Last week at the Panera, I walked through the door and one of the first things that happened was I was passed a newspaper and told to read one of the articles. Afterwards, I made a note to run a google search so I could find an online version to share here. Thinking about the events of this past weekend reminded me and so, here it is.

Judge rejects plea deal in NJ child luring case

TOMS RIVER, N.J.: A New Jersey judge on Friday rejected a plea bargain that prosecutors reached with a man accused of trying to lure three young children into a specially rigged van filled with candy.

Under the deal, Brian Warner pleaded guilty in June to possessing a stun gun. In return, charges of child-luring and possession of bomb-making materials were to have been dismissed, and he would have been sentenced only to the time he already served.

Superior Court Judge Wendel E. Daniels did not publicly disclose his reasons for rejecting the deal. He set another hearing for Nov. 3.

It was not clear whether Warner, 49, would seek to rescind the guilty plea in the wake of Friday's ruling.

Warner stood trial on the charges in 2005, but the jury was deadlocked and a mistrial was declared. He has been free in bail since April 2005, having spent nearly a year in jail while awaiting trial.

Defense attorney Paul Casteleiro called Daniels' ruling "the wrong decision. They (prosecutors) came to us and wanted to do a plea, and we entered into because it made sense to put this behind him."

Michael Mohel, a spokesman for the Ocean County prosecutor's office, did not return a call.

Prosecutors said that in 2004, Warner tried to lure two sisters ages 9 and 10 and their 7-year-old brother into a van equipped with a candy-filled cooler — and also a police scanner, a cage, black louvers on the windows, sound-muffling padding and sensors to alert occupants if someone was approaching.

Prosecutors claimed Warner had rigged the van to snatch children for sexual assault. But his lawyer argued that Warner had the candy because he has low blood sugar and that he was only trying to be friendly to the children.

Now, maybe it's just me, but a candy filled cooler sounds like a spiffy idea. Hell, I don't even have low blood sugar and I think that might make for a nice car accessory. I'm not sure about the cage but you never know when you might run across a mountain lion or something. I'll admit, it might be harder to explain why the guy left a trail of candy that led to the van with signs saying 'Free Balloon Animals Inside', but I'm sure his lawyer can come up with something.

On a sidenote, is that an absolutely perfect userpic for this article or what?

If these things are supposed to come in three's, then someone else should be revealing a homosexual relationship any day now.

LOS ANGELES, California (AP) -- Lindsay Lohan has confirmed what the world has guessed: She's been dating Samantha Ronson "a very long time."
Actress Lindsay Lohan confirmed Monday that she's been dating Samantha Ronson for "a very long time."

Actress Lindsay Lohan confirmed Monday that she's been dating Samantha Ronson for "a very long time."

The 22-year-old actress casually told the co-host of the syndicated radio program "Loveline" on Monday that she's been dating the 31-year-old DJ. The pair have appeared in public and been photographed together, but have never publicly commented about the extent of their relationship.

"You guys, you and Samantha, have been going out for how long now?" DJ Ted Stryker asked. "Like two years, one year, five months, two months?"

"For a very long time," Lohan said after laughing.

I think this one is a mistake for the gay community. Clay Aiken was a pretty good pickup for their team. Nice, cleancut, intelligent and perhaps even talented (I personally wouldn't know since I never watched American Idol or listened to his music). I'm sure he'll end up doing great things for the team. Today's trade though seems like a major mistake. I think that they need to go back to the straights and tell them no deal and they can keep Lohan. She's a ticking time bomb. I'm sure that no one out there wants to go through another Anne Heche incident.

The latest from the lunatic fringe.

PETA Urges Ben & Jerry's To Use Human Milk

WATERBURY, Vt. -- People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals sent a letter to Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, cofounders of Ben & Jerry's Homemade Inc., urging them to replace cow's milk they use in their ice cream products with human breast milk, according to a statement recently released by a PETA spokeswoman.

"PETA's request comes in the wake of news reports that a Swiss restaurant owner will begin purchasing breast milk from nursing mothers and substituting breast milk for 75 percent of the cow's milk in the food he serves," the statement says.

PETA officials say a move to human breast milk would lessen the suffering of dairy cows and their babies on factory farms and benefit human health.

"The fact that human adults consume huge quantities of dairy products made from milk that was meant for a baby cow just doesn't make sense," says PETA Executive Vice President Tracy Reiman. "Everyone knows that 'the breast is best,' so Ben & Jerry's could do consumers and cows a big favor by making the switch to breast milk."

The ironic part is the Ben and Jerry are both hippie nutjobs in their own right. It's always amusing when you see those liberal wankers try to cannibalize one of their own. I guess that it's unlikely ol' B&J's will be changing their recipe anytime soon. Still, I must admit I do find the imagine of large breasted women hooked up to milking machines sort of interesting. It reminds me of a sci-fi short story I once read. Mmmmm Boobies.

