LIFE DOES NOT = MOVIES

What we see in the movies:
It seems to happen in about a third of the action movies/TV shows ever made: Someone jumps our hero from behind, and the screen goes to black. Hours later, he wakes up in some strange place and has to think on his feet to make his escape.
We see it in Casino Royale, after Bond survives a car accident but before he gets smashed in the nuts over and over. It also happens in Pulp Fiction, when Bruce Willis and Ving Rhames are knocked out by the owner of the pawn shop and wake up bound and gagged, right before the guy decides to "bring out the gimp."

Quentin Tarantino has some issues.

When they wake up, the guys aren't happy about it, but they're otherwise immediately alert and aware -- Willis is even able to orchestrate a violent escape a minute later.
It also happens to Marty McFly at least once in every Back to the Future movie: He knocks himself unconscious and inevitably wakes up a while later in bed with his mother (or, in one case, a paternal grandmother who looks disturbingly like his mother).

But that's nothing compared to the repeated head trauma suffered by some TV characters -- you would see it happen repeatedly on Lost (usually with the butt of a gun) and Heroes (usually right before every commercial break). The character Giles from Buffy the Vampire Slayer was known for being a) super-smart and b) extremely prone to head injuries. These two things are not as compatible as you might think.
What would really happen:
We've all seen boxers and football players get knocked out for a few seconds and then jump up and continue playing the game (hell, it's happened to some of you reading this). But it's all about how long you are out. Experts say if you're ever out for more than five minutes, call a goddamned ambulance. There's a really, really good chance you have severe damage. A hit hard enough to keep you down that long means concussion or, worse, a traumatic brain injury or your brain may be goddamned bleeding on the inside.

But hey, it's just your brain.

And that's talking about being out a matter of minutes -- think about all of the movies you've seen where the character wakes up into some wacky misunderstanding hours later. In Pulp Fiction, the guy from the pawn shop has enough time to carry the characters to his basement one at a time, tie them to chairs and wait for his friend to arrive. By the time they wake up (not on their own -- they only wake up because their captor sprays water on them), Willis and Rhames can probably say goodbye to such helpful abilities as standing, walking, talking or maybe even waking up again.
And when you start talking about those TV show characters who are getting knocked out in every other episode, you're dealing with realism on the level of Elmer Fudd surviving getting flattened by a boulder. Concussions -- even mild ones -- have cumulative effects (as every football fan now knows). The more times you get knocked unconscious, the more severe your dizziness, disorientation and nausea will be each time. So, by the end of Back to the Future Part III, after being knocked out so many times in a period of like two weeks (or 125 years, depending on how you look at it), Marty McFly should be reduced to a drooling idiot incapable of walking by himself, let alone driving a DeLorean through time and space

Happy Thanksgiving

The Tin Man gets in on illegal organ trafficking

Sneaky, wrong, and brillant.....

Designed to steal air from car tires for bicycle tires..

Did Texas Execute Another Innocent Man?

David Grann’s New Yorker story about Cameron Todd Willmingham asked whether Texas executed an innocent man in 2004. Willmingham may not have been the first: Claude Jones was executed in Texas 10 years ago for a liquor-store murder, based on a single hair that was found at the scene of the crime. But a recent DNA analysis has shown that the hair did not belong to Jones and it may have belonged, in fact, to the murder victim. Jones was a career criminal who never admitted to the crime. As his execution neared, he pushed then Governor George W. Bush for a DNA test on the hair, but Bush’s office never brought Jones’ request to the governor’s attention. During Jones’ trial, a forensic expert looked at the hair under a microscope and said it could have been Jones’, but not the victim’s; a DNA test was never performed before Jones’ execution

If you have ever been to Kentucky. This would not surprise you...

Harvey Westmoreland and his brother got into a fight with James Hill and Troy Holt in May.

The dispute was over a tractor Westmoreland was trying to sell to one of the men.

Westmoreland said the men felt like they were being ripped off and that's when the fight started.

"Troy offered to buy it from me for $250 dollars. I paid twenty bucks for it. He thought I was trying to cheat him," One thing led to another, and before I knew it, there were knives and guns and everything just went haywire."

