Strange things in the NEWS

[prariepunk]

RE: Re: RE: Power on the 2.5?

Some of the More Interesting topics in the (worldwide) News:
Woman calls cops over unreliable hit man:
TOKYO - A Japanese woman called in the police after a hit man she paid to kill her lover’s wife failed to carry out the job. The 32-year-old Tokyo woman was arrested on Wednesday for incitement to murder, the Daily Yomiuri newspaper said on Friday.The woman contacted a private detective through a Web site last November and paid him $9,000 in cash to murder her love rival, the paper said.

Woman Admits Lengthy 'Sexual Relationship' With 8-Year-Old:
In a deal with prosecutors, Tammy Imre pleaded guilty to a charge of risk of injury to a minor. She faces six years in prison when she is sentenced Nov. 4.

Imre was arrested last November on sexual assault charges after the boy's mother found a letter Imre allegedly had written to him, police said.
In the letter, police said Imre told the boy that she doesn't "want anyone but you. Now tomorrow it's supposed to rain, you can come over we can (you know what). Love ya! I want you!"

Police said the boy, the playmate of Imre's 7-year-old daughter, initially denied doing anything with Imre because he feared getting into trouble. When confronted, police said Imre acknowledged engaging in sexual acts with the boy.

According to the arrest affidavit, she told investigators she considered the relationship "like a fantasy and she was the girlfriend and he was the boyfriend."

Defense attorney Donald Papcsy said Imre suffers from a mental problem that made it hard for her to admit that what she did was wrong.

"She really believed she was in a fantasy relationship," Papcsy said.

The family of the young boy agreed to the plea deal, saying they wanted to spare him and Imre's daughter a lengthy trial in which the children would have to testify.

"This was a big step forward for the family," said George Ganim, the attorney for the victim's family.

Men Riding In Jeep Underneath Plane Unlock Stuck Landing Gear:
Three men in a Jeep traveling underneath a plane at 80 MPH used a pole to yank its locked landing gear down during a risky in-flight fix at the New Smyrna Beach Airport, according to Local 6 News.

A pilot and student were simulating gear failure scenarios Friday when the simulation became the real thing. The plane's landing gear became stuck in the up position.

 

[bchcky]

iditos huh? is this a case of the pot calling the kettle black?

 

[prariepunk]

Can i use adeep cycle marine battery on my Jeep?

Men Riding In Jeep Underneath Plane Unlock Stuck Landing Gear:
Three men in a Jeep traveling underneath a plane at 80 MPH....
....gear became stuck in the up position.

OK, I made the title before I posted the stories , silly me, I forgot to look before it was posted huh?

 

[mingez]

Barbara Streisand

I'm an "idito." I think Sparky, Sully and Twisted are "Iditos" too.

JK.

You know Zach, you can edit a title after you post it.

Cowboy up!

 

[TwistedCU]

gauges

Cowboy up!

:lol: :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol:

 

[Sparky-Watts]

RE: Barbara Streisand

Cowboy up!

:lol: :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol:

x2!!!!!!

 

[prariepunk]

Cowboy up!

Uhhh? I'm not "down" with the "lingo", what does "cowboy up" mean?

 

[prariepunk]

Penis burned -- hospital to be sued
Zhang Xiaobin
2005-09-30 Beijing Time
A Mr Kang who went to a private hospital to have foreskin resection has lost more than he expected, the Xinmin Evening News reported Friday.

Kang, a middle-aged man, read an advertisement and went to a private hospital in Jinshan District on September 8. He followed doctor's instruction to take a course of microwave "heliotherapy". After one hour, Kang noticed that his penis had been burned black and was painful. He had difficulty passing water but the doctor had gone off work and he could find nobody to help him.

On the following day, the doctor tried to treat the inflammation and advised Kang to try other hospitals.

Urologists found that Kang's penis had been so severely "cooked" that the burned parts had to be excised reducing the size of the penis.

The president of the private hospital admitted an "accident" had occurred but asserted that the "operation" had been performed according to the instructions set out on the "heliotherapy" manual and it was the first time that such an accident had occurred, Xinmin said.

An official with the Jinshan health bureau, the local regulator of hospitals, said the incident may have been avoided had the hospital followed the operation procedure strictly.

