Monday Morning Coming Down

It's Depressing

So Very Cheney
Our Vice President (In Charge of Evil) has no respect for the public he claims to serve.

Seriously. He's willing to say so.

Informed during a Good Morning America interview broadcast Wednesday that two-thirds of Americans now think the war was not worth fighting, Cheney said: "So?"

"So you don't care what the American people think?" ABC's Martha Raddatz asked.

He added: "I think we cannot be blown off course by the fluctuations of the public opinion polls. There has in fact been fundamental change and transformation and improvement for the better. That's a huge accomplishment."

Cheney added that the economy was going through a "rough patch, there's no question about it."

The White House later released a transcript which shows that Cheney's first response wasn't "so" as ABC presented on its broadcast.

When first informed by Raddatz that "two-thirds of Americans say [the Iraq war] was not worth fighting," the vice president responded, "They ought to go spend time, like you and I have, Martha. You know what's been happening in Iraq. You've been there as much as anybody. There has, in fact, been fundamental change and transformation, and improvement for the better. I think even you would admit that."

They think the second quote makes them look better. He's saying that his critics should have to go to Iraq, a place where the sewage runs in the streets and five car bombs go off a day in public.

He's either insane or a complete sociopath, or both.

Source: Raw Story

Dear Abby is a Bitch
So Dear Abby answered a strange reader's letter asking about how to deal with his wife's rape by one of his brothers by, err, calling the wife a lying slut. More or less.

But when you decided to forego any sort of censure of the offending brothers and get straight to your real suspicion about what happened: that the wife is a lying slut who needs an AIDS test and a strict talking-to. "Please do not accept as gospel that your wife didn't have an inkling that it wasn't you," you wrote. "It's time to have a serious chat with your wife and get chapter and verse on what happened that night."

It's not like advice columnists have an obligation to print every letter they get; "Dear Abby" thought this was a response worth publishing to millions of idiot readers.

People wonder why 90% of rapes go unreported; it's due in no small part to people like Abby here. Jerk-ass.

Source: Jezebel

I Hate the South
They apparently think cars are toys in South Carolina. Or to be precise, the cops think cars are toys, and suspects are targets.

Federal authorities are looking into possible civil rights violations following the release of videos showing misconduct by South Carolina State Highway Patrol troopers.

The controversy began a month ago, when the South Carolina Legislative Black Caucus came forward with a video from 2004 in which a trooper told a suspect, ""You better run, n**, because I'm fixin' to kill you."

Now a freedom of information request has produced video from dashboard cameras showing two incidents in which troopers used their patrol cars to deliberately ram into suspects fleeing on foot. Both those suspects were also black.

In one video, a patrol car chases a man through the parking lot of an apartment complex, then follows him between buildings and across footpaths and lawns where children are playing before running into him.

In the other, a patrol car hits a suspect as he tries to cross in front of it on a back road. The man flips over the side of the car and then off the road. "Hey, I nailed the fuck out of him," the trooper proclaims. "He went flying up in the air. ... I was trying to hit him."

Both officers remained on duty. The one who boasted of deliberately hitting the suspect was given a three day suspension. The other officer, who admitted to poor judgment but said he hit the man accidentally, received only a reprimand.

And people wonder why I say we should write off, then wall off, the South.

They don't deserve the fruits of our civilization. They can't even use cars without turning them into a form of sick racist attack.

Source: Raw Story

ORLY, O'Reilly?
(ORLY == Oh Really in net-speak)

So Bill-O is up to his usual hijinks, trying to literally dispose of all of his enemies.

Summary: On his radio program, Bill O'Reilly called the "people" at Media Matters for America "the worst Americans in the country" and stated, "If I could, I would deport them." O'Reilly also asserted: "But this Media Matters, this disgusting, despicable, far-left website, they do it all the time. And MoveOn and all these people, that's what they do. They disagree with you, and they brand you a racist."

Hey O'Reilly; fuck you. How dare you call for the deportation of American citizens who disagree with you? Racist scumbag thug. Utterly disgusting.

If anyone's getting deported, it should be him, the creepy sexual deviant.

Source: Media Matters

Shock and Awe
Here we go again. Sigh.

Lamperd, a "firearm training system" company, has patented a bracelet that delivers debilitating shocks when remotely triggered. Their killer app for this is aviation safety: they're proposing that the TSA could force everyone who flies to wear one of these and then flight-attendants could zap us into a stupor if we turn out to be Al Quaeda.

