Verba Volant . info

Lisa Kennedy Montgomerry

2012-01-30T07:26:00.001-08:00

It's not just that her name is annoyingly long, she is easily the most annoying 40-50 y.o. on the face of the Earth. And that says a lot..

Real Time with Bill Maher’s show on January 27, 2012 featured a weird line-up of guests: two conservatives (well, Bashir is officially liberal, but his heart is conservative, just like Bill) and in between, the most annoying creature that has ever come on his show (I haven’t watched all the episodes, but I find it very hard to think otherwise). Everybody on the show seemed to be part of some weird conspiracy to ignore her constant interruptions. And when Bill brought up the issue of the woman waving her finger at Obama, which he thought was disrespectful to the office of the President, she thought that it was sexist to say that – and so were all these attacks against that woman:

Now, I happen to think that whenever you engage in such an attack (finger waving) you inflict more damage onto yourself than on the one you’re attacking. There are situations when you are forced to do so. Maybe here Obama wanted to cut the meeting short, she kept interposing herself between him and his waiting airplane, he attempted to slightly push her aside and she waved her finger “I won’t let you do that!”.

I happen to think that although not very civilized, that wasn’t such a crime of “lez-president” as Bill Maher makes it to be. However, to claim as Kennedy did that it is sexist to bring up this issue, that’s dumb. She also uses “I’m a philosophy major” as an argument; maybe she didn’t have enough time to make a more convincing, elaborate point, but she ought to know that that’s ipse dixit / appeal to authority. It shouldn’t fly in front of an educated audience. And if she didn’t think Bill Maher’s show on HBO has an educated audience, WTF was she doing being incommensurably disgraceful, inarticulate, catty, hysterical and ultimately stupid (at least relative to the other guests) on there?

At one point, after rudely yawning while the Conservative is making a point, then constantly pointing with her finger left and right, the C (who manages to appear “regular” even while reciting his talking points about Obama wanting to gut the military spending) tries to explain to her “if you don’t let me speak, that’s not fair”. She continues, as if her previous stint at MTV or on Politically Incorrect somehow gave her carte blanche to be annoyingly incorrect for the rest of her life. Or maybe Bill Maher wanted to prove me wrong that he’s not losing his patience.

A quick search has shown her to have been voted the most annoying VJ ever on MTV. Judge for yourself in her interview with NIN & David Bowie (Bowie was going to make fun of her, but Reznor wanted to be serious, esp. in part 2), Love Saves the Day 1996, w/ Steve Isaacs (2), David Pena & the Trailer Park Nation, Tori Amos.

Sources / More info: wiki-lkm, wwk-vj, rsn-vj, k-bm-10.11

VerbaVolant, mtv, annoying, bill maher, kennedy, debate (Tags)

Les Chrysanthemes

2011-11-24T06:09:00.001-08:00

I thought I dedicate a song to Natalie. It's all I can do.

It’s a song about dead love, but somehow the sad lyrics and melodic line interact awesomely with the dance beat.

В том саду, где мы с вами встретились,
Ваш любимый куст хризантем расцвел,
И в моей душе расцвело тогда
Чувство яркое нежной любви.
Припев:
Отцвели уж давно
Хризантемы в саду,
Но любовь все живет
В моем сердце больном.
Опустел наш сад, вас давно уж нет,
Я брожу один весь измученный,
И невольные слезы катятся
Пред увядшим кустом хризантем...
Припев.

in this garden where we met
your favourite bush of chrysanthemums has bloomed
and this time in my soul
the bright feeling of tender love was born
chorus:
chrysanthemums in garden had faded a long ago
yo-yo-yo-yo
but the love still alive
in my sick heart
yo-yo-yo
our garden has deserted
its been a while since you'd gone
i’m walking alone
all tired
and unintentional tears
are dropping in front of
the faded bush of chrysanthemums
chorus.

Sources / More info: metacafe [Cosmos1] [Cosmos2] [lua] [Cosmos3] [Na Zare] flickr wiki-mgi

VerbaVolant, song, music, mtv, russian, russians, lyrics, chrysanthemums, crizanteme (Tags)

Natalie Wood, truth drowned

2011-11-24T04:26:00.001-08:00

I finally heard a few days ago news that I longed to hear ever since reading about the weird circumstances of Natalie Wood’s death.

The quintessential Natalie Wood movie remains for me Splendor in the Grass. She may have starred in other films but that love story has defined not only that generation, but many that were to come.

I was glad to recently find out that her death investigation is being reopened. I didn’t write about it because I recognized my bias: I see in NW a deer blinded by the light while the Perp was in my view Robert Wagner, her husband. This name repulsed me even before seeing his face and without Natalie creating a chivalrous response on my part. I remember watching as a kid on TV a soap called Wagner with Richard Burton. He played a despicable character that deeply annoyed me. I could not bring myself to watch it to the end even though it was the only thing to watch on TV.

As for Natalie, her death can be summarized by this photo, taken on their yacht 2 weeks before it happened:

She seems tired of him and rejects him. He was her teenage crush and she married him before she had fully become adult. In her interviews, she used to decry how she grew up around adults, always doing what she was told and always trying to please. I have a feeling she was beginning to wake up and come to her senses and realized she doesn’t really love this man, who was becoming more and more pushy and jealous as a result, feeling he was losing her.

Still, this guilty verdict I have for Robert Wagner has more to do with my attraction to her and my desire to have (had) sex with her than with reality.

Sources / More info: dm-wood1, dm-wood2, wiki-wood, yt-splendor

VerbaVolant, crime and punishment, drowning, yacht, investigation, natalie wood, actors, actress, criminal, terrible, death (Tags)

Amy Winehouse, 27, found dead

2011-07-23T14:10:00.001-07:00

Though we’re all saddened by Amy Winehouse’s joining “Club 27”, I reminisce about some of her songs and also remember other similar deaths.

One cannot stop noticing how incredibly short her career was (from wikipedia):

Winehouse's 2003 debut album, Frank, was critically successful in the UK and was nominated for the Mercury Prize. Her 2006 follow-up album, Back to Black, led to six Grammy Award nominations and five wins, tying the record for the most wins by a female artist in a single night, and made Winehouse the first British singer to win five Grammys, including three of the "Big Four": Best New Artist, Record of the Year and Song of the Year. On 14 February 2007, she won a BRIT Award for Best British Female Artist; she had also been nominated for Best British Album. (Back to Black was the world's seventh biggest selling album for 2008. These sales helped keep Universal Music's recorded music division from dropping to levels experienced by the overall music market).She won the Ivor Novello Award three times, one in 2004 for Best Contemporary Song (musically and lyrically) for "Stronger Than Me", one in 2007 for Best Contemporary Song for "Rehab", and one in 2008 for Best Song Musically and Lyrically for "Love Is a Losing Game", among other prestigious distinctions. The album was the third biggest seller of the 2000s in the United Kingdom.

Apparently, a slew of other musicians died at the same age: Rolling Stones founding member Brian Jones, guitarist Jimi Hendrix, singer Janis Joplin, The Doors singer Jim Morrison and Kurt Cobain (AFP). The late Cobain’s mother Wendy is quoted to have said:

Now he's gone and joined that stupid club, I told him not to join that stupid club.

I am saddened by her death. Still, I can’t help wondering why is it that the death of Sean Hoare – who was first named journalist to allege Andy Coulson knew of hacking, revealing that the British Police and Scotland Yard were getting bribes from Rupert Murdoch’s minions – not being treated as suspicious, while Amy Winehouse’s death is considered “unexplained”?!

Sources / More info: wiki-winehouse, guard-sean-hoare

VerbaVolant, overdose, drugs, music, musicians, rock, jazz, vocal, vocalist, vocalists, mental, decline, rehab, drug, art, artist, artistry (Tags)

Kravitz on the phone

2011-07-03T07:35:00.001-07:00

I find the photo of Lenny Kravitz talking on the street on an old skule headphone attached to his iPhone 4 to be overproduced. Let me tell you why.

You can see to the right the photo published by TMZ showing Lenny Kravitz with a retro handset attached to what seems to be an iPhone 4. I don’t share the view that he’s so “freakin’ cool” but rather that he’s overhyped and overproduced.

Years ago at a live concert he told a story of how he kept some girl hiding under his bed several days (if not longer) – I didn’t see him telling the story live, I only saw a recording. He seemed to gloat over the fact that his mom did not know about it. I never thought that was a cool story and it’s hard to imagine anyone who would.

He concluded his story with the words “and that is another cool thing that happened to me not long ago”. It left me with the impression of him being just a mask who tells whatever his “media advisors” tell him to say.

I don’t care if he’s popular or not – he annoys me; he doesn’t seem real.

Sources / More info: tmz

VerbaVolant, rock, rocker, hipster, phone, iphone, headset, handset, retro, telephone (Tags)

The Hum strikes again

2011-06-15T06:45:00.001-07:00

All over the world there are more and more reports of a strange phenomenon known as "the hum". I would simply dismiss it, but I myself have heard it just a few days ago.

