A friend of mine said she’d shave her head if she could get $1,000 in donations towards education for some kids in Kenya. Apparently people like to help children in Kenya, or they really want to see her with no hair. Either way, the money was raised and the hair came off.
Kenyans will be able to read, and muppet’s skull will be cold. It’s a win-win situation.
I think she should glue the hair she’s chopped off to her boyfriend’s face whilst he sleeps so he wakes up thinking he’s a wolfman. That would be a win-win-win situation. 🙂
Hopefully there’ll be a wolfman video in the near future, but for now the video of the hair removal will have to suffice. 🙂
Good stuff!
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‘British supermarkets are selling beer at prices cheaper than water and soft drinks, with cans sold for as little as 50 cents.
Supermarkets were stocking shelves with beer priced so low they were actually losing money, the Mail on Sunday reported.
Experts estimated that the supermarkets were losing up to 18c per can through excise and production costs, the newspaper said.
Many of the major supermarkets were now selling beer for just 50 pence ($1.15) a litre. The same supermarkets sell mineral water for 56p-92p a litre.
Own-brand cola sells for 56p-65p.
The British health department has commissioned an independent review of alcohol pricing and promotion and has not ruled out changing regulations.’
‘Someone made off with 15 kilometres of copper wire during the power outage caused by post tropical storm Noel, RCMP said Wednesday.
The theft was discovered Tuesday afternoon when power was restored to Pratt and Whitney Drive near the Halifax airport but the lights were still not on.
RCMP said it appears the culprits removed access panels to streetlights, cut the connections and then pulled out the underground copper wires that connect the lights.
The thieves made off with five separate strands of wire, each one three kilometres long.’
‘A tourism student who twice had to walk barefoot in a Sri Lankan rainforest is suing a college, claiming his health was damaged by leeches.
James Sheridan, 50, said people on the field trip were made to remove their footwear because villagers considered the Unesco world heritage sites sacred. [..]
The court heard claims that Mr Sheridan, of Townhill, Swansea, was so weak after returning home that he could “only eat corned beef and lettuce for months”.
Mr Sheridan claimed he had suffered from malaria-like feverishness, sleeplessness, excessive sweating and lethargy in the six years since the trip, paid for with European funding as part of a tourism and leisure management MSc degree course.’
‘It was supposed to be 14 feet high and topped with razor wire. It was also supposed to send a message to Washington that if the government wouldn’t seal off the southern border, volunteers could.
Almost two years later, the reality is a five-strand barbed-wire barrier that ranchers dismiss as a mere cattle fence. [..]
On the Minuteman Web site and in e-mails to members, Simcox asked for donations while making big promises, including a vow to build a fence along the border. It was not just any fence; it was to be 2,000 miles of state-of-the-art fencing at a cost of $55 million.
Simcox described it as “our high-tech, double-layered gauntlet of deterrent.”
The fence was described on the Minuteman Web site as 14 feet high, with security cameras and sensors, topped with razor wire and flanked by ditches to stop vehicles. Simcox referred to it as an “Israeli-style” fence, similar to the barrier Israel has erected to keep Palestinians from crossing from the West Bank.’
‘The father of a fallen Marine was awarded nearly $11 million Wednesday in damages by a jury that found leaders of a fundamentalist church had invaded the family’s privacy and inflicted emotional distress when they picketed the Marine’s funeral.
The jury first awarded $2.9 million in compensatory damages. It returned later in the afternoon with its decision to award $6 million in punitive damages for invasion of privacy and $2 million for causing emotional distress to the Marine’s father, Albert Snyder of York, Pa.
Snyder sued the Kansas-based Westboro Baptist Church for unspecified monetary damages after members staged a demonstration at the March 2006 funeral of his son, Lance Cpl. Matthew Snyder, who was killed in Iraq. [..]
Church members routinely picket funerals of military personnel killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, carrying signs such as “Thank God for dead soldiers” and “God hates fags.”‘
‘A lottery scratchcard has been withdrawn from sale by Camelot – because players couldn’t understand it. [..]
To qualify for a prize, users had to scratch away a window to reveal a temperature lower than the figure displayed on each card. As the game had a winter theme, the temperature was usually below freezing.
But the concept of comparing negative numbers proved too difficult for some Camelot received dozens of complaints on the first day from players who could not understand how, for example, -5 is higher than -6. [..]
