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Wacky News Stories

Now we need to find out how to use the fungus for evil
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Eye Scanner Can Identify Drug Users?

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“Drug testing in the Travis County Drug Court Program will be done in a matter of seconds thanks to a new device which scans the eye for signs of drug use. The PassPoints Oculomotor Testing Device was approved for the drug court program on Tuesday. It will test for drug use, partially replacing the more expensive, more invasive, and time consuming urine analysis test. “We thought this would be a win-win from a budgetary standpoint and for clients,” said drug court manager Sharon Caldwell-Hernandez. Members of the program will initially be tested sober for baseline levels. Each test after that, which involves an eye-scan and breathalyzer, will be able to determine if drug use could be present by comparing results to normal levels. “It will help out day-to-day work flow because we will get results immediately,” said Caldwell-Hernandez. Urine analysis will still be conducted for tests that come back positive, however, eliminating the need for negative eye-tests will help the program save money.”
 
Boat builder floats concrete concept
Alexander MacKenzie merges his two passions to build a ‘rakish’ 10-metre cement schooner


PICTOU LANDING — It’s not the Bluenose II, but boat builder and cement contractor Alexander MacKenzie promises that the concrete vessel under construction in his shop will race the famed Lunenburg ship.

"We can race," he said, as he surveyed the wire-mesh form for his schooner’s 2.5-centimetre-thick cement hull. "I’d not likely win. But I’ll surely finish building this one before they finish the Bluenose. I’ll put it in the water before they do. That’s the race I’ll win."

MacKenzie predicted his 10-metre concrete schooner, which he calls The Pirate King, will also cost a lot less to build and will last a lot longer than the new Bluenose II.

"I give lots of credit to the Bluenose, but it should be built out of concrete if they want it to last 50 years," he said.

For longevity, the Hector, Pictou’s own ship, should also have been constructed of concrete, at least to the waterline, added MacKenzie.

His checkered career includes twice taking election ballot boxes to protest pulp mill effluent at Boat Harbour, fixing the highway in front of his home at his own expense and serving as a county councillor.

So far, MacKenzie has invested 300 hours and about $1,500 to build the steel form sitting in his shop. He expects he’ll use less than three cubic metres of cement to finish the project.

First, he curved wire around wood-braced chipboard profiles of the hull and then bent one-centimetre steel bars, spaced eight centimetres apart, around the flimsy cage. That was covered with six layers of chicken wire and two of welded steel mesh, all fastened with thousands of wire twist ties.

When he’s finished tying the wire, MacKenzie will plaster the outside with a mixture of sand and cement. Then he’ll remove the wood bracing, form concrete ribs inside and plaster the interior with cement. The ship will be finished with wood for the decks, housing and masts.

"She’ll be ‘schooner-rigged and rakish, with a long and lissome hull,’ " said MacKenzie, who went on to quote from memory all six verses of poet John Masefield’s Ballad of John Silver.

He’ll build a special boom truck to move the three-tonne vessel to Pictou Harbour for its launch.

The process, named ferroconcrete because of the steel reinforcement, is not new, said MacKenzie, who has been in the cement business for 36 years. However, he wasn’t aware of the process until a friend mentioned it to him about 15 years ago.

During the first and second world wars, a steel shortage led to the construction of dozens of cement ships, landing craft and barges in the U.S., Britain, Norway, Italy and New Zealand, according to a variety of boating websites.

Some are still afloat, but most ferroconcrete boats now are pleasure craft, like a sailboat Mackenzie saw at a wharf in Cuba.

There are suspicions in the concrete boat-building industry that the material was used as far back as the Roman Empire, but the earliest documented ferroconcrete boat is a dinghy built in France in 1848, say the websites.

The schooner under construction in Mackenzie’s shop is his seventh concrete vessel.

He took his first, a four-metre flat-bottomed dinghy, to Pictou Island and back to the local wharf, where it froze in the ice and sank.

Undaunted, MacKenzie built a six-metre, square-rigged pirate ship, a seven-metre replica of a Viking ship in 2000 and three rowboats, carrying names like Sea Mint, US Molly Brown and Coral.

Over the years, he tinkered with them, replaced rotted wood sections and added or removed motors, or sails made by his wife from Tyvek house wrap. The concrete hulls sit in his backyard, exposed to the elements but intact.

The pirate ship got loose in a gale and washed up on a rock, but the only damage was to the rock, MacKenzie said. In another case, an escaped rowboat hit a rock and got a head-sized hole. MacKenzie used a repair mixture to plaster the hole, in which the wire mesh remained intact.

"Fifteen minutes later I was rowing," he said, adding that the wire mesh reinforcement expands and shrinks at the same rate as the cement, which prevents cracking.

A crushing blow would create a leak by fracturing the concrete and stretching the mesh. But the mesh would hold some cement and act as a sieve so water would fill the boat more slowly than if it was a sudden gap, he said.

