‘The head of a Chinese toy manufacturing company whose products were the target of a massive recall in the U.S. because they contained lead-tainted paint has committed suicide.
Zhang Shuhong, who ran the Lee Der Industrial Co. Ltd., was found hanged in his warehouse Monday morning.
His death comes days after the Chinese government announced a temporary ban on exports by the company.
Earlier this month, Mattel subsidiary Fisher-Price said it was recalling 967,000 toys — including the popular Big Bird, Elmo, Dora and Diego characters — because their paint contained excessive amounts of lead. The Fisher-Price recall involved 83 types of plastic preschool toys made by the Chinese vendor and sold in the United States between May and August.’
‘I once got talking to a guy whose job it was to go into a company, sit alongside the Systems Administrator for two weeks, and write a professional audit on his processes and practices.
Naturally the sys admin would be on his best behavior, showing off all the clever things he did to keep the company’s computer network ticking over.
At the end of the two weeks, the sys admin would be fired. There was never any audit: this was just the method the company used to replace their IT people without disruption, making sure the new guy was trained up and the old guy didn’t cause any damage before he left.’
‘A teenager was taken to hospital after overdosing on espresso coffee.
Jasmine Willis, 17, developed a fever and began hyperventilating after drinking seven double espressos while working at her family’s sandwich shop.
The student, of Stanley, County Durham, was taken to the University Hospital of North Durham, where doctors confirmed she had overdosed on caffeine.
She has since made a full recovery and is now warning others about the dangers of excessive coffee drinking.
Ms Willis, who had thought the coffees were single measures, said the effects were so severe that she began laughing and crying for no reason while serving customers at the shop.’
‘The Sheboygan County Sheriff’s Department was seeking a man Monday who broke into a home and tried to steal from a toddler’s piggy bank. [..]
Sheriff’s Capt. Dave Adams gave the following account:
Julie Herscheb of Wilson woke Friday night and heard a noise about 10:30 p.m.
With her husband asleep in the basement, she grabbed a baseball bat and opened the door to her 2-year-old daughter’s bedroom. Herscheb saw a man trying to shake money from the child’s piggy bank.
She shut the door and went to call 911. She dropped the phone, making a noise. The man was gone when deputies arrived.’
If your friend ate your lunch would you shoot then with a paintball gun to teach them a lesson? What if they were standing on a ladder at the time? :)
(4.4meg Flash video)
see it here »
‘”Brady Bunch” parody “Not the Bradys XXX” hits stores Sept. 18, bringing back memories of the sweet innocent times of the 1970s, according to the company.
“This movie just makes you feel good as you watch it,” said co-producer Scott David of X-Play, which produced the movie with distribution coming through LFP.
“This is a family-style porn movie, which I’m not sure has ever been done,” said the movie’s co-producer Jeff Mullen. “We live in an era of extremely hardcore sex where double-doubles and reverse bukkakees with anal triple-Lutz moves reign supreme, however ‘Not the Bradys XXX’ isn’t about that, but it is the kind of movie you can show the entire family. [..]
The film also stars Mike Horner playing the sensible father, Alana Evans as Carol the mom, Lynn LeMay as Alice and Ron Jeremy as Sam the Butcher. [..]’
‘News agency Reuters has been forced to admit that footage it released last week purportedly showing Russian submersibles on the seabed of the North Pole actually came from the movie Titanic.
The images were reproduced around the world – including by the Guardian and Guardian Unlimited – alongside the story of Russia planting its flag below the North Pole on Thursday last week. [..]
The mistake was only revealed after a 13-year-old Finnish schoolboy contacted a local newspaper to tell them the images looked identical to those used in the movie.’
Followup to Russians to dive below North Pole.
‘Leroy Greer meant to say it with flowers to his girlfriend, but his wife heard about it too, and now the whole arrangement is in federal court.
Claiming 1-800-flowers.com made his life considerably less rosy, Greer sued the flower delivery company, alleging it made his divorce case thornier by faxing his wife a receipt for flowers he had sent his girlfriend — along with the romantic words he wrote for the card.
