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A Thai chef in London, making his bi-annual spicy 'Nam prik pao', shut down several blocks of the city as people smelling the smokey peppers thought it was a chemical agent.
Bonus: Recipe included
Clip:
When Daisy the dachshund bounds along the shoreline, she often picks up a stick or a dead fish to gnaw on.
But going walkies the other day, she briefly found herself in doggie heaven ... when she was confronted by a bone as big as herself.
However, this was no meaty treat - just a prehistoric prize. For Daisy had discovered a fossilised mammoth bone up to two million years old.
Unable to dig it up, she waited for owner Dennis Smith to arrive - and he was stunned to see the 13in, 8lb thigh section sticking out of the sand.
``It's very sad that the president has chosen to veto a bill that would provide health care for 10 million American children for the next five years. ... I don't think the president wants to say to the American people that he as the decider, the self-proclaimed decider, wants to decide what children get health care and which children do not.'' House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif.
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``The Republican Congress created SCHIP a decade ago to give millions of low-income, American children access to high-quality health care - not as a trial balloon for government-run health care or as a way to provide government benefits to adults and upper-income families who can afford private health insurance.'' - House Minority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio.
``Never has it been clearer how detached President Bush is from the priorities of the American people. By vetoing a bipartisan bill to renew the successful Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP), President Bush is denying health care to millions of low-income kids in America.'' - Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev.
The nine metre (30 feet) high and wide creature is made of bronze, stainless steel and marble and is the creation of renowned artist Louise Bourgeois.
"The Spider is an ode to my mother. She was my best friend. Like a spider, my mother was a weaver," the 95-year-old Bourgeois said in a statement.
"Like spiders, my mother was very clever. Spiders are friendly presences that eat mosquitoes. We know that mosquitoes spread diseases and are therefore unwanted. So, spiders are helpful and protective, just like my mother," she added.
Huh? Link
Link to Slate.com Video
Article:
SYDNEY — Customs officals in Australia said Thursday that they had discovered a large amount of ecstasy inside a Mr. Potato Head children's toy mailed to Sydney from Ireland.
Customs said the toy was intercepted in a parcel at Sydney's international mail centre after an alert official suspected there may be something sinister behind Mr. Potato Head's toothy grin.
"Upon opening the parcel, Customs officers were greeted with the smiling face of Mr. Potato Head," Customs said in a statement.
"When a panel from Mr. Potato Head's back was removed, a quantity of MDMA (ecstasy) tablets was found in a small taped bag concealed in the cavity space."
The tablets weighed an estimated 293 grams (10.3 ounces).
"Whilst this is one of the more unusual concealments that we have seen in recent times, people need to be aware that Customs officers are alert to unusual and often outlandish methods of concealment," Customs postal director Karen Williams said.
Police said no arrests had been made but the network responsible had been disrupted.
Found here
Clip:
A high school art teacher fired after officials learned he moonlighted by creating paintings using his bare buttocks and other body parts sued his former employers on Thursday.
Stephen Murmer was fired in January after Chesterfield County Public Schools officials saw a YouTube video of Murmer wearing a swim thong and a Groucho Marx mask, demonstrating how he applies paint to his backside, then presses it onto a canvas. read more
About Stephen Murmer the artist
Clip:
DULUTH, Minnesota -- Jammie Thomas, a single mother of two, was found liable Thursday for copyright infringement in the nation's first file-sharing case to go before a jury.
Twelve jurors here said the Minnesota woman must pay $9,250 for each of 24 shared songs that were the subject of the lawsuit, amounting to $222,000 in penalties.
They could have dinged her for up to $3.6 million in damages, or awarded as little as $18,000. She was found liable for infringing songs from bands such as Journey, Green Day, AFI, Aerosmith and others.
After the verdict was read, Thomas and her attorney left the courthouse without comment. The jurors also declined to talk to reporters.
Continue reading
Clip:
COEUR D'ALENE, Idaho - Security guards refused to allow a woman into a federal courthouse until she removed a bra that triggered a metal detector.
Lori Plato said she and her husband, Owen Plato, were stunned when U.S. Marshals Service employees asked her to remove her bra after the underwire supports set off the alarm.
