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.