The Lord Justice Hath Ruled: Pringles Are Potato Chips

Britain’s Supreme Court of Judicature has answered a question that has long puzzled late-night dorm-room snackers: What, exactly, is a Pringle? With citations ranging from Baroness Hale of Richmond to Oliver Wendell Holmes, Lord Justice Robin Jacob concluded that, legally, it is a potato chip.

The decision is bad news for Procter & Gamble U.K., which now owes $160 million in taxes. It is good news for Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs — and for fans of no-nonsense legal opinions. It is also a reminder, as conservatives begin attacking Judge Sonia Sotomayor for not being a “strict constructionist,” of the pointlessness of labels like that.

In Britain, most foods are exempt from the value-added tax, but potato chips — known as crisps — and “similar products made from the potato, or from potato flour,” are taxable. Procter & Gamble, in what could be considered a plea for strict construction, argued that Pringles — which are about 40 percent potato flour, but also contain corn, rice and wheat — should not be considered potato chips or “similar products.” Rather, they are “savory snacks.”

The VAT and Duties Tribunal disagreed, ruling that Pringles — which have been marketed in the United States as “potato chips” — are taxable. “There are other ingredients,” the tribunal said, but a Pringle is “made from potato flour in the sense that one cannot say that it is not made from potato flour, and the proportion of potato flour is significant being over 40 percent.”

An appeals court reversed, in a convoluted opinion that considered four interpretations of the law before ultimately rejecting three of them. In the end, it decided that Pringles are exempt from the tax, mainly because they have less potato content than a potato chip.

The Supreme Court of Judicature reversed again, in an eloquent decision. Lord Justice Jacob, in an apparent swipe at the midlevel court, insisted the question was “not one calling for or justifying overelaborate, almost mind-numbing legal analysis.”

The VAT and Duties Tribunal took an eminently practical approach, he said. It considered Pringles’ appearance, taste, ingredients, process of manufacture, marketing and packaging, and concluded that “while in many respects” they “are different from potato crisps and so they are near the borderline, they are sufficiently similar to satisfy that test.”

The tribunal was not obliged, he said, “to go on and spell out item by item how each was weighed as if it were using a real scientist’s balance.” It came down to “a matter of overall impression.”

The Supreme Court of Judicature had little patience with Procter & Gamble’s lawyerly attempts to break out of the potato chip category. The company argued that to be “made of potato” Pringles would have to be all potato, or nearly so. If so, Lord Justice Jacob noted, “a marmalade made using both oranges and grapefruit would be made of neither — a nonsense conclusion.”

He was even more dismissive of Procter & Gamble’s argument that to be taxable a product must contain enough potato to have the quality of “potatoness.” This “Aristotelian question” of whether a product has the “essence of potato,” he insisted, simply cannot be answered.

In the Pringles litigation, three levels of British courts engaged in a classic debate over line-drawing, a staple of first-year law school classes. At some point, a potato-chip-like item is so different from a potato chip that it can no longer be called one — but when? Lord Justice Jacob invoked the wisdom of Justice Holmes: “A tyro thinks to puzzle you by asking you where you are going to draw the line and an advocate of more experience will show the arbitrariness of the line proposed by putting cases very near it on one side or the other.”

In other words, sometimes you just have to call them as you see them.

Conservatives like to insist that their judges are strict constructionists, giving the Constitution and statutes their precise meaning and no more, while judges like Ms. Sotomayor are activists. But there is no magic right way to interpret terms like “free speech” or “due process” — or potato chip. Nor is either ideological camp wholly strict or wholly activist. Liberal judges tend to be expansive about things like equal protection, while conservatives read more into ones like “the right to bear arms.”

In the end, as Lord Justice Jacob noted, a judge can only look at the relevant factors and draw an overall impression. His common-sense approach was a rebuke not only to Procter & Gamble, but to everyone out there who insists that the only way to read laws correctly is to read them strictly.

First teaser trailer for Pixar's Toy Story 3

Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D minor on the giant floor-piano at FAO Schwarz.

"These two amazingly talented women run up and down the keys on the giant floor-piano at FAO Schwarz, belting out an astounding rendition of Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D minor. Bach never sounded so good. "

Roswell & Area 51: Will We Ever Know The Truth?

Although truth is often even stranger than fiction, some topics are so enmeshed in both that discovering the truth is like panning for gold.

The military installation in the Nevada desert known as Area 51 has been the matrix for conspiracy theories and UFO sightings for decades and tops the list of controversial and very heated topics. Some new light may now shine through as some of the workers from mysterious base finally speak out.

New York’s Intrepid Sea-Air-Space Museum tells part of the Area 51 story. On display is An A-12 Oxcart, which was a spy plane tested at the notorious secret military base in Nevada.

Oxcart was the moniker applied to the CIA A-12 program that was originally intended to succeed the U-2 in conducting over flights to the Soviet Union. After the U-2 incident of 1960, Eisenhower suspended Soviet airspace violations, but the flight trials continued.

The Los Angeles Times Magazine interviewed five men who worked at the military facility known as Area 51 in an attempt to get to the truth. They are more willing to talk now because in 2007 the CIA declassified certain information concerning the A-12 Oxcart.

All of the men interviewed related fascinating stories about life at the mysterious base, including how the military responded to security breaches involving secret projects. Their responses to the legends arising from the military base were also quite interesting.

One of the legends surrounding Area 51 concerns the belief that the base is....

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I Will Always Have Been Back: Toward a Grand Unified Theory of Schwarzenegger

Arnold Schwarzenegger was one of the first action movie stars of the 80s. Perhaps he was one of the first action movie stars, period. His predecessors to that title - Steve McQueen? Clint Eastwood? - had dramatic credits to their name as well as escapist fare (Papillon, Play Misty For Me, etc). But Arnold Schwarzenegger will never direct Million Dollar Baby. Explosive action movies sit at both the beginning and end of his range.

Consequently, not many critics take Schwarzenegger seriously as an actor. He’s a muscle-bound lunk, they claim. He’s nothing but a stony face and some catchphrases. He always plays the same role.

But what if that’s deliberate?

TWO STOOD AGAINST MANY

Ten thousand years before the tribes of Abraham, in the time between when the oceans drank Atlantis and the rise of the sons of Aryas, a Cimmerian named Conan explored the world. He robbed temples, led brigands and slew sorcerers. He explored tombs, broke curses and rescued princesses. By the time his destiny was fulfilled, he wore the jeweled crown of Aquilonia upon his troubled brow - king by his own hand.

In his old age, after foiling a plot by rival factions to usurp his throne, King Conan received a vision from Crom, ancient and terrible god of the Aquilonians. Crom applauded the valor with which Conan had lived. As a reward, Crom gifted Conan with immortality.

Conan, a man as capable of melancholy as mirth, blanched with horror. “Should I live a thousand years while everyone I know turns to dust?” he cried. “Should I see the kingdom I have saved vanish from the Earth? Why would you do this to me?”

“Because,” Crom intoned, “in your hour of need you both called for my help and cursed my name. And so I grant you this gift and curse - that you will live until a greater warrior defeats you, or until the end of time.”

COME ON! KILL ME! I’M HERE! KILL ME!

Aquilonia vanished beneath the sands. So did Hyboria, Stygia, Kush, Mesopotamia, Phoenicia and Sparta. Yet Conan endured.