"(Then) they cut my beard and forced me to eat it," he said.

Hill and Holt pleaded guilty. It's expected they'll be fined and sentenced to supervised diversion

Very F**kin cool!

New factory in Mojave to produce White Knight spacecraft for Virgin Galactic space tourism

The Los Angeles Times today reports that The Spaceship Company, or TSC—the joint venture owned by Burt Rutan's Mojave-based Scaled Composites and Richard Branson's space tourism company Virgin Galactic—are building a production facility at the Mojave Air and Space Port where the world's first fleet of commercial spaceships will be built.

TSC plans to finish the 68,000-square-foot facility by September, 2011. "It expects to build three White Knight aircraft, which resemble massive flying catamarans, and five smaller SpaceShipTwo rocket planes," according to the LA Times

Happy,happy. Joy,joy

MarketWatch:
The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development says people in Denmark, Finland and the Netherlands are the most content with their lives. The three ranked first, second and third, respectively, in the OECD's rankings of "life satisfaction," or happiness.
There are myriad reasons, of course, for happiness: health, welfare, prosperity, leisure time, strong family, social connections and so on. But there is another common denominator among this group of happy people: taxes.
Northern Europeans pay some of the highest taxes in the world. Danes pay about two-thirds of their income in taxes.

There is hope....

If I had a dollar for evertime this happened to me.

Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!!

Foreskin restoration devices

Passing of a icon.....

Bob May, Jan. 18: The man in the 'Lost in Space' robot suit, usually photographed in costume, posed here with co-star Billy Mummy. May died at the age of 69.

I think that this is a valid line of reasoning..

signs of the apocalypse.

This spring news broke about a bizarre form of entertainment in Thailand where orangutans are forced to wear boxing gloves and fight each other in the ring. During the match female orangutans in bikinis parade around the ring displaying the round numbers

I dig it......

Pumpkin Pi (I know it's corny, but seasonal.)

ahhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!!!!!

Processed

processed meat that is made into nuggetts....

Lawd,Lawd,Lawd. How can this be?

BABY MAMA DRAMA, Y'ALL southern states that stress abstinence have highest teen pregnancy rates..

 In Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Vermont, for instance, 2008 birth rates were less than 25 per 1,000 teens aged 15 to 19, CDC found. In the same year, Arkansas, Mississippi, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Texas all had rates topping 60 per 1,000 teens.
Mississippi had the country's highest rate (65.7), CDC says, while New Hampshire had the lowest (19.8).

Happy Meal Goes Six Months Without Mold

Have McDonald’s chefs discovered the secret of immortality? Artist Sally Davies has photographed a Happy Meal every day for the past six months—and so far it hasn’t begun to decay or grown a speck of mold. “The first thing that struck me on day two of the experiment was that it no longer emitted any smell,” says Davies. “And then the second point of note was that on the second day, my dogs stopped circling the shelf it was sitting on trying to see what was up there.” Davies says the food has grown hard and plastic-like, but there’s still no mold. As  when Davies’ project was younger, there are other ancient McDonald’s burgers lying around: One woman has kept hers without mold for 12 years.

unnessary, but cool..

Veteran Star Wars action figure modders Sillof & Glorbes have a new series of alternate Star Wars dollies: Star Wars 1942, which reimagines the lovable Star Wars people as Allied bomber crew, and sinister Nazis.

The Puritans came to America to escape other people’s religious freedom...

In 1593, radical Protestant “Separatists” emigrated from England to Holland to live in peace without being hung or jailed for religious nonconformity. That led to a new problem for the Puritans: the Dutch allowed people to practice all sorts of “crazy religions,” including Judaism, Catholicism, and even atheism. Worried about their children’s morals, the Separatists hopped on the Mayflower in 1620. Remembered as “the Pilgrims,” they wound up in what is now Massachusetts and founded the first Puritan colony in the New World. Although half of them died the first winter, Separatists were so eager to get away from Holland and England that two more boatloads arrived in 1623 and 1627.

