Saturday, September 21, 2013
Former NFL star threatened with lawsuit from parents of kids who trashed his house
Former Pro Bowler Brian Holloway was staying at his primary residence in Florida when an estimated 300 teenagers crashed his house in New York and held a giant party. Teens being forward-looking and responsible, they naturally documented their destruction of his pad— estimated at $20,000 of graffiti, damaged floors, and stolen property— in photos, videos, tweets, and Facebook posts.
Holloway responded by publicizing some of the photos and publicly pleading with parents and teens to remedy the situation. His website www.helpmesave300.com expresses concern about the teens’ drinking, drug use, and criminal behavior and a desire to prevent kids from “get[ting] off track” and hold them accountable for their actions.
But rather than apologize to Holloway for their children’s behavior, some parents have contacted their lawyers to see what legal action they can take against the former Patriots and Raiders offensive lineman, local affiliate ABC News 10 reported.
Shock video of dad arrested at school meeting after challenging Common Core
You need to read this whole post at Michelle Malkin's site, then follow the link to the Baltimore Sun article.
Get this: Small was charged with second-degree assault of a police officer,which carries a fine of $2,500 and up to 10 years in prison, and disturbing a school operation, which carries a fine of $2,500 and up to six months.
Watch the video. Small’s crime is daring to ask questions and refusing to be intimidated by the Common Core mafia.
In 1961, US nearly detonated atomic bomb over North Carolina
Read the whole thing. Excerpts:
A secret document, published in declassified form for the first time by the Guardian today, reveals that the US Air Force came dramatically close to detonating an atom bomb over North Carolina that would have been 260 times more powerful than the device that devastated Hiroshima.
The accident happened when a B-52 bomber got into trouble, having embarked from Seymour Johnson Air Force base in Goldsboro for a routine flight along the East Coast. As it went into a tailspin, the hydrogen bombs it was carrying became separated. One fell into a field near Faro, North Carolina, its parachute draped in the branches of a tree; the other plummeted into a meadow off Big Daddy's Road.
Jones found that of the four safety mechanisms in the Faro bomb, designed to prevent unintended detonation, three failed to operate properly. When the bomb hit the ground, a firing signal was sent to the nuclear core of the device, and it was only that final, highly vulnerable switch that averted calamity.
Friday, September 20, 2013
Mark Steyn: Obama Calls Congress 'Banana Republic'— He Should Know
"This is the United States of America," declared President Obama to the burghers of Liberty, Missouri, on Friday. "We're not some banana republic."
Read the whole thing (excerpts below) - discussing several ways that America is actually quite "banana republic-esque".
He was talking about the Annual Raising of the Debt Ceiling, a glorious American tradition that seems to come round earlier every year. "This is not a deadbeat nation," President Obama continued. "We don't run out on our tab."
True. But we don't pay it off either. We just keep running it up, ever higher. And every time the bartender says, "Mebbe you've had enough, pal", we protest, "Jush another couple trillion for the road. Set 'em up, Joe."
As Obama explained in another of his recent speeches, "Raising the debt ceiling, which has been done over a hundred times, does not increase our debt."
Where do you go to get a piece of this action? As the old saying goes, bank robbers rob banks because that's where the money is. But the smart guys rob taxpayers because that's where the big money is.
11 Terrifying Childcare Inventions From The Early 20th Century
Enjoy the motorized hanging cradle, the baby gas mask, the UV-ray baby branding prod, and more "infant-friendly" gadgets from the Popular Science archives.
See the whole set at PopSci, along with links to the original articles. Via Boing Boing
'Pirate' sighting caused school lockout on 'Talk Like A Pirate Day'
KUSA - Two schools were placed on lockout Thursday after a group of "buccaneer's searching for sugary bounty" were mistakenly reported to the Douglas County Sheriff's Office as a "suspicious party."
Cresthill Middle School and Highlands Ranch High School were on lockout for 15 minutes as authorities investigated the incident.