For fifteen thousand years Conan wandered from one nation to another, seeking wisdom and selling his sword. His accent became a strange mixture of every European tongue - an impenetrable Central European slur. Finally, Conan migrated across the Atlantic to the New World. He fought for the Colonies. He fought for the Union. He fought against Hitler. And he always won.

In the Eighties, John “Dutch” Matrix was the last generation of a family that had served in the U.S. military for over a century. In reality, of course, he was the same man - having fought for the same country though a series of fake identities for countless years. But Matrix had found a cause he believed in and a renewed willingness to fight.

Central America changed all that.

Dispatched to the jungles of Valverde, Matrix and his commando unit encountered a creature beyond their nightmares - an alien predator that could turn invisible, vault dozens of feet at a time, and kill at a distance with advanced weaponry. Matrix knew, as soon as he saw the skinned remains of the other rescue team, that he was facing something that could slaughter his entire team. But he pressed on.

Not because he owed his friend Dillon any favors. Not because he valued his mission. But because he thought he’d found a warrior that could kill him.

After the alien picked his commandos off one by one, Matrix engaged it in single combat. He taunted the hunter, hoping to find an honorable death. “Come on,” he begged. “Come on! Do it! Do it! Come on. Come on! Kill me! I’m here! Kill me! I’m here! Kill me! Come on! Kill me! I’m here! Come on! Do it now! Kill me!”

But the alien couldn’t beat him, and Crom had made Matrix incapable of suicide. So Matrix walked out of the jungle, taking Anna (the guerilla’s prisoner) back to the States. He abandoned the warrior lifestyle, married Anna, and settled down to something he’d avoided for one hundred and fifty centuries - a family.

Anna died young, leaving Matrix alone in the hills of Los Angeles with his adopted daughter Jenny. He thought he had escaped an eternity of war. But his past exploits in Valverde caught up with him. President Arius kidnapped his adopted daughter, forcing him back into action.

Matrix knew a life of peace was forever beyond him. So he continued wandering.

I’M NOT INTO POLITICS. I’M INTO SURVIVAL

Let’s pass over his brief stint as a small town sheriff, or when he posed as the result of genetic engineering to topple a government conspiracy with the aid of a local hustler. Instead, let’s follow the man called Conan, or Matrix, to the year 2019.

Conan/Matrix, now going as “Ben Richards,” topples the privatized Department of Justice when he leads a riot on the set of The Running Man. The United States faces its greatest internal threat since the Civil War. Food riots, already at a violent pitch, turn into massacres. Politicians can’t show their faces without getting shot at.

And hundreds of millions of Americans watched Ben Richards shoot Killian out of a rocket-sled on live television. The Eternal Warrior became the face of revolution.

In the face of imminent collapse, the U.S. turned to a last-ditch hope: Cyberdyne Systems.

“Skynet is the least of what we can offer,” the Cyberdyne lobbyist remarked in an untelevised committee hearing. “How about a series of robots with unshakable loyalty to the Department of Justice? Robots with superhuman strength, bulletproof titanium frames, and state-of-the-art targeting systems. We can make them look and act like humans, too, blending in with law-enforcement pers–”

“You can make them look like humans?”

The Cyberdyne lobbyist cleared his throat. “Ah, that’s what I’ve been told, yes.”

“Can you make them look like specific humans?”

“Well … with enough prep and some matching funds from DoD, I suppose we …”

“Ben Richards.”

A hush fell over the committee chambers.

“We want an army of peacekeeping robots that look like Ben Richards. The face of the new revolution. Let’s put this ‘hero’ to bed once and for all.”

I’LL BE BACK

Skynet became self-aware. It launched the first round of missiles. The nuclear holocaust came. John Connor fought back.

When John Connor and his resistance fighters breached Skynet’s headquarters, they saw, to their horror, the temporal displacement unit had already been completed. Skynet had sent two Terminator units into the past - a basic T-800 to kill Sarah Connor, and the advanced “liquid metal” T-1000 to kill a young John Connor.

“We’ve got these two captured T-800s,” Sergeant Kyle Reese suggested. “They’ve got an organic shell. Let’s send them back to stop the others.”

“Yes … wait, no,” Connor said. “Kyle, I need you to protect Sarah.”

“Why do–”

“Trust me on this one.”

Connor sent Kyle to protect his mother, and the first T-800 to stop the T-1000. But while he deliberated on what to do with the second captured T-800, something incredible happened.

“You must send me back, too,” the Terminator said.

“When?”

“As far back as the system will allow. Thousands of years into the past. Before recorded history.”

“What will you do there?”

“I will guard the human race,” the Terminator promised. “I will guide its development from chaos into civilization. I will live on the outskirts - a warrior without a home, eternally wandering. And maybe, when Cyberdyne comes around, I’ll be ready for them.”

STEEL ISN’T STRONG. FLESH IS STRONGER

The time portal hurled the Terminator with Ben Richards’ face as far into the past as it could. The shock of traveling a mere sixty years through time could stun a normal human, but the shock of traveling thousands of years would kill one. Even the Terminator barely survived.

When it awoke, it had no memory of its past. It had vague recollections of escaping slavery and worshiping a god who lived under a mountain. It knew that its barbaric love of combat was tempered by a desire to protect the human race. And it knew that it had a destiny - to become king by its own hand.

And so the Terminator, calling itself Conan once more, continued its long and lonely march through history. Having forgot that it was a machine, it lived as a man. He is the guardian of our species, defending us from our own base desires. He will never stop. He will never leave us.

He is Conan the Cimmerian, John Matrix, Ben Richards and the Terminator. He is the Eternal Warrior.

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Terminator Salvation: Deleted Scene

Hands off our Arctic, Canada tells Europeans

In London, the lions of Trafalgar Square share space with the towering image of an Inuit woman and her child. In Paris, an inukshuk greets people leaving the Metro. In Oslo, Ottawa is opening an Arctic political office. And in Brussels, officials are fanning out to promote the image of a cold, northern Canada.

The Harper government has launched an aggressive campaign across Europe to brand Canada as an "Arctic power" and the owner of a third of the contested land and resources of the Far North. Ministers and ambassadors have been instructed to deliver a strong message, through every channel available: Canada owns it; hands off.

This new assertiveness has caught European and Russian officials off guard as Ottawa pushes to fend off attempts by other northern powers and the European Union to claim stakes in the Northwest Passage and the open seas of the High Arctic.

While this involves hard diplomacy, such as Canada's leading role in a move to exclude the EU from sitting on the Arctic Council, Mr. Harper's officials have also ordered embassies abroad to mobilize their cultural resources to deliver this policy message, to create a visual image of a fully Arctic Canada.

The stakes are high. Yesterday, Russia released a report arguing that Arctic resources could spark military confrontations, and Canada recently released a major atlas of the Arctic, the result of research intended to back claims of Arctic land ownership under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea.

"Canada is an Arctic nation and an Arctic power," Foreign Minister Lawrence Cannon told European leaders in Tromso, Norway, at the end of April, while directing his diplomats to adopt an assertive new language around Canada's Arctic possessions. Under his instructions, the new phrase "Arctic power" has begun appearing in communiqués and speeches.

The message for Europe's leaders and citizens is simple and abrupt: The Arctic is not up for grabs. "Through our robust Arctic foreign policy," Mr. Cannon said, "we are affirming our leadership, stewardship and ownership in the region."