That's right; they want to force everyone on a flight to wear a shock-collar, like a damned aggressive dog.

Fat chance. I'd love to see them try it though; we'd have a working mass transit train system six months after the first flight of these monstrous devices.

Source: Boing Boing

Ashes, Ashes...
Gee, yet another faulty bridge almost ready to collapse at rush hour. Big surprise.

CHICAGO — A 51-year-old steel truss bridge over the Mississippi River in St. Cloud, Minn., was abruptly shut down on Thursday after inspectors found that its gusset places were bending — a problem similar to the one believed to have critically weakened the Interstate 35W bridge that collapsed in Minneapolis in August.

Meanwhile, it looks like the Bush controlled NTSB is trying to whitewash this obviously serial neglect in Minnesota for their friend, the Republican governor.

Lt. Gov. Carol Molnau was removed from her post as transportation commissioner last month after years of concern about the department’s performance, but also because of the acute negative attention she received in the aftermath of the collapse. Democratic legislators criticized Ms. Molnau, a Republican, for ineffective leadership.

They have also tried to lay responsibility for the collapse on Mr. Pawlenty, another Republican, because he vetoed a tax increase shortly before the collapse. That money would have been used for highway repairs.

The National Transportation Safety Board has not yet established the overall cause of the collapse in Minneapolis, which killed 13 people and injured 145 when cars plunged into the Mississippi River.

But earlier this week, the board said the bridge was stressed after workers had put 99 tons of sand on the roadway directly over two of the bridge’s weakest points. Stress at one of the two weakest points was 83 percent more than the bridge could have handled, according to an interim report released earlier by the Federal Highway Administration.

Yeah. Because it really turned out to be an isolated incident... oh wait, no, not so much.

Jerks.

Source: The New York Times

Yet More Heartland Values
In this case, where a family tortured a woman to death over several weeks with BB guns and hot glue.

Banished to the basement, the 29-year-old mother with a childlike mind and another baby on the way had little more than a thin rug and a mattress to call her own on the chilly concrete floor.

Dorothy Dixon ate what she could forage from the refrigerator upstairs, where housemates used her for target practice with BBs, burned her with a glue gun and doused her with scalding liquid that peeled away her skin.

They torched what few clothes she had, so she walked around naked. They often pummeled her with an aluminum bat or metal handle.

Dixon — six months pregnant — died after weeks of abuse. Police have charged two adults, three teenagers and a 12-year-old boy with murder in the case that has repulsed many in this Mississippi River town.

Once again, never let anyone tell you how wholesome and wonderful the flyover states are without taking a grain of salt. Bible-thumping doesn't make a society moral. In my experience, it just makes it cruel.

Source: Raw Story

Pope Pokes Muslim Community With Stick
Hardly an uncommon occurrence these days.

VATICAN CITY (Reuters) - Pope Benedict led the world's Catholics into Easter on Saturday at a Vatican service where he baptized a Muslim-born convert who is one of Italy's most famous and controversial journalists.

...

One of the seven adults he baptized on Saturday night was Magdi Allam, 55, an Egyptian-born journalist who, as deputy director of the leading newspaper Corriere della Sera, is one of Italy's best-known intellectuals.

Allam, a fierce critic of Islamic extremism and a strong supporter of Israel, is protected by a police escort because of threats he has received.

...

Allam defended the pope in 2006 when the pontiff made a speech in Regensburg, Germany, that many Muslims perceived as depicting Islam as a violent faith.

The Vatican statement announcing Allam was joining Catholicism said all newcomers were "equally important before God's love and welcome in the community of the Church."

Allam, who has been living in Italy for 35 years, has said he was never a very devout Muslim. Still, his conversion to Christianity came as a surprise.

"What amazes me is the high profile the Vatican has given this conversion," Yaha Sergio Yahe Pallavicini, vice-president of the Italian Islamic Religious Community, told Reuters.

Defending the pope when nobody else will, wow. He really would make a great Catholic in the current power structure. Maybe he can get on the fast track to being a Bishop.

Source: Raw Story

Dana, Dana, Dana
For a bit of lighter news, here's Dana Peroxide, defending El Presidente's idiot position that if we leave Iraq, Al-Queda, not Al-Queda in Iraq, the spinoff, but the actual Al-Queda, will conquer the entire country and start selling Iraqi oil on the global market.

Reeeeeeeeeeeally.