I only heard it once and thought it was a ceiling fan left on, but after checking, all ceiling fans had been turned off and so were the computers in the house and anything with a fan. Upon further investigation (this happened late at night) it turned out that the noise was coming from the outside. Since there was nothing more I could do, I decided to simply go back to sleep. I wish it were The Sportsman’s Quartet or Trent Reznor, but it was not. Here’s a report from The Telegraph:

Residents of Woodland, in County Durham, claim that every night a noise permeates the air similar to the throb of a car engine. It is sometimes so strong that it even shakes the bed of one of the householders. (..) is constant from midnight until 4am every night and stops them sleeping. There are no pylons, factories or abandoned mines nearby. The noise started about two months ago and has been plaguing the isolated village every day since. Marylin Grech, 57, a retired store detective, said:

"In certain areas of the house you can hear it more loudly. It is definitely from outside, it's in the air, all around, very faint. It vibrates through the house. We've turned all the electricity off in the house and we can still hear it, so it's not that. Sometimes we'll be in bed and it vibrates right through our bed, like a throbbing. It's not tinnitus, that's a high pitched sound and this is very low. If I put my fingers in my ears it stops, so I know it's not in my head. At 4am it's so clear, because we live in such an isolated place with no traffic, it's heaven. But it leaves a buzzing in your head for the rest of the day."

John Dawes attributes this widespread effect to ageing and gravitational waves:

The results of experiments carried out over the past year have confirm that the Hum is caused by gravitational waves. These waves are generated by the high voltage electrical grid supply interacting with the charged particles of the Earth's ionosphere.
The interaction takes place at a height of about 250 miles which allows the waves to cover a very large area. Reports obtained from Hum sufferers show the effects must reach a distance of at least 50 miles from the pylons, and probably much further. No increase in Hum level has been observed in close proximity to the pylons and on any given day, the Hum intensity is the same over 100's of square miles. (..)

It must be clearly understood that the Hum is NOT a noise in the normal sense of the word, it is a perceived sound generated inside the head of the sufferer. Only a small percentage of people can actually "hear" the Hum but the cause undoubtedly effects the population at large
Most sufferers start to hear the Hum at about the age of 50 with a two thirds majority of women. This is clearly the result of changes taking place in the body for the presence of the Hum has been established on a national scale for some forty years.

Academia has also looked into this phenomenon:

On 15 November 2006, Dr. Tom Moir of the Massey University in Auckland, New Zealand made a recording of the Auckland Hum and has published it on the university's website. The captured hum's power spectral density peaks at a frequency of 56 hertz. In 2009, the head of audiology at Addenbrooke's Hospital in Cambridge, Dr. David Baguley said that he believed people's problems with hum were based on the physical world about one-third of the time and the other two-thirds stemmed from people focusing too keenly on innocuous background sounds.

Some famous ~~sightings~~ hearings: Taos, New Mexico (1, 2, 3), conspiracy, Auckland, NZ.

It seems like reporting on strange phenomena is more and more a sign of courage. It’s as if something does not exist is we don’t have a rational, full explanation for it. This is precisely why you’ll find it here.

The “mind control” hypothesis seems rather unlikely to me. If there is a government experiment, it is more along the lines of previous Milgram and Zimbardo (@Google, RSA) experiments, trying to see how likely are people to believe verifiable but inexplicable phenomena and how quickly conspiracy memes can spread. It’s more like Asch, if you ask me..

Sources / More info: telegraph, wiki-hum, dawes-hum, auckland-hum, wiki-tinnitus

VerbaVolant, hum, unexplained, strange, phenomenon, phenomena, fenomena, peculiar, science, fail (Tags)

Begging Fraudsterinae

2011-04-18T20:22:00.001-07:00

High-street wisdom has it that donating to African women gives a bigger bang for the buck, for more of these donations will be spread within the community, benefitting more people. Perhaps this is why so many people were surprised by the latest round of cancer fakers, such as Ashley Kirilow and Jessica Ann Leeder in Ontario, Canada and Dorothy McGurk (more like a bum) in USA.

The list of women who faked cancer is surprisingly large. The best known such case in Toronto is that of Ashley Kirilow (1, 2, 3):

Here’s part of her scam,courtesy of Brendan Kennedy from Toronto Star :

In late 2008, Ashley was treated in hospital for a benign lump in one of her breasts. After that procedure, she began telling people she had breast cancer. She also said she had brain cancer, liver cancer, stomach cancer and ovarian cancer, at various stages and in various combinations. She claimed to have only a few months to live.

In mid-January, Ashley called her father. They had talked only once in the previous four years. She told him she had breast cancer and a brain tumour, and that she needed a bone-marrow transplant or she would be dead within six months. “At this stage I thought this was another story, but I went along,” said an exasperated Kirilow. The next day, Kirilow tried calling his daughter to find out her oncologist’s name, but she wouldn’t answer his calls. After 10 days of trying to reach Ashley, he said he called and left a message on her cellphone saying that if she did not call back he would call the police, tell them she had collapsed and they could knock down the door.

He said Ashley called him back right away and told him: “Stay the f--- out of my life.” Kirilow did not hear from his daughter again for more than a year. In the meantime, Ashley’s father and stepmother called the hospitals where Ashley said she had been treated for cancer, but they had no record of her. In April 2009, Ashley called her biological mother — with whom she has had little contact since she was 14 — to say she had cancer and needed money for chemotherapy. “The only thing she ever wanted from me was money, and I couldn’t ever give it to her,” said Cindy Edwards, a former school bus driver who now lives in Brantford. Edwards said she told Ashley that chemo was fully covered in Canada and she could not give her any money. “I was crying, I didn’t know what was going on, I tried to tell her she was beautiful,” Edwards said, adding that Ashley responded: “Well, I’m just calling right now to tell you, before I die, that you’re the worst mother in the world.”

When Adam Catley, 22, heard Ashley was broke, alone and dying of cancer, he found her a place to live rent-free with some of his friends. “Obviously I wanted to do what I could to help her,” Catley said. On Sept. 27, Catley and a group of friends organized a benefit for Ashley at The Queen’s Head, Catley’s father’s pub in downtown Burlington. They charged a $20 cover, bands travelled in from out of town at their own expense, Labatt donated the beer, staff donated all of their tips, and the bar itself donated the night’s profits. Proceeds totalled almost $9,000, Catley said, and he gave the cash to Ashley in an envelope the next day. Photos from the event show Ashley completely hairless, with a scarf around her head. “She’s good, I’ll tell you that,” said Catley. “She had me 100 per cent.”

The other con artist stories are remarkably similar. The difference is that while in the US, one con artist got a prison sentence, here in Ontario both Kirilow and Jessica Ann Leeder avoided jail. There’s an explanation for that:

Pointing to Kirilow's troubled past, which included stretches of institutionalization, the judge said the sentence was meant to put an emphasis on "rehabilitation," and not to be "an instrument for the acting of public vengeance and retribution." Let's hope she pulls through this as well as she did through the fake cancer.

In related news, Erin Calabrese reports in NY Post about Dorothy McGurk, a belly dancer on disability who requested support from her estranged postman hubby:

Despite claims that she couldn't work, rarely left home and rarely socialized because of injuries from a 1996 car accident, Dorothy McGurk, 43, was belly-dancing at home and in Manhattan for hours a day -- and then spending several more hours a day blogging about.

"My belly dancing is the reason why I adore myself so much . . . That comes from hours of dancing and classes . . . It's been a three-and-a-half year journey of realigning my spine (and hardware), body, mind and spirit with belly dancing for me," the 6-foot-tall redhead wrote.

As for African aid, here’s Dambisa Moyo explaining why it generally sucks: [cbc] [ForaTV] [Hoover] [HardTalk] [CSPAN] [Oxford] [China] [TEDx] [wef] [CNBC] [smiley] [TEDxTalks] [Munk1] [Allan Gregg] [Gregg-Collier] [Munk Debates Playlist]

Sources / More info: nyp-Dorothy-McGurk, cbc-kirilow, ts-kirilow, tst-leeder, gm-milton, gm-fakers, wiki-hoaxes, wiki-charity

VerbaVolant, scam, fraud, beg, begging, fake, cancer, fake cancer, solicit, soliciting (Tags)

funny insults car commercial

2011-03-27T12:35:00.001-07:00

Aiming perhaps to increase ethnic acceptance through commerce, a seemingly British car commercial features a senior couple trying to bargain down the already low price of their dream car.

Writes Marc Lachapelle in AutoTrader:

The odds of seeing the names Dacia and Duster used together rival those of winning the 6/49 jackpot with a single ticket. Dacia is a Romanian carmaker that sold crudely-built replicas of old Renault models in Canada in the 80s and Duster is the name of a hallowed family of muscle cars sold under Chrysler’s defunct Plymouth brand in the 70s. Things have changed drastically at Dacia since Renault bought the company in 1999 and sales have almost tripled since the launch of the solid, no-frills Logan model in 2004, growing from 96,300 units sold in twelve countries to 257,000 units available in almost fifty last year. The striking Duster, Dacia’s first crossover concept, was created jointly by Renault’s design studios in Romania and France. It blends DNA from a sport coupe and what Europeans call a MPV (Multi-Purpose Vehicle).

Here’s what I could make of the dialogue (trialogue?):

F: oh, it’s gorgeous
M: I’m not sure if I have enough on me
F: yes you have
[S greets, M gets headache]
M [laying the money on the table] here we are then
S: are you trying to haggle? ..you little shrivelled toddlers’ brick (??)
M: I’m not paying a penny more for that junk heap of scrap metal!
S: you’ve got to be kidding, no? it’s not a done car..
M: you’re not telling me that there’s any juice left in that [???] of sardine tin, you [CDO?]yogurt seller!
F: packed threaded spit is what’s holding it together, that’s all! [spits]
S: screw your mommies you duo of geriatric circus monkeys, where do you think you are, some stinkin’ flea market? that dacia duster is the best car on the market! state of the art 1.6 L 16 valve cylinder, 110 horse power engine. now i know you don’t know what it means [says to M, then turns to F] but I reckon you might, you do the driving, yeah?
F: I’d be surprised if there’s even an engine in that festering horse sled!
M: I bet you did it on the back seat with your mother. while your father watched.
S: Shut your face, or else I’ll have to put my pecker underneath your moustache, you filthy Gypsy! and take your bribe money too!
F [to M, whispering]: give him your watch, dear!
M [protesting] it belonged to dad!
S: are you still here, you toad faced stupid round face German [???]
F [to M]: give him your phone!
M [to F]: you give him YOUR phone!
M [in underwear, taking the key]: may your head swell up until your bones crumble!
S: [charmingly] scare off to your second wife or I’ll shove your mom up the hill
[they laugh and part ways]

Here’s an even more “revolutionary” commercial from Dacia

Sources / More info: wiki-dd, .org, at

VerbaVolant, car, dacia, renault, duster, uk, insult, injury, sales, saleman, used car, used cars (Tags)

Sex and 11 y.o. motherhood

2011-03-15T13:54:00.001-07:00

A set of sad news have shaken the moral foundations of a Cleveland community. But were there any to begin with?!?