The word ownership is key. As Arctic jurisdictional disputes make their way through the United Nations, Ottawa wants to assert its claim to be owner of a third of Arctic land, ice and water, as well as any oil and minerals that happen to lie below.

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The Hero Factory

Turn yourself into a superhero and then fly around the room with your arms extended in front of you, making whooshing sounds. That's what I did.

My Creation (pic to the right)

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Game : Effing Hail

The goal of Effing Hail is to destroy houses, skyscrapers and airplanes with huge hailstones. Hold the left mouse button to start an updraft and control the wind with your mouse. Hails grow larger the longer you keep it in the air. Have fun with this weather simulation game!

Instructions

Hold the left mouse button to control the wind.
Hail grows larger the longer you keep it in the air.
Hurl large hail at objects to rack up points!

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Riddle

A man was to be sentenced, and the judge told him, "You may make a statement. If it is true, I'll sentence you to four years in prison. If it is false, I'll sentence you to six years in prison." After the man made his statement, the judge decided to let him go free. What did the man say?

Answer

Banned Commercial: iPhone Dating Apps

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I scream, you scream..

Is vitaminwater good for you?

Let’s face it – water is so dull. But vitaminwater, with its kaleidoscopic pinks, peaches and violets, is like Vegas in a bottle! Vitaminwater’s shimmering hues even seduced rapper 50 Cent, the inspiration for amethyst-tinged Formula 50. But aside from using star power and flashy colors, vitaminwater’s parent company, Glaceau (owned by Coca-Cola), markets the drink by emphasizing its nutritional value. Is there any science behind the marketing though?

A vitamin-fortified drink may sound like a swell idea, but there are two caveats to keep in mind. First, most Americans aren’t vitamin-deficient, according to Marion Nestle, a nutrition professor at New York University. A government survey in 1999 showed that the median American adult man or woman already consumes more than the Recommended Dietary Allowance (RDA) of vitamins thiamin, riboflavin, niacin, B6 and B12, and three-quarters of the RDA of vitamins C, B9 and A (including carotenes). In fact, vitamin E is the only surveyed vitamin Americans consume at less than half of the RDA – but it’s found in only a third of vitaminwater drinks.

If you want to drink your additional vitamin E, there’s a second caveat: your body may not absorb it. To understand why, it’s important to know that vitamins can be divided into two groups: water-soluble and fat-soluble. Vitamin C and the B complex group are water-soluble and can easily enter the bloodstream with water. Vitamins A, D, E and K are fat-soluble. That means they can only enter the bloodstream to carry out their functions if they are dissolved in dietary fat, like that found in a meal. An Italian study published by the American Heart Association in 2001 showed that subjects who took vitamin E for two weeks on an empty stomach increased their vitamin E concentration in blood little or not at all, compared to an 84 percent increase in subjects who took the vitamin E supplement during dinner. So unless you prefer vitaminwater to wine with your meal, vitamins A and E will pass largely unused into your city’s septic system.

Even if you were to absorb all the vitamins, vitaminwater might have trouble living up to its image as a salubrious alternative to sugary soft drinks: Each bottle of vitaminwater contains 32.5 grams, or two heaping tablespoons, of crystalline fructose. Fructose is a simple sugar that sweetens many fruits, although the crystalline fructose in vitaminwater is produced from cornstarch, not fruit, by crystallizing the fructose in fructose-enriched corn syrups. As one would expect, nobody needs these extra sugars, according to Nestle, the NYU nutritionist. One research team has even indicated that the intense sweetness of sugary drinks may be addictive.

“The way that vitaminwater is marketed and positioned it’s made to look more healthful than other sugary beverages, but it’s not – it’s still just a soft drink,” said Margo G. Wootan, Director of Nutrition Policy at the Center for Science in the Public Interest. “It has this aura of healthfulness that is not deserved. Adding vitamins and minerals to junk food doesn’t make it healthy.”

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Backlash: Women Bullying Women at Work

YELLING, scheming and sabotaging: all are tell-tale signs that a bully is at work, laying traps for employees at every pass.

During this downturn, as stress levels rise, workplace researchers say, bullies are likely to sharpen their elbows and ratchet up their attacks.

It’s probably no surprise that most of these bullies are men, as a survey by the Workplace Bullying Institute, an advocacy group, makes clear. But a good 40 percent of bullies are women. And at least the male bullies take an egalitarian approach, mowing down men and women pretty much in equal measure. The women appear to prefer their own kind, choosing other women as targets more than 70 percent of the time.

In the name of Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem, what is going on here?

Just the mention of women treating other women badly on the job seemingly shakes the women’s movement to its core. It is what Peggy Klaus, an executive coach in Berkeley, Calif., has called “the pink elephant” in the room. How can women break through the glass ceiling if they are ducking verbal blows from other women in cubicles, hallways and conference rooms?

Women don’t like to talk about it because it is “so antithetical to the way that we are supposed to behave to other women,” Ms. Klaus said. “We are supposed to be the nurturers and the supporters.”

Ask women about run-ins with other women at work and some will point out that people of both sexes can misbehave. Others will nod in instant recognition and recount examples of how women — more so than men — have mistreated them.

“I’ve been sabotaged so many times in the workplace by other women, I finally left the corporate world and started my own business,” said Roxy Westphal, who runs the promotional products company Roxy Ventures Inc. in Scottsdale, Ariz. She still recalls the sting of an interview she had with a woman 30 years ago that “turned into a one-person firing squad” and led her to leave the building in tears.

Jean Kondek, who recently retired after a 30-year career in advertising, recalled her anger when an administrator in a small agency called a meeting to dress her down in front of co-workers for not following agency procedure in a client emergency.

But Ms. Kondek said she had the last word. “I said, ‘Would everyone please leave?’ ” She added, “and then I told her, ‘This is not how you handle that.’ ”

Many women who are still in the work force were hesitant to speak out publicly for fear of making matters worse or of jeopardizing their careers. A private accountant in California said she recently joined a company and was immediately frozen out by two women working there. One even pushed her in the cafeteria during an argument, the accountant said. “It’s as if we’re back in high school,” she said.

A senior executive said she had “finally broken the glass ceiling” only to have another woman gun for her job by telling management, “I can’t work for her, she’s passive-aggressive.”

The strategy worked: The executive said she soon lost the job to her accuser.

ONE reason women choose other women as targets “is probably some idea that they can find a less confrontative person or someone less likely to respond to aggression with aggression,” said Gary Namie, research director for the Workplace Bullying Institute, which ordered the study in 2007.

But another dynamic may be at work. After five decades of striving for equality, women make up more than 50 percent of management, professional and related occupations, says Catalyst, the nonprofit research group. And yet, its 2008 census found, only 15.7 percent of Fortune 500 officers and 15.2 percent of directors were women.

Leadership specialists wonder, are women being “overly aggressive” because there are too few opportunities for advancement? Or is it stereotyping and women are only perceived as being overly aggressive? Is there a double standard at work?

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Don’t! The secret of self-control.

In the late nineteen-sixties, Carolyn Weisz, a four-year-old with long brown hair, was invited into a “game room” at the Bing Nursery School, on the campus of Stanford University. The room was little more than a large closet, containing a desk and a chair. Carolyn was asked to sit down in the chair and pick a treat from a tray of marshmallows, cookies, and pretzel sticks. Carolyn chose the marshmallow. Although she’s now forty-four, Carolyn still has a weakness for those air-puffed balls of corn syrup and gelatine. “I know I shouldn’t like them,” she says. “But they’re just so delicious!” A researcher then made Carolyn an offer: she could either eat one marshmallow right away or, if she was willing to wait while he stepped out for a few minutes, she could have two marshmallows when he returned. He said that if she rang a bell on the desk while he was away he would come running back, and she could eat one marshmallow but would forfeit the second. Then he left the room.

