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The place where the world comes together in honesty and mirth.
Windmills Tilted, Scared Cows Butchered, Lies Skewered on the Lance of Reality ... or something to that effect.


Monday, June 23, 2008

A Nation unto himself

Man declares island (population: 1) to be new nation

A 65-year-old man who owns a 2.5 acre island in the Shetland Islands in the North Sea has declared independence from the UK.
Stuart Hill, 65, has lived in the Shetland Islands on the edge of the Atlantic since 2001, when his boat capsized there during an unsuccessful attempted to circumnavigate Britain.

He is Forvik's only resident, and his home is a tent on the storm-battered island. He says on his website that he plans to create Forvik's own currency -- the "gulde" -- print his own stamps and raise his own flag.

"There will be no income tax, VAT (value added tax), council tax, corporation tax, or any of the other taxes instituted by the British government," Hill wrote.

Link

Every Woman's favorite Latin Quote

Veni, Vidi, Visa

I Came, I Saw, I Shopped

Trial delayed in Texas sex club involving children

What is it with Texas recently?!

First the Polygamy Story, now this:

The third trial of an alleged member of a swingers club accused of forcing children into sex shows was postponed Monday amid allegations that the foster father to the young victims molested other children.

Prosecutors said the California child sex charges against John Cantrell, who has custody of three siblings who allegedly performed inside the club, has nothing to do with their case in Texas.

Cantrell, 64, was charged last week with sexually assaulting two of his foster children in 1990. His wife has denied the allegations.

Margie Cantrell first told authorities in 2005 about what the children - now ages 12, 10, and 7 - revealed to her about having being forced into sex at the former daycare.

"What does the fact that he was investigated 18 years ago, when the victims in our case were not even alive, have to do with the guilt or innocence of these defendants on trial today?" Smith County District Attorney Matt Bingham said.

State District Judge Jack Skeen Jr. pushed back the start of the trial of Patrick Kelly until June 30, granting a request by Kelly's attorneys to allow time to investigate the charges against John Cantrell.

Texas Child Protective Services has temporarily forbidden the foster parent to see the children. Cantrell is awaiting extradition.

Kelly, 41, is the third alleged member of the so-called "Mineola Swingers Club" to stand trial. He and five others are accused of teaching children as young as 5 to have sex with each other and dance provocatively for crowds as large as 100 people.

Jurors this year deliberated less than five minutes before returning guilty verdicts against the first two defendants.

Thad Davidson, Kelly's lawyer, says his client passed a lie-detector test and is innocent.

Also Monday, two local reporters who have covered the swingers club trials were subpoenaed to testify Friday about allegedly dating the state's lead prosecutor in the case.

Davidson said he plans to ask Tyler Morning Telegraph reporter Casey Knaupp and KLTV reporter Danielle Capper about their relationships with Assistant District Attorney Joe Murphy.

Davidson is fighting to move the trial outside of Tyler, about 25 miles from where the club was located. He says the reporters' coverage of the case has been biased and has colored the prospective jury pool.

Dave Berry, managing editor of the Tyler Morning Telegraph, said the paper will seek to quash the subpoena at a Tuesday hearing. KLTV said it would have no comment.

*****

So, all you Texans out there - What Gives?!

Seven Simple Rules For How to Take A Nap


Seriously: we all know the whys — they improve mood, creativity, memory function, heart health, and so much else — but how many know the hows of how to take a nap.

Read more from 7 Simple Rules For How to Take A Nap

The Seven Words will never be spoken again

George Carlin, the frenzied performer whose routine "Seven Words You Can Never Say On Television" led to a key Supreme Court ruling on obscenity, has died.

Carlin, who had a history of heart trouble, went into St. John's Health Center in Santa Monica on Sunday afternoon complaining of chest pain and died later that evening, said his publicist, Jeff Abraham. He had performed as recently as last weekend at the Orleans Casino and Hotel in Las Vegas. He was 71.

"He was a genius and I will miss him dearly," Jack Burns, who was the other half of a comedy duo with Carlin in the early 1960s, told The Associated Press.

Carlin's jokes constantly breached the accepted boundaries of comedy and language, particularly with his routine on the "Seven Words" - all of which are taboo on broadcast TV and radio to this day.

When he uttered all seven at a show in Milwaukee in 1972, he was arrested on charges of disturbing the peace, freed on $150 bail and exonerated when a Wisconsin judge dismissed the case, saying it was indecent but citing free speech and the lack of any disturbance.

When the words were later played on a New York radio station, they resulted in a 1978 Supreme Court ruling upholding the government's authority to sanction stations for broadcasting offensive language during hours when children might be listening.

"So my name is a footnote in American legal history, which I'm perversely kind of proud of," he told The Associated Press earlier this year.

Despite his reputation as unapologetically irreverent, Carlin was a television staple through the decades, serving as host of the "Saturday Night Live" debut in 1975 - noting on his Web site that he was "loaded on cocaine all week long" - and appearing some 130 times on "The Tonight Show."

He produced 23 comedy albums, 14 HBO specials, three books, a couple of TV shows and appeared in several movies, from his own comedy specials to "Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure" in 1989 - a testament to his range from cerebral satire and cultural commentary to downright silliness (and sometimes hitting all points in one stroke).

"Why do they lock gas station bathrooms?" he once mused. "Are they afraid someone will clean them?"

He won four Grammy Awards, each for best spoken comedy album, and was nominated for five Emmy awards. On Tuesday, it was announced that Carlin was being awarded the 11th annual Mark Twain Prize for American Humor, which will be presented Nov. 10 in Washington and broadcast on PBS.