Through negotiations hosted by the bureau, the hospital has paid part of Kang's medical costs. Both parties have agreed to take the case to court when a medical negligence appraisal has been carried out by health authorities.

 

[prariepunk]

WEIRD THINGS IN THE NEWS

Fugitive goes on date with policeman

Fri Sep 30, 1:05 PM ET

BUDAPEST (AFP) - A fugitive who escaped from prison in Hungary was caught when he unwittingly went out on a date with a policeman, the national police said in a statement.
ADVERTISEMENT

The unidentified man, sentenced for robbery and fraud, had posted an ad with his own photo in an online dating website.

He set up a date for Thursday at a pastry shop with someone who he thought was a woman.

"At the place of the rendez-vous the surprised man was caught and that is when he realized that the woman with whom he had exchanged emails and for whom he brought a ring was actually a man and on top of it a detective," the police said.

 

[prariepunk]

15 Years in a Fridge

Created: 30.09.2005 11:54 MSK (GMT +3), Updated: 11:54 MSK

MosNews

Click Here!

Vitaly Matyukhin is an Arkhangelsk resident who has not seen the sun for fifteen years. Neighbors shun his household, while his little son cannot understand why he always have to wrap up in warm clothes before seeing his dad.

Suffering a rare disorder — he cannot stand the heat and sunlight — Matyukhin has been confined to a self-built giant fridge for over 15 years now, the Moskovsky Komsomolets daily reported on Friday.

Matyukhin seems to be the only man in Russia’s northern city of Arkhangelsk who gets no kicks from the extraordinarily warm September weather. Instead, he is looking forwarded to snowy winter days. He leaves his shelter only by night, his neighbors say.

The man is suffering a rare heat exchange disorder and cannot stand temperatures over 5 degrees Celsius. For nearly fifteen years no, Matyukhin has been living in a fridge.

Born in Krasnodar in Russian South, Matyukhin graduated from a construction college. One fine day, the youth suffered a sunstroke that triggered all his woes.

Doctors could not help him. They consulted their colleagues in other cities across the country and abroad. At some point it transpired that a similar case had been earlier registered in the U.S. where doctors, too, could not figure out how to alleviate the patient’s suffering. But as the man was able to afford expensive treatment he had a special suit with cold air supplied inside from cylinders made for him.

Mityukhin was never invited to the U.S. Instead, he was given a paper that vaguely stated he was suffering what was worded as “a heat exchange disorder”, and set out to build a refrigerator where he could live.

He moved to Arkhangelsk, together with his young wife Olga, seeking to escape southern heat.

Upon hearing of Matyukhin’s case Moscow doctors contacted by Moskovsky Komsomolets did not seem surprise. More often, such patients suffer from intolerance to cold, Vladimir Padalko of the Sechenov Medical Academy says. Cases such as that of Matyukhin are, indeed, rare.

Meanwhile, Matyukhin works at home — he has mastered a new profession of a telephone sales agent — and hopes for recovery.

He has divorced Olga and married a local woman.

 

[prariepunk]

Live giant squid caught on camera

The giant squid takes the bait - and gets snagged
A live, adult giant squid has been caught on camera in the wild for the very first time.

Japanese researchers took pictures of the elusive creature hunting 900m down, enveloping its prey by coiling its tentacles into a ball.

The images show giant squid, known as Architeuthis, are more vigorous hunters than has been supposed.

The images, captured in the Pacific Ocean, appear in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.


It was exciting to get a live Architeuthis tentacle. It was still functioning when we got it on the boat
Tsunemi Kubodera, National Science Museum
Documentary companies have invested millions of dollars trying to film adult giant squid in their natural environment. These efforts have met with little success - though one team has managed to capture a juvenile on film.

Japanese fishermen have taken snaps of an adult at the surface but, until now, no one had obtained images of the animal in its deep-sea hunting grounds.

Slippery customer

In their efforts to photograph the huge cephalopod, Tsunemi Kubodera and Kyoichi Mori have been using a camera and depth recorder attached to a long-line, which they lower into the sea from their research vessel.

Below the camera, they suspend a weighted jig - a set of ganged hooks to snag the squid - along with a single Japanese common squid as bait and an odour lure consisting of chopped-up shrimps.