Shortly after Thanksgiving, dozens of men ranging in age from middle-schoolers to a 27-year-old gang-raped an 11-year-old girl in an abandoned trailer.

Here’s a composite of the mugshots of the main suspects:

The age of consent in Texas is 17. More details from NYT:

The affidavit said the assault started after a 19-year-old boy invited the victim to ride around in his car. He took her to a house on Travis Street where one of the other men charged, also 19, lived. There the girl was ordered to disrobe and was sexually assaulted by several boys in the bedroom and bathroom. She was told she would be beaten if she did not comply, the affidavit said.

A relative of one of the suspects arrived, and the group fled through a back window. They then went to the abandoned mobile home, where the assaults continued. Some of those present recorded the sexual acts on their telephones, and these later were shown among students.

Residents in the neighborhood where the abandoned trailer stands — known as the Quarters — said the victim had been visiting various friends there for months. They said she dressed older than her age, wearing makeup and fashions more appropriate to a woman in her 20s. She would hang out with teenage boys at a playground, some said.

“Where was her mother? What was her mother thinking?” said Ms. Harrison, one of a handful of neighbors who would speak on the record. “How can you have an 11-year-old child missing down in the Quarters?”

Sadly, many in the community, especially the parents of those arrested, started accusing the girl in a townhall meeting. Since then, there were even more arrests.

And that’s America [Fuck Yeah], ladies and gentlemen. Yet Europe is not far behind, except that in Europe such rapes are called “marriage”. More precisely in Romania – Investi, a gypsy wife has become the world’s youngest grandmother at the ripe age of 23.

Rifca Stanescu gave birth to daughter Maria when she was only 12. Maria topped that performance, giving birth to son Ion at age of 11. You can see both in the photo above.

'Ion is a good boy - and he is already engaged to a girl aged 8. Boys are always good to have - they don't have to suffer as much girls I think.'

Born in 1985, Rifca defied her family's wishes and ran away with jewellery seller Ionel Stanescu when she was 11 and he was 13.

A year after they were married, Rifca fell pregnant with Maria.

She said: 'I wanted to marry him, so I agreed, and of course after we had spent the night together then there was no way anyone could separate us. I had been promised to another boy's family since I was two years old but I didn't want that.'

In gypsy culture virginity is greatly prized and women are married young so that new husband's can be sure their new wives are virgins who affect a good dowry from the families of prospective husbands. Loss of virginity means a deal is cancelled.

Yet this is not something that happens only with gypsies – though there it is very common as well. UK is no stranger to such young grandmothers, according to the Daily Mail:

The youngest British grandmother was an unnamed 26-year-old from Rotherham, Yorkshire whose 12-year-old daughter gave birth in 1999.

We know that those convicted of pedophilia are more likely to suffer abuse in prison. Apparently, this is quite common in private prisons such as the Boise, Idaho “Gladiator School” run by Corrections Corporation of America. Even children themselves are not immune from child pornography accusations, as proven by the case of a 13 and 14 year old from Grand Prairie, Alberta.

Sources / More info: nyt-11, cbs-11, mw-11, dm-gypsy, cn-teens

VerbaVolant, rape, sex, underage, texas, cleveland, grandma, motherhood, mother, birth, children, child, statutory rape, customs, culture, society (Tags)

burning money

2011-02-07T21:48:00.001-08:00

Not long ago (February 2), Matthew Perry went on The Daily Show to promote his latest creation and he couldn’t help making a joke about destroying the almighty USD. Which reminded me in turn about an episode of Simpsons where Krusty destroys a $1 bill.

Our first exhibit is the joke Matthew Perry used to introduce his latest TV series.

.. he’s just impossibly happy ..he just loves being Marc Holder .. to the point where it’s affected our friendship .. because.. I’m not exactly that way and I’ll say “how are you?” and he’ll go “I can’t believe how great I am.. If I was any better I’d be two people! His Facebook status reports things like “what a beautiful, beautiful day”. I actually stopped asking him “how are you” because it annoyed me so much what his answer’s gonna be. So, one day I forgot this rule and I said “how are you?” and he said “I just dropped my kids off to school and it’s a beautiful sunny day” and I said “Terrific! I’m gonna go masturbate into some money.”

I linked the clip below, but if you’re in Canada you won’t be able to see it, because the Viacom honchos are punishing you for having a government that insists on cultural protections.

In a similarly disrespectful Simpsons episode, Krusty the Clown, styled like an early George Carlin (7 words) is burning his money to protest selling out (S09E15, The Last Temptation of Krust). Here’s his standup act:

There’s nothing those Madison Avenue grave robbers won’t do to get us to buy their crap.

[Applause + Homer: Repeat Churchill]

Well, here’s $1 those crooks aren’t gonna get their hands on!

[crowd shocked; Cop: umm, isn’t that illegal?]

I don’t care if it is illegal, I’m making a stand here! Who’s with me?

[Homer colleague: I am! I worked like a dog for this! He burns a banknote and everyone follows suit]

Seymour’s mother: Ohh! You’re burning it all wrong, Seymour!

Principal Skinner: It’s my allowance, mother, and I’ll burn it the way I want!

H omer, burning a pile of banknotes: Take that, you greedy fat cats! Marge, give me your purse!

I can’t really post the videoclip as I run the risk of getting banned for copyright infringement, but I can show you a few screencaps from this particular sequence:

Krusty ends up selling out again for a brand new “Canyonero”, an excellent parody of the SUV. Watch the end-song below.

What is it with burning money? Could it be that such gestures are specifically chosen to wake us up from our mindless materialism and to force us to examine our dysfunctional relationship with money, a simple tool?

Sources / More info: wiki-krust, tds-mat-perry

VerbaVolant, canyonero, money, sell out, sellout, sell-out, selling out, protest, currency, coin, bank note, banknote, bancnota, gold

Gary Moore and The Thrill Is Gone

2011-02-06T18:25:00.001-08:00

Gary Moore is gone. Not much to say. Just listen.

With BB King, Red House, the BLUES, The Loner, Empty Rooms, Pretty Woman

Sources / More info: wiki-gm

VerbaVolant, blues, rock'n'roll, rock, music, obituary, death, dead

Snorting a dead man

2011-01-22T20:21:00.001-08:00

A bunch of thieves stole someone's ashes and snorted part of them then returned them. Keith Richards, where art thou?

By now everyone is familiar with Keith Richards’ 2007 revelation that he snorted the ashes of his father (cf. wikipedia):

In an April 2007 interview for NME magazine, music journalist Mark Beaumont asked Richards what the strangest thing he ever snorted was, and quoted him as replying: "My father. I snorted my father. He was cremated and I couldn't resist grinding him up with a little bit of blow. My dad wouldn't have cared ... It went down pretty well, and I'm still alive." (..) Richards later confirmed in an interview with Mojo magazine that he had, in fact, snorted his father's ashes – with no cocaine mixed in – before burying them under an oak tree: "I said I'd chopped him up like cocaine, not with. I opened his box up and ... out comes a bit of dad on the dining room table. I'm going, 'I can't use a brush and dustpan for this.'"

You would think that nobody would want to duplicate that experience, but some people might have done so inadvertently, according to CNN:

Police said they will search Thursday for what is left of the cremated remains of a man and two dogs that robbers stole from a Florida house and then snorted after mistakenly thinking it was cocaine. Members of the Marion County sheriff's department dive team say they will search a lake in the area where they think the remainder of the ashes may have been dumped. The robbery occurred in December in a home in the central Florida area of Silver Springs, the sheriff department said in a statement. A robbery crew ransacked the home taking electronics, jewelry and the cremated ashes of the homeowner's father and two Great Danes. "During the investigation, detectives learned that the ashes were taken because the suspects mistook the ashes for either cocaine or heroin. It was soon discovered that the suspects snorted some of the ashes believing they were snorting cocaine," a sheriff's department statement said. After learning that they had snorted the ashes of a dead man or dead dogs, the suspects discarded the rest of the ashes, authorities said. Three teens and two juveniles were arrested in the case, the sheriff's department said.

Sources / More info: flickr, cnn-ashes, wiki-keith [MarkDay] [TYT] [Shoutmouth]

VerbaVolant, rolling stone, rolling stones, thief, thieves, theft, hapless, dumb, stupid, coke, cocaine, snort, snorting, sn0rt

Tyrants tyrannized by tyranesses

2011-01-17T09:22:00.001-08:00

We keep on hearing lately girlfriends' perspectives on various criminals. The laughing loner Loughner's former girlfriends spoke up and he emerges from their memories as a normal person.