Me: The President warned of the danger that al Qaeda could gain access to Iraq's oil resources. But I don't understand how a fragmented, clandestine, non-Iraqi terrorist organization could produce and sell Iraqi oil on the global market, especially when the majority of Iraqis have turned against al Qaeda. Could you describe a plausible scenario?

Dana: The purpose of what the President said is that al Qaeda should not be allowed to have safe haven in Iraq and take over --

Me: How can they take over Iraq's oil reserves?

Dana: Well, if we were to leave we would certainly ensue chaos and not be able to -- if we were to leave too soon, it would certainly be chaos and it would be terrible for not only the innocent Iraqis, but the entire region and, in fact, our own national security. That's what the President --

Me: So the Iraqis would let a foreign terrorist organization take over their oil?

Dana: You're missing the point, and I think that you should go back and read --

Me: No, I --

Dana: Yes, actually, I think you are missing the point. And I call on you because I see what you write about how you come here and you really want to have questions asked. And I'm calling on you and I'm providing it to you, but I suggest that you read the President's speech and read it in context, because that's -- what you're suggesting is not what the President said.

Me: That's what he said.

Indeed it is.

It all started when I came across the following line in the President's Iraq War Birthday speech:

"An emboldened al Qaeda with access to Iraq's oil resources could pursue its ambitions to acquire weapons of mass destruction to attack America and other free nations."

Check that out. Bush thinks a small cadre of foreign terrorists will conquer Iraq, rebuild its infrastructure, government, export facilities, quell sectarian unrest and start selling their oil, all of which we have been unable to do with 140,000 US troops.

Wow, sounds efficient. Maybe we should let them have a crack at it!

Source: Raw Story

This Blog is a Vampire

Sent to Draaaaaaain, Also, Avoid Mirrors

Saturn Watch
Yet more science from Saturn and its many moons. This time, it's Tethys, which may have had a liquid ocean once.

Tethys is a mid-sized satellite with a density close to that of pure ice.

But a large valley system visible today must have formed when the crust was being heated and under great strain.

The team thinks that tidal heating, followed by cooling which froze Tethys' ocean, could have formed the giant Ithaca Chasma rift.

Basically, I guess Tethys is a big snowball now, but once, it was a snowball with a yummy liquid center.

Source: The BBC

Our Own Giant Chasm
Also known as the Grand Canyon, is under threat from mining interests.

Flagstaff, Arizona - One of the great natural wonders of the world - the Grand Canyon of the Colorado River - is threatened by uranium exploration. Three conservation groups filed a lawsuit Wednesday challenging the approval of up to 39 new uranium drilling sites within a few miles of Grand Canyon National Park.

In December, the Kaibab National Forest granted British firm Vane Minerals approval to conduct exploratory uranium drilling on national forest lands along the park's southern boundary with no public hearing and no environmental review. It is the first of five such projects slated for the area.

"Grand Canyon simply isn't the place for uranium development," said Taylor McKinnon of the Center for Biological Diversity, one of the plaintiff groups. "Our national treasures deserve better than the calamity of an adjacent industrial zone."

Filed by the Center for Biological Diversity, Sierra Club, and Grand Canyon Trust, the lawsuit claims that the U.S. Forest Service violated the National Environmental Policy Act and two other laws when it approved the uranium exploration using a "categorical exclusion," the least rigorous analysis available to the agency.

The lawsuit claims that the Forest Service failed to consider the controversy surrounding uranium development, the significance of its proximity to the Grand Canyon, the overall cumulative impacts of four other future uranium exploration projects and the potential opening of Denison Corporation's Canyon Mine - all located in the same area.

Seriously folks. We only have one Grand Canyon. Can't you guys mine somewhere else?

Jerks.

Source: Truthout

Speaking of Nukes...
We seem to have a bit of a corporate betrayal of national security on our hands.

A US company and the Indian head of an international firm have admitted to violating laws on export of weapons technology and nuclear power testing equipment to India, the US Justice Department said Thursday.

Decade-long US sanctions over illegal Indian nuclear tests prohibit US-based companies from exporting certain goods and services to India.

Parthasarathy Sudarshan, the Indian CEO of Cirrus Electronics with offices in the United States, Singapore and India, pleaded guilty in Washington Thursday to a charge of shipping restricted weapons technology to the Indian government.

He admitted exporting controlled microprocessors and electronic components to Indian state entities involved in developing ballistic missiles, space launch vehicles and fighter jets.

