Strange & Stupid: Amusing News

on the Deerfield Fair:

Last year I noticed that the floral dept. gave out a lot of ribbons. I think every miniature arrangement got one. Being greedy, I plan to make a tiny bouquet and an arrangement in an unusual container. The flowers have to be real, either live or dried. I never expected to have difficulty obtaining flowers, but I I discovered that all the dried stems of flowers in the craft shops are fake. I haven’t found any of those nice dried bunches of flowers and florists don’t just sell one of these and one of those. The flowers for a diminutive pitcher will come from our gardens, if they don’t all die too soon. Right now, the garden is scroungy looking. My odd container is a horrible styrofoam skull. I cut a hole in it for the flowers and hope to make it look like one of the grateful dead. I would have liked roses but I don’t want to spend much on this foolish project. Instead, the head will hold the requisite 3 types of flowers: goldenrod, black-eyed susans and marigolds.

1. Mccain’s Kennedy love fest was a SHADY move.
2. “This isnt hte beginning of hte end, this crisis, this is the end of the beginning.
—-> FEAR mongering. Hate it.
3. Great Society, Great Depression, multiple references here. FUCK McCain, really.
4. References citizens against government waste. Nice, John!
5. Obama is GREAT. Takes McCains misspeaks and responds with solid “I am ______” statements. You win debate school.
6. QUOTE OF THE NIGHT.. John McCain. “It was FESTOONED with Xmas tree ornaments.”
7. Obama lied about the Energy Bill. NOTHING good actually comes from it. more here
8. Yay College affordability! Yay Obama!
9. Google for Goverment is a RAD idea.
10. “I’m not liberal, I’m anti wrong-headed Bush policies.”
11. McCain: “Only take care of vets and defense” gives more $$ to shitty war and NOT educating youth. DUMB
12. McCain: Nuclear power is not definite answer - may cause OTHER unkown global warming crises.
13. Obama “We have to use our military wisely and we did not use our military wisely in Iraq.”
14. McC: “Noble Re-enlisters.” Bull. If you’re gonna get dragged back anyways, of course youre gonna take the signing bonus. Doesn’t mean they want to be there, just means they know they are gonna either way. Who throws away free money? and what Patriotism lies there?
15. I need to find a pic of GOP watch party. AMAZING. [only old codgettes]
16. McC: “We can’t ignore those messages of history” good, but is it enough? Not just Taliban, we failed on MANY levels.
17. Wow McCain took FOREVER to drop the Reagan bomb.
18. “Let me just make a point. I’ve got a bracelet, too.” Great point, if your bracelet weren’t surrounded by a huge amount of controversy almost from the outset.
19. McCain made a fair statement on Iran, though (maybe?) second Holocaust is a stretch. Is Ahmadinejad a real threat? Is it right to treat him as such?
20. McC: “I’ll sit down w/anybody” but only on YOUR terms. Which is stupid. And wrong.
21. Obama got the SHIT out of McCain on the preconditions/Kissinger thing. Riotous.
22. Ob: “No preconditions doesn’t mean you just invite them over for tea one day…”
23. Spain quote owns face!
24. S v. N Korea? What does height have to do with anything, McCain?
25. Lehrer, you had a GREAT last question!!!

some thoughts on the crowd: what a bunch of TWITS. Of COURSE McCain is condescending. Maybe even….dare I say it…MEAN. Thats the game, folks. Politics has never been pretty.
Why I still take notes on these things is beyond me, but I leave you with this one final thought:

What McCain IS:
sherrif
maverick
What he is NOT:
Miss Congeniality.

Imagine the scene:
You’ve been raped. You’re scared, hurt, alone. Violated. You go to the hospital to embarassingly ask for a test. The only thing that can make this worse is admitting that it happened in such a stark and open environment, and here you are, doing it.
The best part?
It’ll cost you.

Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin’s hometown required women to pay for their own rape examinations while she was mayor, a practice her police chief fought to keep as late as 2000.

Alaska’s Legislature in 2000 banned the practice of charging women for rape exam kits — which experts said could cost up to $1,000.

There are hundreds of ways in which to cut a city budget. Charging women to find out the name of their violator should never be one of them.

BLACKSTONE, Va. - Like some other residents of this small town, Mary Elizabeth Goodwyn doesn’t go outside after dark much anymore.

Since 2003, the Courier-Record has run at least 15 stories on cougar sightings in town and in the neighboring 41,000-acre Army National Guard training base.

Wildlife officials say that except for a known population of 100 in Florida, the large cats _ also called mountain lions, pumas, panthers and the fitting “ghost cats” _ were wiped out in the eastern United States by 1900. They claim sightings most likely are cases of mistaken identity _ perhaps a bobcat, deer or even a Labrador retriever.

“The sense I get is there are a number of game commission people laughing, and that bothers me a bit because we’ve got good people here who aren’t crazy,” said Billy Coleburn, who as editor of the paper wrote most of the stories.