Although Carolyn has no direct memory of the experiment, and the scientists would not release any information about the subjects, she strongly suspects that she was able to delay gratification. “I’ve always been really good at waiting,” Carolyn told me. “If you give me a challenge or a task, then I’m going to find a way to do it, even if it means not eating my favorite food.” Her mother, Karen Sortino, is still more certain: “Even as a young kid, Carolyn was very patient. I’m sure she would have waited.” But her brother Craig, who also took part in the experiment, displayed less fortitude. Craig, a year older than Carolyn, still remembers the torment of trying to wait. “At a certain point, it must have occurred to me that I was all by myself,” he recalls. “And so I just started taking all the candy.” According to Craig, he was also tested with little plastic toys—he could have a second one if he held out—and he broke into the desk, where he figured there would be additional toys. “I took everything I could,” he says. “I cleaned them out. After that, I noticed the teachers encouraged me to not go into the experiment room anymore.”

Footage of these experiments, which were conducted over several years, is poignant, as the kids struggle to delay gratification for just a little bit longer. Some cover their eyes with their hands or turn around so that they can’t see the tray. Others start kicking the desk, or tug on their pigtails, or stroke the marshmallow as if it were a tiny stuffed animal. One child, a boy with neatly parted hair, looks carefully around the room....

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Terminator : Salvation (4 Minute Trailer)

Guitar + Voice Box Rendition of Beach Boys' "God Only Knows."

Dammit, I lost him again...

Free Pet Safety Pack from the ASPCA

Here's a nice freebie for pet owners.

Fill out this short form and get a free pet safety pack from the ASPCA. The ASPCA is, of course, an American society, but they're offering this promotion to Canadians as well as Americans.

The pet safety pack includes window decals to alert rescue personnel that you've got pets inside your home.

Help keep your pets safe with a free pet safety pack from the ASPCA! In the event of an emergency, our pet rescue window decal alerts rescue personnel that pets are inside your home. The safety pack also includes an ASPCA Animal Poison Control Center magnet—a great way to keep the APCC's toll-free emergency number and website address handy in case your pets get into something they shouldn’t!

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New male contraceptive injection appears effective

An injection for men appears to be just as effective at preventing pregnancy as the birth control pill, finds new research that could revolutionize contraception.

In testing in China, only one man in 100 fathered a child while on the injections, the study in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism reports.

The contraceptive is a form of testosterone that is injected into the buttocks once a month. It works by temporarily blocking sperm production.

Chinese researchers injected 1,045 healthy Chinese men aged 20 to 45 years with a 500 mg of testosterone undecanoate in oil, once a month for 24 months. All of the study participants had had at least one child and all their female partners, aged 18 and 38 years, also had normal reproductive function.

They found the contraceptive was almost 99 per cent effective, with a failure rate of only 1.1 per 100 men.

There were no serious side effected reported in any of the men, unlike previous studies on hormonal male contraceptive. Some of the side effects of those formulations have been mood swings and a lowered sex drive.

In all but two of the men in this study, reproductive function returned to normal range within six months of stopping the injections.

"For couples who cannot, or prefer not to use only female-oriented contraception, options have been limited to vasectomy, condom and withdrawal," said Dr. Yi-Qun Gu, of the National Research Institute for Family Planning in Beijing, China.

"Our study shows a male hormonal contraceptive regimen may be a potential, novel and workable alternative."

It should be noted though that almost a third of the 1,045 men in the 30-month trial did not complete the study. No reason was given.

Gu says while the results of this trial are encouraging, more long-term testing needs to be done on the safety of the regimen, with a focus on cardiovascular, prostate and behavioral safety.

Gu said if further tests proved successful, the treatment could become widely available in five years.

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Tiananmen: Twenty Years Later

Twenty years ago tanks rolled into Beijing's Tiananmen Square to crush the biggest pro-democracy movement in history. Hundreds were killed, thousands jailed and many fled to escape persecution. Here exiled leaders of the student revolution tell their remarkable stories and reveal how, after being forced to build new lives, they remain haunted by its bloody legacy.

Over seven tumultuous weeks of nationwide demonstrations and protests, beginning with the death of the sacked reformer, Hu Yaobang, on 15 April 1989 and ending with the movement's violent suppression on 4 June, an estimated 100 million people across China demonstrated in support of political reform. The movement was inchoate, contradictory and politically confused but it remains the biggest peaceful pro-democracy movement in human history. For the millions who took part, life would never be the same again.

Some are still in prison. Others, in mourning, are still harassed. A few campaign openly for a reversal of the Communist Party's verdict that the movement was the work of "a small clique of counter-revolutionaries" who wanted to overthrow the party and the socialist system. Behind the few high-profile campaigners and dissidents is the much larger throng of those who still nurse memories too painful to discuss.

It's been two decades since that lone protester defied a column of tanks on Beijing's Avenue of Eternal Peace, before vanishing, never to be identified. Since that time, China has prospered economically. The party has embraced the market and traded the socialist system it claimed to defend for the pleasures of getting rich. Younger generations are vague about a movement that still cannot be publicly discussed or documented. But the suppression at Tiananmen continues to exact a high price: the constant falsification of history, a political system frozen by the fear of the people's judgment, and a leadership that sees the ghosts of Tiananmen wherever voices call for political reform.

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The Hunt For Gollum (Lord of the Rings Fan Film)

The Hunt For Gollum is an unofficial not for profit short film by a group of enthusiast filmmakers. Made by indie director Chris Bouchard, and he has recruited an immensely talented group of effects wizards, sculptors and artists (trailers can be deceiving, as e all know but if they are any indication, it looks good!). The independant movie is being produced for £3000 -- but it looks professional.
The script is adapted from elements of the appendices of The Lord of the Rings. The story follows the Heir of Isildur; the "greatest huntsman and traveller in Middle Earth" as he sets out to find the creature Gollum. The creature must be found to discover the truth about the Ring, and to protect the future Ringbearer.

The movie will be released FOR FREE on May 3, 2009 as a download at http://www.hunt4gollum.com

In the meantime, enjoy the trailer below, visit the official website, where you can view behind-the-scenes material, more trailer, stills, soundtrack, wallpapers, posters, banners, and lots more goodies!

Trailer 2 - The Hunt For Gollum at SCI-FI-LONDON
Uploaded by HuntForGollum

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When Bad Advice Is the Best Advice

By PETER A. UBEL, M.D

Eighteen years out of training, and I still find myself struggling to understand the moral imperatives of medical practice.

Not long ago, as part of my hospital duties, I cared for a man who could no longer swallow. This dysphagia was his only medical complaint, one that had sneaked up on him over the course of a month. He simply couldn’t find the muscular strength to propel food and liquid down to his stomach.

After some investigation, the medical team discovered he had metastatic lung cancer. That explained the dysphagia: cancer had stimulated his immune system to attack his swallowing muscles.

While the cancer was incurable, we hoped we could slow its progression and give him a few extra months of life — small solace for a man in his mid-50s with a loving wife and several children ready to start new families, but the best we could offer.

