A Robber Snatched My Exam
=================================
Five hooded robbers holding up an Athens post office Tuesday took off with hundreds of algebra, Latin and chemistry exam papers instead of millions of drachmas, a post office spokesman said.

How To Get Free Donuts
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A Knox County man accused of posing as a State Highway Patrol trooper to get free meals was charged last week with impersonating an officer after someone called his bluff and notified the patrol.

World’s Biggest Germ Breeding Ground Opened
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A tropical resort sprouted on the streets of Manhattan as former “Baywatch” star and Playboy model Carmen Electra slipped into a bathing suit and shared the world’s biggest hot tub with about 70 of her closest friends.
“It’s too wet and wild in there!”

Ban Happy Hour
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A crime prevention charity is calling for a ban on happy hours in bars, pubs and clubs. The National Association for the Care and Rehabilitation of Offenders (Nacro) says bar promotions encourage rapid drinking can lead to binge drinking and violence.
“It is all rather depressing that people are proposing to ban happiness.”

The Morning After Risky Sex Pill
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The equivalent of a “morning-after” pill will be given to people who suspect
they have been exposed to HIV.

Pot Is Good For Everything
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In a study appearing in a scientific journal today, researchers have found that
marijuana users may be able to smoke and eat all they want without gaining
weight.
“They were eating more. They consumed more calories but their body weight was
somewhat lower,” Smit said yesterday.
“I’ve heard of this so-called munchie attack. I guess it’s kind of a gateway
drug to potato chips.”

Orphans Said Hurt by Stutter Tests
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For four months during the Great Depression, Mary Tudor instructed a handful of children at an Iowa orphanage in a lesson they would never forget – she taught them to stutter.
The experiment eventually led to a theory that helped thousands of children overcome the speech impediment. But it also condemned some of the children in Tudor’s class to lives as outcasts and misfits.

Godzilla Meat For Sale Now
=================================
Japan’s best-known monster, Godzilla, is coming to stores soon – canned.
“Godzilla Meat,” actually 3.5 ounces of corned beef from Tokyo toy maker Takara Co., is packaged with pictures of the stomping, fire-breathing, irradiated dinosaur made famous by Toho movies that started coming out in the 1950s.
“People can eat Godzilla and become energetic and powerful. It’s got dreams mixed in with fun,”

God Is My Insurance Agent
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A lay preacher who claimed he did not need car insurance because God had given him divine protection from harm has been fined nearly £800.

Balls To Die For
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A 51-year-old scuba diver from Hickory drowned while searching for golf balls in a shallow, murky pond at a Lincoln County golf course Monday.
The inexperienced diver and his 38-year-old partner were diving in a large pond about 8 feet deep at the 15th hole of Westport Golf Club.
Around 1:30 p.m., the younger diver realized his partner was in trouble when he didn’t surface after the usual 15 minutes underwater. He scanned for some sign of the other diver. Then he asked a golfer to call 911.

Have You Asked the Rudest Question?
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If there is a communication that corrupts good manners most, it must be the ill-advised question. Now a respected American arbiter of etiquette has declared that the rudest question of all is “Why aren’t you married?”

Revenge?
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A 17-year-old juvenile, who may face charges for distributing a nude photograph of two classmates online, wanted revenge against the male in the picture, police said.
The juvenile, who is not named because of his age, was petitioned to Luzerne County Court on charges of harassment by communication and displaying obscene and other sexual material – both misdemeanors. He also faces felony charges of criminal use of a communication facility, said Exeter police Sgt. Leonard Galli. The photograph, which featured a 15-year-old male and a 15-year-old female, both of whom were naked, was taken during a gathering of friends at a house, Galli said. The teens were naked, but “not totally exposed,” he said, and would not describe the picture in greater detail.

MMmm

I want some purple throat potion, or Dr. Phineas Prescott’s Patented Guaranteed Cure-All Pain Reducing Powdered Fizzy Water Supplements.

Someone mentioned a virus to me that affects wasps. It encrypts the DNA in their semen…however, if the female wasp is also a host to the virus, it decrypts the semen and allows reproduction to occur.

The stuff is bacteria of genus Wolbachia. To quote a scientific article…”Wolbachia are cytoplasmically inherited bacteria found in many arthropods. They induce various reproductive alterations in their hosts, including cytoplasmic incompatibility, thelytokous parthenogenesis, feminization and male-killing.”

Some explanation:

cytoplasmically inherited: this means that children are automatically infected, because the bacteria live inside the cells.

cytoplasmic incompatibility: Infected individuals will only produce offspring with other infected individuals. Or in most insects, infected females can mate with everyone to produce offspring, but infected males will not produce offspring with uninfected females (“everyday there is more of them, and less of us….”)

Mother………………Father……………….Children
Infected…………….clean…………………infected
Infected…………….infected…………….infected
Clean………………..clean…………………..clean
Clean………………… infected…………….dead

The mechanism is also called “kamikaze sperm”, because it kills all fertilized eggs in the uninfected female, even those already fertilized by uninfected males!

thelytokous parthenogenesis: A female can produce other females from unfertilized eggs. These females are clones of the mother. arrhenotokous parthenogenesis means that males are produced from unfertilized eggs.

feminization: pretty clear, males turning into females.

male-killing: use your imagination. Actually, I think it means that male offspring of an infected mother die in the womb.