...

In the second case, Minnesota company MTS Systems Corp. was fined 400,000 dollars after it pleaded guilty Wednesday in connection with submitting false US export license applications over proposed shipments to India, the Justice Department said.

The company admitted to two misdemeanor counts of "false certification or writing" by omitting critical information linked to test equipment for nuclear-power plants.

"In this case, the omission clearly was an attempt to disguise the end-use of testing structural components of nuclear-power plants," said Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Export Enforcement Darryl Jackson.

The CEO in the first case faces probation and a fine; the second company gets just a fine.

Amazing how seriously the Bush administration takes this issue, isn't it?

Source: Raw Story

Back to Space
ABC has some trivia about life in space and how, err, disgusting it really is.

Laundry: Astronauts never worry about doing laundry -- there is simply no way to wash clothes in space; water and resources are too scarce. So for 12 days, or however long the mission runs, they wear the same clothes over and over. Their T-shirts, socks and underwear have a special silver thread lining that absorbs odor and keeps items wearable longer. NASA recycles the astronauts' clothes for other missions, including the underwear.

There's other stuff too, seriously. Not just underwear triva.

Source: ABC News

Beery Science
So a Czech scientist crunched the numbers and it seems that the more beer you drink the less successful a scientist you are.

What is it that turns one scientist into more of a Darwin and another into more of a dud?

After years of argument over the roles of factors like genius, sex and dumb luck, a new study shows that something entirely unexpected and considerably sudsier may be at play in determining the success or failure of scientists — beer.

According to the study, published in February in Oikos, a highly respected scientific journal, the more beer a scientist drinks, the less likely the scientist is to publish a paper or to have a paper cited by another researcher, a measure of a paper’s quality and importance.

The results were not, however, a matter of a few scientists having had too many brews to be able to stumble back to the lab. Publication did not simply drop off among the heaviest drinkers. Instead, scientific performance steadily declined with increasing beer consumption across the board, from scientists who primly sip at two or three beers over a year to the sort who average knocking back more than two a day.

This is a tragic discovery indeed. Though there is an alternative explanation.

More important, as Dr. Grim pointed out, the study documents a correlation between beer drinking and scientific performance without explaining any correlation. That leaves open the possibility that it is not beer drinking that causes poor scientific performance, but just the opposite.

Or, as Dr. Mike Webster, an ornithologist and a beer enthusiast at Washington State University in Pullman, said, maybe “those with poor publication records are drowning their sorrows.”

Take that, lousy, depressed scientists.

Source: The New York Times

Virtual H2O
No, it's not in a videogame.

STOCKHOLM (Reuters) - A scientist who developed a way to calculate how much water is used in the production of anything from a cup of coffee to a hamburger was awarded the 2008 Stockholm Water Prize on Wednesday.


Professor John Anthony Allan of the University of London in Britain won the award for introducing the concept of "virtual water," a calculation method that has changed the nature of trade policy and research.

...

"Behind that morning cup of coffee, there are 140 liters of water that was consumed to grow, produce, package and ship the beans."

That is about as much water as a person in England uses on average for all daily drinking and household needs.

"For a single hamburger, an estimated 2,400 liters of water are needed. In the USA, the average person consumes nearly 7,000 liters of virtual water every day." It said that was more than three times the average consumption of a Chinese person.

It makes me thirsty just to read that.

Source: Raw Story

Plasma Cooling
You can cool stuff with superheated plasma. Huh.

Boffins in the US have developed a microchip fan with no moving parts that operates silently and generates enough wind to cool a laptop computer..

The solid-state fan, developed with support from the US National Science Foundation (NSF), is touted as the most powerful and energy efficient fan of its size.

The device produces three times the flow rate of a typical small mechanical fan and is one-fourth the size.

RSD5 is the culmination of six years of research by Dan Schlitz and Vishal Singhal of Thorrn Micro Technologies when they were NSF-supported graduate students at Purdue University.

...

He explained that RSD5 incorporates a series of live wires that generate a micro-scale plasma (an ion-rich gas that has free electrons that conduct electricity).

The wires lie within uncharged conducting plates that are contoured into half-cylindrical shapes to partially envelop the wires.

Within the intense electric field that results, ions push neutral air molecules from the wire to the plate, generating a wind. The phenomenon is called corona wind.

Even more surprising, something useful came out of Purdue.

Hehe.

