An altercation broke out at a food stand in the Bremen train station last night. A 23 year old customer asked for a napkin, but the 25 year old vendor didn't give him one (at least not quickly enough), so the customer wiped his hands on the stand. The vendor then threw a large serving spoon full of hot sauce in the customer's face, ran out of the stand and had a heated discussion about food etiquette with the customer, whose eyes were now irritated and bloodshot from the spiciness of the sauce.
The pissing contest was brought to an end by police, and a sample of the sauce was taken as evidence. Both men may be charged for the altercation, with the severity of charges against the vendor to be determined after the police assess whether this was a normal hot sauce attack, or if the spiciness of the sauce rose to the level of grievous bodily harm.
I try to explain it to my kids: no, everyone did not have a computer when I went to college. In fact, almost no one had computers when this news report was filed in 1981.
Of the estimated two to three thousand home computer owners in the Bay Area...
Wow: sometimes even I forget how dark the dark ages were. There are probably more than 100 computers on the little street I live on, not counting iPods, cellphones, Priuses and other specialized computing devices.
I do wonder how the newspaper street vendor at the end of the piece is doing these days, though.
Jenny Chapman of Deeping St. James, Lincolnshire, last weekend had her snore measured at 111.6 decibels, the loudest British snorer on record. Let's put some perspective on this number, because the headlines about her being able to drown out an airplane are inaccurate and clearly irresponsible journalism (this coming from the guy who told you werewolf nuns were scaring tourists away from Australia; you can clearly trust me).
First off, let's throw out a few important decibel numbers.
0 decibels: the threshold of human hearing; if it's below zero decibels you can't hear it.
10 decibels: an increase of 10 decibels is perceived as something being "twice as loud".
60-70 decibels: normal human conversation
80 decibels: dialtone
90 decibels: truck traffic
100 decibels: motorcycle
110 decibels: chainsaw, 3 feet away
111.6 decibels: Jenny Chapman's snore
115 decibels: sandblasting
140 decibels: jet engine, 100 feet away
184 decibels: loudest sound possible
So you see 100 feet away, a jet engine is roughly 8 times louder than her snoring. On the other hand, she IS louder than being three feet away from a chainsaw.
Here is another way to look at it: the OSHA's permissible workplace noise levels are 90 decibels for no more than 8 hours per day, 100 decibels for no more than 2 hours per day, and 110 decibels (about the level of her snoring) for no more than 30 minutes per day. If she fell asleep at her desk her company could get fined for hazardous conditions.
When her snoring starts (usually around 2 or 3 in the morning), her husband, Colin, heads off to the spare bedroom for the rest of the night, closing the door behind him and burying his head under a pillow.
Her snoring was measured at a two day snoring boot-camp sponsored by Helps Stop Snoring. Participants were only allowed alcohol with their first meal on the first night. The next day she and the other camp participants were taught about a healthy diet and participated in pilates classes. The second night her snoring dropped to the level of a motorcycle (99.2 decibels), an improvement to be sure, but still 8 times louder than even a loud conversation.
Says her husband, "It could be worse, she could be a sleepwalker."
Stockholm, Sweden is killing wild rabbits and burning their bodies for fuel.
Every year Stockholm culls thousands from its wild rabbit population. Rabbits, of course, breed like drosophila. A breeding doe can produce a litter of 5 or 6 kits every month, and kits born in the spring may be reproducing by fall. Because there are no natural predators in the city, Stockholm ends up with thousands of new rabbits annually, and culls them throughout the year. The problem isn't so much in the summer, when food is plentiful, but in winter when the rabbits gnaw on anything they can find causing large amounts of damage.
The rabbits are killed by lagomorphic hit-men who shoot them at dawn (with silencers, so as not to wake the neighbors). Once killed the rabbits are frozen, and when the have been accumulated in large enough numbers, are shipped off to a biofuel plant in Karlskoga, where they are burned for fuel. They are not skinned for their fur before being burned. In 2008 six thousand rabbits were killed.
The city also ships off carcasses of other animals including cats, deer, horses, and cows.
The rabbits are not native to Sweden; they are descendants of pets that have been released by Stockholm residents.
