At Penguicon 4 in 2006, Nifty Guest Howard Tayler of www.SchlockMercenary.com took this video of Penguicon co-founder Rob Landley throwing a bowl of liquid nitrogen in the swimming pool, and the resulting billow of fog.

youtube.com — "The Commander in Chief Test," from Humanitainment, the folks who brought you "The Empire Strikes Barack." It's the funniest McCain video I've seen. (Resubmitted because the McCain bury brigade sunk first submission despite 180 diggs in the first 2 hours.)

Hot wheels ... Fiorano in flames

SHOCKED showroom driver Martin Bullen faced a tricky phone call to his boss after this £250,000 Ferrari went up in smoke.

Martin, 43, was at the wheel as the 599 GTB Fiorano burst into flames at traffic lights.

Firefighters were quickly on the scene and doused the blaze – but the car was wrecked.

And shaken Martin was left to break the news to Paul Jaconelli, owner of supercar garage Romans International in Banstead, Surrey.

Paul, who had asked Martin to drive the motor to repairers, said yesterday:

“He rang me and said, ‘Your car’s just gone up in flames’.

“At first I hoped he was joking, but I soon realised he was serious.

Fire-ari ... firefighter battles blaze

“I asked him why it had happened and he said he had no idea.

“Martin’s worked here since he was 15 and he’s a great guy. It’s obviously not his fault – so I’m not going to hold it against him.”

The amazing blaze was caught on camera by a stunned passer-by.

Paul, 58, added: “Martin said the car made a noise at the lights, then just went up in smoke. It should be covered under warranty – but it wasn’t great news.”

http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/article1175191.ece

BUSH Impeachement HEARING Vincent Bugliosi Hammers BUSH!

youtube.com — This guy lets it loose........They try to shut him up.....several times. A must see!!!!

Pick up the can? No.

WeGame.com - Half-Life 2 Videos

By Patrick Kevin Day, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

Where did the Joker come from?

Christopher Nolan's film, "The Dark Knight," certainly doesn't give us any clues. But though the character has many versions of his origin in the fictional world, his actual history is a multimedia mash-up of drawing, voice-overs and visual performance. He's gone from evil clown to annoying clown, to dark, evil, murderous clown that gives you nightmares. And if the buzz continues into the spring, the latest man in the makeup, Heath Ledger, may win a posthumous Oscar for his Joker performance.

But to understand where Ledger came from in his acting, you have to go back to see the characters development over the last 68 years.

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/la-et-joker-2008-pg,0,664720.photogallery

An Israeli human rights group has just released graphic video footage obtained during clashes between Israeli troops and demonstrators protesting against the separation barrier on the West Bank. The video has sparked outrage, as it shows what appears to be an Israeli soldier shooting a Palestinian at close range. Al Jazeera's Emma Hayward reports.

en.wikipedia.org — While Windows Vista contains many new features, a number of capabilities and certain programs that were a part of Windows XP are no longer present or changed, resulting in the removal of certain functionality. The following is a list of features which were present in Windows XP but which have been removed in Windows Vista.

Fliers who find themselves attempting to fly without identification should prep themselves on what their old addresses were, when their wedding anniversary is and and their children's addresses.

Knowing those and other bits of personal information in public records will be key to convincing federal employees to let you past the x-ray machines onto your plane.

That's because under new rules from the Transportation Security Administration, travelers who try to fly without identification now have to do more than just let screeners paw through their bags and wand them up and down.

Now, those who left their license at home or had it stolen have to answer a series of questions relayed to the screener by employees in TSA's operations center in Virginia, where employees have access to databases of public records, including those compiled by data giant Lexis Nexis.

The idea is for screeners to know that the person holding a boarding pass in the name of Buster Brown, actually is that person. For travellers without ID, they better hope that the notoriously inaccurate private dossiers about them are correct.

The process of comparing answers to public records already caused a flare-up after one traveler was asked whether he was registered as a Democrat or a Republican, which TSA spokesman Christopher White called a "day one mistake," where a TSA employee looked at the available public records and asked a question off of the information in the files compiled by Lexis Nexis and others.

Another traveler recently reported that officials looked at the tax returns she was carrying with her, that the screeners had the Ohio DMV pull up her photo and that she was asked questions about her family, according to a story from the Lawrence Journal World.

The DMV photo detail struck TSA's White as odd, saying that he didn't believe the TSA had access to that data and that there were "much less invasive ways to verify identification."

As for the tax returns?

"If a passenger has any type of documents, they can present them to assist in verifying identification," White said. "If she presented an officer with her tax return, we don't care how much money she makes -- we just care about her identity."