The situation was quickly resolved when the sheriff's office learned the "suspicious party" report was merely a group of landlubbing students dressed as pirates walking to Krispy Kreme for free doughnuts.
Thursday is designated as Talk Like A Pirate Day. Legend has it this "holiday" was the brainchild of two friends from Oregon who just randomly started insulting each other in pirate jargon.
Krispy Kreme offered a doughnut to anyone who dressed or spoke like a pirate.
No Jolly Roger flag was found at the scene. The students were not made to walk the plank, either.
Stephen King Calls Out Stanley Kubrick For “Misogynistic” Shining Character
Interesting post at the Mary Sue. Excerpts:
Stephen King is gearing up for the release of his sequel novel to The Shining, Doctor Sleep, and naturally doing a few interviews. It’s no secret the author never really cared for director Stanley Kubrick’s version of his classic novel but we’ve never heard this one before.
King did an interview with the BBC about the sequel book (hitting stores later this month) and the discussion eventually turned to the adaptation of the original novel’s adaptation.
“Shelley Duvall as Wendy is really one of the most misogynistic characters ever put on film, she’s basically just there to scream and be stupid and that’s not the woman that I wrote about.”
UK regulator probing alleged bra price-fixing
LONDON (AP) — Britain's retail regulator says it has evidence that an underwear maker and three department stores colluded to inflate the price of a popular sports bra.
The Office of Fair Trading says it is investigating whether DB Apparel U.K. entered into anti-competitive agreements with retailers John Lewis, Debenhams and House of Fraser between 2008 and 2011 over the Shock Absorber bra.
The regulator said its provisional view was that the manufacturer and the stores agreed on retail prices, in a "serious infringement of competition law."
The office's senior director of services, Ann Pope, said the agency would hear from the companies before making a final ruling.
The companies dispute the claims.
The Shock Absorber was once advertised by tennis player Anna Kournikova under the slogan: "Only the balls should bounce."
Doc Zero: They have one hand in our pockets, and the other one is making a margin call
Read the whole thing:
The stock market is just about the only positive indicator to rise above the frozen tundra of the Obama economy. GDP is flatlined; the workforce is collapsing; every flicker of life in manufacturing, consumer confidence, or housing is quickly extinguished; but the stock market has been doing quite well.
One big reason the stock market has been doing well is the "quantitative easing" program by the Federal Reserve, which is basically printing bales of money and dropping it off at the stock exchange. It's like running an extension cord from the Dow to Washington and plugging it into the Federal Reserve.
Friday links
Gravity: A Supercut of Memorable Falling Scenes.
Rent a Japanese Middle-Aged Man for $10 an Hour.
5 Animals With Stinky Defenses, and here are 40 Detailed Close-Ups of Arthropods.
Rent a Japanese Middle-Aged Man for $10 an Hour.
Top 10 Battles of the Revolutionary War, and the Civil War In a Single Chart.
5 Animals With Stinky Defenses, and here are 40 Detailed Close-Ups of Arthropods.
A medical enema device used for blowing smoke up the ass
Wikipedia: The tobacco smoke enema, an insufflation of tobacco smoke into the rectum by enema, was a medical treatment employed by European physicians for a range of ailments.
Gravity: A Supercut of Memorable Falling Scenes
Watch full screen!
Gravity: A Falling Montage from Plot Point Productions on Vimeo.
Via Laughing Squid.
Gravity: A Falling Montage from Plot Point Productions on Vimeo.
Via Laughing Squid.
Thursday, September 19, 2013
Thursday links
Happy Talk Like a Pirate Day, me hearties!
How to Send Smoke Signals.
Auto-Brewery Syndrome: Apparently, You Can Make Beer In Your Gut.
Auto-Brewery Syndrome: Apparently, You Can Make Beer In Your Gut.
At PJM, Dr. Paul Hsieh has an excellent article on electronic medical records
Read the whole thing. Excerpts:
EMRs are a “dirty word” to many doctors because EMRs are cumbersome, hinder doctors’ ability to practice, and are too expensive.
