Puppies and Flowers

From Bizarre Magazine:

The Island Of The Dolls – located in the vast, bewildering network of canals that lies to the south of Mexico City, between the urban sprawl and the more traditional farmland region called Xochimilco (pronounced so-chee-meel-koh and meaning ‘place of flowers’) – is rich in history and superstition.

Created by the hermit Don Julián Santana who, despite having a wife and family, chose to live alone on the island for over 50 years before his death in 2001, the Island Of The Dolls is a shrine to a dead girl who was said to haunt him, and in whose honour he collected dolls, to calm her restless spirit.

Thanks C C.

From AP:

Man sentenced for faking seizures at restaurants

A Baltimore man has been sentenced to a year and a half in jail for faking seizures to get out of paying restaurant bills. City prosecutors said 43-year-old Andrew Palmer pleaded guilty last week to one count of theft scheme, and a judge agreed to impose an 18-month sentence — the maximum Palmer could have received.

Prosecutors said Palmer ate and drank at several restaurants between April and July, and when he couldn’t pay, he would feign a seizure that required medical personnel to respond. The maximum penalty for each individual offense was 90 days in jail because the value of each meal was less than $100.

Court records show Palmer has a long criminal record that includes 40 convictions for theft and dozens more arrests.

a) A Fir Tree
b) A Pea Plant

Have some ‘puppies and flowers’…

Link to BBC article. Link to CNN’s report.

From The Raw Story:

Like the old song goes, one of these things is not like the other…
However, remind a police officer in Corpus Christi, Texas of those famed Cookie Monster lyrics and they’re likely to give you an annoyed look.That’s because a recently discovered cache of plants, initially pegged by officials speaking to local news as “one of the largest marijuana plant seizures in the police department’s history,” turned out to be a relatively common prairie flower of little significance.Texas officers ultimately spent hours laboring to tag and remove up to 400 plants from a city park, discovering only after a battery of tests that they had been sweating over mere Horse Mint, a member of the mint family — effectively turning their ambitious drug bust into mere yard work.The plants, which bear very few aesthetic similarities to cannabis, were reported by an unnamed youth who came across them while riding a bike in the park around 8 p.m. on Thursday. Upon visual inspection, police apparently agreed that the inoffensive plants had to go. Continue reading…

This may actually be worse than my post last week about the kids re-enacting Scarface. The good news is that “she [will] retire at the age of seven to go to school and eventually planned to go to university”. If she survives that long…

A Chinese zoo has been slammed for letting a three-year-old girl walk a tightrope eight metres above a tiger enclosure.

The little girl walked along the 130 metre long high wire above six hungry Siberian tigers at Changzhou Yancheng Zoo in Jiangsu province.

She was part of a routine which also involved two adult acrobats who crossed the wire using a bicycle and a ladder as props.

But the crowd gasped when three-year-old Zhang Xiaoyan started to walk along the wire, with a thin safety rope attached around her waste.

Witnesses said people screamed when she nearly lost her footing on the first step, as a strong gust of wind nearly blew her off the wire.

The little girl walked along the wire without even a pole, using just her arms for balance, as the tigers prowled below. One even jumped up towards her.

Horrified visitors criticised the zoo for putting on the stunt which they said amounted to child abuse.

“If she was my child, I would never let her do anything like that no matter how talented she is,” complained one parent.

A zoo spokesman said they had hired a professional group, the Jiangxi Elite Children Arts Troupe, to put on the routine which met all safety requirements.

Zhang Shenwen, director of Jiangxi Elite Children Arts Troupe, said Xiaoyan was the world’s youngest high wire walker, and had been training since she was just one.

“She has very good psychological control,” he added, saying she would retire at the age of seven to go to school and eventually planned to go to university.

From MSNBC:

WELLINGTON, New Zealand – This Scotch has been on the rocks for a century.

Five crates of Scotch whisky and two of brandy have been recovered by a team restoring an Antarctic hut used more than 100 years ago by famed polar explorer Ernest Shackleton.

Ice cracked some of the bottles that had been left there in 1909, but the restorers said Friday they are confident the five crates contain intact bottles “given liquid can be heard when the crates are moved.”

New Zealand Antarctic Heritage Trust team leader Al Fastier said the team thought there were two crates and were amazed to find five.

Current distillery owner, drinks group Whyte & Mackay, launched the bid to recover the Scotch whisky for samples to test and decide whether to relaunch the defunct spirit made by distiller McKinlay and Co.

Fastier said restoration workers found the crates under the hut’s floorboards in 2006, but they were too deeply embedded in ice to be dislodged.

The New Zealanders agreed to drill the ice to try to retrieve some bottles, although the rest must stay under conservation guidelines agreed to by 12 Antarctic Treaty nations.

“The unexpected find of the brandy crates, one labeled Chas. Mackinlay & Co and the other labeled The Hunter Valley Distillery Limited Allandale (Australia) are a real bonus,” said Fastier.

Ice has cracked some of the crates and formed inside them. Fastier said in a statement that would make extracting the contents delicate, but the trust would decide how to do so in coming weeks.

Richard Paterson, master blender at Whyte and Mackay, whose company supplied the Mackinlay’s whisky for Shackleton, described the find as “a gift from the heavens for whisky lovers.”