Animal rights activists are up in arms about the practice, of course, but without natural predators the rabbit population grows to its Malthusian limits, and alternative solutions like spraying the plants are not effective (the rabbits just move to unsprayed locations), and ignore the effects of the pesticides on the city's non-bunny biota.
The residents whose houses are warmed by the rabbits don't seem to complain, but residents of Stockholm are of divided opinions.
This story was first reported in mid-August, but now the pan-European news media has picked up on it, so as you can see from the variety of sources below, it is now a widely discussed ethical issue.
Apparently there are only 11 good looking girls in Switzerland. A furor has erupted over a sexy Swiss farm-girl calendar because it has come out that one of the girls is German. Miss April, the German Johanna Sänger says, "I love animals, which is why I agreed to be in the calendar," but at least one of her co-models had this to say, "There was no reason for them to take a German girl."
Then there are the rival coffin manufacturers Lindner (left) from Poland and Cofanifunebri (right) from Italy who are fighting over which of them was the first casket maker to issue a coffin girls calendar. Says Barthosz Lindner, "Our Polish girls are prettier and our coffins are better and more exclusive," while a Cofanifunebri spokesman counters with "We also produce a 'fashion line' of coffins including ones in the colours of the city's football teams AS Roma and Lazio," which really makes as much sense as anything else, I suppose.
And finally, because I'm already on the subject of death calendars and I don't really want to be branded a misogynist (again), I give you the Men of Mortuaries calendar, an attempt to bury the stigmas and stereotypes of morticians by (apparently), turning them into firemen.
Dr. Mark David Ryan, a Queensland University of Technology researcher asks the question: are Australian horror films scaring tourists away from Australia?
Parallels have been drawn between the Wolf Creek movie and the real-life outback murder of British tourist Peter Falconio in 2001 in the Northern Territory. It has also been suggested that the killer bushman character was inspired by real-life serial killer Ivan Milat.
Which is all well and good, except that to folks outside of Australia and possibly Britain, Falconio and Milat are, with due respect to Joanne Lees and the Falconio family , unknown. It is very, very difficult to scare people off when they don't know there's a story. We are not talking Jeffrey Dahmer, here.
And then there are the films themselves. Here is Ryan's Top 10 list. Now, Australia comes out with some great films and I am a huge Peter Weir fan, but, really, are these the films that make you lose sleep at night? More importantly, do they make you think, "Nope, not going to Australia. Think I'll go hang out in Bedford-Stuy where it's safe."?
Wolf Creek (2005)
Dying Breed (2008)
Black Water (2007)
Rogue (2007)
Undead (2003)
Razorback (1984)
Patrick (1978)
Howling III (1987)
Body Melt (1993)
Night of Fear (1972)
Yes, that's right, not only does the list omit Weir's Picnic at Hanging Rock (justifiably, too - not my favorite Weir film), it includes Howling III in the list, and not hanging-on-by-a-fingernail at #10, but at #8 - there are two films worse than Howling III on his list!
A generous 7 star user review (average 2.4) of Howling IIIby kelvinthelion on IMDB yields these thoughts:
It has it's flaws of course but it also has a lot of insignificant firsts like werewolf nuns.
and
It really seems more like an action comedy than a horror movie.
Werewolf nuns. Really.
For those who don't know (and I sure didn't), the concept of Howling III is that a "strange race of human-like marsupials appear suddenly in Australia, and a sociologist who studies these creatures falls in love with a female one." Realistically, this will only attract interest if the sociologist is also female.
Personally, I don't think Australia has to worry about horror films driving people away. The thing keeping me from traveling there is the rise of militant kangaroos.
It's chess! It's boxing! It's chess boxing! It is also ajedrez-boxeo (español), Schachboxen (Deutsch), and шахбокса (Русский).
For the uninitiated, professional chess boxing consists of alternating rounds of chess and boxing. Victory can be claimed in either type of round with either a knockout or a checkmate. The first round is chess, and there are a maximum of eleven rounds.
Each chess round is 4 minutes long and each boxer is on a cumulative 12 minute clock for the bout. A little math shows that should the match make it to the eleventh round (the sixth round of chess) one of the boxers will almost certainly time out. Each boxing round is three minutes long, and there is a one minute break between each round to don or remove gloves.
There is also a shortened set of amateur rules, akin to the way amateur boxing matches are shortened.