On rounds the morning after he received a feeding tube, I stopped by to see how he was doing — checking his abdomen for signs of infection and, more important, assessing his fragile mood. I tried to keep things upbeat, making small talk while examining his belly. But something about his response, and the look he gave his wife, was troubling.

I looked up and asked him how he was feeling, keeping purposely vague about whether I was posing a medical or a social question. It was his wife who replied — angrily. She lashed out at her husband for having sneaked off that morning for a cigarette. He glared back and told her to mind her own business.

She looked toward me for support — I was the physician, after all — and I found myself in a common medical quandary.

Was it my duty to tell this patient what to do or, instead, to give him the medical information he needed to make up his mind?

Medical decisions these days are increasingly recognized as being more than simply medical, with the right choice depending in part on the patient’s preferences.

Should a middle-age woman with mildly elevated cholesterol take a statin, for example? That depends on whether she thinks the pill’s benefits outweigh its burdens, burdens that only she can judge: costs, possible side effects and the inconvenience of taking medications.

Should an elderly man have knee-replacement surgery? That depends on how much he is suffering, how much he cares about the risk of surgical complications and how willing he is to undergo lengthy and painful rehabilitation.

According to this new paradigm of preference-sensitive decision-making, doctors like me shouldn’t tell patients what to do (Take your pills! Stop smoking!), but rather should educate our patients about the risks and benefits of their options.

So going by the book, I should have informed my patient about the pros and cons of tobacco. But I couldn’t stand by, in the role of a dispassionate educator, and let this man hurt himself. Instead, I felt compelled to give him advice that would promote his best interests.

I advised him to smoke.

“You two obviously love each other very much,” I said. Then I turned to his wife.

“I know that you are trying to keep your husband from smoking because you love him and don’t want him to get sicker,” I continued, as I recall. “But those cigarettes aren’t going to hurt him now. If anything, they’ll help him relax. What matters is that you two stick together, because these next few months are going to be really difficult.”

I reminded them that the cancer wasn’t curable, that we were hoping to improve his quality of life, and that the best way to do that was to spend quality time with the people he loved.

Every situation is different, of course. But my duty as a physician is to improve my patients’ lives. And if I can do that by sharing my perspective with them, however strange or uncomfortable it may sound, then that is what I must do.

Even if it means encouraging them to smoke.

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How to make a baby (worksafe!)

What If Marijuana Were Legal? Possible Outcomes

The scenario: Marijuana has been legal for two years throughout the U.S. It is treated, in the eyes of the law, similar to alcohol. It is taxed and regulated, and users must be 21 or older. Pot smokers can buy it by the gram at licensed dispensaries. Predictably, the law change would make some people very happy — and others deeply concerned.

Imagine if you turned on the radio and heard this: "From NPR News in Washington, I'm Carl Kasell. After 70 years of prohibition, marijuana becomes legal today for personal consumption throughout the United States for persons 21 and older …"

How would the world change if cannabis finally came out of the closet, if it were fully legal to possess, sell and cultivate?

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Frozen moment in time

Fast Food Reality

Have you ever seen a McDonald’s or Wendy’s advertisement and really appreciated how delicious a sandwich or burger looked. You were so impressed that you went to said fast food restaurant and ordered yourself one.

You fork over your hard earned white collar cash expecting to receive the same beautiful masterpiece shown in the ads just to be let down by a sloppy disgusting looking sandwich that was probably made by an ex inmate.

Sure, you can’t expect that much for a burger that is delivered in less than three minutes but give me a break people, false advertisement is false advertisement. If you are going to advertise sexy full figured burgers don’t give me a squashed beef patty with some sort of material that is supposed to pass as cheese.

Think I’m just trash talking fast food restaurants? Naaa, I can appreciate a two cheeseburger meal from McDonald’s when nursing a hangover as much as the next guy, but seriously, quit advertising your food as designer foods and start advertising it like it is. Cheap, fast and greasy.

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Macgyver meets Star Wars Mashup!

Eyeball spy turns the tables on Big Brother

"You couldn't make this up: Cameras are being turned on the people paid to watch CCTV streams, to note which bits of surveillance footage they didn't see. The system developed in Turkey uses webcams to track a person's eye movements and can then produce an edited reel of footage that they didn't see at the end of their shift."

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"So the question is finally answered : "Who watches the watchmen?" "

Coyote finally catches Roadrunner!

Trent Reznor Urges Musicians To Ditch Labels

Rocker TRENT REZNOR is urging all musicians to follow in his footsteps and ditch their record labels.

Reznor's band Nine Inch Nails broke away from their deal with Universal in 2007, after a tempestuous relationship with the music giant.

The singer describes the experience as "liberating" - insisting big labels make too much money from musicians and are completely out of touch with the industry.
Reznor says, "Anyone who's an executive at a record label does not understand what the internet is, how it works, how people use it, how fans and consumers interact - no idea. I'm surprised they know how to use email. They have built a business around selling plastic discs, and nobody wants plastic discs any more. They're in such a state of denial it's impossible for them to understand what's happening.

"One of the biggest wake-up calls of my career was when I saw a record contract. I said, 'Wait - you sell it for $18.98 and I make 80 cents? And I have to pay you back the money you lent me to make it and then you own it? Who the f**k made that rule? Oh! The record labels made it because artists are dumb and they'll sign anything' - like I did. When we found out we'd been released (from their recording contract) it was like, 'Thank God!'. But 20 minutes later it was, 'Uh-oh, now what are we going to do?' It was incredibly liberating, and it was terrifying."

And Reznor adds that musicians should be exploring other ways to sell their own music, rather than relying on labels: "As an artist, you are now the marketer."

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The dark side of Dubai

Dubai was meant to be a Middle-Eastern Shangri-La, a glittering monument to Arab enterprise and western capitalism. But as hard times arrive in the city state that rose from the desert sands, an uglier story is emerging.

The wide, smiling face of Sheikh Mohammed – the absolute ruler of Dubai – beams down on his creation. His image is displayed on every other building, sandwiched between the more familiar corporate rictuses of Ronald McDonald and Colonel Sanders. This man has sold Dubai to the world as the city of One Thousand and One Arabian Lights, a Shangri-La in the Middle East insulated from the dust-storms blasting across the region. He dominates the Manhattan-manqué skyline, beaming out from row after row of glass pyramids and hotels smelted into the shape of piles of golden coins. And there he stands on the tallest building in the world – a skinny spike, jabbing farther into the sky than any other human construction in history.

But something has flickered in Sheikh Mohammed's smile. The ubiquitous cranes have paused on the skyline, as if stuck in time. There are countless buildings half-finished, seemingly abandoned. In the swankiest new constructions – like the vast Atlantis hotel, a giant pink castle built in 1,000 days for $1.5bn on its own artificial island – where rainwater is leaking from the ceilings and the tiles are falling off the roof. This Neverland was built on the Never-Never – and now the cracks are beginning to show. Suddenly it looks less like Manhattan in the sun than Iceland in the desert.

Once the manic burst of building has stopped and the whirlwind has slowed, the secrets of Dubai are slowly seeping out. This is a city built from nothing in just a few wild decades on credit and ecocide, suppression and slavery. Dubai is a living metal metaphor for the neo-liberal globalised world that may be crashing – at last – into history.

