Taxpayers in California will pay $40.3 billion for the cost of war in Iraq. For the same amount of money, the following could have been provided:
- 16,733,296 People with Health Care or
- 627,551 Elementary School Teachers or
- 4,767,634 Head Start Places for Children or
- 25,168,314 Children with Health Care or
- 235,246 Affordable Housing Units or
- 4,390 New Elementary Schools or
- 7,685,109 Scholarships for University Students or
- 616,017 Music and Arts Teachers or
- 741,482 Public Safety Officers or
- 117,140,845 Homes with Renewable Electricity or
- 601,790 Port Container Inspectors
via NeatoramaPerhaps the most discomfiting record of this nature involves the youngest person ever to give birth, reputedly a five-year-old girl — not only because such a record posits that a child barely of kindergarten age (presumably involuntarily) underwent an experience we associate with physical and psychological maturity, but also because it implies the commission of an act now considered to be nothing less than child molestation.
Regardless of our squeamishness, we have to note that the claim of a five-year-old girl giving birth is apparently true. Her name was Lina Medina, a Peruvian girl from the Andean village of Ticrapo who made medical history when she gave birth to a boy by caesarean section in May 1939 at the age of five years, seven months and 21 days. Lina's parents initially thought their daughter had a large abdominal tumor, but after they took her to a hospital in the town of Pisco physicians confirmed that her abdominal swelling was due to pregnancy. Lina was eventually transferred to a hospital in Lima, where she delivered a six-pound baby boy by Cesarean section on 14 May 1939 (coincidentally the date on which Mother's Day was celebrated that year). Lina's father was temporarily jailed on suspicion of incest, but he was released for a lack of evidence and authorities were never able to determine who fathered Lina's child.
The deal is directly taking on so profitable Apple's online music store serviceUniversal Music, home to artists such as U2, The Killers and Audioslave, will make its catalog of recordings and music videos available for free on an ad-supported Web site launching later this year, the site's operator said Tuesday.
The two-year deal calls for New York-based SpiralFrog.com to split advertising revenue with the recording company, said Lance Ford, chief marketing and sales officer for SpiralFrog.
Users can download an unlimited number of songs or music videos if they register at the site.
The tracks cannot be burned to a CD, but users will be able to transfer music to portable media players equipped with Microsoft Windows digital rights management software, Ford said.
Offering music and video for free on ad-supported Web sites is not new, but such services have generally been restricted to streaming, in which music and video files are not stored on a user's computer, limiting playback to when there is an Internet connection. SpiralFrog will offer downloads, permitting playback offline and on portable devices.
SpiralFrog will require users to return to the site and renew registration at least once a month or the tracks cease to play [so music will possibly expire after 6 months].
Ancient women's underwear visually adjusted the body shape through form designing. Whether it was square-shaped, diamond-shaped, triangular-shaped, a semi-circle or modeled after nature, underwear in different forms resulted in different visual impressions, while revealing ingenuous creativity at the same time.
From the overall design to the detailed ornaments, ancient underwear also reflected the trends and beliefs of the time, which gives these articles a deep historical essence.
Warren Steed Jeffs, 50, was arrested without incident just outside Las Vegas late Monday, the FBI said Tuesday. No weapons were found, but the 2007 red Cadillac Escalade he was riding in was filled with items including three wigs, 15 cell phones, $54,000 in cash and $10,000 in gift cards, authorities said.Photo seen in Flickr user AngelaShelton's photostream.
Jeffs leads the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, a group that broke away from the Mormon church a century ago. He is said to have at least 40 wives and nearly 60 children.
Over and over the guitarist’s left hand articulated strings with barely perceptible movements, sounding and muting notes almost simultaneously, and playing complete arpeggios through a single stroke with his right hand. Funtwo’s accuracy and velocity seemed record-breaking, but his mouth and jawline — to the extent that they were visible — looked impassive, with none of the exaggerated grimaces of heavy metal guitar heroes. The contrast between the soaring bravado of the undertaking and the reticence of the guitarist gave the 5-minute, 20-second video a gorgeous solemnity.The mysterious funtwo in the video is only recently identified as Korea's Jeong-Hyun Lim.
