‘Until this week, the only people who really hated the Jersey Guys were corrupt politicians. Now, corrupt state troopers hate them, too.
Craig Carton and Ray Rossi walked out in the middle of their popular afternoon talk radio show and took their families into hiding after learning of a press conference in which New Jersey state police union leader David Jones gave out their home addresses and threatened to “crush” the people who leaked anonymous Internet postings by state troopers in which they apparently were plotting a ticket-writing blitz. [..]
In an interview, Jones said, “I don’t believe in intimidating anyone.” [..]
“If guys, be they troopers or not troopers, choose to vent on a blog board, that’s their right, and that’s a board that’s supposed to be shared,” Jones said. “A couple of cowards obviously compromised it, and when I find out who those Girl Scouts are I’m going to crush ’em like bugs.”‘
‘A Brazilian brewery has been ordered to pay $49,000 (£24,570) to an alcoholic beer taster who claims the company failed to prevent his condition.
The man, who has not been named, said the company, Ambev, did not provide him with adequate health care to stop him from developing alcoholism.
He said that for more than a decade he drank around one and a half litres of beer each day.
But Ambev says that the employee was an alcoholic before he took the job. [..]
But Judge Jose Felipe Ledur said the company was still negligent because an alcoholic should have never been employed as a beer taster.’
‘More than 18,000 people stripped down and bared it all in Mexico City’s vast main square Sunday for U.S. photographer Spencer Tunick’s biggest nude shoot yet.
Standing up to salute, crouching in fetal positions and lying prone on the tiles of the Zocalo plaza, the volunteers formed a sea of flesh that Tunick snapped from balconies and a small crane in the morning light.
“What a moment for the Mexican art scene!” Tunick said in a news conference. “I think all eyes are looking south from the United Sates to Mexico City to see how a country can be free and treat the naked body as art. Not as pornography or as a crime, but with happiness and caring.”‘
I really like this image.
Yet again some Japanese TV show has left me amused and confused.
I think I need to add a “why?” category. [shrug] 🙂
(26meg Flash video)
see it here »
‘Setting wheelie bins on fire and inhaling fumes to get high is the new ‘drug of choice’ for teenagers, police say.
The craze is behind more than 50 bin fires in Barnsley, they add.
Anti-solvent abuse charities warn that inhaling bin fumes could be more dangerous than sniffing glue or petrol.
Wheelie bins are made from high density polyethylene – composed of double-bonded carbon and hydrogen molecules.
Burning an empty one releases carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide.
These deadly gases starve the brain of oxygen, giving a headacheheavy short high.’
What the fuck is wrong with children these days?
‘It is rarely a pleasant task and one that demands a caring and tactful approach.
So when bosses at a struggling department store were faced with the prospect of letting 140 staff go, it was a particularly heavy responsibility.
But rather than call each employee in one by one or sending an apologetic letter to each, they chose a different approach.
They set off the fire alarm, assembled the workforce in the car park and then read out a short statement informing them they no longer had a job to go to.’
’03/29/2005 at 03:25:55
I go into 2 player mode in fighting games on my gamecube and put one controller down my pants and beat the shit out of the other guy with the other controller to make the one down my pants vibrate. I always end up cumming all over the thing and I have to clean it. It’s a hassle but it’s worth it…’
‘Rose, the goat that found international celebrity last year after being forced into marriage with a Sudanese man, has died after accidentally swallowing a plastic bag.
The town of Juba in southern Sudan, if not in mourning, at least has the satisfaction of having had the world in stitches as the source of one of the internet’s best-read news items. [..]
Tragedy struck last month when Rose swallowed a plastic bag as she scavenged for food scraps on the streets of Juba.
She left a male kid – goat, not human – and a grieving widower. It is not known whether she was cremated or turned into curry.’
Followup to Sudan man forced to ‘marry’ goat.
‘On January 16, 2007, a dazzling blue flame blasted across the sands of the Mojave desert. In many respects, it looked like an ordinary rocket engine test, but this was different. While most NASA rockets are powered by liquid oxygen and hydrogen or solid chemicals, “we were testing a methane engine,” says project manager Terri Tramel of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC). [..]
The main engine, built and fired by the NASA contractor team Alliant Techsystems/XCOR Aerospace, is still in an early stage of development and isn’t ready for space. But if the technology proves itself, methane engines like this one could eventually be key to deep space exploration.
Methane (CH4), the principal component of natural gas, is abundant in the outer solar system. It can be harvested from Mars, Titan, Jupiter, and many other planets and moons. With fuel waiting at the destination, a rocket leaving Earth wouldn’t have to carry so much propellant, reducing the cost of a mission.’
Check out the video.
(3.3meg Windows media)
‘Voyager 1 and 2 both carry with them a golden record that contains pictures and sounds of Earth, along with symbolic directions for playing the record and data detailing the location of Earth. The record is intended as a combination time capsule and interstellar message to any civilization, alien or far-future human, that recovers either of the Voyager craft. The contents of this record were selected by a committee chaired by Carl Sagan.
The following is a selection of pictures electronically placed on the phonograph records which are carried onboard the Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft.’
‘The locks on a block of public toilets are being changed following complaints it was being used as cheap lodgings.
With heating, a wash basin, a peg and a mirror, the eight cubicles in Stamford Hill, Hackney, east London, are cheap accommodation at just 20p a night.
Local businesses said there was competition for the cubicles and many wanted the more spacious disabled loo.’
‘An environmental consulting firm and other developers here have come up with a non-perishable food pack that creates steaming hot rice with the simple addition of cold water.
The group has recently introduced the product, named “Hotto! Raisu,” to the market.
By subjecting rice to 4,000 times normal atmospheric pressure, the developers were able to preserve rice for long periods in a soft form that holds moisture. When water is poured over an exothermic agent in the pack, steam warms the rice contained within, and after about 15 minutes, the dish is piping hot.’
There’s some graphs showing the change in light levels that indicate the planet is there. Also a graph of light from a binary start system.
‘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.’
