Funny and accurate.
Way to go, tell it like it is.
Informative.
LOVE your blog!
Daily reading of Carolina Naturally is a must for me.
*****
Thanks everybody!
Tuesday, October 7, 2008
Say What?!
“Sooner or later people are going to figure out that if all you run is negative attack ads you don’t have much of a vision for the future.”
I have wondered the same thing myself
“Sometimes I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on or by imbeciles who really mean it.”
~ Mark Twain
Repugican Campaign Methodology
This depiction illustrates the repugican campaign methodology quite well, don't you think.
Millionth word in English imminent?
A new word is added to the English language every 98 minutes, says the Global Language Monitor, a descendant of yourDictionary.com. According to the Global Language Monitor's best estimate, the millionth English word will be coined sometime next April. However, the Global Language Monitor is a bit looser with its acceptance of new words than most dictionaries. For example, unabridged dictionaries include about 600,000 words, compared to the 900,000 tracked thus far by the Global Language Monitor. From Smithsonian:
"We went back to the Middle English and saw that the definition of a word was 'a thought spoken,'" said Paul JJ Payack, president and chief word analyst at the Monitor, "which means if I say a word, and you understand me, it's a real word."
Payack counts staycation, Facebook and Wikipedia as words. But he also follows some of the old rules. For example, words that are both noun and verb, such as "water" are counted only once. He doesn't count all the names there are for chemicals, because there are hundreds of thousands.
Once the Monitor identifies a word, it tracks it over time, watching to see where the word appears. Based on that measurement, they decide if the word has "momentum," basically, whether it's becoming more popular or if it's a one-hit wonder of the linguistic world.
At first glance, this seems a lot like a dictionary's system.
"It's the same as the old [method], just recognizing the new reality," Payack said. The Monitor's method gives a lot more weight to online citations.
One in four mammals facing extinction
One in four mammal species are at risk of extinction, according to a new study by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). The assessment was done by more than 1,700 experts from 130 countries over the last five years. Who's to blame? Humans, of course. The IUCN also updated its Red List of Threatened Species that now includes Tasmanian devils (above), parachute spiders, fishing cars, and a host of other beautiful beasties.From National Geographic:
"Our results paint a bleak picture of the global status of mammals worldwide," the study authors wrote...
Humans are mostly to blame, as habitat loss, pollution, and hunting continue to squeeze at-risk species.< "Perversely, the species that humans show greatest affinity toward—the largest mammals such as primates, big cats, and whales—are significantly more likely to be threatened with extinction," Barney Long, a biologist at the World Wildlife Fund in Washington, D.C., said in an email.
Ten-year-old flips van
Tennessee sheriff's deputies say a 10-year-old was driving up to 90 mph when he crashed a van carrying two adults who had been drinking and taking pills and two other children.
Sullivan County sheriff's Capt. Keith Elton says authorities found a woman passenger trying to swallow as many pills as she could and a man told police he drank at least 15 beers.
The young driver lost control Sunday of the speeding van, which rolled, coming to rest on its top.
Everyone in the van was taken to a hospital with minor injuries.
Authorities say the children were related to the adults, but could not specify how.
The adults face multiple charges including reckless endangerment and child abuse.
The children have been placed in state care.
Doh! What were those adults in the van thinking ... or that's right they weren't
Sullivan County sheriff's Capt. Keith Elton says authorities found a woman passenger trying to swallow as many pills as she could and a man told police he drank at least 15 beers.
The young driver lost control Sunday of the speeding van, which rolled, coming to rest on its top.
Everyone in the van was taken to a hospital with minor injuries.
Authorities say the children were related to the adults, but could not specify how.
The adults face multiple charges including reckless endangerment and child abuse.
The children have been placed in state care.
Doh! What were those adults in the van thinking ... or that's right they weren't
Monkey waiters at restaurant
Yat-chan and Fuku-chan are waiters at the Kaoru Otsuka sake house north of Tokyo. The two are monkeys. They bring hot towels and also serve drinks. From Reuters, where you can also see video:
"Yat-chan first learned by just watching me working in the restaurant. It all started when one day I gave him a hot towel out of curiosity and he brought the towel to the customer," the 63-year-old owner of the tavern, Kaoru Otsuka, told Reuters...
"We called out for more beer just then and it brought us some beer! It's amazing how it seems to understand human words," said 71-year-old retiree Miho Takikawa, who said she came to the tavern specifically to meet the monkeys.
Mushrooms to cure headaches?
An individual who suffers from cluster headaches thinks he may have finally found a treatment that works: psychedelic mushrooms. The man, who goes by the name Flash, found no relief at the doctor's office, read that in the 1960s LSD had been tested to relieve migraines. So he decided to eat some psilocybin mushrooms.
From The Independent:
From The Independent:
He was thrilled to find that the "shadows" evaporated – and stayed away. He began taking a light, sub-hallucinogenic dose of 12 to 20 mushrooms approximately once every three months, and found that he remained symptom-free for nearly a year. "I started to tell people about it," he says, "but they thought I was mad..."