MacKenzie also suspects the shape of a boat’s hull withstands pressure about the same way an egg does. "The wood wears out, but the hull lasts and lasts," MacKenzie said of his boats.

He likes the ferroconcrete method because it doesn’t require the carpentry expertise needed for a wooden vessel, it lasts, and it’s inexpensive. In addition to the cost for the steel form, he figures he will spend another $500 on the concrete and $1,500 on the wood decking.

He figures concrete boats aren’t popular because few people are passionate about both cement and boats. "You’ve got to have that combination," he said.
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Original story here :
http://thechronicleherald.ca/TheNovaScotian/1231656.html
 
They just keep getting smarter.... :rolleyes:

Man Complains To Police About Being Shorted By His Cocaine Dealer


MARCH 15--Believing that he had been ripped off in a commercial transaction, Antonio Recinos decided to contact Connecticut cops to register a complaint.

Perhaps the Better Business Bureau would have been a better choice considering that Recinos, 35, thought he had been cheated by a cocaine dealer who had sold him $40 of the drug Sunday evening.

According to the East Hartford Police Department, Recinos initially dialed 911 to lodge his complaint, but when he spotted a patrolman he approached the cop to deliver his beef face-to-face.

This was a mistake on the part of Recinos, who is pictured in the above mug shot.

Recinos, who displayed a small bag of cocaine, told the officer that he had been shorted by his dealer. While it is unclear what Recinos, who apparently had been drinking, expected the cop to do on his behalf, he likely did not expect to end up in handcuffs over his consumer complaint.

Recinos, an El Salvador native, was arrested early Sunday on a narcotics possession charge. He was later freed on $5000 bail and has a March 30 court appearance, according to police.
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Original story HERE!

And also this....

Snake Dies of Silicone Poisoning After Biting Model's Fake Breast

It was another trip to the Garden of Eden cut short for one legless reptile.

Israeli model Orit Fox was attempting to lick a snake during a publicity stunt for radio DJ Shmulik Tayar when the lucky serpent, presumably aroused, lunged forward and bit Fox's fake breast, sending witnesses into a frenzy.

Fox, who is rumored to have the largest bosom in all of Israel, was hurried to a hospital outside Jerusalem where she received a tetanus shot and was later discharged.

As for the snake, puckering up with a supermodel proved to be the kiss of death. The creature succumbed to silicone poisoning shortly after the incident.
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Original story HERE!

:?
 
Not current news, but amazing nonetheless:


This film shows the terrifying images captured by the Russian filmmaker Vladimir Shevchenko on scene at Chernobyl those dreadful days in April 1986. Shevchenko later died suffering from the radiation he exposed himself to. Although his name is not among the official casualties of the accident, this last tragic film of him keeps his name alive forever.
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Nice find Stallion, I had never seen that footage before.
 
This is the man who has turned himself into a real life Transformer - by creating a fully functional Autobot costume out of a children's toy.
The must-have gadget for any die-hard Transformer fan was the brainchild of Californian Drew Beaumier.
He's already wowed the judges on American Idol and now he's created the crazy costume in his garage armed with just a beginner's tool box.
It took eight weeks of constant trial and error to piece it together using a second-hand Power Wheels car to form the body and spare parts as well as glue bought at WalMart.
Transformer fanatic Drew then ripped the children's car apart leaving him with each separate section.
He then meticulously pieced the parts back together with hinges and glued it to a sports undergarment so he could wear it like a suit.
The robot costume comes complete with wheels attached to his arms and legs so he can fold down into a car and roll along.
But when he stands up, the costume springs back out into the superhero pose famed by Optimus Prime and Co.
The part-time bar tender has now taken to re-enacting famous scenes from the Transformer series along Hollywood and Sunset Boulevard.
And his street performances have already paid off the $300 he spent making his crazy creation after eager tourists began tipping him to have photos taken next to the real-life action hero.
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Full report, with photos of Transforming costume, here:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1368776/Hes-wheely-Inventor-Transform-toy-car.html

But "wowed the judges on American Idol"? Not quite...
http://unrealitytv.com/car-costumed-beaumier-fails-to-transform-into-american-idol/
xD:
 
RIAA Demands $75 Trillion from LimeWire

 The music industry wants LimeWire to pay up to $75 trillion in damages after losing a copyright infringement claim. Manhattan federal Judge Kimba Wood has labeled this request "absurd."

To put that number into perspective, the U.S. GDP is around 14 trillion -- less than one fifth of what the music industry is requesting. Heck, the GDP of the entire world is between 59 and 62 trillion. That's right, the music industry wants LimeWire to pay more money than exists in the entire world.

Popular file-sharing service LimeWire was shut down last October, after Judge Wood found them liable for copyright infringement in May 2010.