Oh, and in today's HomoNews, it's a shocker. Clay Aiken _IS_ teh Ghey.

Here is info on that short story I was talking about. It's titled 'In the Barn' and is by Piers Anthony.

As I'm reading the weather reports of Gustav growing to a category 3 hurricane, I can't help but wonder if New Orleans is going to get flattened again. It just seems ridiculous to me to keep putting money into a place that is below sea level. God keeps knocking it down and we'll keep paying to build it back up again. Sometimes I think it might be a blessing if mother nature just wipes the place out altogether and maybe keeps it underwater this time. It's nice to sing kumaya and we will overcome, but there are just times when it's the better part of valor to admit defeat. Trying to keep a piece of land dry when it's in the middle of a below sea level swamp is just futility given the current climactic situation. Sea level is only going to rise and flooding is only going to become more common.

Apparently things are even more disturbed in the case of the canadian beheading extraveganza than I thought. Take a gander at the news report out today:

TORONTO, Ontario (AP) -- A police officer at the scene of a grisly beheading on a Canadian bus reported seeing the attacker hacking off pieces of the victim's body and eating them, according to a police tape leaked on the Internet Saturday.

In the tape of radio transmissions, a Royal Canadian Mounted Police officer refers to the attacker as "Badger" and says he is armed with a knife and scissors and is "defiling the body at the front of the bus as we speak."

On the tape, which lasts about 80 seconds, officers continue to detail the attacker's movements until one reports, "Badger's at the back of the bus, hacking off pieces and eating it."

Vince Weiguang Li, 40, faces second-degree murder charges for the slaying of a 22-year-old man, whom friends and family identified as Tim McLean. Police have not confirmed the victim's identity.

Holy dog shit, batman. Things must be even worse up in the great wide north than here as far as the economy goes. Hell, at least we're not starting to eat one another yet. Well, unless you mean in the figurative sense and that takes place in just about any ghetto in the country.

Maybe it's time to schedule a couple of airlift food drops so those crazy Canadian whackjobs don't have to resort to cannibalism. You can almost see the reasoning behind the nut's action though. I mean, the victim's name was McLean. Wasn't that some sort of burger put out by McDonalds a few years ago? In this health conscious age where everyone is watching their cholesterol level, who wouldn't be worried about fat content?

I have to say, I'm also a bit confuzzled about the police naming the guy 'Badger'. I'm not quite sure we're talking about the same animal here. It's that small little beaver-like critter that looks like a fat ferret, right? I mean, if I saw some psychopath stab the fuck out of someone, sever his head, and then go to town like it were an all-you-can-eat buffet, I'm not sure if 'Badger' would be the first synonymous animal to come to mind. All I can think is that either the first cop on the scene was a fatuous moron or there's some species of crazed canadian badger heretofore unknown to those of us south of the border.

Poll #1234484
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All

This news story has.....

Other:

Another (As if any sane person really needed one more) reason not to ride the bus.

Bus passenger beheaded seat mate, witness says

As horrified travelers watched, a Greyhound Canada bus passenger repeatedly stabbed and then decapitated a young man who was sitting and sleeping beside him, a witness said Thursday.
Police officers and cars surround the bus near Portage la Prairie, Manitoba, on Wednesday night.

Police officers and cars surround the bus near Portage la Prairie, Manitoba, on Wednesday night.

"There was a bloodcurdling scream. I was just reading my book, and all of a sudden, I heard it," Garnet Caton, who was sitting in front of the two men, said of the Wednesday night incident west of Portage la Prairie, Manitoba.

"It was like something between a dog howling and a baby crying, I guess you could say," Caton said. "I don't think it will leave me for a while."

Passengers exited the bus, and a trucker who stopped provided wrenches and crowbars to several of them so they could keep the suspect on the bus until police came, witnesses told Canadian TV. After a standoff, police took the man into custody early Saturday.

I thought at first that the killing might be justified. Like, maybe the dead guy had been sleeping with his head leaning on his seatmate. I figure that might be ample reason for decapitation. The news story goes on to say the guy was sleeping with his head against the window, so who knows what set off psycho there. Crazyass Canadians. Maybe he got some sort of brain-rotting STD off of a moose.

Every once and a while I read a piece of political commentary that is genius in its insightfulness. This isn't an event that happens all that often and it's something to be treasured when it does. I had that feeling of epiphany recently when reading an article in the Wall Street Journal about Obama and Jesse Jackson. More importantly, the article discusses not the men themselves, but the movements they represent. Here's its take on Jesse Jackson:

Their faith was in the easy moral leverage over white America that the civil rights victories of the 1960s had suddenly bestowed on them. So Mr. Jackson and his generation of black leaders made keeping whites "on the hook" the most sacred article of the post-'60s black identity.

