Archive for April, 2008
Lyre Bird
This bird pulls a Michael Winslow – and if you don’t get that reference then you really don’t have an appreciation for fine 80’s cinema.
The good stuff starts right around the 45 second mark, but the really good stuff starts around the 1:50 mark.
[Thanks, Nathan S!]
300-pound inmate complains Ark. jail doesn’t feed him well
BENTONVILLE, Ark. – An inmate awaiting trial on a murder charge is suing the county, complaining he has lost more than 100 pounds because of the jailhouse menu.
Broderick Lloyd Laswell says he isn’t happy that he’s down to 308 pounds after eight months in the Benton County jail. He has filed a federal lawsuit complaining the jail doesn’t provide inmates with enough food.
According to the suit, Laswell weighed 413 pounds when he was jailed in September. Police say he and a co-defendant fatally beat and stabbed a man, then set his home on fire.
Tresling
They said it couldn’t be done. Mixing Tetris and arm wrestling… not possible. But just like Stallone in “Over the Top,” the impossible happened, dreams came true, tears were shed. I give you Tresling: Not just a two-player version of best game on earth, not just a fist-pumping, back ally arm wrestling match to end all matches… but a mash-up so heroic Zeus himself could not imagine it.
Come friends, its time to join the revolution.
Link (with video)
Seems like an easy record to beat, especially on a college campus
A group of 127 Notre Dame students broke the record for the World’s Longest Spoon Train in the middle of South Quad Thursday afternoon.
Junior Charlie Mahoney originally proposed the idea to his friends as a joke, but the scheme slowly gained credence until finally he and fellow ski team member Joel Sharbrough decided to make the biggest spoon train ever.
“We obviously loved spooning in the first place, so we just thought why don’t we be the best spooners we can be? And it just spiraled into something huge,” event coordinator Sharbrough said.
As ski team spoon co-captain with Kerry McGuire, he planned and advanced the idea for the event.
Spooning occurs when two people lay on their sides facing the same direction so that they fit snugly together.
“It’s not immoral at all,” ski team junior Katie Rehberger said. “It’s a way to unite the campus.”
Entire Bible being read aloud on Capitol Hill
CAPITOL HILL (AP)- The 19th annual U.S. Capitol Bible Reading Marathon has started in a cold drizzle.
The public reading began Sunday evening and is continuing non-stop, day and night, until the final “Amen” of Revelation is read aloud this Thursday – the National Day of Prayer.
The Marathon’s co-director, the Reverend Michael Hall, says the readers’ only shelter is an umbrella, but bad weather has never stopped them before.
He says every time slot is filled, with 18 members of Congress among the volunteer readers.
Passers-by typically watch briefly out of curiosity or ignore the Bible reading altogether, but Hall prays God will use it to change lives and call the nation to repentance.
Praying for lower gas prices
Rocky Twyman has a radical solution for surging gasoline prices: prayer.
Twyman – a community organizer, church choir director and public relations consultant from the Washington, D.C., suburbs – staged a pray-in at a San Francisco Chevron station on Friday, asking God for cheaper gas. He did the same thing in the nation’s Capitol on Wednesday, with volunteers from a soup kitchen joining in. Today he will lead members of an Oakland church in prayer.
Yes, it’s come to that.
“God is the only one we can turn to at this point,” said Twyman, 59. “Our leaders don’t seem to be able to do anything about it. The prices keep soaring and soaring.”
‘Free Tibet’ flags made in China
Police in southern China have discovered a factory manufacturing Free Tibet flags, media reports say.
The factory in Guangdong had been completing overseas orders for the flag of the Tibetan government-in-exile.
Workers said they thought they were just making colourful flags and did not realise their meaning.
But then some of them saw TV images of protesters holding the emblem and they alerted the authorities, according to Hong Kong’s Ming Pao newspaper.
For those of you in need of an instructional workout video this morning
And I find it funny I found this video off a blog titled “Liberally Lean”
Soldiers are coming back to this Dad’s video of run-down barracks sparks military response
The U.S. military is promising action to address conditions in a barracks at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, after a soldier’s father posted images on YouTube showing a building that he said “should be condemned.”
“This is embarrassing. It’s disgusting. It makes me mad as hell,” Ed Frawley said of the building where his son, Sgt. Jeff Frawley, had to live upon his return this month from a 15-month deployment to Afghanistan.
Frawley said Monday that Army Vice Chief of Staff Gen. Dick Cody called him to say he shares Frawley’s anger and that “there’s no excuse.” Cody said he would not want his own sons or any troops to return to such conditions, Frawley said.
Frawley’s 10-minute video shows still photos from throughout the building, which appears to be falling apart and filled with mold and rust.
Paint — which Frawley said is lead-based — is chipping. Ceiling tiles are missing. A broken drain pipe allows sewer gas into the building, while another one has tissues stuffed into it in an apparent effort to stop the gas from coming in.
Photos from the communal bathroom show some of the most disgusting images. In one, a soldier stands in a sink to avoid what Frawley describes as 3 inches of sewage water that filled the floor when toilets overflowed.
Who made Padre Pio’s new face?
From my understanding, the leaders of the Catholic faith will sometimes exhume a body of a saint for public display. The most current is Padre Pio.
The corpse of Padre Pio, exhumed amid protests from relatives and locals in his home town (see earlier post) has been displayed in a glass coffin and launched with a special open-air Mass by a Cardinal. “Padre Pio was dressed in a brown robe and his was covered in a life-like silicone mask” says the report, and already over 700,000 people have registered to view his body at the Capuchin friary in San Giovanni Rotondo. The priest died in 1968, at the age of 81, after living for decades with bleeding wounds on his hands and feet – ’stigmata” – which were never explained. Link
But I wasn’t aware that the face you actually see is a mask created by the British company GEMS.
Wanted: Women to eat chocolate for a year
LONDON, England (CNN) — Scientists in the UK are seeking 150 women to eat chocolate every day for a year in the cause of medical research.
The trial, at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, eastern England, will test whether a natural compound found in cocoa, the main ingredient of chocolate, could cut the risk of heart disease among women with diabetes.