The 23-year-old, who said she had left school without a maths GCSE, said: “On one of my cards it said I had to find temperatures lower than -8. The numbers I uncovered were -6 and -7 so I thought I had won, and so did the woman in the shop. But when she scanned the card the machine said I hadn’t.
“I phoned Camelot and they fobbed me off with some story that -6 is higher – not lower – than -8 but I’m not having it. [..]’
Apparently I am worth exactly $1,925,104.
I wonder what I’ll be worth when I get around to getting back into shape a bit. Heh. 🙂
‘Fewer people are reporting sightings of the Loch Ness monster, amid concerns scepticism about its existence could threaten tourism in the region.
There have only been two reports of sightings this year, compared to three in 2006 and much lower than a decade ago, when the annual number sightings was consistently in the double digits.
“It’s becoming a potential crisis,” said Mikko Takala, 39, a founding member of the Loch Ness Monster Fan Club who runs four webcams on the lake’s north shore.
advertisement [..]
There have been more than 4000 purported sightings of “Nessie” since a surgeon vacationing at the lake in the 1930s released a photo allegedly capturing the legendary monster on film.
Since then, the monster has been a key tourism draw, bringing an estimated £6 million a year into the Highland economy.’
‘It all comes out of the “Millenium Challenge ’02” war games we staged in the Persian Gulf this summer. The big scandal was that the Opposing Force Commander, Gen. Paul van Ripen, quit mid-game because the games were rigged for the US forces to win. The scenario was a US invasion of an unnamed Persian Gulf country (either Iraq or Iran). The US was testing a new hi-tech joint force doctrine, so naturally van Riper used every lo-tech trick he could think of to mess things up. When the Americans jammed his CCC network , he sent messages by motorbike.
The truth is that van Ripen did something so important that I still can’t believe the mainstream press hasn’t made anything of it. With nothing more than a few “small boats and aircraft,” van Ripen managed to sink most of the US fleet in the Persian Gulf.
What this means is as simple and plain as a skull: every US Navy battle group, every one of those big fancy aircraft carriers we love, won’t last one single day in combat against a serious enemy.’
‘Saddam Hussein offered to step down and go into exile one month before the invasion of Iraq, it was claimed last night.
Fearing defeat, Saddam was prepared to go peacefully in return for £500million ($1billion).
The extraordinary offer was revealed yesterday in a transcript of talks in February 2003 between George Bush and the then Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar at the President’s Texas ranch.
The White House refused to comment on the report last night.
But, if verified, it is certain to raise questions in Washington and London over whether the costly four-year war could have been averted.
Only yesterday, the Bush administration asked Congress for another £100billion to finance the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.’
‘British singer George Michael says he’s trying to smoke less cannabis, but says it’s not a problem in his life because he can afford it.
“I’m constantly trying to smoke less marijuana. I’d like to take less and to a degree it’s a problem,” Michael told BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs program.
“Is it a problem in my life? Is it getting in the way of my life? I really don’t think,” Michael said.
“I’m a happy man and I can afford my marijuana so that’s not a problem.”‘
‘One Dylan Stephen Jayne of Pennsylvania filed suit against “Google Internet Search Engine Founders” in Pennsylvania Civil court, seeking the small amount of $5 billion dollars. Jayne claims that his safety is in jeopardy because of Google releasing personal information about him.
Jayne asserts that individuals looking to perform acts of terrorism could obtain his information from Google, making it more likely that he will be detained wrongfully in the future. Jayne’s statement of claim is that, “Dylan Steven Jayne, plaintiff, has a social security number that when the social security number is turned upside down in its entirety it is a scrambled code that does spell the name Google.”‘
‘The most expensive public works project in the US was today in disarray after it emerged that a planned giant nuclear dump would be located on a faultline.
Rock samples from deep within Yucca Mountain, in Nevada, showed that the fault runs directly beneath the site where the US federal government planned to store 70,000 tonnes of highly radioactive waste.
More than $8bn (£4bn) has already been spent on the $58bn project, which had been due to open in 2017, but the proposals – approved by George Bush in 2002 – may now have to be redrawn.
Samples taken from 76 metres below the surface of the mountains, which are around 90 miles north-west of Las Vegas, revealed that the Bow Ridge fault passes hundreds of metres to the east of where scientists believed it lay.’
‘Sotheby’s will auction off one of the earliest versions of the Magna Carta later this year, the auction house announced Tuesday.