Source: iTnews Australia

Project West Ford
From Tom Morris, mad scientist, came a link or two about a mad science project from the early space age.

Project West Ford (also known as Westford Needles and Project Needles) was a test carried out by Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Lincoln Laboratory on behalf of the United States military in 1961 and 1963 to create a ring of copper dipole antennas (2cm long needles) in orbit which would allow global radio communication. After a failed first attempt in 1961 (the needles failed to disperse), the project was eventually successful with the 1963 launch, with radio transmissions carried by the man-made ring. However, the technology was ultimately shelved, partially due to the development of the modern communications satellite and partially due to protests from other scientists.[1] The needles were placed in orbits between 3500 and 3800 km high at 96 and 87 degree inclinations and contributed to Earth's orbital debris.[2] British radio astronomers, together with optical astronomers and the Royal Astronomical Society, protested this action.[3][4] The international protest resulted in a consultation provision included in the 1967 Outer Space Treaty.[3] As of 2006 several clumps of the needles are still in orbit,[5][6] and occasionally re-entering.[7]

Yeah, throw a huge number of needles into orbit. That couldn't possibly cause a problem.

The project itself was a virtually unqualified success. Though the first launch ended in failure, the second launch went without a hitch on May 10th, 1963. Inside the West Ford spacecraft, the needles were packed densely together in blocks made of a napthalene gel that would rapidly evaporate in space. This entire package of needles weighed only 20 kg. After being released, the hundreds of millions of copper needles gradually spread throughout their entire orbit over a period of two months. The final donut-shaped cloud was 15 km wide and 30 km thick and encircled the globe at an altitude of 3700 km.

...

Because of the great distance between the tiny needles, the West Ford belt was visible only in the first few days after launch when the spacing was much smaller. A denser belt intended for permanent communications would probably not have been visible except by very powerful optical telescopes. But, at radio and microwave frequencies, the final dipole clouds may have become scars on the night sky, forever obscuring the universe beyond.


...

Most of the West Ford dipoles re-entered Earth's atmosphere sometime around 1970, according to theoretical and observational evidence. The needles slowly drifted down to the Earth's surface, unscathed by re-entry because of their size. Some consideration was given to recovering one or more of the dipoles in order to learn more about the space environment. Calculations showed that as many as five dipoles would have landed per square kilometer in the high Arctic. But the exceptional cost of recovering these tiny needles from the haystack of billions of tons of Arctic snow killed off any practical attempts at recovery. Back in space, the failed 1971 1961 spacecraft and some larger clumps of the 1973 1963 dipoles remain in orbit like so many other pieces of space junk, silently carrying the long-dead hopes of this nearly forgotten experiment.

It's truly amazing the stupid things people can come up with. A ring of trash around the earth? Yeah, let's do that!

Source: Wikipedia
Damn Interesting

Evil of the Morning
Some truly evil people are working on a way to use blue LEDs to generate a color of light that resets your biological clock to think it's morning, and then put them inside cars.

The idea is to make people less sleepy while driving.

Those of us who are naturally sleepy in the morning, or who just don't want bright blue light in their eyes, are boned, I guess.

Source: Slashdot

More Water News
Good thing that guy came up with virtual water, so we can find out just how doomed we are.

By 2025, fully a third of the planet's growing population could find itself scavenging for safe drinking water, the United Nations has warned ahead of World Water Day on Saturday.

More than two million people in developing countries -- the vast majority children -- die every year from diseases associated with unsanitary water.

There are a number of interlocking causes for this scourge.

Global economic growth, population pressures and the rise of mega-cities have all driven water use to record levels.

Mexico City, Jakarta and Bangkok, to name a few, have underground water sources -- some of them nonrenewable -- depleting at alarming rates.

...

"In the coming decades, water scarcity may be a watchword that prompts action ranging from wholesale population migration to war, unless new ways to supply clean water are found," comment a team of researchers in a review of water purification technology published Thursday in the British journal Nature.

But even as scientists and governments look for ways to satisfy a thirsty world, another threat looms on the horizon: global warming.

Rising sea levels are already forcing salt water into aquifers beneath megadeltas that are home to tens of millions, and changing weather patterns are set to intensify droughts in large swathes of Africa, southern Europe and Asia, according to UN's Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC).

...

Experts and policy makers point to three broad categories of initiatives to ease the shortage of clean, drinkable water, especially in the world's poorest regions: sanitation, purification, and water management.