Officials estimate there are as many as 35,000 mountain lions in the West, including in major metropolitan areas like Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area. And some are inching eastward.

A cougar kitten was hit by a truck in Kentucky in 1997, one cougar was killed and another captured in West Virginia in 1976 and scientists verified droppings from Massachusetts in 1997.

Earlier this year, police killed a cougar in Chicago that was traced through Wisconsin from South Dakota. Sightings have been confirmed in Nebraska, Oklahoma, Kansas, Iowa, Missouri and down to Arkansas and Louisiana.

SEPTEMBER 19–A Wisconsin man serving time for reckless homicide yesterday was awarded $295,000 by a federal jury that found the inmate’s constitutional rights were violated when he was forced to spend two months sleeping on a moldy, waterlogged mattress. Reggie Townsend, 29, scored the six-figure windfall after a U.S. District Court panel decided that he was improperly treated while locked up in late-2004 at the New Lisbon Correctional Institution. The jury’s special verdict can be found below. Following a jail riot, Townsend spent about 60 days in a 12′ x 6′ segregation unit he shared with another state inmate. During that period, the jury found that Townsend had to sleep on the cell floor atop a thin mattress adjacent to the shower. The mattress, Townsend claimed, soon became “wet, moldy and foul smelling” and was not replaced despite his complaints to jail guards. Though he did not suffer any physical harm from the unsanitary bedding, Townsend was deprived of the “minimal civilized measure of life’s necessities,” the jury decided after deliberating six hours. While the $295,000 punitive damage award was levied against Jerry Allen, a corrections officer, the State of Wisconsin may end up on the hook for the alleged actions (or inaction) of its employee. Townsend is serving 23 years for his role in a Milwaukee street shootout that left an 11-year-old girl dead. The child was hit by a stray bullet while inside her grandmother’s home.

E-mail story to a friend.
Buzz up!

SANFORD, Fla. — A Florida woman will spend the rest of her life in prison for having sex with a 5-year-old boy.

A jury in Sanford convicted Kelly Lumadue, 33, for videotaped sex acts with the boy. It was Lumadue’s second trial for the crime.

A garbage collector found the sex tapes in the trash and turned them over to police.

When Lumadue took the stand, she said her husband — who is a professional pornographer — made her do it.

The victim did not testify during the case. He said he doesn’t remember what happened.

GENEVA, Sept. 20 (WashPost)– The world’s largest atom smasher — which was launched with great fanfare earlier this month — has been damaged twice and will be out of commission for at least two months, its operators said Saturday.

The European Organization for Nuclear Research, known as CERN, said Saturday that a large amount of helium had leaked into the 17-mile circular tunnel deep under the Swiss-French border that houses the Large Hadron Collider.

The massive collider began operating Sept. 10 to the delight of physicists around the world, flinging protons around the circle at nearly the speed of light. But it had to be shut down only 36 hours later because an electrical transformer failed.

That was repaired, but a CERN statement said a second failure took place midday Friday in the last section of the tunnel to undergo testing at high current, causing the large helium leak.

Spokesman James Gillies said the latest incident was several miles from the earlier damage. It is considered much more time-consuming to repair than the first malfunction.

The $10 billion particle accelerator has been in the design and construction stages for more than two decades. When operating, it fires beams of protons from the nuclei of atoms through the tunnel at near light speed.

It then causes the protons to collide, revealing how the tiniest particles were first created after the Big Bang, which many theorize was the massive explosion that formed the stars, planets and everything else.

WashPost - Scarless Surgery Uses Body’s Own Openings

When Albert Pagliuca got gallstones, his surgeon offered to remove his gallbladder with a new operation designed to hurt less, get him back to work more quickly and leave no visible scars. But there was one catch: Doctors would pull the organ out through his mouth.

“I kept thinking, ‘What if it gets stuck in my windpipe?’ ” said Pagliuca, 45, who lives outside Chicago. ” ‘What if I choke on it?’ “
To read the whole article…
The approach, called NOTES — for natural orifice transluminal endoscopic surgery — seeks to move beyond arthroscopic and laparoscopic techniques, which for many procedures replaced large incisions with several small ones, shortening hospital stays and recovery time, reducing pain and risks, and leaving much smaller scars.

More recently, surgeons realized they could enter the body through natural openings with flexible endoscopes, which are routinely used for diagnostic purposes such as colon cancer screening. After experimenting for years on pigs and human cadavers, a team in India announced in 2005 the first successful procedure in humans.
And the quote….
The technique has been used mostly to remove gallbladders through the mouth or the vagina. But a few patients have had appendectomies, and doctors are experimenting with stomach surgery for obesity and other conditions.

Shakespeare’s “Timon of Athens” tells another character that given the opportunity, “Thou would’st have . . . melted down thy youth/ In different beds of Lust.”