In the New York Times, Dr. Pauline Chen described how EMRs are impairing doctors’ ability to interact with patients. Many young doctors in training are so busy filling out obligatory electronic forms, they are now spending only 8 minutes per patient each day. As a result, they cut corners:
When finally in a room with patients, they try to [rush through interviews] by limiting or eliminating altogether gestures like sitting down to talk, posing open-ended questions, encouraging family discussions or even fully introducing themselves.
EMRs are not inherently bad. A well-designed EMR can add tremendous value to many medical practices. In a free market, doctors and hospitals would gladly purchase EMR systems that made sense for their particular circumstances. Based on their specific requirements, some practices might purchase an EMR and others might not. Over time, the free market would bring down EMR costs and improve their quality. But the choice of whether and when to purchase an EMR should be left up to each individual hospital and medical practice. It’s not the government’s role to pressure medical practices into adopting EMRs any more than it’s the government’s job to tell everyone that they should purchase a smartphone.
Justice Dept. Lawyer Misconduct Sends Cops to Prison
Read the whole thing at PJM. Excerpts:
What does it take for an employee to get fired in Eric Holder’s Justice Department Civil Rights Division?
Certainly perjury doesn’t do it. Neither does using a government credit card to book airfare for romantic liaisons with a Miami girlfriend — that just gets you a nice buyout. Want to use civil rights laws to protect only black victims of discrimination? Ho hum. The culture of lawlessness is so pervasive at the Civil Rights Division that a former Voting Section chief felt comfortable telephoning current DOJ employees and suggesting they turn over confidential memos … because they were worth cash (see page 145).
Now we learn that that an attorney in the infamous and lawless Civil Rights Division was engaging in clandestine blogging at a major newspaper in order to help convict New Orleans police officers in a matter to which she was assigned. Enter Karla Dobinski, DOJ Civil Rights Division lawyer by day and secret blogger by night. Dobinski was posting in the comments at newspaper sites and anonymously polluting the atmosphere about cases against New Orleans police officers on which she was working.Dobinski’s misconduct was so egregious that United States District Court Judge Kurt Englehardtvacated the convictions of five New Orleans police officers convicted of using excessive force in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.
A government which permits federal employees to abuse power, lie, steal, and ultimately to send citizens to jail based on lawyer misconduct is a government which has betrayed its founding rooted in law. Whether it is Karla Dobinski or Eric Holder, a new breed of highly paid lawyer holds power. They seem immune to consequences for misconduct, and those in Congress with the power to respond under the Constitution seem flummoxed by this new breed of technocrat gangster.
Cartoon of the day: Beeler’s pitch-perfect indictment of agenda journalism
Via HotAir:
Without comment, except to say that Nate Beeler is one of our national treasures in editorial cartooning:
This commercial is brilliant, as is the product: PooPourri
From the Amazon product description:
There once was a young lad from Rhone
Whose odor he'd rather disown
Now he's taming his poo
By anointing the loo
And now happily sits on his throne.
There once was a young lad from Rhone
Whose odor he'd rather disown
Now he's taming his poo
By anointing the loo
And now happily sits on his throne.
Muslim Brotherhood Official, Former Clinton Foundation Employee Arrested
Read the whole thing. Excerpts:
A senior Muslim Brotherhood official who, until recently, had been employed by the William J. Clinton Foundation was arrested in Cairo on Tuesday and charged with inciting violence.
Gehad el-Haddad served as one of the Muslim Brotherhood’s top communications officials until Egyptian security forces seized him as part of a wider crackdown on officials loyal to ousted former President Mohamed Morsi.
Before emerging as a top Brotherhood official and adviser to Morsi, el-Haddad servedfor five years as a top official at the Clinton Foundation, a nonprofit group founded by former President Bill Clinton.
El-Haddad gained a reputation for pushing the Muslim Brotherhood’s Islamist agenda in the foreign press, where he was often quoted defending the Brotherhood’s crackdown on civil liberties in Egypt.