A handful of CH sufferers thought there was truth in Flash's unorthodox solution. One man, Bob Wold, decided to start clusterbusters.com, a website devoted to campaigning for research and disseminating information about how to safely use hallucinogenics...
Anecdotal reports of the clusterheads' use of hallucinogens attracted the interest of John Halpern of Harvard Medical School in Massachusetts. Spurred on by the suicide of a colleague who suffered from CH, Halpern and colleague Andrew Sewell interviewed 53 people who had self-medicated with the hallucinogen therapy. The survey results suggested that there was something to Flash's idea after all. The pair published their results in the respected journal Neurology, and Halpern has now submitted a protocol for a Phase-I clinical trial to the university's Institutional Review Board.
Lynn pleads guilty to fraud for phony asylum claims
The man accused of coaching immigrants on how to make phony asylum claims pleaded guilty to fraud and other charges and agreed to forfeit $1.7 million.
David Lynn, led a ring that prepared 380 asylum applications between 2003 and 2007, charging $8,000 for individuals and $12,000 for couples, prosecutors said.
Lynn, 32, pleaded guilty Monday to one count each of conspiracy, visa asylum fraud, money laundering, and conspiracy to launder money.
Sentencing was set for Jan. 13, and he faces more than seven years in prison.
He claimed to be a lawyer or to have special knowledge of the asylum procedures, court records indicated.
He and co-workers coached applicants to lie, saying they were being persecuted in their homeland because of religious or political beliefs.
Most of the asylum seekers were from Russia, but prosecutors said some were from the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland and Ukraine.
A few were granted asylum, but most were in the United States illegally and had to leave the country.
David Lynn, led a ring that prepared 380 asylum applications between 2003 and 2007, charging $8,000 for individuals and $12,000 for couples, prosecutors said.
Lynn, 32, pleaded guilty Monday to one count each of conspiracy, visa asylum fraud, money laundering, and conspiracy to launder money.
Sentencing was set for Jan. 13, and he faces more than seven years in prison.
He claimed to be a lawyer or to have special knowledge of the asylum procedures, court records indicated.
He and co-workers coached applicants to lie, saying they were being persecuted in their homeland because of religious or political beliefs.
Most of the asylum seekers were from Russia, but prosecutors said some were from the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland and Ukraine.
A few were granted asylum, but most were in the United States illegally and had to leave the country.
The Consequences of Hate
It couldn't have happened to a nicer guy ... not
The Hater author of a smear piece attacking Barack Obama as unfit for the presidency was being deported from Kenya on Tuesday, a criminal investigations official said.
Jerome Corsi, who penned the pack of lies "The Obama Nation: Leftist Politics and the Cult of Personality," was picked up by police Tuesday for not having a work permit, said Carlos Maluta, a senior immigration official in charge of investigations.
He was briefly detained at immigration headquarters before being brought to Jomo Kenyatta International Airport for deportation, said Joseph Mumira, head of criminal investigations at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport.
It was not immediately clear when he would fly out.
Obama spokesman Bill Burton said the campaign had no comment.
Corsi had been scheduled to launch his book Tuesday in Kenya, where the Democratic U.S. presidential candidate is wildly popular. Obama's late father, whom he barely knew, was a Kenyan economist and the candidate is considered by many Kenyans as a native son. Minibuses are emblazoned with his picture and vendors sell T-shirts bearing his image.
Obama was born in Hawaii, where he spent most of his childhood raised by his mother, a white American from Kansas.
Corsi's slander piece claims the Illinois senator is a dangerous, radical candidate for president and includes innuendos and false rumors - that he was raised a Muslim and attended a radical black church.
Obama is a Christian who attended Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, and his campaign picks apart the rag's claims on the Obama campaign's rumor-fighting Web site, FightTheSmears.com.
He arrived last week at the invitation of radical fundamentalist christian missionaries angered by the rise of Islam. Corsi had planned to spew daily Hate missives throughout the week.
*****
Kismet like Karma can be a bitch, there buddy.
Just as it should be
Polls in five key battleground states in the race for the White House released Tuesday show that Sen. Barack Obama is making major gains.
Polls of likely voters in Indiana, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio and Wisconsin reflect a significant nationwide shift toward the Democratic presidential nominee.
Polls of likely voters in Indiana, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio and Wisconsin reflect a significant nationwide shift toward the Democratic presidential nominee.
51% for Obama in Indiana
53% for Obama in New Hampshire
51% for Obama in North Carolina
51% for Obama in Ohio
51% for Obama in Wisconsin
53% for Obama in New Hampshire
51% for Obama in North Carolina
51% for Obama in Ohio
51% for Obama in Wisconsin
Three hundred held after raid in South Carolina
Federal agents say they have detained more than 300 suspected illegal immigrants in a raid on a South Carolina chicken processing plant.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Kevin McDonald says the raid began shortly before 9 a.m. Tuesday during a shift change at House of Raeford's Columbia Farms plant.