They ushered in an extortionist era of civil rights, in which they said to American institutions: Your shame must now become our advantage. To argue differently -- that black development, for example, might be a more enduring road to black equality -- took whites "off the hook" and was therefore an unpardonable heresy. For this generation, an Uncle Tom was not a black who betrayed his race; it was a black who betrayed the group's bounty of moral leverage over whites. And now comes Mr. Obama, who became the first viable black presidential candidate precisely by giving up his moral leverage over whites.

This hit the nail right on the head as far as its take on the current civil rights movement. It has often functioned in an extortionist manner and the same pattern plays itself over and over. There's usually some racial incident, Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton come riding in to fan the flames of discontent, and then negotiate a settlement to make the specter of racism go away. The payment in these situations have varied but most have involved donations to the organizations run by Jackson or Sharpton and providing them and their associates a payoff. There have been innumerable examples of Jesse Jackson going to corporations to rail against the lack of minority participation, and the participation he demands always seems to involve the enrichment of close family or friends. Certainly, this is not the way that all parts of the civil rights movement has turned, but it definitely applies to its most public face in the form of these individuals.

Obama has taken this situation and turned it on its head to his own advantage.

Mr. Obama's great political ingenuity was very simple: to trade moral leverage for gratitude. Give up moral leverage over whites, refuse to shame them with America's racist past, and the gratitude they show you will constitute a new form of black power. They will love you for the faith you show in them.

So it is not hard to see why Mr. Jackson might have experienced Mr. Obama's emergence as something of a stiletto in the heart. Mr. Obama is a white "race card" -- moral leverage that whites can use against the moral leverage black leaders have wielded against them for decades. He is the nullification of Jesse Jackson -- the anti-Jackson.

And then Mr. Obama took it further by going to the NAACP with a message of black responsibility -- this after his speech on the need for black fathers to take responsibility for the children they sire. "Talking down to black people," Mr. Jackson mumbled.

Normally, "black responsibility" is a forbidden phrase for a black leader -- not because blacks reject responsibility, but because even the idea of black responsibility weakens moral leverage over whites. When Mr. Obama uses this language, whites of course are thankful. Black leaders seethe.

It's remarkable when you think about it just how hard Obama has strove to be 'race neutral' in this campaign. I can't think of a single instance where he has waved American's racist history in front of its face nor does he need to. We all know that the specter is there and by not explicitly pointing it out, he garners gratitude. Finally, a black leader that's not constantly screaming that you and everyone you know is a racist. That even if you don't think you're a racist, you're a racist simply because you live in this country or because of the color of your skin. The freedom from that moral hook must make some people almost giddy. You can almost see themselves saying, I can't be a racist, look, I'm going to vote for a black man.

All in all, just like the author of the article, I think this is a step forward. Certainly the extortionist policies of the civil rights movement as it stood was never going to really advance black America since its foundation was black inferiority. At least this way, everyone would get a fresh start of a sort. The question is, will this movement continue or simply stall and die if Obama loses to McCain in the fall?

There might be no surprise, but there's plenty of additional contempt. John Edwards has been caught with his pants down visiting his piece on the side and his bastard by her. I've always said that the guy was just about the smarmiest son of a bitch that has ever lived and he was just about the only presidential candidate I truly loathed.



The funniest part is that he was caught in his shenanigans by the National Enquirer. How much more low brow can you get?

Vice Presidential candidate Sen. John Edwards was caught visiting his mistress and secret love child at 2:40 this morning in a Los Angeles hotel by the NATIONAL ENQUIRER.

The married ex-senator from North Carolina - whose wife Elizabeth continues to battle cancer -- met with his mistress, blonde divorcée Rielle Hunter, at the Beverly Hilton on Monday night, July 21 - and the NATIONAL ENQUIRER was there! He didn't leave until early the next morning.

At 9:45 p.m. (PST) Monday, Edwards appeared at the hotel, and was dropped off at a side entrance. NATIONAL ENQUIRER reporter Alan Butterfield witnessed the ex-senator get out of a BMW driven by a male companion and stroll into the hotel.

Said Butterfield: "Edwards was not carrying anything. He walked in alone. He was wearing a blue dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up. He was looking around nervously before he entered the hotel.

"Once inside, he interestingly bypassed the lobby and ducked down a side stairs to go to the bottom floor to catch the elevator up - rather than taking the elevator in the main lobby. He went out of his way not to be seen."

Meanwhile, Rielle had reserved rooms 246 and 252 under the name of the friend who had accompanied her from Santa Barbara, Bob McGovern. Rielle was in one room and McGovern was in another with her baby. This allowed her and Edwards to spend time alone, a source revealed.