He was raised in a family of prominent Brotherhood supporters and became the public face of the Islamist organization soon after leaving his post at the Clinton Foundation.
However, much of his official work with the Brotherhood took place while he was still claiming to be employed by the Clinton Foundation.
Wednesday, September 18, 2013
Auto-Brewery Syndrome: Apparently, You Can Make Beer In Your Gut
This medical case may give a whole new meaning to the phrase "beer gut."
A 61-year-old man — with a history of home-brewing — stumbled into a Texas emergency room complaining of dizziness. Nurses ran a Breathalyzer test. And sure enough, the man's blood alcohol concentration was a whopping 0.37 percent, or almost five times the legal limit for driving in Texas.
There was just one hitch: The man said that he hadn't touched a drop of alcohol that day.
"He would get drunk out of the blue — on a Sunday morning after being at church, or really, just anytime," says Barabara Cordell, the dean of nursing at Panola College in Carthage, Texas. "His wife was so dismayed about it that she even bought a Breathalyzer."
Other medical professionals chalked up the man's problem to "closet drinking." But Cordell and Dr. Justin McCarthy, a gastroenterologist in Lubbock, wanted to figure out what was really going on.
So the team searched the man's belongings for liquor and then isolated him in a hospital room for 24 hours. Throughout the day, he ate carbohydrate-rich foods, and the doctors periodically checked his blood for alcohol. At one point, it rose 0.12 percent.
Eventually, McCarthy and Cordell pinpointed the culprit: an overabundance of brewer's yeast in his gut.
That's right, folks. According to Cordell and McCarthy, the man's intestinal tract was acting like his own internal brewery.
The patient had an infection with Saccharomyces cerevisiae, Cordell says. So when he ate or drank a bunch of starch — a bagel, pasta or even a soda — the yeast fermented the sugars into ethanol, and he would get drunk. Essentially, he was brewing beer in his own gut. Cordell and McCarthy reported the case of "auto-brewery syndrome" a few months ago in the International Journal of Clinical Medicine.
When we first read the case study, we were more than a little skeptical. It sounded crazy, a phenomenon akin to spontaneous combustion. I mean, come on: Could a person's gut really generate that much ethanol?
Brewer's yeast is in a whole host of foods, including breads, wine and, of course, beer (hence, the name). The critters usually don't do any harm. They just flow right through us. Some people even take Saccharomyces as a probiotic supplement.
But it turns out that in rare cases, the yeasty beasts can indeed take up long-term residency in the gut and possibly cause problems, says Dr. Joseph Heitman, a microbiologist at Duke University.
"Researchers have shown unequivocally that Saccharomyces can grow in the intestinal tract," Heitman tells The Salt. "But it's still unclear whether it's associated with any disease" — or whether it could make someone drunk from the gut up.
We dug around the scant literature on auto-brewery syndrome and uncovered a handful of cases similar to the one in Texas. Some reports in Japan date back to the 1970s. In most instances, the infections occurred after a person took antibiotics — which can wipe out the bacteria in the gut, making room for fungi like yeast to flourish — or had another illness that suppresses their immune system.
Still, such case reports remain extremely rare. Heitman says he had never heard of auto-brewery syndrome until we called him up. "It sounds interesting," he says. But he's also cautious.
"The problem with a case report," he notes, "is that it's just one person. It's not a controlled clinical study."
Obama's pick for State Department Security Chief shot himself in the foot. Literally.
And not Joe Biden "literally". That's not the only problem, of course. Read the whole thing.
Current and former State Department officials told The Cable that confirming Starr could be a mistake and raised a string of fresh allegations against him. Among them: that the man who is supposed to oversee thousands of new security agents has shot himself in the foot. And not just figuratively.
Old and busted: Sharknado. New and hot: SharkNATO
Via io9:
Remember when Thunder Levin, the writer of Sharknado, said that when he was approached to write the film he misheard and thought they were pitching a movie called SharkNATO? About a daring international treaty organization battling a shark army? NOW IT IS A THING.