An innovative handphone screesaver from Japan's wireless operator NTT DoCoMo for its subscribers.The phone [N702is] has a built in motion sensor. When the screen saver is activated, the screen displays glass-like water. The "water" moves when you move the phone around. The water level also reflects your current battery status, the lower it reaches, the less power you have.via Wangtam
Wellknown German blogger Philipp Lenssen got married! Congratulations! His marriage to his Chinese wife was called breaking China Firewall by Amit.
Phillip looks quite handsome but just a bit thin, :-)!
The 7000-Swarovski-crystals-studded fridge is known to be priced at £10,000 (~Malaysia Riggit 70,000) . It is developed and will soon be manufactured only 10 of these by the UK branch of Slovenia's household appliances maker Gorenje.
This clever little £3.50 wind-up robot/pencil-sharpener winds when you sharpen your pencil. Once your pencil's nice and pointy, your robot can take a celebratory lap around your desk.
Tourist: I want to go home. New York is so unchristian. Look at this, they even have a place called "Satan Island"!Buy your Overheard In New York on Amazon for fun reading!
New Yorker: Oh yeah, we New Yorkers are the worst. We even sold our souls to the devil so we could all read.
A scale model of the Titanic which was used in the filming of the movie "Titanic." A 33-metre (100-foot) replica of the "unsinkable" luxury liner built by Briton Stan Fraser and his two sons over a period of six years behind his home, could face a tragic end at the hands of the local planning authorities if Fraser does not get a permission for it.
It's just about 5 Yuan or US$80 cents per bag
Apparently, in Qingdao, the Chinese city where Tsing Tao is brewed, beer in a bag is a common sight. You can buy beer on the streets of the city from people who sell it directly from kegs. Using a small spring scale, they weigh out the amount of beer you ask for. Then you get a small straw to punch through the side of the bag to drink out of.
Creativity+ sez about this of his great exposure:Passion, romance, a roll in the hay, just having a tussle, or a family feud. Maybe even praried dog mud-wrestling in dehydrated mud!! Sometimes it's tough for the untrained eye like mine to tell.
Saudi Arabia first baseman 6 feet 8 inch Aaron Durley, left, watches a pitch as Venezuela's 4 feet 8 inch base runner Ermison Arellano gets ready to take a lead during the fourth inning in their game of the Little League World Series baseball pool play in South Williamsport, Pa., Tuesday, Aug. 22, 2006. Durley is the tallest player to ever play at the Little League World Series.Source: Yahoo!News
If anyone who is travelling at Berlin would like to drop by DerrickT, he can help make this awesome snapshot for you! It is free!
Jiggskykeken's sister found this weird creature in their bathroom. Its clumsy body makes it move very slow and thus easily be caught.
Pluto found by American astronomer Clyde Tombaugh and named after God of the Underworld in Roman mythology by Venetia Phair is now not a planet any longer after astronomers in International Astronomical Union's (IAU) 10-day General Assembly in Prague have voted to strip Pluto of its status as a planet. Instead, it is now categorized as a dwarf planet, together with the biggest asteroid asteroid in solar system Ceres, Pluto's moon Charon and the distant world known as 2003 UB313 (Xena). But not all the scientists agree with the decision. Also Clyde Tombaugh's widow Patricia today said she was "shook up" by yesterday's decision to no longer include Pluto as a planet in our solar system. Even photoshoppers Unite to Save Pluto too!
When reading a post named Some Advice About Life in Chinese Boy's Eye, Clinton's new girl friend was found in Google Adsense ads! I am just feeling curious :-)[...]Bubba, of course, is Bill Clinton. He has been photographed with Stronach several times. The sightings seem to be getting more frequent, leading to press speculation that their relationship has moved beyond official "friendship" - the description used by Stronach's PR people - to true romance. Poor Hillary Clinton. In the run-up to her presidential campaign, the last thing the New York senator needs is lurid stories about her skirt-chasing husband.[...]
Clinton may not care too much. An acquaintance of Belinda's says: "Bill was always more interested in her money than her breasts." Still, you can't help but wonder if his ultimate fantasy revolved around Hillary in the White House and Belinda running Canada: Which G8 leader should I visit this weekend?
