"I have been through some terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened." - Mark Twain

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Atheism Only Lasts a Few Days in Rancho Cucamonga - "A billboard in Rancho Cucamonga asking viewers to "imagine no religion" was taken down this week after residents and the city complained about its message. The Freedom From Religion Foundation advertisement was first installed last week causing local conversation and complaints. The pressure quickly built up and the General Outdoor sign company took it down."
Freedom of religion only applies if you have a religion.

5 Household Uses for Flour - "Stainless steel sinks start to loose their luster over time. You can purchase products to bring the luster back or just use flour. Sprinkle flour over the sink and rub it lightly with a dry, soft cloth. Then just rinse the flour away and your stainless steel sink has its shine back."

Top 5 Uses of Long Hair to Cover Nude Breasts

Darwin Awards 2008 - "German Zookeeper, Friedrich Riesfeldt, fed his constipated elephant 22 doses of animal laxative and more than a bushel of berries, figs and prunes before the plugged-up pachyderm finally got relief. Investigators say ill-fated Friedrich, 46, was attempting to give the ailing elephant an olive oil enema when the relieved beast unloaded. The sheer force of the elephant’s unexpected defecation knocked Mr. Riesfeldt to the ground where he struck his head on a rock as the elephant continued to evacuate 200 pounds of dung on top of him"

The pitfalls of Africa's aid addiction - "Where I come from in West Africa, we have a saying: "A fool at 40 is a fool forever", and most African countries have now been independent for over 40 years. Most are blessed with all the elements to help compete on a global stage - abundant natural resources, a young population and the climate and conditions to be a major agricultural force... I have no doubt we have to take responsibility for our failures. We can't afford to keep playing the blame game... Aid has offered legitimacy to corrupt and autocratic regimes, allowing them to hang on to power even when they have lost popularity with their own citizens... Governments that are highly dependent on aid pay too much attention to donors and too little to the actual needs of their own citizens... Another criticism of aid increasingly voiced by Africans, but rarely heard in the West is that it sponsors failure, but rarely rewards success... Small African producers also have to compete with heavily subsided products from Europe and North America."
Lucky they got an African to write this story

Finance Has Lost Sight of Its Role - "The media. and to a lesser degree, society at large has bought into the construct of the importance, value, and virtue of the financial sector, even as it is coming violently apart before our eyes. Why, for instance, the vituperative reaction against a GM bailout, while we assume Citi has to be rescued? A GM bankruptcy would be at least as catastrophic as a Citi failure. but GM elicits attacks for the incompetence of its management and the supposedly unreasonable posture of the UAW (the same free market advocates recoil at a deal struck by consenting adults)... the specter of incompetent, and worse, DISHONEST management elicits far less anger. GM may not make the best cars, but Citi and other banks sold products that were terrible, destructive, that resulted in huge losses and are wrecking economies, damage crappy cars could never inflict... while UAW workers will have to give up on deals cut earlier, in terms of health care and pension promises (entered into, by the way, to bridge difference over wage levels), I guarantee no Wall Street denizen of the peak years will have to cough up one penny of his bonus from those days... times are bad, and any efforts to extract more revenues from customers, even if it is blood from a turnip, or worse, even if it puts a viable business under, is warranted. The idea that the needs of the financial sector can trump those of the productive sector are dangerous and destructive to our collective well being, and need to be combatted frontally."
Author's comment: "Frequent all nighters (I once pulled two in a row) and no catching up. In at 9 AM, seldom home before 1 AM. 8-10 hours of work most weekends. You have no life. When I was at Goldman, all the married women were married to Goldman guys (except one who joined the firm married) because the only people you ever saw were people at Goldman... To give you another idea, when I went to McKinsey, which is considered high pressure, I thought I had joined a country club, the pace was so relaxed"

When will Chinese Democracy reach Beijing? - "It's clear that China is not lurching toward democracy. Understanding why this is so requires poking some holes in underlying Western assumptions... Premier Wen Jiabao, in an unprecedented interview with Fareed Zakaria earlier this fall, unflinchingly claimed that a democratic China will be the endgame... But the Chinese concept of "democracy" should not be conflated with the Western idea of direct elections and using the rule of law to constrain power. The utterance of the term democracy among the Chinese elite has so far meant promoting government transparency and accountability, village-level elections, rule by consensus and consultation, expanding the public sphere, co-opting entrepreneurs and intellectuals into the party—anything but conceding ultimate power to the people. In short, the CCP has nimbly adapted, is populated largely by elites, and is essentially ruled by a nine-member oligarchy in the Politburo"
Hmm, sounds like another authoritarian country we all know and love

Mythbuster: College Roommates - "Girls hate each other no matter what. However, it’s much better to end up hating a girl you just met that year than someone you were best friends with since you were 11. Girls never get along and I’ll tell you why: because they always want everything to be perfect. Most girls hate confrontation with their friends and will do anything to avoid it. Guys? They live for it... You see, girls pretend like everything is okay, then they bitch and moan to their other roommates. Naturally, because they’re all insecure, that’s how they deal with it. In the end, they all end up hating each other... guys can live together, and not end up hating each other: because they work out the little things by being upfront and obnoxious."

