moonbuggy

Or, atleast attempting to before things take an unexpected turn. 🙂

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‘A man wielding a chain saw and a knife attacked residents at a homeless shelter where he was staying, leaving two people in critical condition and injuring two others, police said Sunday.

Matthew Watkins, 28, was charged with four counts each of first-degree assault and armed criminal action for the attack Saturday at the Mid-America Care Center, the Callaway County sheriff’s office said.

Sheriff Dennis Crane said two victims were cut by a chain saw and two others by a knife. Authorities said the victims injured by the chain saw were in critical condition, while the other two were treated and released.’

‘A Berlin burglar’s break-in took an unexpected turn when he stumbled upon a corpse and felt compelled to call the police.

“He called to say he’d just broken into a flat and found a dead body,” said a spokeswoman for Berlin police Thursday. “He gave the address of the place and then hung up.”

Officers discovered the 64-year-old resident of the flat dead in his bedroom. The man had passed away about two weeks ago, and authorities are not treating the death as suspicious.

The burglar has not been heard of since. Local media said he fled the apartment empty-handed, but police could not confirm this.’

The dog wins. 🙂

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‘Honolulu police said they are investigating the death of a baby on the H-1 Freeway.

Witnesses said that they saw a man throw the infant from the Miller Street pedestrian overpass, but police said they are not sure if the child was alive or dead when the man threw the child. It appears the child was hit by at least two cars, officials said. [..]

The man was wearing hospital scrubs. Officials from Queen’s Medical Center, which is located near the scene, said he is not a patient.

As the man was taken away by police, he yelled, “Thank you for everything” to KITV camera crews. [..]

Police said they are not sure where the infant came from, and they are checking local day care facilities in the area to see if anyone is missing a child.’

‘In 2006 Sean Paul’s “Temperature” was hot, rising to the top of the Billboard charts. But the pop song had a much more chilling effect on 25-year-old Stacey Gayle.

Gayle, a customer service employee at a bank in Alberta, Canada, was suffering as many as 10 grand mal seizures a day, despite being treated with medications designed to control them. The condition became so bad she eventually had to quit her job and leave the church choir where she sang.

Appearing on CBS’ The Early Show, Gayle told co-anchor Harry Smith that she was 21 when she first started having seizures, but it was in the summer of 2006 when she began to suspect a possible trigger.

She recalled, 18 months ago, being at a barbecue and collapsing when the Jamaican rapper Sean Paul’s music started playing, and then remembered having a previous seizure when she had heard his music. “I would get that aura before that song would come on,” she said.’

‘First I got 3 dead harddisks. A small one that used to be my Amiga’s, a normal sized one, and a bigass ancient one. I did this just for the fun of saying I have a harddisk sound system with woofer, midrange, and tweeter drivers ;). I ripped the drives apart. I took sound (in electrical signal form) from the output jack of my sound card. I fed it through a Velleman 30 watt audio amplifier that I bought from Parts Express here and soldered together. I took the amplified signals and fed them through the coil that controls the movement of the HD drive heads. I also connected the amplified signals to the platter motors of the ‘midrange’ and ‘tweeter’ drives, so you can actually see the platters spin sometimes. I determined which places to connect the wires by studying the drives and poking wires around in random places. Hey… they were dead anyway. Anyways, the sound that is being produced is from the rapid vibrations of the heads/platters due to the ‘sound’ signals passing through them. With lower frequency sounds being passed through the drives, you can see the heads move quite a lot. For the high frequency ones, its invisible to our inferior human eyes. This kind of fun isn’t just limited to harddisks… I also got low frequency sounds to come out of an electric motor, and even standard cooling fans will make some sound. Girls can try even making music come out of their vibr… *cough*… The 3 harddisks are connected to the amp in parallel. It’s like ghetto raid with groove ;)’

‘John and Martha Hucko were found dead in their Colonial Park Drive home on Tuesday night. Police said the couple had intravenous lines with a barbiturate hooked to their ankles, and Demerol was found near the bodies.

Police said the couple’s daughter called them after receiving a suicide note from her father.

The case is being treated as murder-suicide or double-suicide, pending the results of autopsies and toxicology tests, police said.

John Hucko was a dentist and a former anesthesiologist. He had a dental office on Brownsville Road, and his wife worked there as an assistant.’

With your own blood as ink and a liitle gearbox to pump the syringe, you pretty much can’t go wrong with this pen. 🙂

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‘It sounds like a freakish ailment from a horror movie: Sores erupt on your skin, mysterious threads pop out of them, and you feel like tiny bugs are crawling all over you. Some experts believe it’s a psychiatric phenomenon, yet hundreds of people say it’s a true physical condition. It’s called Morgellons, and now the government is about to begin its first medical study of it. [..]