The suit, filed this week in Houston, asks that the company pay for his mental anguish and for the increased amount he figures he’ll have to pay in his divorce case, pending since 2005 in Fort Bend County, because his wife has new evidence against him.’
Some guy is dared to dip his whole head in a bucket of paint. How can you resist such a dare? :)
(3.5meg Flash video)
see it here »
‘Three hundred chickens died in panic early on Sunday when a drunken German teenager on a joyride crashed a van into their shed, police said.
“Apparently some of the chickens were so desperate to get away that they ran into the wall and died,” the spokesman said. “Others suffered heart attacks.”‘
‘A grandmother taking a leisurely swim in a Swedish river ended up in the hospital after a beaver attacked her with its tail, regional newspaper Nerikes Allehanda reported Wednesday.
Police sources said it was the second time a beaver had attacked humans at the beach on the banks of the Bottenaa River, around 150 kilometres (93 miles) west of Stockholm, the newspaper reported.
“The beaver attacked the grandmother. She was seriously hit by the animal’s tail and received a number of bites and scratches,” an officer told the newspaper.
The authorities have decided to kill the dozen or so beavers living near the beach to eliminate any further risk to local bathers.’
‘We just received a tip that the source code for the Facebook main index page has been leaked and published on a blog called Facebook Secrets. There are at least two possible ways that the source code got out – the first is that a Facebook developer has sent it out, or the more likely option that a security hole or other method has been used on either one of the Facebook servers or in their source code repository to reveal the code. The blog that published the code only has a single post on it, so it was created exclusively to publish this code – meaning that whoever is behind this both isn’t taking credit for the hole and doesn’t want to be associated with it. While there is no certain way to verify if the code is actually from Facebook, by taking a quick look through the code and by double-checking some paths that have been referenced, we can say with some certainty that this seems to be both real and also a recent version of the main Facebook page.’
‘Police have used a stun gun to subdue a man who smeared himself with faeces and blood after being thrown out of a Gold Coast nightclub.
Officers were called after a security guard was assaulted by a man who had been evicted from the club in Orchid Avenue, Surfers Paradise, around 3.30am (AEST) today.
By the time officers arrived, the man had undressed himself and covered his entire body in faeces and blood, police said.’
‘Every hour Jack breaks through the door and the famous line “Here’s Johnny” plays followed by the scream of Shelly Duvall’
‘You’ve probably never heard of the E70 because Nokia’s marketing team is busy finding every last dick in the universe to suck, so I’m going to do their job for them and tell you about this product. And no, I’m not being paid to do this. I’m just tired of the iPhone fanboys shooting huge sticky wads and high-fiving each other (literally) over their stupid cellphones.
First of all, the E70 has a full keyboard, not some shitty stripped down, tap-and-pray smudgy piece of shit. Nokia uses a technology that’s even more advanced than the iPhone’s tap screen, allowing you to actually feel the keys you press as you’re pressing them! The technology is called “tactile response,” and it allows you to do things like dial a phone number without staring at your screen like a shit-chucking ape. In fact, every other cellphone ever made has this technology, sometimes called “buttons.”‘
‘Tall girl in design with the short brown hair- You have horrendous body odor! I’m not talking a little stench here and there I am talking everyday when you walk into the building people drop dead. I don’t know how you don’t notice it. I’m going to buy you deodorant for Christmas.
Fat woman who works in suite 19- I don’t know exactly what you do for this company, but I know far too much about your personal life. When you talk to your boyfriend on company time, please refrain from telling him it felt so good when he slipped his hard dick into your fat ass! Yea I heard that, and so does everyone else that walks by your suite when you are on the phone. It’s disgusting, and we don’t want to hear about it, so keep your voice down.’
‘An armed robber was no match for a 7-year-old girl in Reidsville, North Carolina.
The gunman tried to hold-up the convenience store where little Alisha’s mom was working. (She didn’t want to reveal her last name.)
Alisha rushed to her mom’s defense when the robber pushed her. Alisha shoved him right back.
“I was pushing on him and telling him to ‘back away, back away man.’
“I didn’t want him to hurt mommy.”
Stymied by the little girl, the gunman gave up on the cash and stole some cigarettes. Then he ran from the store.’
‘Take your breasts off at the door and sit down.’