Edwards went out of the hotel briefly with Rielle, they were observed by the NATIONAL ENQUIRER and then went back to her room, where he stayed until attempting to sneak out of the hotel unseen at 2:40 a.m. (PST). But when he emerged alone from an elevator into the hotel basement he was greeted by several reporters from the NATIONAL ENQUIRER.

Senior NATIONAL ENQUIRER Reporter Alexander Hitchen asked Edwards why he was visiting Rielle and whether he was ready to confirm that he was the father of her baby.

Shocked to see a reporter, and without saying anything, Edwards ran up the stairs leading from the hotel basement to the lobby. But, spotting a photographer, he doubled back into the basement. As he emerged from the stairwell, reporter Butterfield questioned him about his hookup with Rielle.

Edwards did not answer and then ran into a nearby restroom. He stayed inside for about 15 minutes, refusing to answer questions from the NATIONAL ENQUIRER about what he was doing in the hotel. A group of hotel security men eventually escorted him from the men's room, while preventing the NATIONAL ENQUIRER reporters from following him out of the hotel.

Said reporter Hitchen: "After we confronted him about seeing Rielle, Edwards looked like a deer caught in headlights!

"He was clearly surprised that we had caught him at this very late hour inside the hotel.

"Some guests up at this late hour watched the spectacle in amusement from a staircase nearby."

Hilarity all around and it couldn't have happened to a nicer guy. I can just imagine him running around with a look of panic on his face while being chased by the National Enquirer. Just think of the phone calls he made from the bathroom while hiding in the stall. Man, those must've been a gold mine for comedy. He can add this little bit to his old and tired coal miner's son story. It would fit right in since those personal tidbits is all that he's ever had to run on, lacking anything that even hints of policy wins or executive ability. If I weren't sure that he and his wife will simply pull a Bill and Hillary, I would wish her luck in divorcing him and taking him for every cent he has. Considering he's a trial lawyer, it's not as if he earned his money anyway, bleeding it away from poor clients. The entire profession of trial lawyer needs to have its collective ass kicked. There's no way to justify the cut of the judgment that they receive, mostly by screwing people with offers of no 'upfront' costs and convincing them to sign away large chunks of their futures. It's just like a case of predatory lending but worse. At least in predatory lending you usually have choices. When you deal with a trial lawyer, you've already been fucked and just trying to get someone to help unfuck you ends up fucking you twice.

Anyway, the story is just starting to permeate the MSM and Slate had a great little list of John Edwards' excuses. Here were a few of my favorites:

• Edwards met Hunter, who produced videos for the former presidential candidate’s campaign, to shoot a new "webisode" for the series they started last year. This one was going to be about Edwards accepting Barack Obama’s offer to be his running mate. They had to meet in secret at 2 a.m. because Obama didn’t want the news to leak.



• Hunter was planning to sue the Enquirer for defamation, and wanted Edwards, an acclaimed trial lawyer, to represent her.



• Edwards wanted to confirm the baby was not his but couldn’t be sure until it started growing hair.



• A local charity asked Edwards to meet with a single mother who had no health care and couldn’t earn a living wage. He had no idea it would be this one!



• It was a setup by John McCain, who hates anything to do with the Hilton.

Good times. Good times.

Remember a bit back when I was posting about how I was sure those limey assholes killed their own kid while Jon Benet's parents were likely to be innocent? It seems that just a bit after that, I was proven right, at least as far as Jon Benet went. Since her murder ages back, DNA technology has continued to improve until now, they've developed something called touch DNA tests. This is some seriously scary futuristic shit where they can pull your dna out of your fingerprints or anything else you might have touched. No longer do they need a chunk of your hair or a dab of your blood. You touch anything and they can get lucky and extract dna from it.

Anyway, they tested the underware she was wearing the night of her death and managed to find a DNA sample that matched right up to the blood that had previously been found. They ran it against the parents, the police, the EMS, and just about every other son of a bitch who had been in the house and found zero matches. The prosecutor even wrote a letter to John Ramsey apologising for having placed his family under a cloud of suspicion all those years. That's pretty remarkable since DA's are notoriously loathe to admit that they, or their office, were wrong.

I know civil libertarians always throw a fit about this, but I really think that everyone should be DNA'ed and fingerprinted at birth. I mean, we record people's heights and weights and pictures on a driver's license. I don't see why it's any more an invasion of privacy to collect a few skin cells you're not going to need anyway. The samples should be kept in a database and then only used to compare crime samples to. Just think about what it would do for crime solving and, more importantly, the certainty that the right person had been apprehended.