This will be the first time any version of the Magna Carta has ever gone up for auction, according to David Redden, vice chairman of Sotheby’s.
The Magna Carta is expected to fetch at least $20 million to $30 million, Redden said.
Redden, who has also sold dinosaur bones, space race artifacts and a first printing of the Declaration of Independence, called the Magna Carta “the most important document on earth.”
The charter mandated the English king to cede certain basic rights to his citizens, ensuring that no man is above the law.’
‘The Soviet engineers gazed into the abandoned tunnel with dismay. It was 1974 and work was scheduled to resume on the construction of the Baikal-Amur Magistral (BAM), a railway line in north-eastern Siberia. The Dusse-Alin Tunnel had been completed in an earlier phase of the undertaking, as evidenced by the inscription “1947-1950” over the entrance and the busts of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin that earlier workers had hewn out of the nearby rock. But the harsh climate and intervening years had not been kind to the permafrost-piercing passage. Peering into the gaping hole, the worried workers could see something glinting inside. The BAM project, perhaps the greatest civil engineering endeavour the world has ever seen, had encountered yet another problem.’
‘A barber who shares a name and birthday with an imprisoned man is asking for $1 million in damages after he said he was wrongly arrested three times in 17 years due to mistaken identity.
“Every day of my life, it’s as though I could be locked up at any moment at any time,” Keith Lamont Johnson said. “I keep talking and keep talking and no one listens and I end up in jail.”
Johnson, 47, shares his name with a known felon who is now in a state prison for armed robbery, among other crimes.
The federal lawsuit filed names in the cities of Detroit, Woodhaven and Trenton and the counties of Wayne and Macomb as defendants, along with several named and unnamed law enforcement officials in each community.’
‘Microsoft has lost its appeal against a record 497m euro (£343m; $690m) fine imposed by the European Commission in a long-running competition dispute.
The European Court of First Instance upheld the ruling that Microsoft had abused its dominant market position.
A probe concluded in 2004 that Microsoft was guilty of freezing out rivals in server software and products such as media players.’
‘A man who left his girlfriend’s body to decompose in his Jeep Cherokee must pay her parents $500,000 for interfering with their rights to properly bury her, a Jackson County jury has ruled.
In 2005, Matthew C. Davis, 42, pleaded guilty and was sentenced to seven years in prison for abandoning a corpse and 15 more for three unrelated drug charges.
Police found the decomposed body of Amber McGathey, 22, in Davis’ Jeep on June 6, 2004. Prosecutors believed McGathey died of a drug overdose four days earlier, when a witness saw a man wheeling a shopping cart with what appeared to be a body in it.
On Wednesday, the jury ordered Davis to pay $250,000 each to Boyd McGathey, of Parkville, and Debra Augustine, of Waterloo, Ill. They had sued under a rarely used legal doctrine called “interference with the right of sepulcher and burial.”‘
‘A Milwaukee man suffered serious burns during a camping trip and is suing the company that makes his aftershave, reported WISN-TV in Milwaukee.
Federal court records filed this week show that Charles Lewitzke, 81, was at the Arrowhead Campground in the Wisconsin Dells with his kids and grandchildren in 2004. He washed and shaved in a bathroom and afterward applied Brut aftershave on his neck and face. He also used an aerosol deodorant.
Documents said that after grooming, he walked to a fire pit to cook breakfast. When he was starting the fire, the body parts that had Brut on them ignited, seriously burning 30 percent of his body. The second- and third-degree burns needed skin grafts in some areas.’
‘A group of soldiers find a location they suspect has an IED. They use a bomb defusing robot to neutrailize it but end up setting off the IED completely destroying the robot.’
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‘Web search leader Google Inc. will sponsor a $30 million competition for an unmanned lunar landing, following up on the $10 million Ansari X Prize that spurred a private sector race to space.
Like the Ansari X Prize, which was claimed in 2004 by aircraft designer Burt Rutan and financier Paul Allen for a pair of flights by SpaceShipOne, the Google Lunar X Prize is open to private industry and non-government entities worldwide, organizers said on Thursday.
First prize is $20 million for the group that can land a lunar rover – an unmanned robotic probe – on the Moon, take it on a 500-metre trek and broadcast video back to Earth by 31 December 2012.’
‘In a small district in southern Afghanistan, U.S.-backed Afghan drug forces opened fire on farmers who were blocking roads and throwing rocks to protest the destruction of their poppy fields earlier this year. Scores were injured in the firefight.