Morgellons sufferers describe symptoms that include erupting sores, fatigue, the sensation of bugs crawling over them and – perhaps worst of all – mysterious red, blue or black fibers that sprout from their skin. They’ve documented their suffering on Web sites.

Some doctors believe the condition is a form of delusional parasitosis, a psychosis in which people believe they are infected with parasites.’

‘A construction worker claimed in a lawsuit that when he went to a hospital after being hit on the forehead by a falling wooden beam, emergency room staffers forcibly gave him a rectal examination.

Brian Persaud, 38, says in court papers that after he denied a request by NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital emergency room employees to examine his rectum, he was “assaulted, battered and falsely imprisoned.”

His lawyer, Gerrard M. Marrone, said he and Persaud later learned the exam was one way of determining whether he had suffered spinal damage in the accident.

Marrone said his client got eight stitches for a cut over his eyebrow.

Then, Marrone said, emergency room staffers insisted on examining his rectum and held him down while he begged, “Please don’t do that.” He said Persaud hit a doctor while flailing around and staffers gave him an injection, which knocked him out, and performed the rectal exam.’

‘A pet dog missed the family’s dead cat so much that he dug up his grave and brought the body back into the house.

When Oscar’s owners woke up the next morning they discovered the dog curled up beside Arthur, the late cat, in his basket.

His owners, Robert Bell, 73, and his wife, Mavis, of Wigan, Greater Manchester, believe that the dog had licked the cat clean before falling asleep. [..]

Oscar, an 18-month-old Lancashire Heeler, had watched Mr Bell dig a grave in the garden and then lower the cat into the hole.Mr Bell said: “He had managed to climb out through the cat flap in the night, obviously with the intent to get Arthur back. Bearing in mind that Arthur was a huge cat, Oscar must have used all the strength he could muster.’

‘#xkcd has had about 250 chatters these days. Large communities suck. This problem is hard to solve, but we’ve come up with a fun attack on it — enforced originality (in a very narrow sense). We’ve put together an auto-moderation system in an experimental channel, #xkcd-signal, and it seems to work well, so we invite you all to take part. [..]

I was trying to decide what made a channel consistently enjoyable. A common factor in my favorite hangouts seemed to be a focus on original and unpredictable content on each line. It didn’t necessarily need to be useful, just interesting. I started trying to think of ways to encourage this.

And then I had an idea — what if you were only allowed to say sentences that had never been said before, ever? A bot with access to the full channel logs could kick you out when you repeated something that had already been said. There would be no “all your base are belong to us”, no “lol”, no “asl”, no “there are no girls on the internet”. No “I know rite”, no “hi everyone”, no “morning sucks.” Just thoughtful, full sentences.’

‘Shinzo Abe would like the world to know that he did not resign last year because of failed policies or election losses. The real reason reason for his resignation was crippling diarrhea that forced him to go to the toilet 30 times a day:

Abe said he has been struck by ulcerative colitis, a bowel illness caused by ulcers, at least once a year since he was 17. [..]

“To mention an indelicate matter, I rushed to the lavatory after having keen abdominal pains and saw the basin all red with tremendous bleeding,” he said.

“Bleeding causes slight anaemia. More than anything else, though, you feel depressed as you see fresh blood every time you go to the toilet,” he said in an article contributed to the major conservative monthly Bungei Shunju.

Abe said the illness usually made him “feel the need to relieve my bowels every 30 minutes.” [..]

“The need to go to the toilet many times a day hampers election and other political activities very much,” he said, adding his wife, Akie, once made a tearful plea to him to quit his political career.’

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‘A Polish man got the shock of his life when he visited a brothel and spotted his wife among the establishment’s employees.

Polish tabloid Super Express said the woman had been making some extra money on the side while telling her husband she worked at a store in a nearby town.

“I was dumfounded. I thought I was dreaming,” the husband told the newspaper on Wednesday.

The couple, married for 14 years, are now divorcing, the newspaper reported.’

‘A man who believed he bore the biblical “mark of the beast” used a circular saw to cut off one hand, then he cooked it in the microwave and called 911, authorities said.

The man, in his mid-20s, was calm when Kootenai County sheriff’s deputies arrived Saturday. He was in protective custody in the mental health unit of Kootenai Medical Center.

“It had been somewhat cooked by the time the deputy arrived,” sheriff’s Capt. Ben Wolfinger said. “He put a tourniquet on his arm before, so he didn’t bleed to death. That kind of mental illness is just sad.”‘

‘A Russian man has been charged with killing two friends with an axe after he walked in on them cutting up his pet dog for food at his home in eastern Siberia, local prosecutors said today.