The squid finally escaped, but lost a tentacle
At 0915 local time on 30 September 2004, they struck lucky. At a depth close to 1km in waters off Japan's Ogasawara Islands, an 8m-long Architeuthis wrapped its long tentacles around the bait, snagging one of them on the jig.

Kubodera and Mori took more than 550 images of the giant squid as it made repeated attempts to detach itself.

The pictures show the squid spreading its arms, enveloping the long-line and swimming away in its efforts to struggle free.

Finally, four hours and 13 minutes after it was first snagged, the attached tentacle broke off, allowing the squid to escape. The researchers retrieved a 5.5m portion with the line.

Severed appendage

"It was exciting to get a live Architeuthis tentacle. It was still functioning when we got it on the boat," Dr Kubodera told BBC News.

The large suckers repeatedly gripped the boat deck - and Dr Kubodera's fingers when he prodded the severed appendage.


TOTAL LENGTH COMPARISON

Scientists admit they know little about the largest of the squid
"The grip wasn't as strong as I expected; it felt sticky," he explained.

But while other researchers have suggested that Architeuthis is a rather sluggish creature, the images show it is in fact an energetic predator.

Dr Steve O'Shea, of the Auckland University of Technology, New Zealand, told the BBC News website that he was extremely pleased for the researchers.

Kubodera, he said, had "ever-so-quietly been working away in the background on this for a number of years".

And Dr O'Shea, a world renowned expert on giant squid, added: "From the point of view of the public, who believe this squid is the largest, the meanest, most aggressive squid that we have - it is hugely significant."

Trawling threat

The Auckland-based researcher said now that the squid had been caught on camera, researchers could focus on other, lesser known squid species and on conservation.

Bottom-trawling by fisheries is destroying squid egg masses on the seabed, Dr O'Shea claimed. Evidence for this comes from an efficient squid predator - the sperm whale.

The severed appendage was still functional
"Five of the species of squid that were staple in the diet of the sperm whale are recognised in New Zealand as threatened solely as a consequence of the effects of deep-sea bottom-trawling."

"[Sperm whales] are returning from the Antarctic on their historic migratory route to one of the richest regions on Earth in terms of squid diversity. But the larder is bare and the poor things are washing up on the beaches here starved."

The giant squid is by no means the largest known. Several other species, including the colossal squid Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni, are thought to grow larger.

 

[prariepunk]

WEIRD THINGS IN THE NEWS

Missing man found driving dead deer in ambulance

Associated Press

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. - A man reported missing from a Florida hospital was found in North Carolina dressed like a doctor and driving a stolen ambulance with a dead deer wedged in the back, authorities said.

Leon Holliman Jr., 37, was reported missing from a River Region Human Services facility in Jacksonville last month.

The North Carolina State Highway Patrol found him driving the ambulance with the deer on Sunday.

"I don't know how the man got it up in there," said Sgt. Robert Pearson. "It was a six point buck."

It wasn't known where Holliman got the deer, which had been dead for some time, Pearson said.

Authorities tracked the stolen ambulance through three rural North Carolina counties and one county in southern Virginia before its tires were punctured and it wound up in a ditch, Pearson said.

Holliman was admitted to a North Carolina hospital for a psychiatric evaluation. Police said they would decide whether to charge Holliman after that evaluation is complete.

 

[prariepunk]

RE: WEIRD THINGS IN THE NEWS

Kids smoking cane toads
By GREG McLEAN
28sep05

CHILDREN as young as 12 are licking cane toads in an attempt to get high, the Northern Territory News has learned.





Some juveniles and young adults in Katherine and Arnhem Land are even drying out the skins of cane toads and rolling them up as joints to get a hit.

But Territory health authorities have warned that those who lick or smoke cane toads are dicing with death and stress that there are no hallucinogenic effects possible from bufo toxin, the toxin excreted by the introduced pest.

Director of emergency medicine at Royal Darwin Hospital Didier Palmer said anyone who ingests bufo toxin is more likely to die than get high from it.

``These are very foolish and dangerous acts,'' he said.

``Anyone who does this runs the very serious risk of seizures, a rapid loss of consciousness, cardio-vascular collapse and death.''