I thought I'd try to be a bit topical today. I was just looking through CNN and saw that the Portuguese police are finally going to close the case on Madeleine McCann. Frankly, it's probably well past time since they've been beating that dead horse for ages. There hasn't been a lead that's provided any new information in at least a year. I followed along pretty closely in the early days of the investigation and I'm still with those who say the parents did it. As much as movies and thriller novels would like to make us think otherwise, strangers don't usually walk into other people's homes and wander off with their children. The fact that the parents just happen to have left a freaking three year old and a pair of two year olds by themselves in a house so they could go out drinking with friends just tells you that something's not quite kosher. Seriously, who the fuck does something like that anyway?

The real kicker as far as I'm concerned is that no body was ever found. That really does suggest that whoever offed the kid had plenty of time to plan and dispose. I've never bought those assertions that some ring of pedophiles kidnapped her for use in their toddler sex rings. I mean, there are craploads of kids out there and probably poor parents willing to sell them to you. You'd have to be a complete idiot to swipe the kid of a tourist if you wanted to get away with the crime. Even if it were some sort of impulse snatch and grab, it's just hard to believe that you could dispose of the body so well in a short period of time that it's never found without any sort of planning. My personal theory is the kid kicked the bucket, likely through overdose or child abuse, and the parents pitched her into the ocean with a fisher price anchor tied around her neck. I have no good evidence for that idea but there's just no possibility of this being a stranger abduction and murder. The police supposedly found faint traces of her blood in the house. What kinda freak who just happens to walk past a house wanders in, kills/bloodies a kid, cleans up after themselves, and then carries the body out the door with them?

In the end, we'll never know exactly what happened. It's like the John Benet Ramsey case all over again. It's odd, but in that situation I believed the parents had notta to do with it. I dunno why exactly but something about the McCann's just give me the willies. I just don't like them nor find them trustworthy in any way. At least with all this publicity we can be pretty sure they won't kill their remaining kids. Well, not without an airtight alibi ready anyway.

Poll #1217143
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All

Who killed/abducted Madeleine McCann?

Police: Man Stabs Mom, Assaults Another Woman With Chicken

YPSILANTI, Mich. -- Police said an Ypsilanti man is accused of stabbing his mother with a fork and hitting another woman over the head with a frozen chicken.

Frederick McKaney, 40, was arraigned in a Jackson courtroom on Thursday on two felony assault charges, one count of assault and battery and one count of resisting an officer.

"He stabbed his mother in the back of the neck when she refused to give him money, and then, an hour later, he attacked a neighbor woman with a chicken," Jackson County Chief Assistant Prosecutor Mark Blumer told the Ann Arbor news.

Police said McKaney went to his mother's house and demanded money. When she refused, he stabbed her and took off on his bicycle, police said.

A short time later, he encountered two other women talking on the sidewalk on Woodbridge Street.

The woman said he said something nasty to them and hit one of them over the head with 10 pounds of frozen chicken.

The woman went to the hospital and got stitches in her head.

McKaney's mother suffered minor injuries from the stabbing.

I stumbled over this story while at Origins and figured I just had to relate it. It's not every day you see a news story about someone assaulting someone else with poultry. I wonder if they classify the chicken as a deadly weapon. I mean, it was frozen. I'm sure you could possibly kill someone with a 10 pound bowling ball so death is just as likely with a 10 pound oven stuffer roaster.

In other news, I've finished uploading the videos from the con up to the laptop. I just have to go through and stick some of the clips together and then port them up to google. I'm a bit stymied at the moment since watching some of that shaky camera footage has made me a weeee bit nauseous. I'm taking a break and hoping the urge to spew vomit passes quickly. I should have taken more care not to wiggle the flip ultra around while I was filming. Then again, it just might be the percocets which are causing the problem. It's hard to tell.

The worst natural disaster in the world has got to be flooding. It might not kill all that many people (at least in a developed country) but the damage it causes is worse than all the others. I've been looking at a few of the CNN clips of flooding in Iowa and reading news stories about the floods in China and other places. That has convinced me that only a complete moron would ever buy a home anywhere near a river or in any basin. You can't predict flooding with any real accuracy and when it hits, there's fuck nothing you can do about it. Even sandbagging your entire house is only likely to provide minimal effect. At least with hurricanes you can board up windows and whatnot.

Really though, it's the aftereffects that are the most damaging part. There's a quote from Thomas Covenant that's stuck with me over the years. Paraphrased, it says that to really hurt a man you take something from him and then give it back to him broken. That just paints flood damage to a T in my opinion. The water damage leaves everything standing but it's now rotted and corrupted and there's a good chance you'll never be able to fix it again. At least if a Tornado picks your house up and drops it, it's just completely flattened and destroyed. It must be easier to let go of it then to know that everything still looks more or less the same on the surface but it damaged beyond repair.