Nazari Omar was running away from a “supernatural being” and fell off a third floor balcony of an apartment in Jalan Duta.
But the stunt went awry when he landed just short of the boxes and mattresses that would cushion his fall.
Nazari, in his 40s, was standing in for lead actor Pierre Andre on the set of Metrowealth’s Jangan Pandang Belakang during the 5.20am incident [on August 24].
The movie tells the story of a young man who tries to get to the bottom of his fiancee’s mysterious death but is haunted by something supernatural.
This $10-valued writer considers for your hand health:The Penagain takes a novel ergonomic approach to ink pen design. The body of the pen is shaped like a "Y" creating a cradle for the index finger to rest in.
In theory the form factor allows you to use the weight of the hand to provide all the downward pressure needed to mark on the page. This releases your fingers from the need to grip the pen bottom, thereby removing the static stress on the fingers and hand that leads to writer's cramp.
Spiders in the family of Linyphiidae can be nicknamed as money spider which in the United Kingdom, from the superstition that if such a spider is seen running on someone, it has come to spin him/her new clothes, meaning financial good fortune. Possibly based on such idea, Curis built and photographed his penny spider!
Cartoon watchers in Britain can't see smoking scenes in some episodes of audience-prevalent Tom and Jerry that was banned by the goverment agency after the concerned authorities received tv-goer's complaintsScenes that appear to glamorise smoking are to be edited out of Tom and Jerry cartoons following complaints to Ofcom, the broadcasting watchdog, that they are not appropriate to be shown to children.
The complaint, published yesterday[21/8/06] by Ofcom, was about two cartoons - Texas Tom and Tennis Chumps - transmitted on Turner Broadcasting's children's channel, Boomerang. More than half (56%) of the channel's audience are aged four to 14.
Trap-jaw ants, Odontomachus bauri, originating from Latin America, was found to have the world's fastest bite:[Andrew]Suarez and [Barian] Fisher [entomologists from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign & California Academy of Sciences, respectively], along with University of California at Berkeley researchers Sheila Patek and Joseph Baio, found the ant's jaws accelerate at 100,000 times the force of gravity. This means they can snap shut 2,300 times faster than a blink of the eye to reach speeds up to 145 mph, exerting forces 300 to 500 times the ant's body weight.
"Until recently, cameras were simply not fast enough to capture the movement of the mandibles," Suarez said. He and his colleagues had to use high-speed video cameras capable of taking up to 250,000 frames per second to film the ant jaws, roughly 10,000 faster than speeds movies are usually shot at.
During World War II, Winston Churchill was forced to live within the bomb shelter of the Cabinet War Rooms in London when the Nazi air attacks the city. The great man's private room doesn't have a toilent but just includes a white chamber pot!
The explosive news was uncovered by a Sudanese poet and novelist named Kola Boof (also claiming she was once the world's prime terrorist Osama bin Laden's sex slave for four months a decade ago) in her autobiography Diary of a Lost Girl:"He told me Whitney Houston was the most beautiful woman he'd ever seen."
"He said that he had a paramount desire for Whitney Houston, and although he claimed music was evil he spoke of someday spending vast amounts of money to go to America and try to arrange a meeting with the superstar.""It didn't seem impossible to me. He said he wanted to give Whitney Houston a mansion that he owned in a suburb of Khartoum."
"He would say how beautiful she is, what a nice smile she has, how truly Islamic she is but is just brainwashed by American culture and by her husband -- Bobby Brown."
Farish Noor: Some would argue that this weakness stems from the fear of being seen as being 'too radical'. I have problems with this concept, for I believe that being a radical is not necessarily a bad thing. After all Nelson Mandela, Kwame Nkrumah, Jomo Kenyata, Ghandhi, Nehru, were all radicals in their time; and they did not compromise in their opposition to colonialism, imperialism, racism and apartheid. So why can't we be radicals now?
Abu Bakar Bashir : You are right, but the weakness does not come from the millions of Muslims in the world. They do not mind being radical, they have no fear to speak out and to protest and to jihad. But the weakness comes from these Westernised co-opted Muslim leaders who just want to look good in the eyes of the West and Western media. They are scared that the BBC or CNN may call them radicals, so they remain soft instead. The problem lies there, with the Muslim leaders, not the Muslim masses.