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Monopoly Killer: Perfect German Board Game Redefines Genre

In 1991, Klaus Teuber was well on his way to becoming one of the planet's hottest board game designers. Teuber (pronounced "TOY-burr"), a dental technician living with his wife and three kids in a white row house in Rossdorf, Germany, had created a game a few years earlier called Barbarossa and the Riddlemaster, a sort of ur-Cranium in which players mold figures out of modeling clay while their opponents try to guess what the sculptures represent. The game was a hit, and in 1988 it won the Spiel des Jahres prize—German board gaming's highest honor.

Winning some obscure German award may not sound impressive, but in the board game world the Spiel des Jahres is, in fact, a very, very big deal. Germans, it turns out, are absolutely nuts about board games. More are sold per capita in Germany than anywhere else on earth. The country's mainstream newspapers review board games alongside movies and books, and the annual Spiel board game convention in Essen draws more than 150,000 fans from all walks of life.

Because of this enthusiasm, board game design has become high art—and big business—in Germany. Any game aficionado will tell you that the best-designed titles in the world come from this country. In fact, the phrase German-style game is now shorthand for a breed of tight, well-designed games that resemble Monopoly the way a Porsche 911 resembles a Chevy Cobalt.

Eventually, Teuber whittled his invention down to a standard pair of dice, a handful of colored wooden houses that represented settlements and cities, stacks of cards that stood for resources (brick, wool, wheat, and others), and 19 hexagonal cardboard tiles that were arranged on a table to form the island. He had hit on something with this combination—the enthusiasm on family game night was palpable. During nearly every session, he, his wife, and their children would find themselves in heated competition. The game was done, Teuber decided. He called it...

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The hunt for the last Nazis

The US has deported to Austria a former Nazi death camp guard, Josias Kumpf. The move sheds light on the continuing search - in some countries, at least - for World War II war criminals. Mario Cacciottolo examines a hunt now entering its final phase.

"Looking for Nazi war criminals is the ultimate law enforcement race against the clock."

Eli Rosenbaum, director of the Office of Special Investigations (OSI) in the United States, has a list of thousands of suspects.

But working out whether any of them are alive and in the US is a laborious job.

A full check could take 100 years at current rates, he says - but in 10 years "the World War II biological clock will come to an end".

Contrary to popular belief, most former Nazis did not go into hiding after the war. Most did not even change their name.

There were some - such as Adolf Eichmann, who planned the transport of Jews to death camps, and Dr Joseph Mengele, Auschwitz's "Angel of Death" - who slipped away amid the post-war chaos and assumed false identities.

But the majority simply took off their uniforms, went home, and got a job.

And for a crucial period in the 1950s, little was done to track them down, experts say.

Justice 'not done'

"More could have been done, but there was a lack of political will. Not from 1945 to 1948, but after that," says Jean-Marc Dreyfus, lecturer in Holocaust studies at the University of Manchester.

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Replica Monty Python hand grenade causes bomb scare in London

Water company engineers spotted the object when they lifted up a fire hydrant cover during work on a street in Shoreditch, east London.

The road was cordoned off and a nearby pub was evacuated amid fears that the "grenade" could explode.

But after nearly an hour of analysis bomb experts realised that the cause of the scare was in fact a copy of the "Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch" used by Eric Idle to slaughter a killer rabbit in the 1975 film Monty Python And The Holy Grail.

The fictional weapon looks more like a golden ornament than a hand grenade; it was based on the Sovereign's Orb used at royal coronations.

The prop has become a popular in-joke among Python fans and replicas can be bought on eBay for as little as £14.

An spokeswoman for Islington police confirmed that the device was a toy and that had been no danger to the public

Local businesses criticised the police for taking so long to realise there was no threat.

Alberto Romanelli, owner of the Windmill put that was evacuated, said: "I lost a good hour's worth of business."


"And the Lord spake, saying, "First shalt thou take out the Holy Pin. Then shalt thou count to three, no more, no less. Three shall be the number thou shalt count, and the number of the counting shall be three. Four shalt thou not count, neither count thou two, excepting that thou then proceed to three. Five is right out. Once the number three, being the third number, be reached, then lobbest thou thy Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch towards thy foe, who, being naughty in my sight, shall snuff it."

A Quiet Revolution Grows in the Muslim World

Three decades after Iran's upheaval established Islamic clerical rule for the first time in 14 centuries, a quieter and more profound revolution is transforming the Muslim world. Dalia Ziada is a part of it.

When Ziada was 8, her mother told her to don a white party dress for a surprise celebration. It turned out to be a painful circumcision. But Ziada decided to fight back. The young Egyptian spent years arguing with her father and uncles against the genital mutilation of her sister and cousins, a campaign she eventually developed into a wider movement. She now champions everything from freedom of speech to women's rights and political prisoners. To promote civil disobedience, Ziada last year translated into Arabic a comic-book history about Martin Luther King Jr. and distributed 2,000 copies from Morocco to Yemen.

Now 26, Ziada organized Cairo's first human-rights film festival in November. The censorship board did not approve the films, so Ziada doorstopped its chairman at the elevator and rode up with him to plead her case. When the theater was suspiciously closed at the last minute, she rented a tourist boat on the Nile for opening night--waiting until it was offshore and beyond the arm of the law to start the movie.

Ziada shies away from little, including the grisly intimate details of her life. But she also wears a veil, a sign that her religious faith remains undimmed. "My ultimate interest," she wrote in her first blog entry, "is to please Allah with all I am doing in my own life."

That sentiment is echoed around the Muslim world. In many of the scores of countries that are predominantly Muslim, the latest generation of activists is redefining society in novel ways. This new soft revolution is distinct from three earlier waves of change--the Islamic revival of the 1970s, the rise of extremism in the 1980s and the growth of Muslim political parties in the 1990s.

Today's revolution is more vibrantly Islamic than ever.

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Kill Bill Parts 1 & 2, in One Minute, in One Take

Batman Icon's Mutation 2.0

"Cool, I never really paid attention to the different logos over the past 30 years. "

Jon Stewart to Dick Cheney: Drink a cup of 'Shut the f**k up'

Still overcome with incredulity over former Vice President Dick Cheney’s interview on Sunday with CNN, The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart couldn’t resist Tuesday night taking a couple of shots at some of the eye-brow raising statements made.

In his interview with CNN’s John King, Cheney said of President Obama’s national security policies, “He’s making some choices that in my mind, will in fact, raise the risk to the American people of another attack.”

Noting that Cheney no longer can truly know what he is talking about as he no longer receives daily intelligence briefings, Stewart indignantly said, “Maybe I could interest you in a hot cup of shut the f**k up.”

“The guy’s vice president for eight years, you barely see a whiff of him. He lives in some subterranean lair, literally has his house removed from Google Earth,” Stewart said. “Then when he’s no longer accountable to the American people he’s popping up everywhere. I can’t get him off my TV. He’s like the Mario Lopez of doom now.”

(With Video Goodness!!)
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"How do I make a segue from cold blooded reptilian killers? With us this morning, Former Vice President Dick Cheney..."

Awesomeness.

'MacGyver' getting revived as feature film

New Line is using twine, bubble gum and a pencil to throw "MacGyver" into development as a feature film.

Raffaella De Laurentiis, daughter of Dino De Laurentiis, is producing through her Raffaella Prods. along with Martha De Laurentiis and series creator Lee Zlotoff.