Police Find, Defuse Chicken Bomb

SIMSBURY - — As bomb scares go, this one might be the most unusual for local police.

A motorist on Powder Forest Drive Friday morning noticed what looked like a whole chicken — the kind bought at grocery stores for roasting — with a pipe bomb stuffed inside, police said Monday.

When they arrived on the scene around 9 a.m. officers found the roaster had an improvised explosive device where the fowl's innards should have been.

They closed the road for part of the morning as the Hartford Police Department's bomb squad was called to detonate the device, police said.

You just know there's some crazyass story behind this.

I ran across a couple of similarly bizzare news stories over the past few days and it got me to thinking. First though, here are the stories:

Stockton Man Beaten -- With His Own Artificial Leg

STOCKTON, CA - Police are looking for three suspects who attacked an elderly couple early Wednesday evening and used an unusual weapon to attack them -- the man's artificial leg.

Ma Khamchai, 66, and his wife, 62 year-old Noi were walking near their Lindsay Street home when they were confronted by two women and a man who demanded Noi's purse.

Ma fought back, kicking at his attackers, but in the scuffle his artificial leg came off. The robbers then used the leg to beat the couple.

Man hurls hedgehog at teen, pays fine

WELLINGTON, New Zealand - A New Zealand man accused of assault with prickly weapon — a hedgehog — has been fined by a court and ordered to pay most of his fine to his teenage victim.

Whakatane District Court was told Thursday that William Singalargh picked up the hedgehog and threw it several yards to hit a 15-year-old boy in the North Island east coast town of Whakatane on Feb. 9.

Police told the court the creature had hit the victim in the leg, causing a large, red welt and several puncture marks. The teen did not need medical treatment.

It remained unclear whether the hedgehog was dead or alive at the time of the attack, but Senior Sgt. Bruce Jenkins said earlier that it was dead when collected as evidence.

So, if you had a choice would you rather be beaten by your own artificial leg or have a, possibly living, hedgehog hurled at you hard enough to break the skin?

Poll #1197115
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All

I would choose....

Microscopic ramen bowl believed to be world's smallest

TOKYO, Japan (AP) -- Japanese scientists say they have used cutting-edge technology to create a noodle bowl so small, it can be seen only through a microscope.

Mechanical engineering professor Masayuki Nakao said Thursday that he and his students at the University of Tokyo used a carbon-based material to produce a noodle bowl with a diameter of 1/25,000 of an inch.

The project was aimed at developing nanotube-processing technology.

Nakao said the Japanese-style ramen bowl was carved out of microscopic nanotubes.

Nanotubes are tube-shaped pieces of carbon, measuring about 1/10,000 of the thickness of a human hair.

The ramen bowl experiment included a string of "noodles" that measured 1/12,500 of an inch in length.

Doesn't exactly look appetizing, does it? Besides, to be a real bowl of ramen, shouldn't it have a fishball or something in it?

I just hope all of this has some practical purpose down the line. I'm sure the guiness people are happy to see this sort of thing but it seems a bit ridiculous to me. Besides, the darn thing looks ambiguous enough that I can't help but wonder if they made it first and then tried to figure out what it looked the most like so they could market it to the world. I'm pretty sure CNN wouldn't be carrying the story if the headline was 'Japanese scientists make world's smallest block and squiggly thing'.

Penis theft panic hits city

KINSHASA (Reuters) - Police in Congo have arrested 13 suspected sorcerers accused of using black magic to steal or shrink men's penises after a wave of panic and attempted lynchings triggered by the alleged witchcraft.

Reports of so-called penis snatching are not uncommon in West Africa, where belief in traditional religions and witchcraft remains widespread, and where ritual killings to obtain blood or body parts still occur.

Rumors of penis theft began circulating last week in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo's sprawling capital of some 8 million inhabitants. They quickly dominated radio call-in shows, with listeners advised to beware of fellow passengers in communal taxis wearing gold rings.

Purported victims, 14 of whom were also detained by police, claimed that sorcerers simply touched them to make their genitals shrink or disappear, in what some residents said was an attempt to extort cash with the promise of a cure.

"You just have to be accused of that, and people come after you. We've had a number of attempted lynchings. ... You see them covered in marks after being beaten," Kinshasa's police chief, Jean-Dieudonne Oleko, told Reuters on Tuesday.

Police arrested the accused sorcerers and their victims in an effort to avoid the sort of bloodshed seen in Ghana a decade ago, when 12 suspected penis snatchers were beaten to death by angry mobs. The 27 men have since been released.

"I'm tempted to say it's one huge joke," Oleko said.

"But when you try to tell the victims that their penises are still there, they tell you that it's become tiny or that they've become impotent. To that I tell them, 'How do you know if you haven't gone home and tried it'," he said.