Scary stuff. I wonder if I could work that into a story for the future, as a ‘people virus’.

A strain infecting humans would definitly be a very fun device. The fact that Wolbachia is a bacteria means that it is susceptible to antibiotics and heat. Parthenogenous wasps held at high temperatures or given antibiotics will suddenly produce male children.

A fascinating subject.

Next thought: how parasitoids eat their victims from within and influence their behavior. Isn’t entomology fun?

I’ve been behind on my blood donation/apheresis lately. (If I’m going to get pierced later, I’ll have to take 6 mos to a year off… so I’d better get it in now)

And walkies.

New efforts will be redoubled to make sure that I get on schedule for those.

After the other day’s hoax, this occurs… It may just be me, but it seems that it wouldn’t be that hard to use Microsoft’s SharePoint Team Services as a back-end for a weblog. You don’t need a SQL Server database to run it; it will install MSDE (essentially, SQL Server lite) if you want it to. All in all, it’s a pretty interesting thing to think about — Microsoft muscling in on the weblog space. If Lj ever bites the biscuit, I’ll probably use that.

Speaking of which – More on Smart Tags: it seems that, in true American fashion, people are now considering lawsuit ideas to end Microsoft’s newest concept. I don’t know if I’ve heard anything more preposterous or legally specious. Could Opera be held legally liable for copyright violations because its web browser lets you turn off style sheets, and change the fonts, colors, and link styles of any web page? Heck, Netscape 6 will automatically translate web pages into other languages, and that’s pretty much the definition of a derivative work. People need to get over their apocalyptic fear of Microsoft — it’s making them look like real dingalings.

Before your lights quite fail
And you fall spinning singing from the same song
Pass your hand before me
Palm shining, light streaming
Speak to me your lips touch
Crackle light water spilling
tumbling down

Sing to me lull softly call quiver
Dream to me like a flame flicker
Shimmering Shimmering mirage like vision
of tranquility

Honeyflower sing suckle
oh so sweetly call to me
lure linger please
lure linger, lure linger

Cover me with youre hands unfolded
wrapped around, held like a ball
Think of me — put all your self inside me
Then send me spinning into the sun

Dreams drempt and thoughts thunk
Tooth brushed and watch wound
Before toast and tea
Before toast and tea

“Breakfast!” Good morning everybody,
The sun is up and there’s lots of toast and jelly
Wash Wash, you gotta wash the dishes
If you’re gonna eat upon ’em, ya gotta wash ’em.
You can get it if you really want,
you gotta try hard, try hard
(P.S. Keep on the sunny side)

perorate PUR-uh-rayt, intransitive verb:
1. To conclude or sum up a long discourse.
2. To speak or expound at length; to declaim.

Perorate comes from Latin perorare “to speak at length or to the end,” from per-, “through, throughout,” + orare, “to speak.”

gyrovague (JYE-ro-vayg) noun

A monk who travels from one place to another.

[From French, from Late Latin gyrovagus gyro- circle + vagus wandering.]

Happy Sixth Birfday to

A big pile of non-msg ramen for you!

With every fiber of my being.

She means the world to me, better than Ice cream, kung fu, and Walt Whitman all rolled together.

for me, that’s saying a heck of a lot.

I’m going to bed. nitey nite folks!

Just spent the last half hour picking through my win.ini and registry, plumbing out the last bits of a worm on my system. All clean, now…after purging all manner of yuck. I *highly* recommend Symantec’s Anti-virus center for purging malignant code from your system, it had a number of things to try that I probably wouldn’t have thought of.(especially key names in the registry to deal with… here’s the page I was working with. as an example of some how to’s for doing cleanup. Much useful detail, especially regarding Win Me(h) of which I’m still learning the little extra ins and outs.

trouble with my pooter… now solved was –

Category 4 (Severe):

Dangerous threat type, difficult to contain. The latest virus definitions should be downloaded immediately and deployed.

1) Wild: High

and

2) Damage or Distribution: High

I’m glad that part of my torment is up.

cute hoax, puts words in brads mouth via html.clever!

http://www.livejournal.com/talkread.bml?itemid=5161455

Dangit. I should’ve stayed home. I’m not sick, but I should’ve anyway. *grinds toe into the dirt.

Farting Vaccine?
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A new anti-farting vaccine for sheep and cattle might cut down on Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions…It works by reducing the amount of gut organisms which produce methane during digestion.

Move Over Mama Cass, Pork Claims Another Victim
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Forget rheumatic fever, kidney stones, heart disease, pneumonia, and even poisoning. What may have really killed Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was schnitzel.
The latest theory about the composer’s death on Dec. 5, 1791, at age 35 in Vienna suggests the culprit was probably trichinosis.
The illness is usually caused by eating undercooked pork infested by the worm, and could explain all of Mozart’s symptoms, which included fever, rash, limb pain, and swelling, said Dr. Jan V. Hirschmann of Puget Sound Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Seattle.

Why aren’t there any coffee-flavored cereals?

(aside from sweetalyssm’s moco-puff comment. :P)