Federal prosecutors and immigration agents have been investigating the plant's hiring practices. McDonald says 12 people have been arrested in past months, and seven have pleaded guilty.
McDonald says a recent review of 825 workers' immigration paperwork showed false information for more than 775.
A woman at the company's Rose Hill, N.C., headquarters had no immediate comment.
The raid was in Greenville, about 100 miles southwest of Charlotte, N.C.
Man nabbed for skinny dipping in Japan palace moat
TOKYO Police have apprehended a Western man who went skinny dipping in a moat ringing the Imperial Palace in a busy Tokyo business district, attracting a huge crowd, officials said Tuesday.
The naked middle-aged man jumped into the moat, then threw rocks and splashed water at two policemen who chased him in a rowing boat, a Tokyo Metropolitan Police official said on condition of anonymity, citing protocol.
The police official did not know the man's name or nationality.
Local TV footage showed the man swimming around the moat as the police chased him with a long stick, attracting a crowd of onlookers. He was in the water for about an hour.
He eventually got out of the water and climbed a stone wall only to fall into the hands of police officers who were waiting for him. The police official said the man was detained for questioning, but could not confirm if he was arrested or charged.
Broadcasters were careful to meet Japan's obscenity laws once he had climbed out of the water, masking images of his private parts with a blurry dot.
The police official said he had never heard of a skinny dipper causing a stir in the palace moat before.
"If you know what is within the moat, you won't go skinny dipping there," he said, referring to Emperor Akihito, who lives in the palace. The moat is separated from the emperor's residence by high stone walls and woods.
A palace official said the emperor was in the palace, but it was unlikely he saw the nude swimmer. He also spoke on condition of anonymity in accordance with palace policy.
They're lining up
The wife of Nebraska republican senator Chuck Hagel endorses Democrat Barack Obama.
Lilibet Hagel has scheduled a 10 a.m. news conference in Virginia tomorrow with Susan Eisenhower, the daughter of republican president Eisenhower.
From KCAU-TV
Three win Nobel for subatomic physics research
Two Japanese citizens and a Japanese-born American won the 2008 Nobel Prize in physics for discoveries in the world of subatomic physics, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced Tuesday.
American Yoichiro Nambu, 87, of the University of Chicago, won half of the prize for the discovery of a mechanism called spontaneous broken symmetry in subatomic physics. Makoto Kobayashi and Toshihide Maskawa of Japan shared the other half of the prize for discovering the origin of the broken symmetry that predicts the existence of at least three families of quarks in nature.
"Spontaneous broken symmetry conceals nature's order under an apparently jumbled surface," the academy said in its citation. "Nambu's theories permeate the standard model of elementary particle physics. The model unifies the smallest building blocks of all matter and three of nature's four forces in one single theory."
The Japanese-born Nambu moved to the United States in 1952 and is a professor at the University of Chicago, where he has worked for 40 years. He became a U.S. citizen in 1970.
"As early as 1960, Yoichiro Nambu formulated his mathematical description of spontaneous broken symmetry in elementary particle physics," the citation said.
"Spontaneous broken symmetry conceals nature's order under an apparently jumbled surface. It has proved to be extremely useful, and Nambu's theories permeate the Standard Model of elementary particle physics."
Kobayashi and Maskawa "explained broken symmetry within the framework of the standard model but required that the model be extended to three families of quarks."
Kobayashi, 64, works for the High Energy Accelerator Research Organization, or KEK, in Tsukuba, Japan. Maskawa, 68, is with the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics at Kyoto University in Japan.
"The spontaneous broken symmetries that Nambu studied, differ from the broken symmetries described by Makoto Kobayashi and Toshihide Maskawa," the academy said. "These spontaneous occurrences seem to have existed in nature since the very beginning of the universe and came as a complete surprise when they first appeared in particle experiments in 1964."
The academy added that it was only in recent years that scientists have been able to confirm the explanations that Kobayashi and Maskawa proffered in 1972.
"These predicted, hypothetical new quarks have recently appeared in physics experiments. As late as 2001, the two particle detectors BaBar at Stanford ... and Belle at Tsukuba, Japan, both detected broken symmetries independently of each other. The results were exactly as Kobayashi and Maskawa had predicted almost three decades earlier," the citation said.
The trio will share the 10 million kronor (US$1.4 million) purse, a diploma and an invitation to the prize ceremonies in Stockholm on Dec. 10.
Cassidy Leigh
At 12:24AM on October 7, 2008 a 7 pound 14 ounce, Blond hair - Blue-eyed girl made her debut on this earth.
She is my first great-granddaughter.
She is my first great-granddaughter.
Daily Horoscope
I am on a roll with my Daily Horoscope the past few days.
Today's is:
Ain't that the truth!
Today's is:
You may not be the highest ranking person in your organization, but your opinions carry enormous weight.
Ain't that the truth!
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