According to Law.com, the RIAA and the 13 record companies that are suing LimeWire for copyright infringement have demanded damages ranging from $400 billion to $75 trillion, and have claimed that Section 504©(1) of the Copyright Act allow them to request damages for each instance of infringement where two or more parties were liable. In other words, the RIAA thinks it should be entitled to damages not only for the individual works, but for every time that work was infringed (i.e. downloaded by another user).

At the moment, about 11,000 songs have been identified as "infringed" material, and each song probably has probably been downloaded thousands of times. The RIAA thinks it should be compensated for each individual download.

Judge Wood disagrees. In a 14-page ruling (PDF), Judge Wood said that the music industry is entitled only to a "single statutory damage award from Defendants per work infringed," for several reasons, including "Absurd Result." According to the document, the "Plaintiffs' position on statutory damages also offends the 'canon that we should avoid endorsing statutory interpretations that would lead to absurd results.'"

The document goes on to read: "As it stands now, Defendants face a damage award that 'could be in the hundreds of millions of dollars, if not over a billion dollars.'"

Judge Wood also points out that "if one multiplies the maximum statutory damage award ($150,000) by approximately 10,000 post-1972 works, Defendants face a potential award of over a billion dollars in statutory damages alone. If Plaintiffs were able to pursue a statutory damage theory predicated on the number of direct infringers per work, Defendants' damages could reach into the trillions. As Defendants note, Plaintiffs are suggesting an award that is 'more money than the entire music recording industry has made since Edison's invention of the phonograph in 1877.'"

This "absurd results" clause isn't anything new, Judge Wood points out. She mentions the 2010 Arista Records LLC v. Usenet.com, Inc. case, in which Arista Records requested the court calculate the damages by multiplying the maximum amount of damages ($150,000) by the number of infringements (878), or $131,700,000. The court found the defendants liable for $6,585,000, by multiplying the number of infringements by $7,500.

Unfortunately, this still isn't great news for LimeWire -- while Judge Wood says the music industry is entitled to only a single statutory damage award per infringed work, there are still 11,000 works. That means LimeWire could still be liable for damages in excess of one billion.

 http://www.pcworld.com/article/22343...n_damages.html
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Just goes to show you what an overblown sense of self importance those morons have. :rolleyes:

Large mako shark leaps into fishing boat off Texas coast[imgleft]http://img819.imageshack.us/img819/9556/354823.jpg[/imgleft]

Jason Kresse never dreamed he'd become so popular, being a commercial fisherman who spends long and tedious hours in the dark, hauling snapper from the Gulf of Mexico depths.

But nor did Kresse ever dream that an eight-foot mako shark would leap 15 feet into the air and land inside his 25-foot boat, leaving him with little choice but to carefully guide the vessel to port.

This happened Monday off Freeport, Texas. Kresse put the 375-pound shark on display at Captain Mark's Seafood, which he manages, and spent much of Tuesday and Wednesday morning either taking calls from or dodging reporters.

"It's been unreal," he said. "I didn't think anything of it when I brought the shark in but ever since there have been news crews coming. They even got a hold of my parents and had them come down [and be interviewed]."

Unreal is an apt description of the incident in the gulf. Kresse, Steven Prejean and Jonathan Stohr had landed 2,400 pounds of snapper and were calling it quits at about 3:30 a.m. After pulling anchor and dumping two large buckets of snapper guts overboard they heard a large splash in the darkness.

They then heard a thud -- it was the shark slamming into the side of Kresse's boat. That's when Kresse saw something very large launching out of the water. "I looked up and 15 feet up in the air is a big-old shark," the fisherman said. "It ended up landing in the back of my boat."

It remains unclear what caused the shark to jump. The fishermen were not armed and unsure what to do, so they just watched as the powerful predator began to thrash on the deck, breaking two reels, a fishing rod and a gaff.

The shark then vaulted to the front of the boat. "And it just sat there, thrashing, for the next three or four hours until it finally died," Kresse said. "It was thrashing so hard it sounded like someone was hitting the boat with a sledge hammer. We weren't going to go near it."

The crew was not permitted to catch sharks so Kresse contacted federal officials on shore. No violations occurred because the shark's death was accidental.

Kresse has contacted a taxidermist and will have the shark mounted, an accidental trophy, proof an almost unbelievable fish story. "It was crazy," he said.
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Original story here : http://www.grindtv.com/outdoor/blog/25505/large+mako+shark+leaps+into+fishing+boat+off+texas+coast/
 
If I'd been on the boat, I'd have stabilized it weight wise. I'd have jumped overboard as it jumped aboard! The hell with spending face time with a bloody shark! xD:
 
I agree Stallion! I sure wouldn't have waited four hours for the thing to die while I was cowering in the back on the boat! :facepalm
 
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