Inspired by the so-called success at Plymouth, about 20,000 non-Separatist Puritans left England for Boston. But these non-Separatists proved just as intolerant. When Roger Williams suggested detaching church from state, he was banished and went on to found Rhode Island. Fellow rebel Thomas Hooker led his more relaxed followers to Connecticut. Shortly thereafter, Puritan elders exiled a woman for criticizing their authority, like Puritans had criticized the Catholic and Anglican clergy. It seems that Puritans, in addition to disapproving of laughing, smiling, dancing, and touching, did not have a sense of irony.

The bigger point is that seeking isolation across the ocean didn’t solve any of their problems. The Puritans were surprised when new immigrants and their own children didn’t share their religious ideals. In 1691, King Charles II accelerated the Puritan society breakdown when he changed the colony’s royal charter so that property ownership became the basis of voting rights instead of membership in a Puritan church. He also amended the charter to include protection of religious dissenters. Looking back, the old-fashioned Puritans might have regretted the move overseas

emergence from the dark ages...........

NEW YORK — Geron Corp. has begun testing an embryonic stem-cell treatment on a patient with spinal cord injuries, marking the first time such a medical therapy has been used on a human in a government approved study.

The company said it enrolled the first patient in the early stage study, which will look at the safety of the treatment and how well the patient can tolerate it. The patient was enrolled at Shepherd Center, a spinal cord and brain injury rehabilitation center in Atlanta, one of seven potential sites in the United States. In order to participate, a patient must have been injured within the previous two weeks.

This is why they have stickers on mowers that say"please do not put hands underneath while operating."

Irmgard Holm of Arizona had what she called "a nightmare-and-a-half" over the weekend when she mistook Super Glue for eye drops,  She explained, "The bottles look identical. You know, I'm not young anymore but I'm not senile."
Paramedics had to cut off the glue and Holm avoided any major consequences. It turns out this type of mistake isn't so rare, with "Super Glue ocular injuries" dating back to 1982

And some how it won't matter..........

Another university is bringing Christine O'Donnell's self-professed education history into question Wednesday, as Claremont Graduate University, a school that the Delaware Senate candidate claims she attended, has told Talking Points Memo that they have no record of her being there.

"Claremont Graduate University has no student or education record for an individual named Christine O'Donnell," Rod Leveque, a spokesman for Claremont told TPM Tuesday, despite O'Donnell's inclusion of the school on her LinkedIn education history.

"Today I find this more attractive then I should."

I wanted to burn the Louvre.  I'd do the Elgin Marbles with a sledgehammer and wipe my ass with the Mona Lisa.  This is my world, now.  This is my world, my world, and those ancient people are dead.  ~Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

I knew it....

Among von Braunhut's many inventions, which range from bulletproof garb to an insect observation kit, is a pen-sized weapon called the Kiyoga Agent M5, which telescopes into a metal whip at a flick of the wrist. The M5 caused an uproar in 1988 after it was revealed, in a fund-raising letter for the Aryan Nations, that a portion of the sales proceeds was going to Richard Butler, founder and leader of the organization. (This is the same Richard Butler who, along with the Aryan Nations, was recently found negligent and ordered to pay $5.1 million after two security guards assaulted a mother and son outside the Nations compound in Idaho in 1998.) Butler was on trial for sedition and needed help with his legal bills. Shortly after the M5 story broke, the Washington Post ran a lengthy article about Von Braunhut, revealing his involvement with "some of the most extreme racist and anti-Semitic organizations in the country." The article quoted an official with the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith as saying: "He has a reputation of being a generous contributor." Von Braunhut has vehemently denied the accusations in various news reports. Yet in a 1988 interview with the Seattle Times, he referred to the "inscrutable, slanty Korean eyes" of Korean shop owners and was quoted as saying, "You know what side I'm on. I don't make any bones about it."

At my request, the ADL, which has tracked Von Braunhut for years, sends me a rather hefty package. In it is a picture of the inventor, who resembles Lenny Bruce, posing in a priest's collar in front of a Nazi flag.

great......