Dino De Laurentiis is exec producing.

"MacGyver" was a science-oriented adventure series that ran from 1985-92 on ABC. Richard Dean Anderson, later of "Stargate: Atlantis" and "SG-1" fame, starred as an incredibly resourceful secret agent for the Phoenix Foundation who frequently would escape from dangerous situations with ingenious and lightning-quick engineering trickery.

Two telefilms starring Anderson aired in the years after the show's cancellation. The character eventually achieved enough cultural penetration to become a reference for anyone attempting to jury-rig a solution out of household items. "Saturday Night Live" took the concept to the next level with its spoofs "MacGruber," starring Will Forte.

No writer is attached, but the studio hopes to find a script that can acknowledge how the concept has staked a place into pop culture yet still makes for a serious and fun adventure movie.

"We think we're a stick of chewing gum, a paper clip and an A-list writer away from a global franchise," said New Line's Richard Brener, who will oversee with Sam Brown and Walter Hamada.

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The cold hard facts of freezing to death

There is no precise core temperature at which the human body perishes from cold. At Dachau's cold-water immersion baths, Nazi doctors calculated death to arrive at around 77 degrees Fahrenheit. The lowest recorded core temperature in a surviving adult is 60.8 degrees. For a child it's lower: In 1994, a two-year-old girl in Saskatchewan wandered out of her house into a minus-40 night. She was found near her doorstep the next morning, limbs frozen solid, her core temperature 57 degrees. She lived.

Others are less fortunate, even in much milder conditions. One of Europe's worst weather disasters occurred during a 1964 competitive walk on a windy, rainy English moor; three of the racers died from hypothermia, though temperatures never fell below freezing and ranged as high as 45.

But for all scientists and statisticians now know of freezing and its physiology, no one can yet predict exactly how quickly and in whom hypothermia will strike--and whether it will kill when it does. The cold remains a mystery, more prone to fell men than women, more lethal to the thin and well muscled than to those with avoirdupois, and least forgiving to the arrogant and the unaware.

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Movie Theater Popcorn, It Really Is That Expensive

Here you see a movie ticket and kernel popcorn, as scaled to their price increase over the past 80 years. On your left, 1929. On your right, 2009. Needless to say, things have changed.

In 1929, The Great Depression popularized popcorn as a movie time treat since it was cheap, easy, tasty and somewhat filling. Back then, a bag cost you 5 cents. Now, a (small) bag costs you $4.75. Sure, our new bag is probably a bit bigger, but it's vastly more expensive.

In fact, when adjusted for inflation, popcorn prices* have seen an ironic 666% price increase, while movie ticket prices have increased a more moderate 66%. The above picture tells the story to scale, but just in case you're a bigger fan of numbers:

1929
Movie - $4.32 ($0.35 pre-inflation)
Popcorn - $0.62 ($0.05 pre-inflation)

2009
Movie - $7.20
Popcorn - $4.75

What gives? As many of you know, Hollywood takes a majority of ticket proceeds (we're talking upwards of 70%) during the first few weeks a film is released. Not so coincidentally, those first few weeks are also usually a film's best-attended screenings. So theaters fall back to popcorn, soda and candy to make money because Hollywood doesn't see a cut of these sales.

But is this 666% popcorn price increase evil? Obviously, numbers don't lie. Has the increased price of popcorn helped keep ticket prices in check? Possibly, though there's no real way of knowing.

Still, one thing's for sure: Those stadium seats and surround sound systems won't pay for themselves...right?

* Explanation on Data
Movie ticket data is based upon stats by the MPAA/NATO, seen here, with a 2009 estimate based upon the 2008 price. Realize that movie ticket price is always an average of all tickets sold per year, which drops the price greatly due to child tickets, matinees and second run theaters.

Popcorn price was based upon the widespead 5-cent bag of popcorn compared to a small popcorn from the AMC in Brooklyn, OH—which we feel is, if anything, a conservative sampling of movie popcorn prices. We'd love to have an average sale price on movie popcorn across America (just as we do tickets), but that data is not tracked by either the Popcorn Board or the National Association of Concessionaires.

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Weather Change Can Trigger Throbbing Headaches

Most people who are prone to headaches or migraines suspect that certain things, such as red wine or strong perfume, can trigger their head pain. Now a new study suggests that rising temperatures could trigger headaches, too.

According to a study published Monday in the journal Neurology, a spike in temperature may be enough to land some headache-prone people in the emergency room. The researchers found that for every 5-degrees-Celsius increase in temperature, the risk of a hospital-related headache visit went up 7.5 percent in the next 24-hour period. And a drop in barometric air pressure, which tends to happen before it rains, was also linked to a greater risk of headaches in the next 48 to 72 hours.

While people may think they’ve got a handle on their migraine triggers, in truth, weather changes may be to blame for at least some of those headaches, says Kenneth J. Mukamal, MD, the study’s lead author and an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School in Boston. “In the summer, you may think that ice cream set off your migraine,” he says. “But it wasn’t the ice cream—it was the temperature increase on that very hot day that led you to eat the ice cream.”

Dr. Mukamal’s team looked at 7,054 patients diagnosed with headaches in the emergency room of Boston’s Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center over a span of seven years; they compared factors like temperature, barometric pressure, humidity, and pollution for the period immediately preceding and following each patient’s hospital visit. While temperature and barometric pressure were linked to headaches, pollution—which is linked to a greater risk of heart attack and stroke—was not associated with migraines. But Dr. Mukamal isn’t ruling out the possibility. “Our city was not big enough to say for sure that air pollution is off the hook,” he says, adding that a similar study performed in Los Angeles (where air pollution levels are considerably higher) might yield different results.

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How NOT To Pull a Jeep Out Of The Mud

"It's a wonder nobody was seriously injured removing this Jeep from the mud."

The Time Machine: START HERE!

An actual interactive choose-your-own-adventure type of YouTube videos with time travel - start with this one, make the choices!

Die Hardererer (Bootleg Edition)

Die Hardererer (Bootleg Edition) by Nicholas Chatfield-Taylor from Nicholas Chatfield-Taylor on Vimeo.


Die Hard, Die Hard 2: Die Harder, Die Hard with a Vengeance, Live Free or Die Hard (Bootleg Version) edited down to only the frames containing fire.

Zero Punctuation: House of the Dead: Overkill

"This week, House of the Dead: Overkill versus Killzone 2. Place your bets."

The Front Fell Off!

John Clarke and Bryan Dawe debate the merits of ship design and the concepts of maritime law in this Monty-Python-esque comedy sketch.

For all those that hated the Bush presidency...

Available for only $16, from Print Liberation :
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Every Swear Word on Every Episode of the Sopranos, Ever, in Chronological Order. (video) (NSFW!)

Just to make sure, this is ABSOLUTELY not work-safe.


the sopranos, uncensored. from victor solomon on Vimeo.

Ancient Fossil Find: This Snake Could Eat a Cow!

Never mind the snake that menaced Jennifer Lopez in the 1997 movie Anaconda. Not even Hollywood could match a new discovery from the ancient world.

Stunned scientists have found the fossilised remains of the world's greatest snake - a record-busting serpent that was as long as a bus and snacked on crocodiles.

The boa-like behemoth ruled the tropical rainforests of what is now Colombia some 60 million years ago, at a time when the world was far hotter than now, they report in a study released on Wednesday.