To be more specific, Jennell (AKA @mixedmediologist on Twitter) has made it so!
WTF? Navy Yard: Swat team 'stood down' at mass shooting scene
BBC: (Excerpts below)
Multiple sources in the Capitol Police department have told the BBC that its highly trained and heavily armed four-man Containment and Emergency Response Team (Cert) was near the Navy Yard when the initial report of an active shooter came in about 8:20 local time.
The officers, wearing full tactical gear and armed with HK-416 assault weapons, arrived outside Building 197 a few minutes later, an official with knowledge of the incident told the BBC.
'A different outcome'
According to a Capitol Police source, an officer with the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD), Washington DC's main municipal force, told the Capitol Cert officers they were the only police on the site equipped with long guns and requested their help stopping the gunman.
When the Capitol Police team radioed their superiors, they were told by a watch commander to leave the scene, the BBC was told.
The gunman, Aaron Alexis, was reported killed after 09:00.
Several Capitol Police sources who spoke to the BBC asked to remain anonymous for fear of reprisal.
Capitol Police Officer Jim Konczos, who leads the officers' union, said the Cert police train for what are known as active shooter situations and are expert marksmen.
"Odds are it might have had a different outcome," he said of Monday's shooting and the decision to order the Cert unit to stand down. "It probably could have been neutralised."
Excellent blog post: Drunk tanks. Yes, why not?
James Delingpole at the Telegraph:
Nothing brings out the John Galt in me quite so much as the sight of a stinking drunk being scooped off the pavement by an ambulance crew or being tended to by a huddle of police officers.
It makes me think: “OK, so you’ve clearly got a problem. But why should it be everybody else’s problem?” I think of all the more deserving cases our hard-pressed emergency services could be dealing with. And I think of the massive drain on the public purse.
...
My concern, though, is that while drunk tanks might provide a powerful disincentive to casual binge drinking – stag and hen parties; Bullingdon club outings; etc – they’re not going to address the much bigger problem of chronically alcoholic down-and-outs. What exactly is the point of fining someone £400 when his only source of income are government hand outs?
I know there will be lots of smugly liberal-lefty bleeding hearts congratulating themselves on how violently they disagree with this blogpost. It will be, for them, a matter of huge pride that they live in a society where a serial alkie can collapse on the pavement day after day, secure in the knowledge that a team from the emergency services will always be there to prolong his miserable, squalid life with the best care taxpayers’ money can provide.
At the risk of sounding like a heartless bastard, I can’t say I share this My-Little-Pony-level perspective on modern Britain. Among its many flaws is that it perpetuates two of the most suicidal idiocies of our socialised system: the idea that no matter how stupidly or irresponsibly we behave the benign state with bottomless pockets will always be there to pick up tab; the idea that if you're a "victim" you're relieved of all responsibility for your actions.
What Famous Celebrities Would Look Like as Normal People
Thanks to the power of Photoshop and the skill of artist Danny Evans, here are visualizations of celebrities without their personal trainers, stylists and dietists.
ArtFido.com via Fark.
Earth Wormes fried with Goose greace: Earache cure from 1590
"Earth Wormes fried with Goose greace, then straind, and a little thereof dropt warme into the deaffe or pained eare, doth helpe the same: you must use it halfe a dosen times at the least. This is true."Thomas Lupton, A Thousand Notable Things (1590)
This remedy doth helpe the patient to realize that whatever his original problem was, it wasn't as bad as having hot greasy worms dripped into his ear.
Pranksters replace friend’s home plumbing with beer
Via Daily Caller: A group of dudes in New Zealand pulled the nicest prank of all time on one of their friends: They replaced his entire plumbing system with kegs of beer so that nothing but cold, delicious ale came out of his faucets.
Tuesday, September 17, 2013
Tuesday links
If Disney Princesses Twerked.
Anal secretions from the beaver taste like vanilla in baking.