“If the contents can be confirmed, safely extracted and analyzed, the original blend may be able to be replicated. Given the original recipe no longer exists, this may open a door into history,” he said in a statement.

Shackleton’s expedition ran short of supplies on its long ski trek to the South Pole from the northern Antarctic coast in 1907-1909 and turned back about 100 miles (160 kilometers) short of its goal.

The expedition sailed away in 1909 as winter ice formed, leaving behind supplies, including the whisky and brandy.

Marie D. E. sent in this video, titled “Karen 26,” in which a woman claims to be looking for the father of the child she conceived after a one-night stand with a tourist (found at Adland):

The video, it turns out, was actually produced as part of a campaign by Visit Denmark, a Danish tourism agency. The idea is, apparently, to market Denmark to male tourists with the implication that it’s easy to have anonymous, unprotected sex with attractive local women who just want to introduce you to Danish customs. I don’t know that the possibility of unplanned pregnancy would be the best tourism draw, but she does assure us that she’s not a slut and she’s not wanting anything from the father, so perhaps that will reassure potential tourists that not only can they have unprotected sex with local women, there are no real consequences to doing so.

So the perception in many parts of the world of Scandinavian women as sexually liberated and promiscuous is used by a state-funded agency to promote tourism by turning female sexuality into another local attraction…with the added benefit of being free, unlike in nations known for sex tourism.

Found at Sociological Images

From The BBC:

An Australian psychology expert who has been studying emotions has found being grumpy makes us think more clearly.

In contrast to those annoying happy types, miserable people are better at decision-making and less gullible, his experiments showed.

While cheerfulness fosters creativity, gloominess breeds attentiveness and careful thinking, Professor Joe Forgas told Australian Science Magazine.

‘Eeyore days’

The University of New South Wales researcher says a grumpy person can cope with more demanding situations than a happy one because of the way the brain “promotes information processing strategies”.

He asked volunteers to watch different films and dwell on positive or negative events in their life, designed to put them in either a good or bad mood.

Next he asked them to take part in a series of tasks, including judging the truth of urban myths and providing eyewitness accounts of events.

Those in a bad mood outperformed those who were jolly – they made fewer mistakes and were better communicators.

Professor Forgas said: “Whereas positive mood seems to promote creativity, flexibility, co-operation and reliance on mental shortcuts, negative moods trigger more attentive, careful thinking, paying greater attention to the external world.”

The study also found that sad people were better at stating their case through written arguments, which Forgas said showed that a “mildly negative mood may actually promote a more concrete, accommodative and ultimately more successful communication style”.

His earlier work shows the weather has a similar impact on us – wet, dreary days sharpened memory, while bright sunny spells make people forgetful.

From The Chicago Tribune:

One rips off a bikini top. The other rips an arm off a hapless victim, beating the just-single-limbed person mercilessly before feasting on the bloody remains. Neither wants you touching them.

Exotic dancers and zombies, the two grand pillars of American subculture, have finally joined forces — thus proving our nation’s obsession with the walking dead has irrevocably crossed the line of mainstream consciousness, where now strippers are parodying a trend.

The site is Albany Park’s Admiral Theatre, a gentlemen’s club where chairs have leopard prints and a woman who works there is named Euphoria (likely not her Christian name).

Wednesday night, club organizers are throwing an event called “Night of the Stripping Dead,” where professional makeup artists will transform otherwise pious dancers into undead dancers.

The highlight, said club marketing manager Tim Brown, will be a performance by zombie burlesque dancer Miss Maya Sinstress. Brown first noticed Sinstress at a burlesque convention.

“She came out in a metal corset, metal bikini and proceeded to take it off with a chain saw,” Brown said. “It floored me.”

Brown, who came up with the idea, was also particularly excited about “zombie (little people)” running the concession stand that night, which he said is “gonna be nuts.”

From NYTimes:

BRUSSELS — After months of complaints by European dairy farmers angry over low prices, protesters in Brussels on Monday poured milk onto the streets, hurled eggs and other missiles, and started fires that filled the air with black smoke.

From Gawker:

Columnist and presidential speechwriter Bill Safire was one of only three non-disloyal Jews President Nixon could name. Here is the speech he drafted for Nixon to read in case the Apollo 11 Astronauts became stranded on the moon!

It is a wonderful piece of alternate universe American history, in which President Nixon had to explain to a nation that Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong were going to die on the moon.

photo credit

Russian fans told to ‘drink whisky’ when in Wales for World Cup qualifer.

From article:

Russian soccer fans have been told to drink whisky on their trip to Wales for next month’s World Cup qualifier to ward off the H1N1 swine flu virus, the head of the country’s supporter association (VOB) said today.

“We urge our fans to drink a lot of Welsh whisky as a form of disinfection,” VOB head Alexander Shprygin told Reuters.

“That should cure all symptoms of the disease.”

Russia’s Health Ministry has issued a public warning against travelling to Britain because of the spread of the H1N1 virus but Shprygin said he expected at least several hundred fans would go to Wales for the Sept. 9 qualifier in Cardiff.

“Health officials say this virus is very dangerous but being a fan myself I can tell you that for a real fan nothing is more important than the well-being of the team,” said Shprygin, who also sits on the executive board of the Russian FA.

via Russia fans told to ‘drink whisky’ when in Wales – News & Comment, Football – The Independent.

Link to There, I Fixed It.