The Bikini Accident of Aya Hirano - "Fans of bikini model and occasional seiyuu Aya Hirano are in uproar over the embarrassing clothing malfunction which befell her in a recently published photo shoot."

YouTube - Chicken Head Tracking - "Chickens have a great ability to keep their heads stable. Our bodies use a gyro-like mechanism in our ears which has 3 mutually orthogonal inertial measurement devices. Modern motion processors use something called an Inertial Measurment Unit (IMU). These devices provide movement data which can be used to compensate for the movement. Chickens apparently have the same type mechanism only with a higher update rate."
A whole new meaning to "Chicken Gyros"

Milky Way's sweetness throughout - "A simple sugar that is one of the ingredients of life has been found for the first time in a relatively hospitable part of the galaxy. As molecules go, glycolaldehyde is not an impressive one, but its link to the origins of life make it important. It can react to form ribose, a key constituent of the nucleic acid RNA."
The Intelligent Designer goes further afield!

A Heap of Trouble - "nine naked men just walking down the road
would cause a heap of trouble for all concerned"

Chickipedia - "Chickipedia is the world’s largest web-based, women-based, wiki-based database of hot chicks on the planet. It is entirely user generated, making it the first female-only encyclopedia of the people, by the people, and for the people. All you have to do is have access to the internet, log on, go to our “Add New Chick” link, and voila—you can create a new article, or revise an existing one. Just be sure to do so within our guidelines or risk being spanked. Hard."

California Wild Spring 2004 - Material Girls - "In the inch-long hangingflies of North America, the main benefit to the female of the gift-giving seems to be the child support payment. During the mating period, females basically stop hunting, and males go after larger prey. When a male snags something, he sends out a chemical signal, or pheromone, and females make a beeline for the meal. As the female chows down, the male begins to mate with her. But the female is rather mercenary about the whole affair: Even though they are coupled, she somehow prevents his sperm from entering her body until she has gorged herself for a full five minutes. If, after that time, she has already devoured the insect, she will struggle to free herself from this male--he has offered her too paltry a gift. Time to move on to another one, who might provide a bigger offering."
Prostitution in hangingflies

Turgooducochiqua puts local turducken tradition to shame - "Not for the faint of heart or high in blood-pressure, the turgooduccochiqua starts with a quail stuffed inside a cornish hen, then stuffed into a duck, then a chicken, then a turkey and finally a goose. Oh, don't forget the bacon between each layer."

Switzerland's Suicide Tourists , 60 Minutes II Accompanies German Patient To His Death - "Under Swiss law, assisted suicide is legal, as long as nobody profits from a death. But one Swiss organization is pushing this law to the limits, attracting an increasing number of foreigners who want to take their own lives, and raising serious ethical questions about an act most countries forbid... At the end of the last journey Aschmoneit will ever make is Ludwig Minelli, a human rights lawyer who founded Dignitas as an alternative to other assisted suicide groups in Switzerland. It has more than 2,000 members and is the only group that welcomes foreigners."

Welcome to Cathay - "First Class Entertainment at Economy Rates! At Cathay Cineplexes, there's no such thing as a downturn ... except when it comes to our lower ticket prices! The only "slump" we talk about would be the act of slouching restfully on our comfy seats. And a "slowdown" would mean unwinding at any of our 41 cinema screens island wide."
Who comes up with stuff like this?!

University of Hong Kong Offers CLIT Courses - "CLIT1008 and CLIT1009 are open for eager young students who want to learn a little more culture."

Japan Breaks Record for Largest Orgy - "Japan has successfully set a new world record - having 250 men and 250 women consent to have sex in the same place at the same time, completing the world’s biggest orgy!"
...

YewNorkBabe: Why You Should Always Check Your Kid's Homework - "When I grow up... I want to be like mommy!"
One comment: I think it's a hatchet! She is probably a corporate raider and does hatchet jobs on lazy personnel in order to become the next CEO.

Ultrasonic Ringtones - the new ringtones that only kids can hear! - "Ultrasonics are great new ringtones that play at a higher frequency than normal tones. This means that they can only be heard by kids and generally can't be heard by adults over the age over 20 or so."
I haven't lost aural perception since my JC days; Another site with a sweeping sine tone, from 22kHz to 12kHz