Former Air Force Officers: UFOs Tampered With Nuclear Missiles

"All of a sudden, we started getting bells and whistles going off. As we looked at the display board in front of us, sure enough, the missiles began going into an unlaunchable, or no-go, mode. They couldn't be launched -- it went from green to red.We also had a couple of security violations, meaning there were lights indicating some kind of intrusion at the missile sites, where the missiles were actually located, about a mile or two away from the launch control facility.Salas said they immediately performed a system checklist to see what was wrong and to determine how it was possible that 10 nuclear missiles could suddenly be deactivated."

please oh please don't punish the wealthy by raising their tax rate from 34-39%

Top 1 Percent Control 42 Percent of Financial Wealth in the U.S. – How Average Americans are Lured into Debt Servitude by Promises of Mega Wealth.


Posted by mybudget360 in 401k, bailout, banks, bubbles, corporate power, crooks, debt, economy, government, i-banking, millionaire, psychology, sucker rally, wall street, wealth preservation

35 Comment Many Americans are not buying the recent stock market rally. This is being reflected in multiple polls showing negative attitudes towards the economy and Wall Street. Wall Street is so disconnected from the average American that they fail to see the 27 million unemployed and underemployed Americans that now have a harder time believing the gospel of financial engineering prosperity. Americans have a reason to be dubious regarding the recovery because jobs are the main push for most Americans. A recent study shows that over 70 percent of Americans derive their monthly income from an actual W-2 job. In other words, working is the prime mover and source of their income. Yet the financial elite have very little understanding of this concept. Why? 42 percent of financial wealth is controlled by the top 1 percent. We would need to go back to the Great Depression to see such lopsided data

are you kidding me?

Owner of Segway Company Dies in Segway Accident

The owner of Segway died on Sunday riding one of his company’s electric scooters off a cliff and into a river.
The 62-year-old millionaire Jimi Heselden crashed into the River Wharfe in Northern England while inspecting his North Yorkshire estate, according to multiple reports.

Heselden was riding a rugged-country version of the Segway, which was also recovered at the scene, according to the Telegraph.
Unveiled in 2001, the Segway was invented by Dean Kamen, who dreamed of launching a transportation revolution. The scooter contains five gyroscopes linked to a set of computers to monitor a rider’s center of gravity.

Heselden, chairman of Hesco Bastian and a former miner who earned millions from defense contracts, purchased the Segway company in early 2010







Read More http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/09/segway-death/#ixzz10kTfKaY0

fact is sadder then fiction

Just as they did in 2000, the Republicans are running this year on an economic platform of tax cuts, especially making the tax cuts permanent for the richest among us. So how did the tax cuts work out? My analysis of the new data, with all figures in 2008 dollars:

Total income was $2.74 trillion less during the eight Bush years than if incomes had stayed at 2000 levels.
That much additional income would have more than made up for the lack of demand that keeps us mired in the Great Recession. That would mean no need for a stimulus, although it would not have affected the last administration's interfering with market capitalism by bailing out irresponsible Wall Streeters instead of letting the market determine their fortunes.

So, can you hear me now?

ha ha ha ha ....

Surprised? Think not......

Top UK spies revealed as wankers

The UK spy agency MI6 experimented with using semen as invisible ink; presumably because this fluid was readily available to several of their field agents on a few moments' notice. The agent in charge of the project? Mansfield Cumming. This and other revelations appear in MI6: The History of the Secret Intelligence Service 1909-1949, to be published this week.

I like it...

The U.S. has plans for a manned visit to Mars by the mid-2030s. The ESA and Russia have sketched out a similar joint mission, and it is claimed that China's space program has the same objective. Apart from their destination, all these plans share something in common: extraordinary danger for the explorers. What happens if someone dies out there, months away from Earth?


Swedish ecologists Susanne Wiigh-Mäsak and Peter Mäsak are the inventors of an environmentally friendly alternative to cremation and burial, called Promession. The technique entails freezing a body, vibrating it into tiny pieces, and then freeze-drying the pieces, which can then be used as compost to grow a memorial shrub or tree.

I’ma get medieval on your ass: The ‘Galileo Was Wrong’ conference is not a prank

A awesome banana shoe.

A distrubing trend......