"I asked if I could go into the bathroom because they didn't have a privacy screen and no women security officers were available," Plato said Wednesday. "They said, 'No.' read more
From the Wired article:
Wired: You started working on this movie more than 25 years ago. How does it feel to be talking about it again?
Scott: It never went away, so I'm used to it. It kept reemerging, and that's when I realized that it had really unusual staying power. It's all very well to say, "Well, I knew it had." But I didn't, really, at the time. I knew I'd done a pretty interesting movie, but it was so unusual that the majority of people were taken aback. They simply didn't get it. Or, I think, better to say that they were enormously distracted by the environment.
Wired: What do you mean by that?
Scott:I was touching on possibilities like replication. It's now quite commonplace, but 25 years ago they were barely discussing it in the corridors of power. Now, the film is not really about that at all, it's simply leveraging that possibility into one of those detective film-noir kinds of stories. People were familiar with that kind of character, but not with the world I was cooking up. I wanted to call it San Angeles, and somebody said, "I don't get it." I said, "You know, San Francisco and Los Angeles." It's bizarre: People only think about what's under their noses until it comes and kicks them in the ass.
Wired: How did you decide to tell a 21st-century story in a 1940s style?
Scott:Well, people want a comfortable preconception about what they're seeing. It's a bit like 20 years of Westerns and, now, 45 years of cop movies. People are comfortable with the roles. Even though every nook and cranny has been explored, they'll still sit through endless variations on cops and bad guys, right? In this instance, I was doing a cop and a different bad guy. And to justify the creation of the bad guy, i.e., replication, it had to be in the future.
Link to Wired article
Think I neeed to create an 'ironic' category...
The coach carrying the Diana inquest jury has reportedly crashed as it traced the Princess's last movements around Paris.
In an eerie parallel with the catastrophic accident which killed the Princess, the bus driver was apparently trying to out-manoeuvre paparazzi outside the Ritz
The jury, coroner Lord Justice Scott Baker, and teams of lawyers made British legal history by making a site inspection of the places where the Princess and her lover Dodi Fayed spent their final hours.
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Introductions at Seville Square in downtown Pensacola on Saturday were based more on noses and smells than handshakes and hellos.
Hundreds of canines led their owners through a maze of leashes, vendors and other patrons during Barktoberfest, an annual event hosted by the Humane Society of Pensacola.
The event — one of the main fundraisers for the no-kill animal shelter at 5 North Q St. — featured costume and best-trick contests; local artists and painters; and activities for children and families. read more
Link to more photos
Found at baldhead.nl
A Cambridge team says the creature owes its existence to a genetic quirk that offers some recompense for its prolonged celibacy.
Many asexual organisms have died out because they cannot adapt to changes in the natural world.
But an evolutionary trick allows this pond-dweller to survive when conditions change, researchers report in Science.
The animal is a tiny invertebrate known as a bdelloid rotifer. It lives in freshwater pools. If deprived of water, it survives in a desiccated state until water becomes available again. continue reading
Won't be holding my breath waiting for these…
via newshelton
Clip:
The disc-shaped device can take off vertically from any surface, land practically anywhere, and if it accidentally contacts a building or cliff, it won't explode into a fireball, like those rascally helicopters.
These features could make the aircraft uniquely suited to flying in urban war zones, aiding with search and rescue in disaster areas, inspecting crops and pipelines, and taking aerial photographs (read: surveillance).
Ananova reports:
A new water sport in which contestants row a boat made of a single bamboo cane has been invented in China.
Villagers from Chishui, near Zuiyi city, came up with the idea, reports News Express.
They make the boats out of locally grown bamboo and hold races on the Pinzhou River.
"Participants can sit or stand on the piece of bamboo, and with a thin bamboo oar, they race and compete at other tasks," explained one villager.
Villagers say the races have become a popular local attraction and hope the sport will spread across the region.
Clip:
FRANKFURT (Reuters) - The Frankfurt Book Fair has an indicator to help publishers gauge public interest in the new offerings presented at the annual exhibition -- the unofficial "most stolen book" index.
Bild am Sonntag and Germany's ZDF television have come up with lists of titles most stolen from 15 leading German publishers' stands set up in the Frankfurt trade fair grounds.