(3.6meg Shockwave)
‘To observe the motion of an electron – an elementary particle with a mass that is one billionth of a billionth of a billionth of a gram – has been considered to be impossible. So when two Brown University physicists showed movies of electrons moving through liquid helium at the 2006 International Symposium on Quantum Fluids and Solids in Kyoto, they raised some eyebrows.
The images, which were published online on May 31, 2007, in the Journal of Low Temperature Physics, show scattered points of light moving down the screen – some in straight lines, some following a snakelike path. The Matrix it’s not. Still, the fact that they can be seen at all is astounding. “We were astonished when we first saw an electron moving across the screen,” said Humphrey Maris, a professor of physics at Brown University. “Once we had the idea, setting it up was surprisingly easy.”‘
‘I wondered why the baseball was getting bigger. Then it hit me.
The short fortune teller who escaped from prison was a small medium at large.
A thief fell and broke his leg in wet cement. He became a hardened criminal.
A dentist and a manicurist fought tooth and nail.
Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana.
When a clock is hungry it goes back four seconds.
He had a photographic memory which was never developed.’
Hooray for the Lamb of God. :)
‘A city woman who apparently thought she couldn’t be arrested for stealing once she left the store was in fact charged with multiple misdemeanors yesterday after, police said, she fought with the Neiman Marcus security guard who caught her.
Jazmine Roberts, 19, “went into a rage, repeatedly yelling ‘it’s too late, I already left the store,’ ” according to a police report of the incident, which took place shortly before 4 p.m. at Maple Avenue and Paulding Street.
Roberts, of 86 Dekalb Ave., was seen stealing a $251 pair of jeans at the store by the guard who, police said, followed her outside and apprehended her after a struggle during which Roberts allegedly pulled the guard’s hair, bit her on the wrist and choked her. The guard, who was not identified, was not seriously injured.’
All sorts of stats about the world population.
‘There has to be an Orwell Corollary to Godwin’s Law, one that says any discussion of today’s Republican Party will invariably lead to comparisons with 1984. That’s the easy place to run when trying to sum up the miasma of misdirection and jingoism that passes for Republican speech. But, damn it, when the candidates insist on treating the utterances of the Ministry of Truth as a textbook, what can you do? [..]
“Freedom is not a concept in which people can do anything they want, be anything they can be. Freedom is about authority. Freedom is about the willingness of every single human being to cede to lawful authority a great deal of discretion about what you do.”‘
‘All across America, a mysterious disease is wiping out bee colonies. This malady causes all the bees in a hive to seemingly vanish overnight, abandoning their brood in the nursery, as well as their stores of honey and pollen. Other bees and pests, which normally plunder deserted honey, shun these hives. This baffling die-off dealt a financial blow to commercial beekeepers this season and raised fears of environmental and economic disaster. For farmers, no bees means no pollination.
But pollination is happening like mad in Leah Fortin’s tiny yard in North Oakland, Calif. Busy little bee bodies cover the clumps of lavender, salvia and roses that line her driveway. More bees work the malaleucas on the parking strip, those trees with shaggy bark that look like giant Q-tips when they’re in bloom.’
‘A man confessed to breaking into a Porter County probation office and stealing two urine samples, including his own, police said.
Joseph Klinkman, 23, of Valparaiso faces a burglary charge for Tuesday night’s break-in. The theft was discovered Wednesday morning at the Porter County PACT office, which operates programs for prisoners, ex-offenders, victims and witnesses.
A judge had ordered Klinkman to undergo programs through PACT because of an earlier drug possession charge. [..]
“He’d been in a few hours before and gave a urine sample,” Balon said. “He saw they were testing for a drug he didn’t think they were testing for. He panicked.”‘
‘Americans are living longer than ever, but not as long as people in 41 other countries.
For decades, the United States has been slipping in international rankings of life expectancy, as other countries improve health care, nutrition and lifestyles.
Countries that surpass the U.S. include Japan and most of Europe, as well as Jordan, Guam and the Cayman Islands.
“Something’s wrong here when one of the richest countries in the world, the one that spends the most on health care, is not able to keep up with other countries,” said Dr. Christopher Murray, head of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington.’