Researchers investigating what substances petrol sniffers in Arnhem Land abuse were shocked to be told that some were skinning cane toads, drying them and smoking them.

Maranboy police also report they had to take a road worker into custody last month after he licked a cane toad while intoxicated.

It is understood the man's eyes rolled in the back of his head and he became extremely aggressive, and began shaking uncontrollably after licking the bufo toxin.

Officer-in-charge of Maranboy police, Brevet Sergeant Angelo Denale, said it was unclear whether the man's aggression was caused by alcohol or bufo toxin but warned against experimenting with the dangerous substance.

``Whether or not he became aggressive from licking cane toads, smoking cannabis or alcohol, it is a recipe for disaster,'' he said.

``Licking cane toads gives off some form of poison and it's obviously bad for your health.''

 

[prariepunk]

RE: WEIRD THINGS IN THE NEWS

Surfer Fights Off 16-Foot Shark

POSTED: 10:57 am EDT September 26, 2005
UPDATED: 11:07 am EDT September 26, 2005

An Australian surfer who survived an attack by an apparent Great White shark Sunday said he pushed it away as his friends pulled him to the safety of some nearby rocks.

"I was about 20 meters away from Josh and this shark's head just came out of the water and grabbed him, I saw a wave coming so just grabbed it and headed towards the rocks," a witness said.

Officials said Josh Berris, 26, was attacked and injured Sunday in the sea off southern Australia's Kangaroo Island. Witnesses said the shark was about 16-feet long, according to reports.

Berris, who suffered leg injuries was transported to Flinders Medical Center in Adelaide, where he underwent surgery, South Australia Ambulance spokesman Lee Francis said. He is expected to survive the attack.

"I was about 20 meters away from Josh and this shark's head just came out of the water and grabbed him, I saw a wave coming so just grabbed it and headed towards the rocks," a witness said.

The shark attack came just days after a surfer in western Australia fought off a shark by punching it in the head.

Sunday's was the latest in a string of shark attacks off the coast of southern Australia, a known haunt for giant great white sharks.

Earlier this month, South Australia state Emergency Services Minister Carmel Zollo said a rescue helicopter and fixed-wing aircraft would patrol Adelaide beaches during the coming summer.

Great whites are a protected species but the attacks have prompted calls for a cull to reduce numbers.

Watch Local 6 News for more on this story

 

[prariepunk]

RE: WEIRD THINGS IN THE NEWS

Billion-dollar pirate treasure trove found

From correspondents in Santiago

September 26, 2005


TREASURE hunters believe they have found a legendary trove of 18th century jewels and gold coins worth billions of dollars on Chile's Robinson Crusoe island.
The island in the Juan Fernandez archipelago, 700km west of Chile was a refuge for corsairs crossing the Pacific Ocean.

Legend has it Spanish navigator Juan Esteban Ubilla y Echeverria stashed a fortune on the island in 1715.

Advertisement:
It was later found by a British sailor Cornelius Webb and reburied in another area. An expedition using a metal-detecting robot believe they have pinpointed the site.

 

[prariepunk]

RE: WEIRD THINGS IN THE NEWS

24 years later, he has DUI hearing

Thursday, September 22, 2005
AP

John Strickland Jr. told the judge he didn't even remember being stopped for drunken driving. That's probably because it happened 24 years ago.

Strickland, 58, who now lives in Greensboro, Greene County, was picked up by Washington County Sheriff's deputies on the decades-old warrant last Thursday.

Strickland was charged with drunken driving and refusing to take a breath test after an accident in Charleroi on Aug. 14, 1981. But he told Washington County Judge Paul Pozonsky on Monday that he didn't realize he was a wanted man all this time. He had even moved out of the state for about 10 years before returning in the early 1990s.

"I don't remember ever getting stopped," he said.

Pozonsky suggested the charges be dropped because of the amount of time that had elapsed, but Assistant District Attorney Michael Fagella refused until a deal was struck for Strickland to plead guilty to a reduced charge of disorderly conduct.

Pozonsky sentenced him to the four days he served in jail since his arrest and a $200 fine.

"I would have been up here a long time ago if I knew about it," Strickland said

 

[prariepunk]

RE: WEIRD THINGS IN THE NEWS

Ronald McDonald Gets A Sex Change

Mcgirl Kiddy-fiddler Ronald McDonald (as in he fiddles children out of their pocket money) has had a sex change in order to lure older Japanese people back into eating their "food".