"The most-stolen books are usually the most-sold later on," Claudia Hanssen of the Goldmann Verlag publishing house told Bild am Sonntag newspaper, which published a list of the 10 most stolen German-language books this year.
Continue reading
Clip from c|net:
A new Senate bill would protect not only telephone companies from lawsuits claiming illegal cooperation with the National Security Agency. It would retroactively immunize e-mail providers, search engines, Internet service providers and instant-messaging services too.
The broad language appears in new legislation that a Senate committee approved by a 13-to-2 vote on Thursday during a meeting closed to the press and public. It enjoys the support of the panel's Democrats and Republicans.
It goes further in crafting an impenetrable legal shield than similar proposals in the House of Representatives, such as the so-called Restore Act (PDF), which immunizes only "communications service providers." Bowing to pressure from President Bush, House Democrats postponed a vote on the Restore Act last week.
The broader Senate bill (PDF) would sweep in Web sites, e-mail providers and more. "My suspicion is the scope of the immunity provision is the most revealing way to assess the scope of the underlying authority," said Marc Rotenberg, director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center.
Link to c|net article
The Raw Story is reporting that Comcast has a pricing structure for installing FISA wiretaps:
Comcast, which is among the nation's largest telecommunication companies, charges $1,000 to install a FISA wiretap and $750 for each additional month authorities want to keep an eye on suspects, according to the company's Handbook for Law Enforcement. Secrecy News obtained the document and published it Monday.
Link to the raw story report
Thanks Faisal
Clip from ABC News:
Anxious to avoid upsetting air travelers, NASA is withholding results from an unprecedented national survey of pilots that found safety problems like near collisions and runway interference occur far more frequently than the government previously recognized.
NASA gathered the information under an $8.5 million safety project, through telephone interviews with roughly 24,000 commercial and general aviation pilots over nearly four years. Since ending the interviews at the beginning of 2005 and shutting down the project completely more than one year ago, the space agency has refused to divulge the results publicly.
Just last week, NASA ordered the contractor that conducted the survey to purge all related data from its computers.
Link to article
From article:
A BARMAID has been fined for crushing beer cans between her bare breasts while an off-duty colleague has been fined for hanging spoons from her friend's nipples, Westrern Australia police said today.
Police said the 31-year old barmaid pleaded guilty in the local magistrate's court to twice exposing her breasts to patrons at the Premier Hotel in Pinjarra, south of Perth.
The woman "is alleged to have also crushed beer cans between her breasts during one of the offences", in breach of hotel licensing laws, police from the Peel district of Western Australia said.
The barmaid and the hotel manager were both fined $1000, while an off-duty barmaid was fined $500 for helping to hang spoons from the woman's nipples, police said.
"It sends a clear message to all licensees in Peel that we will not tolerate this type of behaviour in our licensed premises," local police superintendent David Parkinson said.
Will the *real* Sam Adams please stand up:
PORTLAND, Ore. - The Boston brewers of Sam Adams beer objected when they learned that a mayoral campaign here included Web sites invoking the name of their product.
What they didn't realize is that Sam Adams is also the name of the candidate — and has been since before the beer hit the market.
The Portland Sam Adams, a mild-mannered bicycle rider, is a far cry from the Boston Sam Adams, a patriot, brewer, rabble-rouser and business flop of Revolutionary War times. The second cousin to former president John Adams inherited the brewery, and it failed several years later.
When Mayor Tom Potter said he wouldn't seek re-election last month, City Commissioner Sam Adams jumped into the nonpartisan race. So far he's the only candidate.
Enterprising KEX radio hosts Mark Mason and Dave Anderson registered the Web addresses http://www.samadamsformayor.com and http://www.mayorsamadams.com, promising to give them to Adams if he discussed his political future on their show. Adams did.
The letter from Boston Beer Co. came to Anderson last week.
"Boston Beer has used the trademarks SAM ADAMS and SAMUEL ADAMS since 1984," said the letter, which asked Anderson to surrender the Web sites.
The radio hosts have responded by broadcasting the sound of a listener pouring Sam Adams beer in the toilet.
Article found here
A Mother pig feeds her nine hungry offspring – in the middle of a country road.