Poppy farmer
Undeterred by the violence, a group of angry farmers gathered around Masood Azizi, the Afghan official supervising the eradication. They maintained that cultivating poppy for opium is the only way they can survive. “We are hungry, thirsty, and we don’t have any money. We are in debt,” one said.
It’s a message that reverberates throughout this impoverished, war-torn country. [..]
Eradicating opium poppies has been a key pillar of U.S. policy in Afghanistan since 2004, said Doug Wankel, director of the U.S. Counter-Narcotics Task Force in Afghanistan.
Yet today, Afghanistan produces roughly 93 percent of the world’s illicit opium, according to the UNODC report, and the Taliban are making inroads in remote areas of the country thanks, in part, to proceeds from the drug trade.’
‘Consumers’ associations in Italy have asked people to refrain from buying or eating pasta for the day, in protest against recent price increases.
The groups are requesting the government intervene to reduce pasta prices.
An increase in the price of wheat in recent months has forced pasta manufacturers to pass on the cost.
Pasta is a national dish in Italy, with each Italian eating on average 28 kg (62 lb) of pasta every year.’
‘A service offering a complete “revenge package” in which people can destroy the financial status and relationships of their enemies at the click of a mouse is being offered over the internet.
For as little as £10 a month, customers of the confidentialaccess.com website can make the credit ratings of people they dislike plummet and even have them suspected of fraud.
Their bank accounts can be shut down remotely and all their essential utilities cut off.
Fake e-mails and text messages which purport to come from someone else, such as the victim’s spouse, can be sent containing false accusations of affairs or sexual liaisons.
The new “revenge” services are the latest example of the harm the internet can cause individuals. ‘
‘A man robbing a bank demanded the money by writing a note on one of his own checks, authorities say. Not surprisingly, he was caught soon afterward.
Forest Kelly Bissonnette, 27, apparently tried to cover his name on the check, then handed the note to a teller Sept. 5 at the Bank of the West in Englewood, according to authorities.
“We could still make it out even though he blacked it out,” FBI agent Rene VonderHaar said. Nearly $5,000 was taken.’
‘Marry Our Daughter is an introduction service assisting those following the Biblical tradition of arranging marriages for their daughters.
Those who wish to list their Daughters with our site should click on SIGN UP OUR DAUGHTER on our main page for a form to fill out.
Those who wish to propose to a specific Daughter should click on the PROPOSE button on the Daughter’s INFO CARD.’
‘Nothing binds a town together like a powerful story: the Giants win the pennant, for example, or a mother wolf rescues twin boys from the riverbank, or a silversmith and a borrowed horse conspire to foil the Redcoats.
In this town, the story is broken.
The characters are not heroes. They are not even villains. They are merely conniving mercenaries with a tolerance for gore.
If you have heard of Vernon, population 780, an old steamboat port between the red hills of Alabama and the white shores of Florida’s Emerald Coast, there is a good chance you have heard this story. To the outside world, it has become Vernon’s master narrative.
Poor country folk get desperate. Poor country folk get an idea. Poor country folk buy insurance. Poor country folk fire guns at selves, blowing off hands or feet, and poor country folk get rich.’
‘”Have you ever been through the Denver airport? It’s strange. It’s one of the busiest, but I’m telling you, it’s weird. There’s a firestorm of people talking about this thing.”
Especially on June 11, when George Noory devotes all four hours of Coast to Coast, his nationally syndicated talk-radio program dedicated to the “paranormal, extraterrestrial and other topics typically overlooked by more mainstream media outlets,” to a discussion of Denver International Airport. Broadcast on more than 500 affiliate stations, including KHOW, the popular overnight show is the 60 Minutes of conspiracy theories, often with self-educated experts expounding on such subjects as the occult, psychic visions, crop circles, Skull and Bones and apocalyptic predictions. And almost all of these conspiracies intersect at DIA.’
‘Liberia’s government says it has found more than 7,000 ‘ghost’ workers on its payroll – employees who do not actually exist, or do not work for it.
The discovery was made when the government embarked on a civil service overhaul to improve efficiency.
The Civil Service Agency head, William Allen, told the BBC that the ghost workers “got there through the usual avenue, which is corruption”.
He said they had cost Liberian tax payers about $2.6m (£1.3m) a year.’
