacking at the child’s head and shouting, “Die, die!”‘
On his last day of work his colleagues decide to put his car up on cinder blocks so he can’t drive away. I wonder how long it took him to figure it out. :)
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‘Like any three-year-old, Tom Trueman is constantly at risk of taking a tumble.
But in his case every fall could prove fatal – which is why he wears a safety helmet every waking moment.
Tom, who has already had ten operations, had half of his skull removed after a hospital infection attacked most of the bones in his head.
He has astounded doctors with his progress since but, as his everwatchful parents know, a knock from a fall or a glancing blow from a stray football could cause permanent brain damage or prove fatal.’
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‘US researchers say they have invented a lightweight paper battery that could serve as an enhanced power storage device for the next generation of consumer electronic devices.
The battery produces electricity in the same way as the conventional lithium-ion batteries that power so many of today’s gadgets, but all the components have been incorporated into a lightweight, flexible sheet of paper.
An early prototype of the device, just big enough to be held between thumb and forefinger, kicks out 2.5 volts, enough juice to power a small fan, or illuminate a light, and its inventors say the battery can be easily scaled up to provide enough power to run any number of electronic gadgets.
“You can stack one sheet on top of another to boost the power output,” said Robert Linhardt, a biology and chemistry professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, and a project team member.’
‘When a little green plant cropped up suddenly in Helge and Helga Nilsson’s garden a couple of months ago, they thought nothing of it. In fact, thinking it was rather pretty, they nurtured it as it grew until it was one-and-a-half metres tall.
The couple, from Löddeköpinge, near Lund in southern Sweden, did not know the name of their plant until they saw a television report about drugs which showed footage of cannabis plants. Helga Nilsson reacted immediately.
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“Lord, Helge – we’ve got one of those in the garden,” were Mrs Nilsson’s words to her husband after seeing the report, according to Sydsvenskan.
The couple asked the Lund Botanical Gardens for advice, and now plan to remove the plant, although the couple say they will be sorry to see it go.
“It’s really quite decorative,” Mr. Nilsson said’
‘This poor little guy kept getting picked on until he finally had enough and ended up whopping the bigger guys ass. When it was over the bully ended up leaving the party crying.’
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