Carlin started his career on the traditional nightclub circuit in a coat and tie, pairing with Burns to spoof TV game shows, news and movies. Perhaps in spite of the outlaw soul, "George was fairly conservative when I met him," said Burns, describing himself as the more left-leaning of the two. It was a degree of separation that would reverse when they came upon Lenny Bruce, the original shock comic, in the early '60s.

"We were working in Chicago, and we went to see Lenny, and we were both blown away," Burns said, recalling the moment as the beginning of the end for their collaboration if not their close friendship. "It was an epiphany for George. The comedy we were doing at the time wasn't exactly groundbreaking, and George knew then that he wanted to go in a different direction."

That direction would make Carlin as much a social commentator and philosopher as comedian, a position he would relish through the years.

"The whole problem with this idea of obscenity and indecency, and all of these things - bad language and whatever - it's all caused by one basic thing, and that is: religious superstition," Carlin told the AP in a 2004 interview. "There's an idea that the human body is somehow evil and bad and there are parts of it that are especially evil and bad, and we should be ashamed. Fear, guilt and shame are built into the attitude toward sex and the body. ... It's reflected in these prohibitions and these taboos that we have."

Carlin was born on May 12, 1937, and grew up in the Morningside Heights section of Manhattan, raised by a single mother. After dropping out of high school in the ninth grade, he joined the Air Force in 1954. He received three court-martials and numerous disciplinary punishments, according to his official Web site.

While in the Air Force he started working as an off-base disc jockey at a radio station in Shreveport, La., and after receiving a general discharge in 1957, took an announcing job at WEZE in Boston.

"Fired after three months for driving mobile news van to New York to buy pot," his Web site says.

From there he went on to a job on the night shift as a deejay at a radio station in Fort Worth, Texas. Carlin also worked variety of temporary jobs including a carnival organist and a marketing director for a peanut brittle.

In 1960, he left with Burns, a Texas radio buddy, for Hollywood to pursue a nightclub career as comedy team Burns & Carlin. He left with $300, but his first break came just months later when the duo appeared on Jack Paar's "Tonight Show."

Carlin said he hoped to emulate his childhood hero, Danny Kaye, the kindly, rubber-faced comedian who ruled over the decade Carlin grew up in - the 1950s - with a clever but gentle humor reflective of the times.

It didn't work for him, and the pair broke up by 1962.

"I was doing superficial comedy entertaining people who didn't really care: Businessmen, people in nightclubs, conservative people. And I had been doing that for the better part of 10 years when it finally dawned on me that I was in the wrong place doing the wrong things for the wrong people," Carlin reflected recently as he prepared for his 14th HBO special, "It's Bad For Ya."

Eventually Carlin lost the buttoned-up look, favoring the beard, ponytail and all-black attire for which he came to be known.

But even with his decidedly adult-comedy bent, Carlin never lost his childlike sense of mischief, even voicing kid-friendly projects like episodes of the TV show "Thomas the Tank Engine and Friends" and the spacey Volkswagen bus Fillmore in the 2006 Pixar hit "Cars."

Carlin's first wife, Brenda, died in 1997. He is survived by wife Sally Wade; daughter Kelly Carlin McCall; son-in-law Bob McCall; brother Patrick Carlin; and sister-in-law Marlene Carlin.

Click on the Audio MP3 for George's classic "Class Clown"

Question of the Day

I hesitate to bring this up - but who do you ask if you think a word in the dictionary is misspelled?

Tainted Tomato Toll Now Stands At 552

I haven't posted on the Tomato contamination problem before but it is getting a bit worrisome.
Here is the latest:

The victim count in the tainted tomato outbreak leaped to 552 Friday even as U.S health officials announced that the salmonella contaminant did indeed come from farms in Florida and Mexico.

The huge increase in victims since the nationwide outbreak began on April 10 appeared largely a result of the state of Texas now reporting 265 illnesses, according to the latest count by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

At least 53 people have been hospitalized, Ian Williams, chief of the CDC's OutbreakNet Team, told reporters at a mid-afternoon teleconference.

"The FDA is sending teams to Florida and Mexico this weekend to begin inspection of these farms," Dr. David Acheson, associate commissioner for food protection at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, added. "We are also working with the state of Texas to identify the cluster of illness there."

The increase in people sickened by the singular strain of salmonella saintpaul was not unexpected. Last week, the count was below 200; two days ago, it jumped to more than 380. At least 32 states, plus the District of Columbia, have now reported cases.

On Thursday, health officials had warned that the end was not yet in sight.

"The marked increase is not due to new infections, but mainly because some states improved surveillance in response to this outbreak, and laboratory identification of many other previously submitted strains has now been completed," said Casey Barton Behravesh, an epidemiologist with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, during a Thursday teleconference.

"We are continuing to receive reports of ill people," added Dr. Robert Tauxe, deputy director of the CDC's division of foodborne, bacterial and mycotic diseases. "We do not think the outbreak is over."

On Friday, Acheson said the investigation into the outbreak has now zeroed in on "a number of farms" in both Florida and Mexico.

"These farms along with their associated distribution chains are going to be part of an ongoing investigation," he added, noting, "We do not have a specific farm involved in the contamination; we have to look at the whole chain."

Health officials last week had said that the bulk of the tomatoes available at the start of the outbreak in April had come from Mexico and parts of Florida.

But on Wednesday, Acheson seemed less certain than he has in the past that the exact source would ever be identified. "I have to acknowledge that we may not ultimately know the farm where these came from," he said. "But we're continuing to go flat-out, assuming we are going to get to that point."

Salmonella is a bacteria that can cause bloody diarrhea in humans. Some 40,000 cases of salmonellosis are reported in the United States each year, although the CDC estimates that because milder cases are not diagnosed or reported, the actual number of infections may be 30 or more times greater. Approximately 600 people die each year after being infected.

More information

Visit the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for more on the salmonella outbreak.