Alexander Yermilov, 40, “caught two friends with the body of his beloved dog, which they had cut up for meat” when he returned to his home one evening in December, the prosecutor’s office in the town of Chita said in a statement.

“Flying into a rage, the dog’s owner grabbed an axe from the floor and began to strike his uninvited guests on the head,” the statement said.

Yermilov then called the police to explain what had happened. He has been charged with two counts of murder and is in police custody, the statement said.’

‘Two New York men wheeled the corpse of their friend around midtown Manhattan in an office chair in a failed attempt to cash his $US355 ($405) Social Security cheque, police said.

Virgilio Cintron, 66, had died of natural causes when two of his friends, David Dalaia and James O’Hare, both aged 65, brought him to a cheque-cashing store in the Hell’s Kitchen neighbourhood.

“They were trying to pass him off as still being alive,” police spokesman Paul Browne said.’

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‘One of the longest-serving stars on hit TV drama The Bill, Jeff Stewart, has tried to kill himself after being sacked from the show.

Stewart, who played the popular character PC Reg Hollis, slashed his wrists after being told his contract would not be renewed, The Sun newspaper reported.

The 52-year-old actor was the only original 1984 cast member left on the show, which is one of ABC TV’s most popular programs.

Stewart cut his wrists in his dressing room at the south London studios where the show is filmed but then telephoned for help.

Security staff found him and called an ambulance.’

‘Dozens of girls fought — possibly about a boy — outside a mall on Wednesday, and the brawl ended with mall security officers using pepper spray and police using Taser guns, authorities said.

It happened outside an Applebees at Independence Center and involved about 20 to 30 teenage girls, police said.

A mall security officer was injured trying to break up the fight.’

‘Mourners shivering in a chapel are to be kept warm using “body heat” generated from cremating their loved ones.

The idea will be tried at a crematorium near Manchester where grieving friends and relatives have complained of the cold during services.

Tameside council will use heat from cremating bodies to keep the mourners warm at Dukinfield Crematorium.

Town hall chiefs say the heat generated will be enough to power the boiler and light the chapel. But they admit it is a “sensitive” issue and have promised to consult clergy and the wider community.’

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‘I Am Not My Brother’s Keeper’

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‘Scientists trekking across a little visited part of Antarctica have discovered a bizarre relic of the Soviet Union is dominating the South Pole of Inaccessibility.

In the middle of no-where — literally the point on Antarctica furthest from the sea — an imposing bust of revolutionary Bolshevik Vladimir Lenin peers out onto the polar emptiness. [..]

The Inaccessibility Pole marks the point on Antarctica that is furthest from the ocean. At 3718 metres above sea-level it is in the Australian zone and seldom visited.

The Scientific Traverse this week made it to the Inaccessibility Pole for New Year’s Day and found a one time Soviet Union base buried under the ice.

The group’s website says Soviet scientists first visited the Pole in December 1958 and built a small cabin there.

After several weeks they left, putting the bust of Lenin on top of the chimney facing Moscow.’

‘i have come into the possession of my great grandfathers life work, among being a decorated aeronautical engineer it would appear he dabbled in the lesser accepted sciences. i have almost finished building his masterpiece a 1952 nash rambler time machine. unfortunately my grandfather didn’t live long enough to find an energy source with high enough density to fuel his machine, but i believe i have the problem solved.

serious offers only, i would like to exchange paper money for paper money printed before 1965 (for OBVIOUS reasons!). i will pay 5% of the total currency exchanged, unfortunately i cannot offer transfers of coinage as i am already pushing the weight limit as it is!’

‘A New Zealand woman who pulled apart a Christmas cracker got more than the party hat and joke she had expected, finding a dead mouse.

Betty Lawrence, a grandmother from the South Island city of Invercargill, made the discovery sitting down to Christmas dinner with 20 relatives, The Southland Times newspaper reported.

“I had said to my granddaughter ‘what’s the smell’ and we couldn’t work it out until we pulled the cracker,” Lawrence told the newspaper, after finding a dead and partially decomposed mouse.

The discovery curbed her enthusiasm for the Christmas meal.’

‘A little girl thought she was getting an iPod for Christmas but ended up getting a rude surprise. She got the box but when she opened it up, she found a surprising switch: the iPod had been replaced with a bizarre note.

The note reads in part “Reclaim your mind from the media shackles.”

Jay Ellis, the girls father, returned the ipod to the Germantown, Md. Wal-Mart store where he purchased it. The store manger told him that another customer returned an iPod with a similar issue.’