Whenever some dude does something crazy, we always try to find a reason, somebody we can pin the blame on. No wonder that it’s not enough when CBS found Kelsey Hawkes to interview – according to her, everything was peachy. So other reporters find another ex-girlfriend who confirms that “he did marijuana and ALSO hallucinogenic mushrooms”. People made even a video out of his idiosyncratic ramblings..

The sad truth is that we will never be fully secure from such random demented individuals’ attacks because “securing” everything to prevent them would exact too high a cost on our freedoms, just like TSA idiocy cannot prevent a new 9/11. We should have realized by now that the security theatre we subject ourselves with is completely useless: it failed to prevent any attack (we were lucky the attackers were dumb), it has added hundreds of dollars to the cost of each ticket and it encourages abuses of passengers reminiscent of the Zimbardo experiment.

Killers and violent morons are everywhere and they tend to rise to the top. Some, as in the photo above are stupid enough to allow themselves to get photographed. They seem to either not care or simply to crave notoriety more so than freedom. Others, smarter, penetrate dictator’s close circles then manipulate them. When dictators rise to the top it should not come as a surprise that their women are also a bit off the grid. In an essay featured by Le Figaro, Femmes de dictateurs by Diane Ducret, several “excesses” of dictators’ wives and mistresses are collected and exposed.

Hitler und Eva

We thus learn that Hitler’s paramour Eva Braun persecuted his dog Blondie jailing it in a small room and defied Goebbels’ censorship by listening to American records:

..one day, Eva was in her room listening to an American disc. Hitler entered and said: “That music is nice.” Eve responded with great certainty in her voice: “Yes, it is. Especially now that your good friend Goebbels has just banned this disc throughout the entire Reich.”

Hitler’s dog was the one that had most suffered from Eva. After she moved in with Hitler, and took her little Scottish terriers, Blondie, the Nazi leader’s pet, was jailed in his room for an indefinite amount of time. “Your dog Blondie is as big as a bull,” was the explanation offered by Eva for her decision to shut the dog. In response, Hitler refused to be photographed with Eva and her two puppies and prohibited his girlfriend from doing such photographs.

In the weeks that followed, however, Hitler had to do with Eva’s iron will. But he managed to reconcile with her with a very expensive jewelry. Only after a few days, did Hitler dare to ask his mistress in a timid voice: “Honey, will you let poor little Blondie to come out and walk with us for half an hour?”.

Apparently, Hitler also suffered from an addiction to tranquilizers and sexual stimulants, taking a total of about 82 daily pills, prescribed by his doctor, Theodor Morell.

At least in 1944, before each meeting with Eva Braun, Hitler used to make injections with high doses of testosterone or hormones originating from the prostate or young bull’s sperm, a sort of Viagra of those times. In addition, the Fuhrer was suffering from hypochondria, fearing he could become sick with cancer. According to the book “War Hitler Krank?” ( “Was Hitler sick?)”, when the Fuhrer felt depressed, Dr. Morell gave him Methamphetamine (aka Crystal Meth), a drug that induces dependence, along with 81 other substances, from concentrated sugar to vitamins.

Mussolini and Leda

The one thing that both Hitler and Loughner seem to share is a cult for Nietzsche (detailed and explained by Slate in “Angry Nerds” – link below) and purported addictions to drugs that are illegal. Mussolini shared the same cult for Nietzsche with his Islam-converted mistress, Leda Rafanelli whom he met after she wrote a flattering article about him:

“I spent three delicious hours. We like the solitude. While you’re looking for it in Africa, I search for it in the crowd, in a tumultuous life. But our goal is the same. When I will take a break, I will come back to see you. We will read Nietzsche and the Koran,” Mussolini wrote in a note addressed to his muse, cited by Diane Ducret in her essay. The two meet again several times. In order to convince her to give in to him, the Italian politician wore a full bedouin costume with beard, turban and an amber necklace and even lied to her concerning his civil status, saying he was not married.

Mao and He Tigress

Mao’s mistress, for whom he had left his wife, was prone to jealous rage. She used to taunt him with sweet insults:

“Son of a pig, turtle egg, reprobate who thinks only bitch. I will teach you not to come here and sleep with that bourgeois slut.” These words were shouted by angry He Zizhen, in 1937, to a stupefied Mao. It wasn’t the first jealousy scene of the woman for whom Mao left his wife, Yang Kaihui. When Mao spent a few moments in the company of actress Lily Wu in a meeting organized by journalist Agnes Smadley, all hell broke loose. The two women escaped only with their faces scarred.

Ceausescu and Elena

While the previous dictators had their follies with mistresses, Nicolae Ceausescu, the Romanian dictator, was more homely, indulging his wife’s ambitions. The French author writes that in 1975, after the Romanian couple set foot on King Hussein of Jordan’s yacht, Elena Ceausescu decided she wanted the very vessel the Jordan royal family owned. After the king tells her the Yacht in question was a gift for his daughter Alya, princess of Jordan, Elena eventually found a solution, promising to order an identical boat from the United States. It wasn’t just yachts, however, it was also cars:

The Mercedes 600 limousine for Nicolae, a Mercedes 450 coupe for Zoe and two Audi cars for Nicu”, Diane Ducret writes in her essay.

Bokassa

Compared to the above, Jean-Bédel Bokassa’s “future empress”, Catherine, seems formidably well behaved: she only forbade him from drinking alcohol, because “A future king shouldn’t get drunk”.

For more on the lifestyles of the rich and famous, be sure to read the ForeignPolicy article, linked below, as well as more news of American decline and an attempt to find out where bad ideas come from.

Sources / More info: le-figaro-tyrannisés, inrumor-tyrannized, inrumor-hitler, inquirer-caloocan, cbs-erica-hill, wiki-zimbardo, slate-loughner-nietzsche, wiki-hitler, wiki-meth, wiki-mao, wiki-ceausescu, wiki-bokassa, fp-lifestyles, fp-decline, fp-bad-ideas, fp-wisdom

VerbaVolant, couple, girlfriend, girlfriends, mistress, mistresses, maitresse, wife, wives, pretentions, pretentious, demands, demand, loughner, leadership, leaders, leading

top 10 causes of die-offs

2011-01-07T05:18:00.001-08:00

Whenever I drive around with my hunter friend watching the wild geese on Canadian roads, he tells me that "you can never go hungry in this country; look at'em!". Then the hunting season starts and I don't hear from him for a while..

Nowadays, it doesn’t seem like one has even to hunt animals anymore: they fall from the sky. You can see a summary below, we’ll first brainstorm possible causes, inspired by comments on various message boards.

Angry birds game gone rogue
Secret weapon tests, active denial microwave, chemtrails & HAARP (Putin report)
Bastian won’t say the name (original, ivory tower, dream, c’mon) of Childlike Empress Moonchild (fairy queen)
BP oil spill: exposure to corexit dispersant
Mass extinctions accelerating (biogeosciences)
Jesus killing the planet because of gays in the military
Unsafe pesticide clothianidin, like bee CCD (PDF)
Poorly timed fireworks (scpr)
blunt trauma in midair (lab report) or hypothermia mid-flight (pdf)
On January 2nd there was a HUGE solar flare. You can see it here if you set the date right (2011-01-02 00:00:00, be sure to choose the red telescope).

Additionally, there’s been talk of the Summer of the Shark and the Sokal affair.

Apparently, it all started in Arkansas, where birds and fish started to die.

Motorists stopped and gawked at hundreds of dead red-winged blackbirds on a highway in Pointe Coupee Parish, La., Monday, just days after residents of Beebe, Ark., saw more than 1,000 birds fall from the sky on New Year's Eve. On Monday, state biologists were gathering up some of the approximately 500 blackbirds and starlings that lay dead along Louisiana Route 1 near Pointe Coupee Central High School for testing. The United States Geological Survey has noted 16 incidents in the past 30 years where more than 1,000 black birds have died at the same time, usually the result of tightly-packed flocks flying into bad weather. What's more, more than 5 billion birds die of natural causes in the United States each year, so it is, in a way, unusual that Americans don't witness more major bird kills. Yet the use of improved testing and a state of heightened concern on the parts of state ornithologists is a proper response, even if the two bird kills had not come so close together, experts say. "Birds can be really good indicators of environmental problems, so I'd hate to think that 5,000 would die and nobody would care," says Greg Butcher, director of bird conservation at the National Audobon Society, in Washington. "It's worth investigation to find out what happened because there is potentially something we should worry about and it's potentially something that has an odd, but benign cause." Americans have theorized that everything from fallout from secret government weapons testing to UFO collisions downed the birds in Arkansas. But the newly-discovered bird rain in Louisiana is likely to focus more serious attention to the plight of blackbirds now bundled in winter flocks that can number over 100,000 birds. Postmortem tests of birds in the Arkansas incident showed evidence of blunt force trauma to many of the victims, which Mr. Butcher says means that it's likely the birds were spooked by New Year's Eve fireworks and may, in mass confusion, have run into cars and houses. Since blackbirds are considered a nuisance by farmers, the mass death in Louisiana could be attributable to a legal pest control effort. Pest control experts kill blackbird roosts in several ways, including spraying water on birds to induce hypothermia or by using legal poisons. Most such poisons work quickly, but a botched control attempt could mean that birds may have flown away from the roost and died nearby.

Fisheries officials are investigating the death of hundreds of snapper washed up on Coromandel Peninsula beaches. Beachgoers at Little Bay and Waikawau Bay found the fish - many with their eyes missing - dead on the sand yesterday. Aucklander James Hughes, who was visiting friends, said they were sitting around when children in their group ran towards them holding fish. "We said, 'Where'd you get them?' and they said they just started floating up to the beach." Mr Hughes and others on the beach began walking towards the spot where the fish had washed up, and found many dead fish in the water too. "We spoke to boaties coming in and they said there was a carpet of them floating in the water." A Department of Conservation official told Mr Hughes fish in the Coromandel area were starving because of weather conditions. "That's just completely untrue. This was something deliberate and it's just wrong," Mr Hughes said. Ministry of Fisheries official Brendon Mikkelsen said the fish had been in the water for at least 12 hours and would be unsafe to eat. Last night, another ministry official said the matter was being investigated. It would be illegal to deliberately dump snapper, but there could be an innocent explanation, such as a net splitting.

LE: NPR (link below) has a story about the National Wildlife Health Center in Madison, Wisconsin:

The center has been analyzing 15 other blackbird die-offs over the past five years. And its scientists say the recent Arkansas die-offs seem different from the other cases.

Then neoporcupine came up with this list:

Probably not the end of times, perhaps the beginning of hard ones. But could just be the environment as usual.

dead birds in Falköping, Sweden

2011 Jan 06 2 million fish found dead in Maryland

2011 Jan 05 Massive fish die off in New Zealand

2011 Jan 05 Dead birds in Kentucky

2011 Jan 05 Dead fish in Peterborough

2011 Jan 04 Fish, 15 tons, wash up on Brazil shores

2011 Jan 04 2 million dead fish in Baltimore

2011 Jan 04 Dead fish Florida

2011 Jan 04 Dead birds in Louisiana

2011 Jan 03 Dead birds in Japan

2011 Jan 03 Up to 100,000 dead fish in Ozark, Arkansas river

2011 Jan 02 More than 1000 dead birds fall from Beebe, Arkansas sky

2011 Jan 02 Dead fish in Abergavenny, Wales

2010 Dec 31 Dead fish Monmouthshire, Wales

2010 Dec 31 150 tonnes of dead fish, Vietnam

2010 Dec 31 Dead fish Lubock Canada

2010 Dec 30 Dead fish in Roseville, Arkansas

2010 Dec 29 Dead fish in Texas

2010 Dec 26 Dead fish in Haiti

2010 Dec 23 10 tonnes dead fish trapped in net, New Zealand

2010 Dec 19 Dead fish in lake in Sydney

2010 Dec 17 Dead fish Michigan Indianna

2010 Dec 15 Dead fish Cocoa Florida

2010 Dec 13 Barramundi found dead Rochhampton, Australia

2010 Nov 9 Botulism Lake Simcoe, Wasaga Beach

Coincidence? Or maybe time to take up religion; yeah take that atheists! Where's your God now?!

We even have a Google Map of the deaths.

Sources / More info: wiki-sonic, wiki-ads, grist-clothianidin, shatter-bee-decline, wiki-angry birds, cnn-ak-fish, npr-puzzling

VerbaVolant, conspiracy theory, conspiracy, eco, ecology, disaster, extinction, rapture, mystery, science, death, HAARP, experiment, secret, secrecy, mistrust

arson and nerd laughs

2011-01-06T04:43:00.001-08:00

One of my favourite cartoon sites, xkcd.com has recently sent me on a trip down memory lane. First, let’s look at the cartoon:

Hint: Pen Fifteen is "pen15"

Well, "This City Never Sleeps" by Eurythmics could be just as good a soundtrack as MC 900 Ft Jesus - The City Sleeps.

Stealing down an ally on a cold dark night
I see a halo in the rain around the street light
I stop and look, and listen to the sound
As the raindrops penetrate the silence all around
Alone, I gaze into the glistening street
The distant thunder echoing my heartbeat
Urging me on to a secret goal
Away from the light from this lamp on a pole
So I turn, slip away into the rain
Drifting like a spirit through the shadows in the lane
Clutching the tools of my trade in my hand
An old box of matches and a gasoline can
Darkness envelopes the scene like a shroud
A veil of emptiness hangs from the clouds
Filling up the cracks in this desolate place
Cradled by the night in an icy embrace
Moving to the town like a ghost in the rain
A dim reflection in a dark window pane
Blackness beckons from every side
Creeping all around like an incoming tide
A broken window in an empty house
I slip inside and begin to douse
The whole place with the fuel that will feed the fire
And push back the night, taking me higher
On out of the darkness in a defeaning roar
The match in my hand is the key to the door
A simple turn of the wrist will suffice
To open a passage to paradise
I pause, I think about the past and the gloom
The smell of gasoline permeates the room
Everyone has a little secret he keeps
I light the fires while the city sleeps
(Like the 4th of July)
The match makes a graceful arc to the floor
And time stands still as I turn for the door
Which explodes in a fireball and throws me to the street
I hit the ground running with the flames at my feet
Reaching for the night which recoils from the fire
The raindrops hiss like a devilish choir
Dying in the flames with a terrible sound
Calling all the names of the sleepers all around
But then in the arms of the night, they lay
Their dreams, sprout wings and fly away
Out of the houses in a gathering flock
Swarming overhead as I hurry down the block
I make my escape with the greatest of ease
And savor the darkness, drop to my knees
And the lightless window, my hand on the latch
I reach in my pocket, and pull out a match
(Like the 4th of July)

Sources / More info: xkcd-mike, [mc900 no movie]

VerbaVolant, fire, arson, arsonist, conspiracy, conspiracy theory, light my fire, light the fire, mc 900 ft, jesus

Nicolas Cage would die 4 honor

2010-12-14T07:50:00.001-08:00

..but not for cold. At least that's what we make of a recent scandal in Bucharest. See it for yourself!

Filming Ghost Rider 2, Cage appeared to Show/Off:

"You know it! I get in the car and you walk away! Otherwise, you wanna kill me? Don’t fuck with my brothers! I would fuckin’ die in the name of honor! I would die right now! Want to hit me in the head? Go for it!"

Nicolas Cage starts to walk away.

Get off me! Don’t touch me!

See it in my eyes! I’m not a liar! That man is NOT a liar!

Respect him as you’re respecting me!

[bodyguard] Be careful! Get in the car NOW!

Fuck you! I would DIE in the name of honour!

Apparently, one of the extras protested against the working conditions, where they were being kept in the cold while Cage was caged in the his car, where it was warm. There are other reports that the altercation took place outside a night club and had nothing to do with filming. If that were true, Cage was most likely under some kind of “influence”.

Now, as we have previously shown, Bucharest can be colder and with more snow than a mountain resort in the winter. It’s also normal for extras to have worse work conditions than the star. What Nicolas tried to show is that he has not forgotten the time when he himself was a low-paid actor.

But has that ever happened? Cage grew up in the Coppola family, attended Beverly Hills High School, is the nephew of Francis Ford Coppola and changed his name early in his career “to avoid the appearance of nepotism” according to wikipedia. Furthermore:

born Nicolas Kim Coppola; January 7, 1964
at age 32, became the fifth youngest actor ever to win the Oscar for Leaving Las Vegas
His father, August Coppola, was a professor of literature, while Cage's mother, Joy Vogelsang, is a dancer and choreographer
Cage has been married three times. His first wife was the actress Patricia Arquette (married on April 8, 1995, divorce finalized on May 18, 2001). Cage's second wife was singer/songwriter Lisa Marie Presley, the daughter of Elvis Presley, of whom Cage is a fan and on whom he based his performance in Wild at Heart. His third and current wife Alice Kim, a former waitress who previously worked at the Los Angeles restaurant Kabuki, met Cage at the Los Angeles-based Korean nightclub, Le Privé. She is the mother of his son, Kal-El (born October 3, 2005), named after Superman's birth name.
He once owned the medieval castle of Schloss Neidstein in the Oberpfalz region in Germany, which he bought in 2006 and sold in 2009 for $2.5 million.
In August 2007, Cage purchased a home in Middletown, Rhode Island. The 24,000-square-foot (2,200 m²), brick-and-stone country manor occupies 26 acres (110,000 m²), has 12 bedrooms, 10 full bathrooms, and ocean views and borders the Norman Bird Sanctuary. The estate is called the "Grey Craig". Also in 2007, the actor purchased Midford Castle in Somerset, England.
Shortly after selling his German castle, Cage also put homes in Rhode Island, Louisiana, Nevada, and California, as well as a $7 million island in the Bahamas, up for sale.
On July 14, 2009, the Internal Revenue Service filed documents in New Orleans in connection with a federal tax lien against property owned by Cage in Louisiana, concerning unpaid federal taxes. The IRS alleges that Cage failed to pay over $6.2 million in federal income tax for the year 2007. In addition, the Internal Revenue Service has another lien for more than $350,000 in unpaid taxes dating from 2002 to 2004. Cage filed a $20 million lawsuit on October 16, 2009, against his business manager, Samuel J. Levin, alleging negligence and fraud. The lawsuit states that Levin "had failed to pay taxes when they were due and had placed [Cage] in speculative and risky real estate investments 'resulting in (the actor suffering catastrophic losses'."Cage is also facing separate lawsuits from East West Bank and Red Curb Investments for unpaid, multimillion dollar loans.
Samuel Levin filed a counter-complaint and responded to the lawsuit in a filing stating that he warned Cage that he was living beyond his means and urged him to spend less. Levin's filing states that "instead of listening to Levin, cross-defendant Coppola spent most of his free time shopping for high ticket purchases, and wound up with 15 personal residences", Levin's complaint continued: "Likewise, Levin advised Coppola against buying a Gulfstream jet, against buying and owning a flotilla of yachts, against buying and owning a squadron of Rolls Royces, against buying millions of dollars in jewelry and art."
In his filing Levin says that in 2007 Cage's "shopping spree entailed the purchase of three additional residences at a total cost of more than $33 million; the purchase of 22 automobiles (including 9 Rolls Royces); 12 purchases of expensive jewelry; and 47 purchases of artwork and exotic items." One of those exotic items was a dinosaur skull of a Tarbosaurus for which Nicolas Cage paid $276,000 in an auction after winning a bidding contest against Leonardo DiCaprio.
He is a fan and collector of painter and underground comic artist Robert Williams. He has written introductions for Juxtapoz magazine and purchased the painting Death On The Boards.

It seems Cage went with his family to a small restaurant in another Romanian city where he left a very good impression, also buying one of the pictures on the wall. Here’s what Ebert had to say about him:

There are often lists of the great living male movie stars: De Niro, Nicholson and Pacino, usually. How often do you see the name of Nicolas Cage? He should always be up there. He's daring and fearless in his choice of roles, and unafraid to crawl out on a limb, saw it off and remain suspended in air. No one else can project inner trembling so effectively.... He always seems so earnest. However improbable his character, he never winks at the audience. He is committed to the character with every atom and plays him as if he were him.

I fully agree with Roger Ebert. Nicolas Cage embraces not just his roles with all his heart, but life as well.

Sources / More info: cluj-cage-comedy, wiki-cage, [yt-cage] [yt-ls-sht]

VerbaVolant, scandal, cage, ghost, ghost rider, ghostrider, actor, actors, acting, show, show-off

Save a life, get accused of murder

2010-11-19T14:51:00.001-08:00

A man, awakened late at night by some major hubbub, woke up an jumped into the freezing water to save a woman from a sinking car.

Luckily, Police got it right:

"He, no doubt in my mind, saved her life," said Ocean City police spokeswoman Jessica Waters. "When you look up 'hero' in the dictionary, that's what you find. Thank goodness he was there."

Police said it was about 2 a.m. Monday when Taylor Cole Vanderhook of Fenwick Island drove across the parking lot of Macky's Bayside Grill at 54th Street, bumped a pontoon boat on blocks, then drove into a canal behind a Candy Kitchen and Chauncey's Surf Shop.

Coming to her rescue was Chris Sullivan, the general manager of the adjacent Yang's Palace restaurant, who said he suffered a sleepless night after pulling her from her sinking car.

"I felt like the girl had died," he said. "She came so close. I wonder if she knew. ... I wonder how close to death she came. It haunts me even now. It's surreal."

After rescuing her from the car by breaking into it, here’s what he got:

"She said, 'Dude, I'm gonna kill you -- you broke my car.' I said, 'Darling, you gotta get out, or you're going to die,' " Sullivan said.

Sullivan offered to give Vanderhook a ride home, but police soon arrived, finding her at a nearby bus stop, and arrested her.

By the time police arrived, her car was completely submerged in the 50-degree water. The Ocean City Fire Department Water Rescue Team checked to make sure no one else was inside.

Vanderhook was charged with negligent driving, failure to provide identification, driving while intoxicated and driving under the influence.

According to charging documents, Ocean City Police Pfc. Pat Flynn was taking her back to the police station when she told him, "If you drop me off here, I'll give you $20 ... I'll pay you anything, just let me go."

She offered increasing amounts up to $200 in exchange for her release, police said. Police also charged Vanderhook with attempting to bribe a public official.

Vanderhook is scheduled to face her charges Dec. 16 in Ocean City District Court. Court records show Vanderhook was also charged in 2007 with drunken driving in Ocean Pines. She pleaded guilty to a charge of driving while impaired, paying $458 in court costs and fines.

Kill your saviour, bribe the police. Way to go, Taylor..

Sources / More info: dol-man

VerbaVolant, save, sos, s.o.s., saviour, savior, drown, drowning

the Time-Traveler's Grandma

2010-11-19T13:35:00.001-08:00

Yet another myth has been busted by Discovery. It turns out that the old lady talking on the cell phone in the Charlie Chaplin movie from the '20s was actually deaf..

Though I would agree with George Clarke, CEO of Yellow Fever Productions (in the original video clip) who claims that a woman shown going to the 1928 premiere of Charlie Chaplin’s “Circus” is using a large mobile phone covering half her face. He even states that she looks more like a man in drag.

Then James Williams from Discovery decides to “investigate”, claiming that “the first commercial mobile phone wasn’t even approved by the FCC until 1983”. This is a rather silly argument or at best redundant information. What we needed to know is whether the phone had been invented by that time – after all, she could’ve had an early prototype.

James hasn’t even bothered to investigate if she had perhaps a walkie-talkie. We did – that was not invented until WW2, so that possibility flies out the window. The first portable (pocket) transistor radio, Regency TR-1, was only introduced in 1954. Suzanne Moon, Associate Professor in History of Science at U of Oklahoma believes that the device is a hearing aid. That seems to make sense as that old woman maybe had just purchased the device and was testing it by talking into it to see if it works.

Ian O’Neill, the producer, thinks that time travel was actually possible if you connect to a wormhole. He imagines a Matrix scenario. The trivia for Chaplin’s movie yields even more starting points:

Final Charles Chaplin film of the silent era. He would make two more "silent" films, bucking the trend towards sound, however both City Lights (1931) and Modern Times (1936) would nonetheless include significant compromises to incorporate sound.
Chaplin's studio burnt down during production. This, combined with a number of major personal issues that arose during production, led to Chaplin's nervous breakdown (he spent time recovering in New York after about two-thirds of the film had been shot).

The first clue may suggest that the old lady may have been purposely introduced, as a metaphor for the bygone era of silent films. Then again, his nervous breakdown may be related to having seen the future. Here are some choice quotes from wikipedia:

Although time travel has been a common plot device in fiction since the 19th century, and one-way travel into the future is arguably possible given the phenomenon of time dilation based on velocity in the theory of special relativity (exemplified by the twin paradox), as well as gravitational time dilation in the theory of general relativity, it is currently unknown whether the laws of physics would allow backwards time travel.

A proposed time-travel machine using a traversable wormhole would (hypothetically) work in the following way: One end of the wormhole is accelerated to some significant fraction of the speed of light, perhaps with some advanced propulsion system, and then brought back to the point of origin. Alternatively, another way is to take one entrance of the wormhole and move it to within the gravitational field of an object that has higher gravity than the other entrance, and then return it to a position near the other entrance.

Time travel is an unsolved problem in physics, but old movies can easily be interpreted..

Sources / More info: wiki-tt, imdb-circus(1928), wiki-wt, wiki-radio, wiki-tr-1, smoon

[Chaplin's Time Traveler Explained by DiscoveryNetworks] [Chaplins (ORIGINAL) Time Traveler]

VerbaVolant, charlie chaplin, film, movie, oldies, oldie, time travel, e=mc2, e=mc^2

Yo DUB, B gd 2 me!

2010-11-13T17:20:00.001-08:00

Every now and then, when my 80s cravings strike, I remember one of the best one hit wonders to have ever hit my ears, infecting me with the dance bug, modifying my DNA and significantly improving my music taste buds.

As luck would have it, I first listened to this track back in in the very early ‘90s, just as my native Eastern European country was getting its first taste of freedom. It is one of the first dance tracks I kept playing obsessively. It belongs to Beats International, a one-hit wonder group. The only one with staying power was Norman Cook, who later on found notoriety as Fatboy Slim.

BEATS INTERNATIONAL

DUB BE GOOD TO ME vs LINDY LAYTON - 03/03/1990

4 weeks at #1 - 13 weeks on chart

Tank fly boss walk jam nitty gritty
You're listening to the boy from the big bad city
This is jam hot
This is jam hot

Friends tell me I am crazy
That I'm wasting time with you
You'll never be mine
That's not the way I see it
Coz I feel you're glad you're mine
Whenever you're with me

People always talk about reputation
I don't care about your other girls
Just be good to me
Just be good to me
Tank fly boss walk jam nitty gritty
You're listening to the boy from the big bad city
This is jam hot
This is jam hot

Love is a game of chances
So I'll take my chance with you
And you I won't try to change
We talk about it and I'd
Rather have a piece of you
Than out of nothing

Just be good to me in the morning
Just be good to me in the afternoon or evening
Yeah just be good to me
I'm not the jealous kind
I won't tie you down
When you need me
I'll be around
I'll be good to you
You'll be good to me
We could be together, be together

(Just be good to me)
(Just be good to me)
(Just be good to me)
Tank fly boss walk jam nitty gritty
You're listening to the boy from the big bad city
This is jam hot

Obviously, the lyrics are written by a man and they represent a male’s fantasy. No real woman would ever say

I don't care about your other girls
And you I won't try to change

Here’s what wikipedia tells us:

The track started out as in instrumental with the title "The Invasion of the Estate Agents". While also included as the B side to this single, it originally appeared as the B side to Norman Cook's 1989 single "For Spacious Lies". This instrumental track is heavily based on the bassline from The Clash's "Guns of Brixton" with a sample of the distinctive "harmonica" theme from the epic western film Once Upon a Time in the West, written by Ennio Morricone. This instrumental, in slightly remixed form, had vocals added from The SOS Band's "Just Be Good to Me" (as re-recorded by Lindy Layton) to form "Dub Be Good To Me". The track also features the distinctive vocals of David John-Baptiste, more commonly known as DJ Deejay or just DJ. The opening and closing line "tank fly boss walk jam nitty gritty you're listening to the boy from the big bad city, this is jam hot, this is jam hot" was from Johnny Dynell's 1983 hit "Jam Hot" and became an instant classic and was repeated often, being used as the most common reference to the song. The song was a massive hit spending 4 weeks at number one on the UK singles chart in February 1990. It was the 7th best-selling single of 1990 in the UK. In the U.S., the song reached #1 on the Billboard Hot Dance Club Play chart and #76 on the Billboard Hot 100.

I miss those times, when marriage was a far away, nebulous possibility and living together was a really serious thing. Where did that feeling go?

Clicking the [links] below will open the video clips in the window.

Sources / More info: wiki-dub, wiki-cook, lyrics

Video: [Dub @ dailymotion] [Dub @ yt] [Dub Tsoy Remix 2010] [DJ Salaryman Dub Be Seekness] [Faithless] [Unreleased Syv2 Un1 Remix] [2008] [DJ Kaos Drum'n'Bass Remix] [Live in Holland] [ Pulse Sonic Mix] [Ku Ibiza '90] [UKG 2-step BM Dubs Remix] [Acoustic Cover XFM Manchester Radio] [In The Ghetto] [Robert Wilsdon Remix] [col m remix] [Sebastian Nawrat aka CJ SeeN remix] [Beats International - Won't Talk About It -Norman Cook Remix] [Revolver] [12" Extended Mix] [David Kassi & Dino R M1x] [Covers (15/05/09 Gig)] [UB40 kaemjott remix] [Turbo Mix] [beige] [The Clash - Guns Of Brixton Video] [Jane Child - Don't Wanna Fall In Love] [Lady Fingaz rmx] [Tha Phunky Phat DJ Kalo mix] [The Sun Doesn't Shine reggae] [Corey Davis REmix] [Jam Hot] [Dynell NY] [Dynell NY 88] [Tank 2010] [Doujah Raze - Virginia] [Cher Lloyd] [S.O.S. Band] [Won't Talk About It] [Tribute To King Tubby] [Absolut Bhangra 4] [Change Your Mind (Daou Piano Mix)] [Echo Chamber] [Total Mix 1989] [Jack Penate] [Dannie Kavanagh] [butterflyzzzz] [The Response Collective] [Dub Deluxe - Your're not good for me (Main mix)] [DJ L.A.B] [Karmah Just Be Good To Me /Raphie Romina Willy]

VerbaVolant, music, dub, beat, dance, dancing, beats, muzak, muzica, musica, video, video clip, videoclip, clips

Farmville infanticide

2010-11-05T04:11:00.001-07:00

Recently, the Supreme Court has been debating suppressing violent games. There is clear evidence that they should be taking a closer look at the "innocent" Farmville (or, better yet, do nothing). We’re looking not only at Farmville, but also at South Korean game addictions and Supreme Comedy.

We do not believe that violent games cause violence anymore than so-called “click-games” the epitome of boredom and addiction on Facebook. As if to prove this assertion in the most vile manner, a Jacksonville Florida mother entered a guilty plea in the death of her son:

Alexandra V. Tobias, 22, was arrested after the January death of 3-month-old Dylan Lee Edmondson. She told investigators she became angry because the baby was crying while she was playing a computer game called FarmVille on the Facebook social-networking website. She told investigators the baby cried loudly as she played the game, which prosecutor Richard Mantei identified as FarmVille, a simulation game in which players raise crops and livestock with the help of Facebook friends.

Furthermore,

Tobias then put the baby on the couch and stepped out for a cigarette to regain her composure, the arrest report says. When she came back in, the family dog knocked the baby off the couch. The crying started again and Tobias shook the baby a second time before calling for an ambulance, the arrest report says. (..) She told the judge she'd graduated from high school. Court papers say she went to Samuel W. Wolfson Senior High School in Jacksonville. The paperwork also said Tobias did not have a job. (..) According to court records, her child abuse arrest violated a six-month probation she began serving just a few weeks before after pleading no contest to a domestic battery charge.

Farmville may have had other, even more counterintuitive effects. A story from just a few days ago in SeattleWeekly suggests that 27 y.o. Gary A. Veldhuizen from Ferndale, FarmVille player, pleaded guilty to raping a goat (i.e., bestiality):

The billy buggering took place at a farm near Enterprise Road at Willeys Lake Road in May. Apparently a family member caught Veldhuizen in mid-shag and called sheriff's deputies who came and arrested him. Veldhuizen's Facebook page shows the pudgy Ferndalian's love of ranch life extends to the virtual world as well, as he is a big fan of the game FarmVille. One of the more recent posts says he wants to "share some grape bushels with you."

Incidentally, Farmville has also other similar “click” games, one involving Mafia and organized crime, but that game has yet to result in someone’s death.

South Korea Online

Sad as it may be, this is not the first time addictive, non-violent games were involved in the death of children. Only a few months earlier, in February-March 2010, a South-Korean couple was arrested for starving their 3-month-old prematurely born daughter.

Once a day, between 12-hour stretches at a neighborhood Internet cafe, they fed their baby. Instead of nurturing their own daughter, they became obsessed with raising a virtual child in the popular role-playing game called Prius Online. The couple were arrested in Suwon, a suburb of Seoul, 5 months after reporting the death of their baby. The baby’s autopsy showed that she’d died due to a long period of malnutrition. (..) This is the dirty underbelly of South Korea’s fast and cheap Internet connections. Over the last ten years, there have been many stories of Internet addiction and compulsive gaming leading to serious consequences and even death. In 2007, South Korea established an Internet addiction camp to help people overcome their addiction to the Internet.

According to PBS, in the more than 20000 Korean “PC Bangs” (i.e., Internet cafes), the more time you spend playing, the less you pay:

Roughly 50 percent of South Koreans play games regularly, and 75 percent of gamers prefer online games
Currently, the most played game in Korean "PC bangs" (Internet cafes) is Aion, a massively multiplayer online role playing game. It is due for release in the U.S. in fall 2009.
In December 2008, the Korean government announced it would invest $237 million in the game industry to help expand gaming exports, which topped $1 billion for the first time in 2008.
The South Korean online games market is expected to exceed $1.7 billion by the end of 2009
Korea hosted the first Global Online Game Awards in 2008
One-third of South Korea's population of 48 million has registered to play the game KartRider at least once
Video game consoles, such as Sony PlayStation or Nintendo Wii, are less popular than PC games, in part because of widely available broadband Internet and a previous ban on Japanese cultural imports.

In 2005, a 28-year-old Korean man died after playing Starcraft almost non-stop for 50 hours. He inspired (or was he inspired by) the South Park WoW episode. He had just been fired for playing games too much. The government solution is Jump Up Internet Rescue School, a boot camp to cure online gaming addiction. According to New York Times,

South Korea boasts of being the most wired nation on earth. In fact, perhaps no other country has so fully embraced the Internet. Ninety percent of homes connect to cheap, high-speed broadband, online gaming is a professional sport, and social life for the young revolves around the “PC bang,” dim Internet parlors that sit on practically every street corner. (..) Up to 30 percent of South Koreans under 18, or about 2.4 million people, are at risk of Internet addiction, said Ahn Dong-hyun, a child psychiatrist at Hanyang University in Seoul who just completed a three-year government-financed survey of the problem. (..) To address the problem, the government has built a network of 140 Internet-addiction counseling centers, in addition to treatment programs at almost 100 hospitals and, most recently, the Internet Rescue camp, which started this summer. Researchers have developed a checklist for diagnosing the addiction and determining its severity, the K-Scale. (The K is for Korea.)

NYT offers even insight into how such addictions get started:

One participant, Lee Chang-hoon, 15, began using the computer to pass the time while his parents were working and he was home alone. He said he quickly came to prefer the virtual world, where he seemed to enjoy more success and popularity than in the real one. He spent 17 hours a day online, mostly looking at Japanese comics and playing a combat role-playing game called Sudden Attack. He played all night, and skipped school two or three times a week to catch up on sleep. When his parents told him he had to go to school, he reacted violently. Desperate, his mother, Kim Soon-yeol, sent him to the camp. “He didn’t seem to be able to control himself,” said Mrs. Kim, a hairdresser. “He used to be so passionate about his favorite subjects” at school. “Now, he gives up easily and gets even more absorbed in his games.” Her son was reluctant at first to give up his pastime. “I don’t have a problem,” Chang-hoon said in an interview three days after starting the camp. “Seventeen hours a day online is fine.” But later that day, he seemed to start changing his mind, if only slightly.

The Supremes

In USA and especially California, addiction is not seen as a problem. The “problem” is solely violent games. Recently, the Governator signed a strict law to control game violence, a law eventually appealed by a Game producers association all the way to the Supreme Court. The hearings were, according to the Hollywood reporter, cause for comedy:

Justice Alito getting a sly dig at his colleague over "original intent" in the U.S. Constitution: "I think what Justice Scalia wants to know is what James Madison thought about video games. Did he enjoy them?"
Justice Kagan, the junior member of the high court, trying to show she's hip: "You think Mortal Kombat is prohibited by this statute? It's a candidate, meaning, a reasonable jury could find that Mortal Kombat, which is an iconic game, which I am sure half of the clerks who work for us spent considerable amount of time in their adolescence playing."
Justice Breyer creating, excuse the pun, a tortured metaphor about a 13-year-old playing video games depicting violence: "I have tried to take as bad a [scenario] as I could think of, gratuitous torture of children. OK. Now, you can't buy a naked woman, but you can go and buy that, you say to the 13-year-old. Now, what sense is there to that?"
Justice Scalia muses about whether it would be a good thing to let juries act as censors: "Juries are not controllable. That's the wonderful thing about juries, also the worst thing about juries."
Just about anything out of the mouth of Justice Sotomayor, including these questions:

"One of the studies, the Anderson study, says that the effect of violence is the same for a Bugs Bunny episode as it is for a violent video. So can the legislature now, because it has that study, say we can outlaw Bugs Bunny?"
"Could you get rid of rap music? Have you heard some of the lyrics of some of the rap music...?"
"Would a video game that portrayed a Vulcan as opposed to a human being, being maimed and tortured, would that be covered by the act?"
"So if the video producer says this is not a human being, it's an android computer simulated person, then all they have to do is put a little artificial feature on the creature and they could sell the video game?"
"What happens when the character gets maimed, head chopped off and immediately after it happens they spring back to life and they continue their battle? Is that covered by your act?"

It seems to me that Schwarzenegger, though not a big fan of such a law, signed it stating “children must be protected” not because he believes that, but rather because he thinks that reason is unconvincing for parents. All hopes that such ill-conceived legislation will be stopped so that it does not push game development to Asia rest now with the Supreme Court.

Video: PBS: Digital Nation: Life on the Virtual Frontier, 1 Game Too Many, sp-mlnw, sp-s10e08-inside

Sources / More info: [yt-fv-parody], [yt-fv-tr], [yt-h8-fv], [yt-h8-fv], [yt-h8-fv], [yt-fv-prblm], [yt-h8-fv], [yt-h8-fv], [Supreme Court], SC-hearing, Jacksonville-mom, jacksonville-sentencing, huff-j, /.-exodus, /.-sc, atlantic-arnold, nxtwb-sk, st-kd, nyt-kbc, gzm-bsy, Kogia-study, wiki-lv,notwc, sw-veldhuizen, fb-veldhuizen, bbc-spanish-piglet

VerbaVolant, farmville, violence, game, games, online, online games, supreme court, supremes, mmog, mmorpg, massive multiplayer, massively multiplayer, schwartzenegger

Gabriel Grecu set-up in Moscow

2010-08-17T10:31:00.001-07:00

A Romanian diplomat was busted spying by FSB then detained, in an apparent violation of Vienna Convention and what seems to be Russia’s show of force against its former satellite and possibly retribution for USA’s busting of the suburban spy ring.

Not long ago we’ve heard about a Katya Gerasimova, apparently a Russian spy, embarrassing the Russian opposition to Vladimir Putin’s establishment, to which Youtube reacted by censoring it. Then the US dropped the bomb with the 10 Americanized Russian spies (and we were supposed to believe that), to which Russia reacted by calling it fabrication. Then Anna Fermanova was busted for trying to smuggle military equipment to Russia.

Yesterday, we were told that Russia arrested a Romanian diplomat who was apparently “stealing Russian secrets”. The videos below should be edifying.

Normally, such events happen without media coverage. The only time when there is a big event is when one of the parties wants to capitalize on it. It seems that Russia does not like Romania much, it does not like the Moldovan Republic trying to escape poverty and certainly does not like Romania, a NATO member, building missile defenses that would protect NATO countries from Middle Eastern launches, even though that would – technically – have nothing to do with it.

What is unusual is Russia’s handling of the diplomat, which certainly violated his diplomatic immunity. It seems that the message is “You, Romania, think that just because you’re NATO, you can mess with us?! We are Putin, we piss on y’all”.

In turn, Romania expelled a similarly ranked Russian diplomat. Way to go, security theatre directors!

Sources / More info: bbc, cnn, fp, itar, xinhua, en, reuters, rt, actmedia, wikio, hn, yt-gr

VerbaVolant, spying, espionage, counterespionage, russia, russian, kgb, nkvd, putin, fsb, security theater

Ayatollah! Leave the kids alone!

2010-08-12T08:53:00.001-07:00

Next to North Korea, Iran might appear to be a functional, democratic, open country. But that's not how we'll be looking at them..

When Iran makes the news lately, there’s almost always something embarrassing.

I could tell you about

the weird connection between religious business and economic stagnation
an Iranian from Toronto who lectures the government about haircuts
Iran lecturing Canada on human rights
a very recent attack on President Ahamdinejad
Ahmadinejad speech in USA when he claimed that there are no gays in his country
the green revolution
the voting age in Iran (16, as I recall)
the fracas with the “spy” who returned to his wife, eerily similar to Nasreh & Diocletian

Instead, I’ll just give you the links below and a song from a group accused on their facebook page of being sponsored by the CIA

Sources / More info: wiki-iran, natpo-bv, tstar-haircut, tsun-lectures, np-iran-denies, msnbc-unhurt

VerbaVolant, musica, music, muzica, iran, persia, iranian, persian, persians, iranians, green revolution, islamic republic

music can never get old

2010-08-11T08:47:00.001-07:00

That's because, obviously, we have covers. Good songs cannot be out of the public eye and ear for more long because someone will take them and make them theirs through their own interpretation.

Each cover song I love deserve its very own spot, separate from the rest. Unfortunately, that would cause this page to load too slowly, so I put them all in the playlist below. Do not despair though, for you can navigate it by either pressing the big arrows to the left and right or, alternatively, clicking on the video clip thumbnails at the bottom.

What do we have?

Well, we have quite a few ABBA songs, remixed by Mad Caddies (SOS), Arno (Knowing me, Knowing You) and even Reel Big Fish’s A-ha (Take on Me). Then there’s Milkshake, covered by Buddy and Goodnight Nurse, Oops! I did it again in Children of Bodom’s interpretation. It’s hard to pick from Marilyn Manson’s covers, but I liked his “Tainted Love”. Same goes for Bohemian Rhapsody in The Braids’ version, or Neutral Milk Hotel’s cover of John Lennon’s Mother.

I particularly enjoyed Kate Bush’s Running Up That Hill as covered by both Placebo and Within Temptation.

I am still not sure if I’ll add Johnny Cash covers from his very last album – they seem somehow way too personal. What I am sure of is that this list will most likely keep on growing, as I add more innovative, impactful covers.

Sources / More info: flickr, yt-covers

VerbaVolant, music, muzak, musica, muzica, video, videoclip, video clip, playlist

Sauna Champ Dies in Heat of Battle

2010-08-09T12:24:00.001-07:00

I participated once in an improptu sauna contest, but I had the wisdom and instinct of self-preservation to give up before sublimating. Some people don't, and you can see them in a very graphic video.

Personally, I think you need an (un)healthy dose of sadomasochism to “win” in such a competition. Here are the rules, courtesy of wikipedia:

The starting temperature is 110 degrees Centigrade. Half a liter of water will be poured on the stove every 30 seconds.
Use of alcohol is prohibited prior to and during the competition.
Competitors must wash themselves beforehand, and remove any creams and lotions.
Competitor must sit erect, their buttocks and thighs on the bench.
Ordinary swimsuits must be used. Pant legs in men's swimsuits may be up to 20 centimeters long, and women's shoulder straps may be up to 5 centimeters wide.
Hair that reaches the shoulders must be tied into a ponytail.
Touching the skin and brushing is prohibited.
Competitors must not disturb each other.
When the Judges ask, competitors must show that they are in their senses with a thumbs up.
Competitors must be able to leave the sauna unaided to qualify.
A breach of the rules results in a warning. Another one results in disqualification.
The last person in the sauna is the winner.

The sad events:

On 7 August 2010, Russian finalist and former third-place finisher Vladimir Ladyzhensky and Finnish five-time champion Timo Kaukonen, passed out after six minutes in the sauna, both suffering from terrible burns and trauma. They were both rushed to the hospital but Ladyzhensky died en route. Kaukonen was reported to suffer from extreme burn injuries, and his condition was described as critical, but stable. Just a few minutes before the finals, Kaukonen told the Norwegian newspaper Verdens Gang that the saunas used for the 2010 championship were a lot more extreme than the saunas used for previous competitions.

Sources / More info: guardian, wiki-sauna, yt-sauna

VerbaVolant, sauna, banya, contest, heat, heat exhaustion

Dog chews off man's toe

2010-08-09T11:22:00.001-07:00

Some weird things happen in the world. But even what may appear vicious could actually be good. Like this dog saving his master by chewing off his toe.

It is one of those news you’ll have to read more than once to fully grasp..

In short, a man wakes up from drunken stupor to find his dog with a blood moustache and himself without a previously infected toe. Rushed to the hospital by his wife, he learns he had Type 2 diabetes and the rest of his digit is amputated.

His owners credit the dog with saving his man’s life. Inexplicably, the man had been postponing going to the doctor and his wife, a registered nurse, did not think it was important or could not convince him.

Sources / More info: flickr, star-dog

DETROIT—A Michigan man credited his dog with saving his life by chewing off his diseased big toe as he lay passed out in a drunken stupor.

Jerry Douthett, 48, woke up on a Saturday night in late July in his Rockford, Michigan home to find his Jack Russell Terrier, Kiko, had gnawed off his right big toe.

“The dog always lays with me on the bed,” said Douthett. “That night, I woke up and looked down at my foot, and it was wet. When I looked it was blood, and there was the dog looking at me with a blood mustache.”

Douthett’s wife, Rosee, rushed him to a hospital where doctors found he was suffering from Type 2 diabetes. His toe was badly infected and surgeons amputated the remainder of the digit.

Douthett’s wife, a registered nurse, had been urging him for weeks to have his infected toe examined by a doctor.

On the night Kiko ate his toe, Douthett said he had been out with his wife and drank about “six or seven beers” and a pair of giant margaritas “big enough to put goldfish in.”

“I was self-medicating at this point,” he said. “The moral of the story is that the dog saved my life, because otherwise I never would have gone in to see a doctor.”

The couple said they were amazed that Kiko appeared to know Douthett had an infection that needed treatment.

VerbaVolant, diabetes, dog, infection, amputation, toe, tip-toe, man's best friend