"Poor sanitation combines with a lack of safe drinking water and inadequate hygiene to contribute to the terrible global death toll," UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said earlier this month.

"Every 20 seconds, a child dies as a result of the abysmal sanitation conditions endured by some 2.6 billion people globally," he said in launching the International Year of Sanitation.

Less than half the households in major Asian cities are connected to sewers, which means that tonnes of raw sewage runs into rivers and oceans, according to the UN.

In Latin America and Africa that figure drops to 40 and 20 percent, respectively.

While governments attempt to improve sanitation infrastructure, scientists are developing new technology to purify the water available, said Mark Shannon, a professor at the University of Illinois and Director of the US government funded Center of Advanced Materials for the Purification of Water with Systems.

"Desalination with reverse osmosis is already the largest single growth area in terms of new water supplies," he told AFP in an interview.

New techniques of reverse osmosis use membranes with nanometer-size pores to filter out salt and other contaminants from water, and could for the first time pave the way for industrial-scale use.

Micro-filters are also used to decontaminate bodies of water increasingly laced with pesticides, arsenic, heavy metals, nitrates and pharmaceutical derivatives.

...

With worldwide food production set to expand 50 percent by 2030, scientists are also developing genetically modified grain plants that consume less water and can withstand harsh conditions.

Researchers in the US, for example, have developed genetically engineered rice with a higher tolerance for drought, salt and low temperatures, the three main causes of crop failure.

Expect a lot of resistance to the GM crop ideas from whackos, naturally. Though drought resistance is one of the things you have to be careful of in GM plants, to be fair. It provides a serious evolutionary advantage over plants that don't have it, so if you have a GM crop that can interbreed with a wild relative, you might end up with drought resistant superweeds via transgene escape.

The most obvious solution to that is to avoid planting GM crops near their wild relatives, of course.

Most food plants are not that great as evolutionary products, spending so much energy producing huge, and often sterile or semi-sterile fruits, so there's less risk of wild GM foods themselves running amok by far.

Source: Raw Story

Methane AND Water News
This time from far away.

An organic chemical that could be an indicator of extraterrestrial life has been identified on a distant planet.

Observations from the Hubble Space Telescope have shown that the atmosphere of a planet called HD 189733b contains methane, which can be a precursor of life or generated by living organisms.

HD 189733b is too hot to be anything but barren, and its methane must therefore come from a nonliving source, but the successful identification of the “marker” chemical gives scientists confidence that they may make similar discoveries on planets that are capable of supporting life.

...

The Hubble observations of HD 189733b have also confirmed that the planet, which lies 63 light years from Earth in the constellation Vulpecula (“the little fox”), has water vapour in its atmosphere.

The chemical signature of water was first picked up last year by the same team, using the Spitzer Space Telescope, which observes in the infra-red spectrum. “With this latest observation there is no question whether there is water or not,” Dr Swain said. “Water is present.”

Ahh, science. Lovely.

Source: The Times Online

Various News, Including Evil Tom Morris

Odd

The Evil Empire
So my friend Tom is up to no good, forging an evil radio empire.

After 10 years of uncertainty and hard work, "the time has come," said former Radiate FM General Manager Brennan Forsyth.

Radiate FM, the FIU student radio station, installed its translator on top of the Marine Biology building and began transmitting through its new signal, 96.9 FM on Feb. 28.

...

The translator, which sits 40 feet above the Marine Biology building, will broadcast within a 10 to 15 mile radius of BBC. Penton and the station's student engineer, Tom Morris, spent four days on top of the roof of the building, working in the rain and cold last week, and finished the transmitter on Feb. 28.

"We braved quite a wind chill up there. It was absolutely freezing by South Florida standards, anyone from up north would have laughed at us," Morris said.

...

Morris, who was heavily involved with installing the translator, is already looking to the future and even thinking about expanding the station more.

"If the FCC opened up translator applications again, I would love to get a translator up on the Pines Center," Morris said. If there's free spot on the dial, I'll do it."

From its inception 21 years ago, Morris' ambitious dream may not seem that far-fetched.

"Two years ago, we didn't even hear our radio station on either campus; now you can pick it up as far as the Key Largo," Jaross said.

We must stop this cancerous spread before it reaches actual civilization.

Tom Morris must DIE

Source: The Beacon (FIU Newspaper) Also, the URL for this site is WAY TOO LONG.

The Doors... Sorta
Actually a terrifying cover of Riders on the Storm. A very unfortunate cover.