Some Kinshasa residents accuse a separatist sect from nearby Bas-Congo province of being behind the witchcraft in revenge for a recent government crackdown on its members.

"It's real. Just yesterday here, there was a man who was a victim. We saw. What was left was tiny," said 29-year-old Alain Kalala, who sells phone credits near a Kinshasa police station.

I wonder if there's actually a law on the books against penis thievery. I'm afraid I'm going to have to charge with a 10-13, that's aggravated genital theft punishable by up to 5 years in prison and being subjected to the dunking stool.

Every once and a while, you run across a blurb for a news/magazine article and just can't help but want to read the rest. In this case Harper's magazine did a 6-page story on the magical penis thieves of Africa. See? You're interested already, aren't you? Unfortunately, the only way to access the article at the moment is to pay $17 to Harper's magazine for an online subscription and while I might be curious, I don't think I'm $17 curious. So instead, I figured I'd just do some reading on the history of penis thievery without taking a look at the article.

It turns out that the idea of penis theft is pretty common in Nigeria and other countries in that area. The crime includes not only the outright theft of penises but the shrinking of them as well. Hell, I've known a few women in my time who had the same effect. Maybe they should be charged with something based on that.

Anyway, magical penis theft has often grown into an epidemic of cultural hysteria. I guess it'd be sort of like seeing non-stop 'SUMMER OF THE SHARK' stories on cable news.

Ilechukwu reports on "epidemics" of temporary magical penis loss in Nigeria during the mid-1970s, and again in 1990. A major Nigerian episode of "vanishing" genitalia in 1990, mainly affected men, but sometimes women, while walking in public places. Accusations were typically triggered by incidental body contact with a stranger that was interpreted as intentionally contrived, followed by unusual sensations within the scrotum. The affected person would then physically grab their genitals to confirm that all or parts were missing, after which he would shout a phrase such as "Thief! my genitals are gone!". The "victim" would then completely disrobe to convince quickly gathering crowds of bystanders that his penis was actually missing. The accused was threatened and usually beaten (sometimes fatally) until the genitals were "returned."

While some "victims" soon realized that their genitalia were intact, "many then claimed that they were 'returned' at the time they raised the alarm or that, although the penis had been 'returned, it was shrunken and so probably a 'wrong' one or just the ghost of a penis". In such instances, the assault or lynching would usually continue until the "original, real" penis reappeared.

I must admit, I'm sort of enamored with this idea. I can just imagine some Nigerian guy saying, 'Yeah, well, it was bigger before but then there was that magical penis thief that came to town.' It's also fun to imagine just what things would be like if it were possible to steal penises. Excuse me, but we caught this guy climbing out of your bedroom window last night and he had a giant bag of penises with him. Could you please look at the contents and tell us which penis is yours? At which point you could anticipate a bit of a scuffle as many of the victims tried to trade up for a larger model.

In the end, I guess what goes around comes around. I think the next time I get a phishing scam from Nigeria, I'll just respond that if they don't leave me alone I'll send someone to steal their penis.

Purr-fect station chief brings passengers back

TOKYO - A money-losing Japanese train company has found the purr-fect pet mascot to draw crowds and bring back business — tabby Tama.

All the 9-year-old female cat does is sit by the entrance of Kishi Station in western Japan, wearing a black uniform cap and posing for photos for the tourists who are now flocking in droves from across the nation.

Tama has been doing such a good job of raising revenue for the troubled Kishikawa train line that she was recently promoted to "super-station-master."

"She never complains, even though passengers touch her all over the place. She is an amazing cat. She has patience and charisma," Wakayama Electric Railway Co. spokeswoman Yoshiko Yamaki told The Associated Press Monday. "She is the perfect station master."

Appointing a cat to turn around fortunes makes cultural sense in Japan, where cats are considered good luck and are believed to bring in business.

People are snatching up novelty goods — postcards, erasers, notebooks and pins — decorated with Tama's photos. There's even a special 1,365 yen ($13) book of photos of Tama called, "Diary of Tama, the Station Master."

The Kishikawa line had been losing $4.9 million a year as passenger numbers fell steadily to as low as about 5,000 a day, or some 1.9 million a year.

After Tama's appointment last year passengers have been gradually returning, recently rising 10 percent to about 2.1 million a year.

In December Tama was rewarded with bonus pay — all in cat food.

I have no doubt the trains run on time at this particular station. The station master comes out and sucks out the souls of any conductor unlucky enough to be late.

It's probably just a sad sign of our times that cats are put into managerial positions. Seeing as they're willing to work for cat food (and the opportunity to further to forces of darkness), more companies are likely to follow suit in catsourcing their labor. If you thought that calling customer service is a nightmare now because of call centers in India, just wait a few months and see what happens when it's staffed by lolcats.