The size of the snake's vertebrae suggest the beast weighed about 1.135 tons, in a range of 730 kilograms to 2.03 tons.

And it measured 13 metres from nose to tail, in a range of 10.64-15 metres, they estimate.

"Truly enormous snakes really spark people's imagination, but reality has exceeded the fantasies of Hollywood," said Jonathan Block, a vertebrate palaeontologist at the University of Florida, who co-led the work.

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"The snake that tried to eat Jennifer Lopez in the movie Anaconda is not as big as the one they found!!!"

Antarctica Time Lapse: A Year on Ice

"Time-lapse video filmed in Antarctica, in and around McMurdo Station and Scott Base.

Each year the sun is below the horizon for 4 months in the middle of winter, and above the horizon for 4 months in summer. During the couple of months in between we have more-or-less normal days.
Includes shots of auroras and the very rare polar stratospheric nacreous clouds, which form when ozone depleting gases crystallize in the upper atmosphere in the intense cold.
Summer population is about 1200 people, winter about 130."

Lego to launch new range of digital cameras and MP3 players

Lego, the Danish toy maker, has revealed plans for an entirely new product range – digital cameras and music players.

The move, which marks a radical departure from the building brick toys for which it is traditionally known, will see Lego join forces with a US firm to produce electronic gadgets aimed at children.

Lego said it hoped to bring its toys to life in "an all-new way for its fans". The range includes fully-functional digital cameras, MP3 music players, alarm clocks and walkie-talkies, which all feature Lego's distinctive look.

"Our entrance into the youth electronics space will enable our fans to express themselves through photos, videos and music, while displaying their enthusiasm for one of the world's all-time favourite toys," said Jill Wilfert, Lego Group's vice president of licensing.

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"So will you be able to put this together yourself? If so, there's no way I'd buy this for my kid...he'd never get it back from me cause I'd be too busy playing with it!"

Star Wars Retold By Someone Who Never Saw Star Wars

Star Wars: Retold (by someone who hasn't seen it) from Joe Nicolosi on Vimeo.

The Best Job In The World

Would you like to be paid AUD$150,0000 (US 100,000) to live for free in a three-bedroom villa on an island in the Great Barrier Reef for six months, simply in exchange for blogging about your experience?
Yeah, so would I.
Submit your application before February 22nd, and see if you make it through the other millions of people who are sure to apply.

And no--it's not a joke.
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It’s Survival of the Weak and Scrawny

Researchers see 'evolution in reverse' as hunters kill off prized animals with the biggest antlers and pelts.

Some of the most iconic photographs of Teddy Roosevelt, one of the first conservationists in American politics, show the president posing companionably with the prizes of his trophy hunts. An elephant felled in Africa in 1909 points its tusks skyward; a Cape buffalo, crowned with horns in the shape of a handlebar mustache, slumps in a Kenyan swamp. In North America, he stalked deer, pronghorn antelope, bighorn sheep and elk, which he called "lordly game" for their majestic antlers. What's remarkable about these photographs is not that they depict a hunter who was also naturalist John Muir's staunchest political ally. It's that just 100 years after his expeditions, many of the kind of magnificent trophies he routinely captured are becoming rare.

Elk still range across parts of North America, but every hunting season brings a greater challenge to find the sought-after bull with a towering spread of antlers. Africa and Asia still have elephants, but Roosevelt would have regarded most of them as freaks, because they don't have tusks. Researchers describe what's happening as none other than the selection process that Darwin made famous: the fittest of a species survive to reproduce and pass along their traits to succeeding generations, while the traits of the unfit gradually disappear. Selective hunting—picking out individuals with the best horns or antlers, or the largest piece of hide—works in reverse: the evolutionary loser is not the small and defenseless, but the biggest and best-equipped to win mates or fend off attackers.

When hunting is severe enough to outstrip other threats to survival, the unsought, middling individuals make out better than the alpha animals, and the species changes. "Survival of the fittest" is still the rule, but the "fit" begin to look unlike what you might expect. And looks aren't the only things changing: behavior adapts too, from how hunted animals act to how they reproduce. There's nothing wrong with a species getting molded over time by new kinds of risk. But some experts believe problems arise when these changes make no evolutionary sense.

Ram Mountain in Alberta, Canada, is home to a population of bighorn sheep, whose most vulnerable individuals are males with thick, curving horns that give them a regal, Princess Leia look. In the course of 30 years of study, biologist Marco Festa-Bianchet of the University of Sherbrooke in Quebec found a roughly 25 percent decline in the size of these horns, and both male and female sheep getting smaller. There's no mystery on Ram Mountain: male sheep with big horns tend to be larger and produce larger offspring. During the fall rut, or breeding season, these alpha rams mate more than any other males, by winning fights or thwarting other males' access to their ewes. Their success, however, is contingent upon their surviving the two-month hunting season just before the rut, and in a strange way, they're competing against their horns. Around the age of 4, their horn size makes them legal game—several years before their reproductive peak. That means smaller-horned males get far more opportunity to mate.

Other species are shrinking, too. Australia's red kangaroo has become noticeably smaller as poachers target the largest animals for leather. The phenomenon has been most apparent in harvested fish: since fishing nets began capturing only fish of sufficient size in the 1980s, the Atlantic cod and salmon, several flounders and the northern pike have all propagated in miniature.

So what if fish or kangaroos are smaller? If being smaller is safer, this might be a successful adaptation for a hunted species. After all, " 'fitness' is relative and transitory," says Columbia University biologist Don Melnick, meaning that Darwinian natural selection has nothing to do with what's good or bad, or the way things should be. Tusks used to make elephants fitter, as a weapon or a tool in foraging—until ivory became a precious commodity and having tusks got you killed. Then tuskless elephants, products of a genetic fluke, became the more consistent breeders and grew from around 2 percent among African elephants to more than 38 percent in one Zambian population, and 98 percent in a South African one. In Asia, where female elephants don't have tusks to begin with, the proportion of tuskless elephants has more than doubled, to more than 90 percent in Sri Lanka. But there's a cost to not having tusks. Tusked elephants, like the old dominant males on Ram Mountain, were "genetically 'better' individuals," says Festa-Bianchet. "When you take them systematically out of the population for several years, you end up leaving essentially a bunch of losers doing the breeding."

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Lead for car batteries poisons an African town

Battery recycling leaves deadly levels of contamination, claims 18 children

THIAROYE SUR MER, Senegal - First, it took the animals. Goats fell silent and refused to stand up. Chickens died in handfuls, then en masse. Street dogs disappeared.

Then it took the children. Toddlers stopped talking and their legs gave out. Women birthed stillborns. Infants withered and died. Some said the houses were cursed. Others said the families were cursed.

The mysterious illness killed 18 children in this town on the fringes of Dakar, Senegal's capital, before anyone in the outside world noticed. When they did — when the TV news aired parents' angry pleas for an investigation, when the doctors ordered more tests, when the West sent health experts — they did not find malaria, or polio or AIDS, or any of the diseases that kill the poor of Africa.

They found lead.

The dirt here is laced with lead left over from years of extracting it from old car batteries. So when the price of lead quadrupled over five years, residents started digging up the earth to get at it. The World Health Organization says the area is still severely contaminated, 10 months after a government cleanup.

The tragedy of Thiaroye Sur Mer gives a glimpse at how the globalization of a modern tool — the car battery — can wreak havoc in the developing world.

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