Source: I Am TRex

Latin
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.

"Whatever is said in Latin, sounds profound."

Source: The BBC (Other phrases available at this site too)

5 Dollar Gas
Granted, it's an anomaly. As yet.

James Willman seems to be a nice enough guy: polite, good-humored and hard-working, pumping gas seven days a week at the Amerigo Gas Station in the tiny Big Sur town of Gorda, about 35 miles north of Cambria.

But at least once a day, Willman said, someone pulls in and starts cursing him.

“They say all kinds of stuff—‘You ought to be shot,’ or ‘Where’s your mask?’ ” Willman said. “I’m like, ‘Hey, I just work here.’ ”

The reason for consumer hostility is that the station is serving up what might be the costliest gas in the land.

This week, as crude oil flirted with $110 a barrel and gasoline prices surged nationwide, a gallon of regular at Amerigo was going for $5.20.

See this is a tiny town with a tiny gas station that has to run a diesel generator all day for power, so they gouge. Party because they have to, partly because, well, they can.

It's the American way.

Source: San Luis Obispo County

Spidey in the Attic
Cool picture.

Turnip Bomb
I swear, Indiana exists as a cautionary tale.

Terror came to Fort Wayne, Indiana, late last week as a suspicious package arrived at the offices of a local law firm in a move that seemed to presage a deadly bomb outrage slaughter campaign.

After a tense operation by robot and human bomb-disposal operatives, however, it was discovered that the infernal device was in fact - in the judgement of the local bomb squad - a potentially exploding turnip.

The threatening vegetable was despatched in a "bluish gift bag" contained within a box slightly smaller than a baseball, according to Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette reporter Abby Slutsky.

...

"I'm now on constant alert against this and other rooted vegetables," said Fort Wayne lawyer Mark GiaQuinta, to whom the package was addressed.

He theorised that the explosive-esque yet nourishing gift had been sent to him by a disgruntled individual against whom GiaQuinta had acted in court. This person, described by the attorney as "volatile", had perhaps been trying to send the message "you can't get blood from a turnip".

The man thinks he's funny, but he called in the bomb squad because someone left him a gift.

He's a serious paranoid whacko.

Source: The Register

Speaking of Bombs
Here's a nifty page on the disarming of a bomb in the Falklands via the awesome sounding 'Double Baldrick' manuever.

Source: South Atlatic Remote Territories Media Association

Get Bent
This lady needs psychological help, badly.

ASHLAND, Ky. (WSAZ) -- A mother says the straws she bought for her three-year-old daughter were shaped like a male sex organ.

Andrea Bailey says she went shopping at the Ashland Wal-Mart on Thursday, February 28th, and bought a package of fun straws for her three 3-year-old daughter, Ashlynn.

Bailey says Ashlynn came in and used one shaped like a heart. A couple others in the package, though, were shaped like something different.

“There are two of them that are shaped like the male private area,” said Bailey. “I called Wal-Mart and they very rude with me about it. They acted like I was lying, like I was making it all up. You know, I would never make something up like that, especially about my little girl. But, that's just how they treated me and it’s just not right.”

Ahh, conservative, paranoid scolds.

Is there nothing they cannot ruin?

This woman probably gets upset at missiles, speedboats and launches of the space shuttle too.

Whaaaaaacko.

Source: WSAZ.com (check it out for yourself if you like)

Swastika Update
So once again, we have a controversy over a building whose wings form a swastika from the air.

Sigh.

DECATUR, Ala. (AP) -- From the ground, the Wesley Acres Methodist retirement home looks like any other building. But fly over in an airplane, and the outline is unmistakable: It's one big swastika.

Prompted by complaints from a Jewish activist, the agency that owns the government-funded building is planning to alter its shape to disguise the Nazi symbol. The move comes just a few years after a $1 million design modification meant to quiet similar complaints from a U.S. senator.

Naturally, the shape of the building is the sole, overriding concern here.

"The difficulty is there are a limited number of options for fixing a building that has been there for some time," said Mike Giles, counsel for the Methodist Homes Corp. of Alabama and Northwest Florida. "We have to come up with a way to fix an appearance that we want solved and not hurt our residents."

Wesley Acres provides government-subsidized housing for 117 low-income people ages 62 and above. Most have no reason to suspect their hallways take on a sinister shape.