The Muslim leaders swallow the advice of the Western powers and bodies like the IMF and World Bank, even when it is bad for their countries and they know this. They are the real hypocrites and traitors to Islam and Muslims. Yet as you say we should not accept the idea that being a radical is a bad thing. Any movement for change will be radical. Our Prophet was a radical too- he fought against the injustices of his community and challenged the feudal order of his society, so they called him a radical. So what? We should be proud of that!
We should be proud that our Prophet came into the world with the message of Islam to change it for the better, and not for the worse, or to keep things as they are. What use is revelation or religion if it doesnt change anything?
Today the Western powers and media want to domesticate us like sheep, to keep us tame and domesticated. But why are animals domesticated? So that they can be slaughtered in the end!
That is why they use the label 'radical' in the way they do, to keep us scared and to keep us under control. This is true for our leaders, who have all been domesticated and trained to speak the way their Western bosses want them to.
After twelve years of reserch and development, French inventor Guy Negre has developed the air car [wiki] which has an so-called air engine [wiki] that can only be powered by compressed air. The car installed such engines is both eviroment-friendly and economical.
I started a blog which nobody read.. When I went to work, I blogged there instead..I started a blog which nobody view..via Yee's Blog
I started a blog but nobody came; no issues were raised, no comments were made;
I started a blog which nobody read.. all I did wasn't that great but you must know here's what is said..
I started a blog; I sent you the link; I wanted you the world to know what I think..
I started a blog but when I read yours; it made me forget what I had started my for..
It's South Korean electronics mogul Samsung's 70-inch LCD panel, a 5-inch beat to Sharp's PN-655U 65-inch mode! It seems that the company's Executive Vice President Kim Sang-Soo has more confidence than anyone else:"Our new 70-inch LCD is not only significantly larger, but also sets a new benchmark of excellence in terms of video image reproduction, viewing angle and image quality. We've designed it to dramatically enhance the large screen LCD TV user's viewing experience. "People to the upcoming International Meeting on Information Displays 2006 to be comvened in Daegu on the 23rd of this month should be able to have a first look at the giant 70-incher.
The British are soon to have one more frangance choice.Soccer star David Beckham and his pop-star wife, Victoria, are set to get intimate with the unveiling of a new fragrance for men and women next month. Dubbed "intimately Beckham for Him" and "for Her," the fragrances will be sold starting since September 1 across Britain.
Compared to some footballer's World Cup headcuts, this hairstyle is too eccentric not to be appreciated!
Simple but distinguish!Named "the beauty of seal characters" and with strokes of seal characters as their basic form, the pictograms of the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games integrate pictographic charm of inscriptions on bones and bronze objects in ancient China with simplified embodiment of modern graphics, making them easy to be recognized, remembered and used,. Skillfully using the effect of sharp contrast between the black and white colors which the typical Chinese traditional artistic form of rubbings have, the pictograms of the Beijing Olympic Games display distinct motion character, graceful aesthetic perception of movement and rich cultural connotations, thus arriving at the harmony and unity of form with conception.
The Beijing Olympics Pictograms comprise of 35 sport icons, namely those of athletics, rowing, badminton, baseball, basketball, boxing, canoe / kayak flatwater, canoe / kayak slalom, cycling, equestrian, fencing, football, artistic gymnastics, rhythmic gymnastics, trampoline, weightlifting, handball, hockey, judo, wrestling, swimming, synchronized swimming, diving, water polo, modern pentathlon, softball, taekwondo, tennis, table tennis, shooting, archery, triathlon, sailing, volleyball and beach volleyball.
From Fun MansionThe N55 Rocket System enables persons to communicate their protest in a concrete way. It is a low tech, low cost, highly efficient hybrid rocket propulsion system, fueled by a mixture of polyethylene and laughing gas (N2O).
It is now possible to distribute various things from high altitudes. For example, printed matter or plant seeds could be spread over a vast area.The rocket PROTEST, constructed to protest against large concentrations of power, can carry a payload of 2 kg to an altitude of approximately 5200 m, if launched from an angle of 85 degrees. The fuel will burn for 6 seconds, bringing the rocket to a maximum speed of 475 m/s.