I am sort of curious what the next level of promotion is for Tama. I mean, there's station master and then super station master. What's next? I'm betting it'll be happy lucky super sparkle station master. They'll probably also allocate it one magical transformation per day and the ability to wield a 5-foot long sword.

Indiana Jones to invade Russia and smack those commie rat bastards a good one.

That should be the news headline for the CNN story I just read if newspaper editors were as stupid as russian communists. Here's the substance of the story:

MOSCOW, Russia (AP) -- Members of Russia's Communist Party are calling for a nationwide boycott of the new Indiana Jones movie, saying it aims to undermine communist ideology and distort history.

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" stars Harrison Ford as an archaeologist in 1957 competing with an evil KGB agent, played by Cate Blanchett, to find a skull endowed with mystic powers.

It hit Russian screens Thursday.

Communist Party members in St. Petersburg said on a web site this week that the Soviet Union in 1957 "did not send terrorists to the States," but launched a satellite, "which evoked the admiration of the whole world."

Moscow Communist lawmaker Andrei Andreyev said Saturday "it is very disturbing if talented directors want to provoke a new Cold War."

What a buncha spazztic morons. They do have a point though. When we studied the historical record in school when the real Indiana Jones battled communists to seize the mystical artifact, it was nothing like how it was in the movie. Oh wait, that's right, this is fiction and never happened. That's why it's not possible for it to distort history.

I do sort of like the idea that this movie could provoke a new cold war though. Talk about hilarity. Can you imagine if 50 years from now all the history texts had an entry about the War of Indiana Jones and the dire political impact it had? I'm sure that would make Stephen Spielburg happy. The royalties would keep rolling in forever.

I ran across something unexpected while reading the CNN headlines earlier. It seems that Lori Drew is going to get what's coming to her after all. In case you don't recall, she was the mother from that myspace suicide case a while back. The last I had heard about it, a grand jury had been issuing subpeonas, but I never anticipated that the case would amount to much. It seemed that they were simply grasping at straws. Well, it looks like the prosecutor ended up hitting paydirt.

Mom indicted in deadly MySpace hoax

LOS ANGELES, California (AP) -- A federal grand jury indicted a Missouri woman Thursday for her alleged role in perpetrating a hoax on the online social network MySpace against a 13-year-old neighbor who committed suicide.

Lori Drew of suburban St. Louis is said to have helped create a false-identity MySpace account to contact Megan Meier, who thought she was chatting with a 16-year-old boy named Josh Evans. Josh didn't exist.

Megan hanged herself at home in October 2006 after receiving cruel messages, including one stating the world would be better off without her.

Salvador Hernandez, assistant agent in charge of the Los Angeles FBI office, called the case heart-rending.

"The Internet is a world unto itself. People must know how far they can go before they must stop. They exploited a young girl's weaknesses," Hernandez said. "Whether the defendant could have foreseen the results, she's responsible for her actions."

Drew was charged with one count of conspiracy and three counts of accessing protected computers without authorization to get information used to inflict emotional distress on the girl.

Drew has denied creating the account or sending messages to Megan.

U.S. Attorney Thomas P. O'Brien said this was the first time the federal statute on accessing protected computers has been used in a social-networking case. It has been used in the past to address hacking.

"This was a tragedy that did not have to happen," O'Brien said.

Both the girl and MySpace are named as victims in the case, he said.

MySpace is a subsidiary of Beverly Hills, California-based Fox Interactive Media Inc., which is owned by News Corp. The indictment noted that MySpace computer servers are located in Los Angeles County.

Due to juvenile privacy rules, the U.S. attorney's office said, the indictment refers to the girl as M.T.M.

FBI agents in St. Louis and Los Angeles investigated the case, Hernandez said.

Each of the four counts carries a maximum possible penalty of five years in prison.

Drew will be arraigned in St. Louis and then moved to Los Angeles for trial.

I don't really know how I feel about this case anymore. I agree that the mom was a douche and should have faced scorn but I just don't know if I believe there should be criminal charges. It's not exactly her fault that the girl was an unbalanced nutjob exactly. It'd be different if she had handed her the rope but I'm not sure it's exactly foreseeable that she would off herself.

The other aspect of this case that bothers me is the new information that's come out since that shows that it was Drew's 19 year old employee who actually created the account and also issued the fateful 'the world would be better off without you' message that is believed to have precipitated the suicide. I'm sure she was acting, at least to some degree, at Lori Drew's behest, but there's no reason she should have escaped being charged as well. With that information out there and the lack of other indictments, it just makes this look like a witch hunt. I'm also not sure that it bodes well to have this case as a precedent either.