In the great state of Maine. The gentleman on the left is former Waterville mayor Paul LePage. He a tea party favorite and looking like a easy winner has some interesting ideas and or beliefs. Part of the earth is only five thousand year old crowd he is pushing for off shore oil exploration on the Maine coast. (where he thinks oil came from in just five thousand years is beyond me.) Also a advocate of nuclear power plants he has nothing but contempt for the green movement denouncing them as impracticable. He also has a habit of sounding like a idiot when answering questions. So he refuses to meet or answer any questions before the election. Brilliant. This is a strategy that may of seemed impossible a few years ago but is something of a point of pride with the information suspicious, fact phobic followers of the new insurgency.
 The young woman who just one Delaware's republican senate primary is a study in the soft lunacy that pervades the far right.O'Donnell has said plenty of wacky things in her variegated career. A former campaign manager, for example, claimed O'Donnell once told her that Joe Biden had "tapped her phone line." On The Bill O'Reilly Show, O'Donnell said that "American scientific companies are cross-breeding humans and animals and coming up with mice with fully functioning human brains." Plus, as O'Donnell is an evangelical Christian, there have been the expected, unfortunate comments about evolution, homosexuality, etc.
 The truly frightening part is she will probably win.
Easily

Best Who ever...

Would have been cool.

right on....

Faith of the Abomination: Lesbian couple goes undercover as man and wife at evangelical church
There looks to be an interesting film screening coming up this weekend in Austin, TX. A lesbian couple went “undercover” as a man and wife at a local evangelical church and their documentary, Faith of the Abomination is the result. The screening at the South Lamar Alamo Drafthouse as part of the Austin Gay & Lesbian International Film Festival on Sunday at 2:30 p.m.

From an article in the Austin Statesman:

Their mission was to go undercover with Melton posing as a man to see if the couple would be treated differently as a heterosexual couple in ministry. They aimed to stay 6 months. It was successful, Nguyen said. “We loved them and they loved us,” she said. “The leadership took us in right away. They told us secrets they hadn’t revealed to their board of directors. Spiritually, we were able to connect with them because they didn’t have the stumbling block of what we looked like and what our spirits were. We became close with them, they took us out for private luncheons. We ministered in their church. It was the spirit in us that they connected to, not the packages.”
The couple became a part of the church for about four months, they said. They decided that they would reveal who they were and told the congregation that they were going back to Vietnam. “We told people how much we loved them and thanked them for their love,” Nguyen said. “We told them that we were two lesbian ministers of God, and the bodyguards started to rush us and the pastor called them off. He knew cameras were on him. I told him, ‘God is Love, we are not abominations. God created me, God loves my people. We’re here for a reason.’”
As scared as they were about their revelation, they felt like it was necessary to come out publicly so that the church would know what had happened to them and who they really were. That was September 3, 2006. Their emails and phone calls to the church have not been returned, they say. They hope one day to move back to Austin; perhaps after the premiere of the film here on Sunday.

Wingnuts are acomin there's dancing tonight.....

At the FreedomWorks 9/12 rally at the National Mall, conservative blowhard Andrew Breitbart asked this question of the mainstream media, “How dare you call these God-loving Americans, racists?” He accused Theresa Brewer of using Photoshop to doctor photographs to make Tea party, uh, “patriots” look like racists and homophobes.

But why bother, as you can tell from the above photograph of Mr. Breitbart, left, speaking with one of his admirers.

Nicely done whoever got that stellar snapshot!
I have never been able to get my head around Andrew Breitbart. Clearly he’s not an idiot, and yet he seems so freakishly resistant to the stark reality that he was speaking to an audience comprised entirely of idiots

This explains alot....

Wingnuts begin to gather

Gingrich: Obama Has 'Kenyan' Worldview

A fate worse than President Palin? Possible 2012 contender Newt Gingrich is doing his best to dial up the craziness: In an interview with the National Review on Sunday, he said President Obama has a “Kenyan, anti-colonial worldview.” Here’s the full quote: "What if [Obama] is so outside our comprehension, that only if you understand Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior, can you begin to piece together [his actions]? That is the most accurate, predictive model for his behavior." Gingrich says Obama “conned” American voters and that he “worked very hard at being a person who is normal.”

I know it's wrong. But I dig it...