An awesome gallery of 42 photographs of glasswing butterflies.
Impressive Multimedia Dance Performance.
How to Turn Your Favorite Fruit Juice into Cheap Homemade Booze.
Ernest Hemingway’s Favorite Hamburger Recipe.
Anal secretions from the beaver taste like vanilla in baking.
An awesome gallery of 42 photographs of glasswing butterflies.
Impressive Multimedia Dance Performance.
How to Turn Your Favorite Fruit Juice into Cheap Homemade Booze.
Ernest Hemingway’s Favorite Hamburger Recipe.
Grandkids Retire
What happens when you gather a group of children and ask them what they're going to do when they retire? What would it look like if you then asked the kid's grandparents to reenact their responses?
via The Presurfer.
Female Squid Wear Fake Testes to Avoid Male Advances
The females in one species of squid may have a natural defense for escaping unwanted male attention: special light-reflecting cells that can create the illusion of testes.
Like many of its cousins, the opalescent inshore squid (Doryteuthis opalescens) of the Eastern Pacific Ocean is equipped with shimmery cells on its body that can change color for camouflage and communication.
But while studying the species, researchers at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) noticed that some opalescent inshore squid had bright iridescent rainbow stripes underneath their fins. [See Stunning Photos of Deep-Sea Squid]
"Sometimes most of the squid in a batch would have them, sometimes none," Daniel DeMartini, a UCSB doctoral student, said in a statement. "After a while we started to realize the rainbow stripes were only seen in the females."
In investigating the phenomenon, DeMartini found all females were capable of producing these colorful stripes. A peek at the underlying tissue under a microscope showed that it was full of iridocytes — the cells that give these squid their iridescent, rainbow markings. What's more, these patches of iridocytes were packed with layers of a light-changing protein known as reflectin, making them six times brighter than other blotches of the color-changing cells, the researchers said.
As these rainbow streaks emerged on the squid, so did a bright white patch on the squid's body that was made up of leucophore cells, which also contain reflectin proteins but only give off white light.
The researchers say this is the first time "switchable" leucophores have been found in squid. Experiments showed that the white-colored cells turn on in response to the neurotransmitter acetylcholine, just as iridocytes do.
"This discovery reveals a fundamental relationship between the switchable leucophores and the tunable color-producing iridocytes, suggesting they share a mechanism at the molecular level," DeMartini said.
DeMartini noted that the white stripe looks very similar to the white testes seen in male squid. Turning on these leucophores could help females look like males to avoid attention from notoriously aggressive males, the researchers say.
Ernest Hemingway’s Favorite Hamburger Recipe
Earlier this year the food writer Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan stumbled across an article in the Boston Globe describing a trove of digitized documents from Ernest Hemingway’s home in Cuba that were recently donated to the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, home of Hemingway’s personal archives. One line in the article caught her eye: “And the more mundane, like his instructions to the household staff, including how to prepare his hamburgers: ground beef, onions, garlic, India relish, and capers, cooked so the edges were crispy but the center red and juicy.”
She reported her experiences this week on the Paris Review Daily blog.
Papa prefers this combination.
Ingredients --
1 lb. ground lean beef
2 cloves, minced garlic
2 little green onions, finely chopped
1 heaping teaspoon, India relish
2 tablespoons, capers
1 heaping teaspoon, Spice Islands sage
Spice Islands Beau Monde Seasoning -- ½ teaspoon
Spice Islands Mei Yen Powder -- ½ teaspoon **
1 egg, beaten in a cup with a fork
About one third cup dry red or white wine.
1 tablespoon cooking oil
What to do --
Break up the meat with a fork and scatter the garlic, onion and dry seasonings over it, then mix them into the meat with a fork or your fingers. Let the bowl of meat sit out of the icebox for ten or fifteen minutes while you set the table and make the salad. Add the relish, capers, everything else including wine and let the meat sit, quietly marinating, for another ten minutes if possible. Now make four fat, juicy patties with your hands. The patties should be an inch thick, and soft in texture but not runny. Have the oil in your frying-pan hot but not smoking when you drop in the patties and then turn the heat down and fry the burgers about four minutes. Take the pan off the burner and turn the heat high again. Flip the burgers over, put the pan back on the hot fire, then after one minute, turn the heat down again and cook another three minutes. Both sides of the burgers should be crispy brown and the middle pink and juicy.