McDonald's have sexed up Ronald by hacking off his gentials, wiping off his make-up, and straightening his hair. One new wardrobe later and you've got the foxy Rhonda McDonald (our name, not theirs) who's pictured eating burgers which would actually put her out of a job within weeks.

 

[prariepunk]

Polish toddler runs over family members in car
Sat Sep 24, 2005 6:44 PM BST167
Printer Friendly | Email Article | RSS


WARSAW (Reuters) - An 18-month-old child started the family car and ran over three family members in a southern Polish village on Saturday, police said.

"The child somehow started the car, whose keys had been left in the ignition, and it began reversing," police spokesman Adam Jachimczak said.

The child's mother, who tried to stop the car, and her four-year-old daughter, got run over by the vehicle which pinned the grandfather against the wall of a barn.

The four-year-old, who suffered the most serious injuries, was rushed to hospital together with her mother and grandfather who were also hurt, Jachimczak said.







Ugh, the jokes about this one!

 

[prariepunk]

The world's least alike twins
Dutch twin boys born of the same womb — one black, one white — face growing up in a not-so-colorblind world

By Ann Curry
NBC News
Updated: 12:59 p.m. ET Sept. 29, 2005


Ann Curry
• Profile
They are like any two 11 1/2 year-old-boys. Best friends that aren’t above the occasional fight, the bond that Koen and Tuen share goes deeper than squabbling.

Looking at them, it might surprise you to learn that not only are they brothers— they’re twin brothers.

Dateline has been following their story since they first arrived in 1993.

The two boys are growing up in a world that sees color everywhere, but in a family that says it’s color blind.

Wilma Stuart, mother of twin boys: We are so used to it we don’t see that they are different in color.

Ann Curry, anchor: But you live in a world that does.

Wilma: Yes.

Curry: And therein lies the problem.

Wilma: Exactly.

How they got to this place is its own remarkable story. The Stuarts, Wilma and Willem are Dutch. He’s an engineer, she’s a nurse. Theirs is an extraordinary story that began in the most ordinary way: They married in 1984 and assumed children would follow, but they didn’t. After six years they tried invitro fertilization.

The Stuarts were lucky. On April 2, 1993 Wilma learned she was pregnant, and soon after, they discovered they were having twins— exactly what they had hoped for.

Wilma settled in to enjoy her pregnancy, but the delivery was not as easy. On December 1, 1993, two boys were born by emergency caesarian section. Koen, short for Conrad, arrived at 2:55 a.m.

Wilma: He was beautifully pink. He had blue eyes and dark hair.

The second twin, Tuen, was born just three minutes later. He was not as robust as his brother. He went to an incubator on another floor of the hospital, while Koen was placed in a bassinet at his mother’s side.

It was three days before the Stuarts saw their new babies together.

Wilma: At that time the difference was so big that I immediately said "He is brown, he’s very brown." I knew immediately that something went wrong.

And she started asking questions and looking for an explanation.

Wilma: We would ask nurses, "How come that Koen’s so brown?" They would say that newborn babies have sometimes liver problems, and that they turn yellow. So they would check that in his blood and the level would always be normal and they didn’t talk about it any more, so we didn’t either.

If not the jaundiced condition that so many babies are born with— what was it?

Wilma: I descend from French gypsies and he descends from Mongolian people so a little brown could be somewhere in the family. But it never eased my mind. It never did. He was too different.

With every possible explanation as to why was one of their babies was so dark, there remained the one nagging fear that no one wanted to say out loud.

Wilma: You don’t want to hear someone else say, “Well, we think that’s not your baby. You don’t want to know that.”

Wilma had long ago fallen hopelessly in love with her baby boys, and was haunted by the prospect that one of the boys might not be hers. But not a single doctor had ever raised a question, and in fact many doctors say that it is often impossible to identify the race of a newborn by skin tone. Pigment melanin, which determines skin color, may not fully develop until well after birth.

'Inside Dateline' blog

* NBC producer blogs: Stuarts' home is filled with love
* Viewer reactions to the show

But what doctors in the Netherlands missed— strangers didn’t.

