Drug trafficking — you’re doing it wrong.
One would think that with all that drug money smugglers would be able to rig up a better system than this.
I’m … inclined to think they’re called the Log Cabin Club because their role model is Uncle Tom.
Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA), who is openly gay, slammed LGBT Republicans Thursday for standing by their party even as it refuses to budge on gay rights. (via tpmmedia)
I’m going to miss Barney.
(via tpmmedia)
Giant sinkhole swallows car in Ottawa on highway off-ramp
(Ottawa Fire Department/The Canadian Press)
The Mole Men are coming.
“GET A JOB”: DIALOGUE BETWEEN A CONSERVATIVE CONGRESSMAN AND A VOTER ON THE MINIMUM WAGE
VOTER TO REP. C.W. BILL YOUNG (R-FLA.): Jesse Jackson Jr. is passing around a bill to increase the minimum wage to $10 an hour. Would you support that?
REP. YOUNG: “Probably not.”
VOTER: “It’s $10 bucks an hour. It would give us a living wage.”
YOUNG: “How about getting a job. Why do you want that benefit? Get a job.”
VOTER: “I have a job, but it’s not enough to get by on.”
(YOUNG WALKS AWAY)
Any legislator whose response to a legitimate policy question is “Get a job” should not be a legislator.
Congressman Young is currently the longest-serving Republican member of Congress. That speaks volumes.
Orgy? Tough Life For Blue-Blooded Horseshoe Crab
Anthony Fredericks readily admits he was a college professor when he attended his first orgy.
There he was, on the beach, staring at a mass of bodies clambering all over each other, watching “transfixed as couples mated on any stretch of sandy real estate they could find … There were the usual twosomes and threesomes, and occasionally we would come across a foursome, a fivesome, and even one over-stimulated sixsome.”
It was not an especially erotic scene. It would be hard for it to be so, given that the bodies on display were, as he describes them, “submarine tanks,” each with ten legs and ten eyes, that plowed into each other “with all the delicacy of a frenzied herd of bull elephants.”
Image: Mating Horseshoe Crabs (Limulus polyphemus), Merostomata, Chelicerata, Atlantic Coast of North America. (Milton Tierney, Corbis)
I like this part:
As Fredericks quotes ERDG’s Glenn Gauvry as explaining as saying: “What you’ve got is, you’ve got people who used to bury crabs in holes. Here in Delaware, they’d get backhoes and just bury them under. Now they’re flipping them over, and the first thing that they start to realize is the thousands that are dying on the beach, smelling up their beach and drawing flies and making recreational activity somewhat unpleasant, the vast majority would have gone back in the water if they had just been flipped over. That’s the first thing we started hearing from these communities—it’s like, ‘Geez, we have a lot less horseshoe crabs to die on the beach.’”
They’re quick learners there in Delaware.
BREAKING: NBC News confirms veteran TV personality Dick Clark has died. He was 82.
I wonder if ABC will still wheel him out for New Year’s Eve.
Lorax statue taken from home of Dr. Seuss’s widow
- SAN DIEGO - They took the Lorax, made of bronze, the thieves they came, and now he’s gone.
Unless…
James Cameron on historic trip into the abyss: It was like visiting an ‘alien world’
Titanic director James Cameron described a “desolate” and “alien” environment on the bottom of the sea after a record-setting solo submarine dive to the deepest point in the world’s oceans.
I guess that CN Tower / Mariana Trench thing was just a myth after all.
centerforinvestigativereporting:
There’s a gold rush in the Himalayas. Fortunes are being made – and lives are being ruined – not over gleaming metal nuggets, but in the reckless pursuit of yarsagumba. A rare hybrid of caterpillar and mushroom that grows only in the high alpine meadows of Tibet, Nepal and India. It has been prescribed by traditional healers in Asia for centuries to treat lung and kidney diseases, build up bone marrow and stop hemorrhaging, but it is prized above all for its reputation as a powerful aphrodisiac, earning it the nickname “Himalayan Viagra.”
The explosive growth in the yarsagumba market beggars the most extravagant superlatives: In 1992, a pound of the stuff sold for $3; today, the same quantity retails for around $9,400. Read more.
Photo by Thomas L. Kelly, visit www.thomaslkellyphotos.com
Who doesn’t love a tasty parasitic caterpillar/mushroom combination?
“Last week, the 7,800-member Society of Professional Journalists passed a resolution at the Excellence in Journalism convention in New Orleans to drop the i-word. The resolution discontinued use of the term ‘illegal alien,’and suggested continued discussion to re-evaluate the implications of the use of ‘illegal immigrant.’
“It’s been a long road for SPJ members who have led the charge to drop the i-word. For the past two years, Leo Laurence, a member of SPJ’s diversity committee, has been leading the charge to get his colleagues to drop the i-word, pointing to the unconstitutionality of the language. The resolution was completely rejected at last year’s conference. Laurence has suffered personal and professional attacks, often via hate mail and phone calls following a Fox News appearance last December. Still, diversity committee members have focused on building awareness about the damaging term in the last year. And now their work has paid off. Big time.”
Excellent.
Compact fluorescent lights release mercury vapor when broken
centerforinvestigativereporting:
A broken light bulb could prove seriously hazardous to your health – and not just from stepping on jagged glass.
A new study indicates that when a compact fluorescent bulb is broken, mercury is released in a vapor. And the bulb will continue to release vapor for more than 10 weeks. According to the authors of the study, the levels of mercury emitted by the bulbs can actually exceed the amount considered safe for people.
The research [PDF] was published in the journal Environmental Engineering Science.
Good thing we came up with a safe alternative to those nasty incandescent bulbs we legislated out of existence over the next few years.
This week we launched the 6th iteration of the Tumblr Dashboard. And as you can probably tell, it makes room for a whole bunch of new things we’re getting ready to launch.
Hey look, it’s a Tumblr Staff post about the changes to the Dashboard 50+ hours later that doesn’t really say anything about the changes they already made, and no, actually I hadn’t thought to myself, “Well this certainly makes room for a whole bunch of new things they’re probably getting ready to launch,” but what do I know, I’m just a user.
centerforinvestigativereporting:
New Android app allows users to track, upload reports of bribes from around the world. (h/t Wall Street Journal)
I wonder how much they’d take to remove a name from their database.
From the Knoxville News Sentinel:
A man cited by the city over an old toilet he converted into a flowerpot and put in his front yard has won his day in court.
Oak Ridge City Judge Robert A. McNees III this morning dismissed the city’s citation against William Terry that contended the toilet is rubbish.
For some reason, I thought this type of landscaping was de rigueur for Tennessee. Perhaps not?
Now, emboldened by the judge’s decision, Terry is thinking of taking things a step further.
“I might get two toilets and put them beside what you could call my driveway.”
The article goes into more of the case background, which gets a little boring for me personally, but for those of you who relish such minutiae the article ends with this little teaser:
More details as they develop online and in Friday’s News Sentinel.
Photo by Bob Fowler.
Source: knoxnews.com
Tampa man arrested for wearing a clown mask in public
TAMPA — An 18-year-old Tampa man was jailed Tuesday afternoon, charged with wearing a clown mask on a public road.
Wait, what?
Is Tampa no longer part of the United States?
Source: tampabay.com
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