** Spice Islands discontinued its production of Mei Yen Powder three years ago. If you don’t have any in your pantry, here’s how to recreate it:
9 parts salt
9 parts sugar
2 parts MSG
If a recipe calls for 1 teaspoon Mei Yen Powder, use 2/3 tsp of the dry recipe (above) mixed with 1/8 tsp of soy sauce.
Monday, September 16, 2013
Russian shot in quarrel over Kant's philosophy
MOSCOW (AP) - An argument in southern Russia over philosopher Immanuel Kant, the author of "Critique of Pure Reason," devolved into pure mayhem when one debater shot the other.
The state news agency RIA Novosti on Monday cited police in the city of Rostov-on-Don as saying the argument took place in a small store and deteriorated into a fistfight. One participant pulled out a small nonlethal pistol and fired repeatedly.
The victim was hospitalized with injuries that were not life-threatening. The weapon fired plastic bullets or blanks. Neither person was identified.
It was not clear which of Kant's ideas may have triggered the violence.
An Illustrated Book of Bad Arguments: Logical Fallacies Explained With Animals
An Illustrated Book of Bad Arguments, available in an online version, is filled with explanations of logical fallacies and animal-related examples.
Request for blood of female virgins misread
Peking University Cancer Hospital is conducting studies of possible antibodies. The hospital said it would need 100 healthy female virgin college students from 18 to 24 years old as blood donors for the studies.
Some netizens denounced the request as promoting virginity worship, which they said is demeaning to women.
But hospital spokeswoman Guan Jiuping defended the request, saying the blood of virgins is medically necessary for the studies.
"It's in line with international practice to collect female virgins' blood samples, which serve as negative control substances in HPV research, given that the risk of contracting HPV is low among women who have never had sex," Guan said.
Same guy as Navy Yard shooter? Aaron Alexis 2010 mugshot from Fort Worth
via
Name: Aaron Alexis
Location:
Fort Worth, TX
Age: 31 years
Arrest Date: 2010-09-04
JustMugshots ID: 814064
Charges: Pc 42.12(b) Ma Discharge Firearm Ce
Location:
Fort Worth, TX
Age: 31 years
Arrest Date: 2010-09-04
JustMugshots ID: 814064
Charges: Pc 42.12(b) Ma Discharge Firearm Ce
This trailer for the new Sleepy Hollow series is pretty cool
After being resurrected and pulled two and a half centuries through time, ICHABOD CRANE (Tom Mison) finds himself in modern-day Sleepy Hollow, where he quickly realizes that evil has awoken with him.
TIME Magazine Puts Putin on Covers Across World, Except U.S.
America's weak and waffling, Russia's rich and resurgent... and it's leader doesn't care what anybody thinks of him.
Sunday, September 15, 2013
Anal secretions from the beaver taste like vanilla in baking
Am I the only one wondering who discovered this, and how?
The Swedish National Food Agency (Livsmedelsverket) has confirmed that anal secretions from the beaver can be used to provide a taste similar to vanilla in baked goods and sweets.
How the Owners of All 32 NFL Teams Made Their Money
Interesting article at Mental Floss. Not surprisingly, many of these owners inherited their money (and in some cases the teams) and.or bought the teams back when they were cheap. The NY Giants franchise cost $500 at the time of it's purchase in 1925.
This 922-pound liger (offspring of a male lion and a tigress) looks like something from a scifi movie
With a name like Hercules, you know he's got to be big.
But at 922 pounds, big is an understatement for the world's largest living cat, according to the 2014 Guinness Book of World Records.
Via Huffpo.