Wilma: They would say to me, ‘Are these your children?’ and I would say ‘Yes.’ ‘Is this a twin?’ ‘Yes, it’s a twin.’ ‘You must have gotten the scare of your life when he was born.’ And I would say ‘Why? He has two arms, two legs, he has a beautiful face.’

People felt obliged to share their surprise. Whether white or black, people would speak up.

Wilma: We were walking downtown, and there came a black woman looking in our baby carrier, looking at us. And she would say, “Where did you get such a brown baby? How’s that possible?” And we would say “I don’t know. But he’s ours.”

When the twins were six months old, Koen developed a bronchial infection. The Stuarts took both boys to a new pediatrician.

Dr. Brussel: I said, ‘I see two children and one is very white and one is very black. I’m puzzling how that’s possible?’

Wilma: He asked us if it had occurred to us that they were so different in color. And we said, “Yes, of course.”

Dr. Brussel: And when I started the subject she starts crying immediately, Wilma.

Hospital makes a 'regrettable mistake'
After half a year of worrying and wondering, the Stuarts where about to find out if their children, who’d been side by side since life began, were biologically related at all.

Wilma: We didn’t know either what was going on. Was he my child? Was he Willem’s child? Wasn’t he either one of ours?

The possibilities were staggering: Had the lab mixed someone else’s sperm with Wilma’s eggs? Had someone else’s egg been mixed with Willem’s sperm? Or had some other couples fertilized embyro been implanted in Wilma’s womb?

Only DNA testing would answer those questions.

The twins were nearly a year old when the tests came back: The news was at once reassuring and devastating. One of the children Wilma nurtured for nine months in her womb was theirs. But the other was not.

As far as Willem was concerned, Koen was still his child, but as painful as it was, there were some questions that would have to be answered...

Wilma: The immediate next question is what happened? What went wrong? And if Willem is not his biological father, who is?

The Stuarts tried to go on as normal: they marked the boys' first birthday while they worried what would happen if their secret got out.

Living with that fear and paranoia was too much for the Stuarts. They decided to go public on their own terms. They gave one newspaper interview. And on Saturday, June 6, 1995, the paper hit the stands.

Within hours, their story was all over the world. Some of the public response was even stranger than the Stuarts had imagined.

Wilma: When the story came out there were reactions like— “If you’re not happy with your brown child, you can give it to me.” As if we would give away our own child. So amazing.

The hospital called it a “deeply regrettable mistake.” The report of the investigation still has not been made public, but speculation is that a piece of lab equipment called a pipette, like a large eyedropper, had been used twice, causing another man’s sperm to be mixed with Willem’s.

Wilma: They think that that’s what’s happened.

In fact, there were two other couples in the waiting room that day, and one of them was black.

The hospital located the man and confirmed he was Koen's biological father. And though he was under no obligation to meet the son he never knew he had, when Koen was 18 months old, he did.

Wilma: Koen’s biological father just looked at him from a distance. He didn’t try to claim him or take him on his lap or— I don’t think Koen noticed him as being someone special.

Koen had met his biological father but it was up to Stuarts to tackle the question every child asks, “Where did I come from?” For the Stuarts, answering that question proved a lot more complicated.

Wilma: I’ll tell him that the fact that you’re born means that your urge to be born was so big that you couldn’t wait for a black mommy.

Even by the age of two, the boys seemed to have absorbed their differences on some level.

Wilma: When they see babies on television and it’s a white baby, all white babies are named “Tuen.” And when we show them a picture with a darker baby it’s always named “Koen.” It’s adorable.

Whatever their differences, from the beginning the twins undeniably had that special bond of siblings who shared a womb for nine months.

Wilma: Yeah, they can be together in a very small space without getting in each other’s way. For instance, we don’t have a big bathtub and they sit in together. It’s never a problem. It’s duo penotti. That’s a white and brown chocolate cream for on your sandwich. That’s what Koen and Teun are called, duo penotti. Black and white in one body.

 

[mingez]

Cowboy up!

Uhhh? I'm not "down" with the "lingo", what does "cowboy up" mean?

I was just teasing you because of the Cowboy hat thread.

"Cowboy Up" is kinda like "Get'er done", or "Tough it out" depending on the context. I was just jokin'. :wink: