Misc: Oldest English words identified.
*takes off hat and bows deeply*A sex-mad Russian died after guzzling a bottle of Viagra pills to keep him going for a 12-hour orgy with two women pals.The women had bet mechanic Sergey Tuganov £3,000 that he wouldn’t be able to satisfy them both non-stop for the half-day sex marathon.
But minutes after winning the wager, the randy 28-year-old dropped dead with a heart attack, revealed Moscow police.
One of the women, named only as Alina, said: “We called emergency services but it was too late, there was nothing they could do.”
From the Sun.
DENVER (AP) - A good Samaritan who helped push three people out of the path of a pickup truck before being struck and injured has gotten a strange rewarded for his good deed: A jaywalking ticket.Family members say 58-year-old Jim Moffett and another man were helping two elderly women cross a busy Denver street in a snowstorm when he was hit Friday night.
Moffett suffered bleeding in the brain, broken bones, a dislocated shoulder and a possible ruptured spleen. He was in serious but stable condition Wednesday.
The Colorado State Patrol issued the citation. Trooper Ryan Sullivan says that despite Moffett's intentions, jaywalking contributed to the accident.
Another good Samaritan that night also was cited for jaywalking, while the pickup driver was cited with careless driving that led to injury. Sullivan says the two elderly women haven't been cited but the investigation is ongoing.
They should contact the Whizzo Chocolate Factory!Scientists in Belarus say they have come up with a way to jump-start their credit-crunched economy - breeding edible frogs.
Boffins say that exporting the local delicacy could turn the former Soviet state into an agriculture super-power.
"We have immense reserves. The republic could expect a huge foreign currency inflow if it developed the industrial breeding of these amphibians," explained Ruslan Novitsky, a member of the country's National Academy of Sciences.
More on crunchy frogs here.
The Obama administration will seek to reinstate the assault weapons ban that expired in 2004 during the Bush administration, Attorney General Eric Holder said today."As President Obama indicated during the campaign, there are just a few gun-related changes that we would like to make, and among them would be to reinstitute the ban on the sale of assault weapons," Holder told reporters.
Holder said that putting the ban back in place would not only be a positive move by the United States, it would help cut down on the flow of guns going across the border into Mexico, which is struggling with heavy violence among drug cartels along the border.
"I think that will have a positive impact in Mexico, at a minimum." Holder said at a news conference on the arrest of more than 700 people in a drug enforcement crackdown on Mexican drug cartels operating in the U.S.
Sad and philosophically ironic all at once. From the Daily Mail:
An Oxford University student killed himself just hours after being told his PhD thesis needed to be improved, an inquest has heard.
A coroner was told how former Buddhist monk Juncnok Park hanged himself after what he saw was a colossal disappointment and an embarrassment.
The criticism was probably the first time the South Korean mature student had ever failed at anything in his life.
The inquest heard how Mr Park, who had served ten years under holy orders in his native country, shunned television and other pastimes to devote himself to gaining a doctorate in Buddhism.
It was hours after his academic supervisor confirmed his fears - that examiners believed he was not yet ready to be awarded a doctorate from the university - that the 37-year-old student took his life.
OMGBOUNCYFISH!"Psychedelica" seems the perfect name for a species of fish that is a wild swirl of tan and peach zebra stripes and behaves in ways contrary to its brethren. So says University of Washington's Ted Pietsch, who is the first to describe the new species in the scientific literature and thus the one to select the name.Read more here.Psychedelica is perhaps even more apt given the cockamamie way the fish swim, some with so little control they look intoxicated and should be cited for DUI.
Members of Histiophryne psychedelica, or H. psychedelica, don't so much swim as hop. Each time they strike the seafloor they use their fins to push off and they expel water from tiny gill openings on their sides to jettison themselves forward. With tails curled tightly to one side –which surely limits their ability to steer – they look like inflated rubber balls bouncing hither and thither.
Protecting their cuisine or they don't want foreigners staying and making a living in their town? Italy is becoming really lame and scary. If they don't like foreign influences, maybe tourists should stay home.Lucca, a tourist hot spot that lies 40 miles from Florence, has declared a ban on the opening of any more "ethnic" food outlets in what it says is a campaign to preserve authentic Italian – or more specifically, Tuscan – culinary traditions.
The initiative, announced by the city council last month, has sparked an intense debate about whether it amounts to legitimate cultural protectionism in an age of rapid globalization, or an ugly manifestation of gastronomic racism.
Lucca's center-right council, which passed the measure by 23 votes to 11, says ethnic restaurants betray Tuscany's culinary heritage.
Kebabs, curries, and couscous are now out, in favor of such local specialities as zuppa di faro, a grain-based soup, and torta di spinaci, a tart made with spinach.
The ban is staunchly supported by Italy's agriculture minister. "This is not a battle against anything or anyone, but a defense of our culture and our agriculture," said Luca Zaia, a member of the right-wing, anti-immigration Northern League, which campaigns for greater autonomy for Italy's rich north. "In Italy we have available 4,500 typical food products. Every one of these represents the culture and history of our country," he added.
Others are embarrassed by what they see as a case of extreme parochialism.
The new law is "an absurdity," said an opposition MP, Andrea Marcucci, because it would "make it impossible to open in Lucca not only a kebab shop but also a high-class French bar serving oysters and champagne." The legislation had damaged Lucca's image and was a big mistake, Mr. Marcucci added.
Critics of Lucca's new law point out that many of the staples of Italian food have foreign origins – tomatoes, for instance, were introduced from South America, and pasta is widely believed to have been brought from China by Marco Polo.
And what of food from Sicily, which has a heavy Arab influence – should couscous, a staple of Sicilian dishes, be classed as foreign or Italian?
Yay, I'm not alone! From the NY Post:
Turns out that many New Yorkers think they're a bunch of drunks who love to overeat and smoke, according to a poll released today.
The survey by the Siena College Research Institute found that 44 percent of state residents claim they are overweight, while a whopping 63 percent have chugged down an alcoholic drink over the last year.
As a result, only 28 percent of New Yorkers believe they are in good health and at the correct weight.
"When it comes to health, nutrition and exercise, knowing and doing just don't match up," said Don Levy, director of the Siena College Research Institute.
Read the full article here.Facebook, MySpace and other social networking websites are rewiring children's brains making them more self-centered and reducing their attention spans, a neuroscientist has warned.The nature of communication on the sites could stunt development of the brain, Oxford University neuroscientist Susan Greenfield said.
"We know how small babies need constant reassurance that they exist", she told the UK's Daily Mail.
"My fear is that these technologies are infantilising the brain into the state of small children who are attracted by buzzing noises and bright lights, who have a small attention span and who live for the moment."
The Elder God may still be asleep, but his children are awakening.... Creepy parts in bold.
Scientists have found some odd life forms in Lake Huron.
Peculiar geological formations are supporting floating plumes and purple mats of microbes dwelling in enclaves of the Great Lake, researchers report. The odd biology is more akin to what is found in some of Earth's most extreme environments.
The mats are located about 66 feet (20 meters) below the surface of Lake Huron — the third largest of North America's Great Lakes — where researchers have found sinkholes made by water dissolving parts of an ancient underlying seabed.
More horror at LiveScience.
I think I've got a double-shot grande... in my pants! From the Houston Chronicle:VASSALBORO, Maine — Cup size has more than one meaning at a new central Maine coffeehouse.
Servers are topless at the Grand View Topless Coffee Shop, which opened its doors Monday on a busy road in Vassalboro. A sign outside says, “Over 18 only.” Another says, “No cameras, no touching, cash only.”
On Tuesday, two men sipped coffee at a booth while three topless waitresses and a bare-chested waiter stood nearby. Topless waitress Susie Wiley said men, women and couples have stopped by.
The coffee shop raised the ire of dozens of residents when it went before the town planning board last month. Town officials said the coffee shop met the letter of the law.
Not to be insensitive, but I definitely want to go to Thailand now.
A BRITISH backpacker who collapsed on a train in Thailand may have died from 'excitement', say medical experts.
Algernon Lendrum, 19, suffered a brain haemorrhage in 2008 while on a 14-hour over night train to Bangkok.
The teenage traveller from Stove in England keeled over when a rare undiagnosed congenital weakness caused a blood vessel in his brain to burst, reports the UK's Daily Telegraph.
Pathologist Dr Peter Wilkins, who discovered the burst aneurism, said the symptom is "often associated with excitement or stress, such as railway journeys or changing trains."
From the Guardian:One summer day in 2006, Lucy Parkinson, then 21 years old, was shopping in Ealing, west London, when she heard behind her an altercation between two men. "I was crossing the road, and got stuck with a pack of other people at a traffic island," she says. "I was wearing a long-sleeved blouse and a white knee-length skirt." One man ran off and the other told her he had "chased him away because he had seen him 'upskirting' me".
Upskirting is the term used to describe taking photographs, often on a mobile-phone camera, up an unsuspecting woman's skirt.
"I hadn't even noticed it happening," says Parkinson, "and that's the most unsettling part - in a city, you just don't notice physical proximity to strangers. It could have happened a dozen other times too, for all I know."
It is impossible to judge how many women have been victims of upskirting, though a quick internet search yields hundreds of sites with hundreds of thousands of images. And there may be millions more pictures on phones and laptops that have never been shared. They have been taken in the street, on escalators in shopping centres, on trains, at bus stops and in supermarkets, schools, offices and nightclubs.
Australia's been in the news lately with random violence against tourists. And not the rabid dingo kind. From News.com.au:
POLICE believe a beer stubbie was full when it was thrown from a passing car and smashed into the face of a cycling Swiss tourist.
The Geelong Advertiser reports the weight of the fluid added to the shattering impact as it broke his eye socket, nose, a tooth and prescription sunglasses and sent him flying from his bike.
He was fulfilling a dream to ride from Melbourne to Geelong and on to the Great Ocean Road when the incident happened about 6.20pm (AEST) yesterday.
The 27-year-old tourist, identified as Thomas, lay on the bitumen verge of the Princes Freeway, blood pouring from the split in the flesh beside his nose, knocked senseless by a senseless act.
He had slowed on the Geelong-bound verge of the freeway to cautiously cross the Lara exit lane. He looked carefully and no cars were exiting. That's the last he can remember.
From ABC News:
It's a war being fought across the country in all types of workplaces. An estimated 54 million people say they have been bullied at work, according to a 2007 survey by Zogby International.
While men tend to target male and female employees equally, women bosses are likely to aim their hostility toward other women more than 70 percent of the time, according to a survey by the Workplace Bullying Institute.
Workplace experts have different theories on why women more often target other women. Some say these women see female co-workers as possible competition for only a few top-level positions.
Namie said it's more important to get help, not try to analyze the tormenter's motives. The institute says more than 80 percent of those bullied lose their jobs, and 41 percent suffer clinical depression.
These judges should spend as many years in jail as they unfairly meted out to children. From CNN:
As scandals from Wall Street to Washington roil the public trust, the justice system in Luzerne County, in the heart of Pennsylvania's struggling coal country, has also fallen prey to corruption. The county has been rocked by a kickback scandal involving two elected judges who essentially jailed kids for cash. Many of the children had appeared before judges without a lawyer.
The nonprofit Juvenile Law Center in Philadelphia said Phillip is one of at least 5,000 children over the past five years who appeared before former Luzerne County President Judge Mark Ciavarella.
[...] The judges have been disbarred and have resigned from their elected positions. They agreed to serve 87 months in prison under their plea deals. Ciavarella and Conahan did not return calls, and their attorneys told CNN that they have no comment.
Ciavarella, 58, along with Conahan, 56, corruptly and fraudulently "created the potential for an increased number of juvenile offenders to be sent to juvenile detention facilities," federal court documents alleged. Children would be placed in private detention centers, under contract with the court, to increase the head count. In exchange, the two judges would receive kickbacks.
Or maybe he didn't pass the drug test? From Ananova:
George W Bush has turned down his first chance of a new job since leaving the White House - at a hardware store in Dallas.
Elliots store manager Andrea Bond said the former US president entered the Elliott's outlet with his security detail saying "I'm looking for a job.".
The owner of the Texas chain had made the offer earlier this month in a letter published in a Dallas newspaper, reports the BBC.
But despite not yet having a publisher for his memoirs, Mr Bush decided on reflection to turn the job down.
Equipped with a name tag reading 'W', Mr Bush spent an hour there with his secret service security detail, chatting to customers and shopping.
From Ananova:
Irish police chasing a Polish driver who had apparently committed more then 50 motoring offences have discovered the embarrassing truth.
Officers had been puzzled how the mysterious 'Prawo Jazdy' had always produced his documents - but with a different address each time.
However, they have now discovered that 'Prawo Jazdy' is Polish for driving licence, reports Metro.
An internal Garda memo, reported in Irish papers, said officers taking details of Polish traffic offenders had been mistakenly using 'Prawo Jazdy', printed in the top right corner of the driving licence, as the holder's name.
"Prawo Jazdy is actually the Polish for driving licence and not the first and surname on the licence," the police memo said.
"It is quite embarrassing to see the system has created Prawo Jazdy as a person with over 50 identities."
Some of the UK's best-selling chocolate bars, such as Mars and Twix, will no longer be suitable for vegetarians.Also affecting brands such as Snickers and Maltesers, owner Masterfoods said it had started to use animal product rennet to make its chocolate products.
Masterfoods said the change was due to it switching the sourcing of its ingredients and the admission was a "principled decision" on its part.
The Vegetarian Society said the company's move was "incomprehensible".