The one-story building, designed in the mid-1970s and completed in 1980, underwent a $1 million alteration in 2001 with funding from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development following complaints by Democratic Sen. Howell Heflin, who has since died. But the addition of two wings did little to hide the offensive shape, and in some ways accentuates it.

Options for the new renovations include the addition of covered porches or other outdoor areas.

The latest push to rid the landscape of the broken cross shape follows complaints from Avrahaum Segol, the same Israeli-American researcher who last fall helped publicize a swastika-shaped barracks at Naval Base Coronado in San Diego. The Navy said it would spend about $600,000 to alter the building, which opened in the 1960s, but the work has not yet been done.

It's the same guy? The same guy made the complaints?

Is this all he does?

The latest push to rid the landscape of the broken cross shape follows complaints from Avrahaum Segol, the same Israeli-American researcher who last fall helped publicize a swastika-shaped barracks at Naval Base Coronado in San Diego. The Navy said it would spend about $600,000 to alter the building, which opened in the 1960s, but the work has not yet been done.

Segol calls the Alabama retirement home a "sister swastika" to the building in California and says they were both part of a tangled, government-funded conspiracy to honor Nazis.

Segol claims the swastika shape of Wesley Acres in Decatur pays homage to the German scientists who came to nearby Huntsville after World War II and designed the rockets that put Americans on the moon.

Methodist Homes' Giles said Segol's conspiracy claims are ridiculous. The building was originally designed to be much larger, he said, and cutbacks resulted in a shape that resembled the four-armed swastika used as the symbol of German Nazis during World War II.

"It was certainly not intentional," Giles said.

IT IS! IT'S ALL HE DOES! He looks for reasons to get upset from Google Earth!

The shape of the retirement center is evident in satellite photos available on the Internet. But it is located in a residential section in a city with few tall buildings, and many in Decatur have no idea Wesley Acres resembles a swastika.

Giles said any changes to the building must be relatively inexpensive since the agency lacks money for an elaborate solution. Planners are considering modifications, he said, "so that from the air it takes your eye away from what was originally there."

Yes, the low-income housing people have to spend money that would otherwise be available to shelter poor old folks to install shrubbery because some idiot with a computer and time on his hands is all atwitter.

I hate conspiracy theorists.

Source: The Associated Press

So a Woman With a Grenade Walks Into a Police Station..
At least it wasn't in Indiana.

CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas (AP) - The police department was briefly evacuated after a woman decided she should bring in a hand grenade she found.

The unidentified woman handed it to an officer Thursday after finding it while cleaning out a relative's belongings. The officer immediately took it outside the building and police cleared the building until the bomb squad took it away and detonated it about an hour later.

The grenade appeared to be live.

"When we countercharged it, it went boom," bomb squad supervisor Lt. James Brandon told the Corpus Christi Caller-Times.

Source: My Way News

I Hate Schools
They always have to make themselves look dumb.

A 15-year-old girl who stopped an out-of-control school bus she was riding on was handed a Saturday detention instead because she was skipping school.

Marina High School student Amanda Rouse was on a bus with 40 elementary school students Wednesday morning when the driver fell out of her seat after a turn and hit her head.

Rouse jumped up and applied the brakes, bringing the bus to a halt after striking two parked cars. No one was injured.

She said had asked the bus driver for a ride because she felt sick at school.

Of course, idiots like this don't help matters.

"She is in trouble with school because she made the wrong decision," said Rouse's grandmother, Sally Correll. "But I can't help but believe that she was where God wanted her to be."

Yes, God wanted her to play hooky to avoid an accident.

Why didn't he just make the bus driver better at their job?

Source: AZ Central

See My Vest
Well, ok, not mine.

Not yet.

A vest that enables video gamers to feel the impact when their characters are shot in-game is raising fears that young people are being desensitized to violence.

The 3rdSpace gaming vest, invented by a Seattle surgeon, includes eight air pistons over vital spots and may be the most sophisticated offering yet in a series of such devices that have been intended to enhance the sensory experience of gaming.

Gamers' reactions have ranged from mildly interested to highly enthusiastic, but anti-gun campaigners in Britain, where the device has recently become available, are alarmed. One activist told Channel 4 News that people keep asking her "Why are our kids out in the street killing each other on a weekly basis?" and warned that it's because "We feed them a diet of violence."

Please...please shut the hell up.

It.

Is.

A.

Toy.

You.

Whackjob.

I do sort of wonder about the long-term health effects of having air pistons hitting you in the chest though.

Source: Raw Story