The first chess boxing world championship took place in Amsterdam in 2003, won by Iepe the Joker when Luis the Lawyer exceeded his time limit in the 11th round.
In order to become a member of the World Chess Boxing Organisation you must have been in at least 20 boxing matches, and you must have an ELO rating of 1800 which would be a Class A player under the United States Chess Federation rating system.
The best chess boxer to come out of the United States is David "Double-D" Depto, who grew up in West Virginia's Ohio Valley, and once beat the daylights out of the NFL's Tom Brady when he was at school in Michigan.
The idea for chess boxing was inspired by the graphic novel Froid Équateur by Enki Bilal.
Therese Van Belle, 58, of Schaarbeek, Brussels, has won the first Miss Homeless Beligium contest, entitling her to live in an apartment rent-free for a year.
The main purpose of the competition was to hilight the plight of the estimated 17,000 living in Belgium sans domicile fixe (SDF), one third of whom are women.
The competition was organized by Matilde Pelsers and Aline Duportail. Matilde, who runs Petit Le Portail, an organization that runs five shelters, came up with the idea of a homeless beauty pageant when Aline, her daughter, registered for the Miss Belgium competition.
Although the teenage Aline is a writer and was first-runner up in the East Flanders section of Miss Belgium, she is no stranger to the streets, having spent some time as a drug runner. Her most recent work, De Lijn Is Waar De Liefde Stopt, is a book of philosophical poems. Says Aline about turning her life around, "You do not realize what a comeback it was for me. A beauty pageant can be a tremendous boost."
Competitors were judged on inner beauty and strength, motivation, backstory, solidarity, and their commitment to making a new life off the streets.
Clearly this is a bit of a spectacle, and intentionally so. It does raise awareness, but the outlandishness of the concept walks a fine line - I can't help but think of the Derelicte campaign in Zoolander. It is easy for me to mock the Miss Plastic contestants, but I find it more difficult to do make fun here, and I think I'm not alone. Below is a video from Phara from last year where they cover the competition. It's a serious issue, and the laughter seems more nervous than anything else. What do you think? Is this funny? Touching? Sad? Pathetic?What is your mix of emotions?
You too can qualify for a free second honeymoon if your marriage is on the brink of divorce and you have been through marriage counseling. Oh, and you also have to live in the Malaysian state of Terrengganu.
To combat a soaring divorce rate not only among newlyweds but also among couples married 20 years or more, the Malaysian state recently ran a pilot program with 25 couples on the verge of divorce. The couples were given three days and two nights at one of the states island or beach resorts to give them one more opportunity to patch things up. The program was effective enough that it will be deployed state wide by the end of the year.
The program costs about RM1500 per couple.
Malaysia is a primarily Muslim country. Divorce is legal, but frowned upon; Prophet Mohammed said that divorce was, in the eyes of God, the most distasteful lawful act.
Said Ashaari Idris, the State Welfare, Community Development and Women Affairs committee chairman: "We hope through this package couples will treasure their marital ties and avoid separation or divorce."
As shocking as it is to you (and probably more shocking to the Scots), American Matthew Cox has taken the 2009 Golden Spurtle, indicative of the finest porridge in the world.
A spurtle is a wooden spatchula-ish utensil used in the making of porridge. Porridge is, uh, oatmeal.
Cox, a member of Team Bob's Red Mill out of Milwaukie, Oregon, was a decided underdog before beating out such pre-competition favorites as Addy Deggert, Barry Gauld, Lee Barclay, and, of course, defending champion Ian Bishop to win the 16th annual edition of the event in Carrbridge, Inverness-shire, Scotland.
Cox won in the traditional oats category, for which he was awarded a £350 hotel voucher and £250 cash (somewhat less than the take from the Miss Plastic Competition held simultaneously in Budapest). He is pictured (right) with Anna Louise Batchelor, an environmental researcher and marathon runner out of Reading, Birkshire, who won the specialty category with her recipe for Steamed Porridge Spotted Dick with Custard.
This year the event was held in conjunction with World Porridge Day, a fund raising day for Mary's Meals a charity which provides daily meals for 375,000 children around the globe.
Golden Spurtle souveniers (including specially inscribed spurtles) are available at their Golden Spurtle EBay store.