She halted as the piglets began suckling in the New Forest, Hants. Bernie Bed-ford, 60, who took our pic, said: “She wouldn’t move.”
Link to lots more samples
Below: the new NYC Taxi logo that caused an uproar, click here to see reader submitted designs, some of which are excellent.
Designed by Wolff Olins — who also created the 'fabulous' London 2012 Olympic logo:
Link to BBC readers alternatives
The elaborate corn maze in Dixon, 40 acres in size, has been certified as the largest in the world by Guinness World Records. It's easy to get lost in the tall stalks that make up the maze.
Link with more pictures
This is a wild story:
BRUSSELS (Reuters) - A Belgian inmate made a dramatic escape from jail for the fourth time Sunday evening after his armed accomplices landed in the prison grounds in a hijacked helicopter, prosecutors said Monday.
Nordin Benallal, self-styled "escape king" with several convictions for armed robbery and carjacking, has previously run from a prison van, walked out of jail wearing a wig and sunglasses and scaled a prison wall with a rope ladder.
Sunday, Benallal's accomplices hijacked a helicopter near the prison in Ittre, some 30 km (19 miles) south of Brussels.
On landing, the helicopter was crowded by other prisoners, making takeoff impossible and causing it to crash. The pilot and a prisoner were slightly injured.
Benallal and his cohorts then briefly seized two prison warders as hostages and fled in a car parked nearby.
It marked the second time this year that a prisoner has escaped from a Belgian jail using a helicopter. In April, two men posing as tourists hijacked a helicopter and flew into the yard of a prison near Liege, in the east of the country, to pick up an inmate.
Gene Simmons pumpkin with ham tongue, from the 2006 winners list. Link
With an interesting post on the 'art' of sharpening pencils. Link
From Neatorama:
Some people that work here had a going away party the other day for a woman that is leaving.
One of the supervisors called a Walmart and ordered the cake. he told them to write: “best wishes Suzanne” and underneath that write “we will miss you”. here’s the cake that was delivered.
Christopher Locke buys up confiscated scissors from TSA auctions and makes these really cool spider sculptures from them. Follow link to see more pictures and a how-to of the process.
Clip:
A group of German grannies have turned their knitting circle into a company selling kinky knitwear.
Their range includes lingerie, face masks and willy warmers, as well as conventional woollen clothing.
Manuela Buesch-Dankewitz, 45, who manages the group of lady knitters said: "The women love to knit, and it's great to earn something from it.
"Our oldest team member is 86. She makes willy warmers and other gear just like the rest."
Ms Buesch-Dankewitz came up with the idea after a US customer asked for a woollen bondage suit and since then has expanded her team to cater for ever more exotic tastes.
She added: "Since we put the items on-line we have been flooded with requests from all around the world.
"We make our wool products to order and there is a big demand out there."
The firm's products can be seen on their new web site at http://wolltraum.de
From Annanova:
The organisers of the Basel Shift Festival have decided not to report the theft to the police yet, and hope the thief will return the book.
The book with the words "Steal this Book" emblazoned across its cover had been placed in an incubator by artists from the Viennese artist's group Ubermorgen.
A spokesman for the artists said: "The central part of the work was a book with the title 'Steal this Book' as a way of representing in art an internet hacking operation that made entire books readable on amazon.com, instead of just single pages.
"It was an attempt to praise those that fought for the right for literary freedom, and not an invitation to steal the book."
The book was written by Abbie Hoffman in 1970 and published in 1971, and includes advice on growing marijuana, starting a pirate radio station, living in a commune, stealing food, shoplifting, stealing credit cards, making pipe bombs, and obtaining a free buffalo from the US Department of the Interior.
Many bookstores refused to carry the book, because so many patrons followed the advice of the book's title and stole it.
From article:
A model who killed three people while trying to commit suicide has been told she faces up to ten years in jail.
Stunning Jeanette Sliwinski deliberately rammed her car into another vehicle that had stopped at a red light.
The three occupants of the car were killed instantly in the horror smash - while Sliwinski only suffered a broken ankle in the accident, which happened two years ago.
This page contains all entries posted to Puppies and Flowers in October 2007. They are listed from oldest to newest.
September 2007 is the previous archive.
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