White promised to look into the story further.

The new rules went into effect June 21, and in the first five days, 1705 people out of 10 million attempted to fly without identification and 59 of those were denied access to the plane.

White says the changes are just about making it harder for a would-be terrorist to board a plane using a ticket in someone else's name, which would bypass the no-fly list.

The TSA is experimenting with verifying boarding passes at the screening line, which would close the longstanding loophole that lets someone use a combination of a real identity card, a fake boarding pass and a real one to board a plane despite being on the no-fly list.

http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/07/flying-without.html

The purported takeover of the San Francisco government's new fiber optic network by an employee who locked out all the other administrators sounds extreme, but disgruntled or fired employees have long used computers to get a dose of revenge.

Hitting this button caused millions in losses to a bank by killing power to the main computing center, according to the FBI.

The city is still scrambling to regain control of the municipal network that handles everything from the mayor's e-mail to San Francisco's electronic court records, according to Ron Vinson, the deputy director of San Francisco's telecommunications and information services department.

Terry Childs, a city tech employee, allegedly modified the system so that only he had top level permissions. Childs was arrested Sunday and is being held on $5 million bail, after allegedly refusing to hand over the passwords.

"This is a great example of how powerful insiders can be," assuming the allegations are true, says security expert Adam Shostack, co-author of the New School of Information Security. "Insiders do have a tremendous amount of power."

At the same time, such shenanigans are still rare, at least compared to how many network administrators are fired, or quit, without burning the system behind them, says Shostack. One thing's for certain: with no actual damage reported, the San Francisco incident pales next to other reported cyber-sabotage efforts.

• In 2008, Danielle Duann, a former employee of the Life Gift Organ Donation Center in Houston, Texas, was indicted for computer hacking. Duann allegedly deleted database records used to match organs to needy patients after she was fired in November, 2005. The feds say the deletions caused more than $70,000 in damages, and had the potential to affect medical treatment.


• In 2007, Lonnie Denison pleaded guilty to intentionally sabotaging a data control center in the California Independent System Operator Corporation, which the Feds described as an effort to bring down the Golden State's power grid. Denison, a contractor working at the CAL ISO, broke into a high-security computer room and pushed an emergency electrical shut-off button for the computer room. That sabotage crashed computers that communicate with California's deregulated power market and could have caused severe damage if it had happened during peak electrical usage.


• In October 2003, Andrew Garcia, a former employee of monitor maker Viewsonic, was sentenced to a year in prison for deleting critical server files that were necessary for Viewsonic's Taiwan office to do work.


• In 2002, a former American Eagle Outfitters employee posted passwords and logins for the company's network on a hacker mailing list on Yahoo. He also included instructions on how to get into American Eagle's wide-area network. He put those instructions into use himself after Thanksgiving 2002, hoping to disrupt the company during the busy holiday season. For his trouble, Kenneth Patterson was sentenced to 18 months in prison.


• A former network administrator for the Inglewood, California-based Airline Coach Service and Sky Limo Company attacked his former employer's network, deleting files and changing passwords. The hack crashed the company's dispatch system, causing thousands in losses. When his house was raided by the feds, they discovered a file folder labeled "retaliation." In 2003, Alan Giang Tran plead guilty to one count of hacking.


• A disgruntled Australian engineer used a laptop and radio control equipment to dump hundreds of thousands of gallons of sewage into rivers and parks in Australia in 2000. The engineer was angry at being rejected for a job from the Maroochy Shire in Queensland, which contracted the company he worked for to make the sewage system.


• Roger Duronio, a disgruntled former UBS PaineWebber employee was sentenced to 97 months in jail for planting a time-bomb program that destroyed files on thousands of computers inside the financial giant's computer network. Duronio planted the code before his February 22, 2002 resignation, which followed repeated complaints by Duronio about his salary and bonuses. The timer for the code went off on March 4, and Duronio shorted UBS's stock on the day of the time bomb, hoping to make a profit by having the rogue code drive down the company's stock price.


• In 1996, a network administrator planted computer code that deleted the sophisticated production software of a high-tech measurement and control instruments company called Omega Engineering, causing $10 million in damages. Timothy Allen Lloyd designed the company's network, but was fired after 11 years on July 10, 1996. The time bomb went off 20 days later. After being convicted in 2000, Lloyd was eventually sentenced to 41 months imprisonment.

Despite the horror stories, at least one can be thankful that when someone in the IT department goes postal, they tend to take down the mail server, not pick up an assault rifle.

http://blog.wired.com

Vaughan Thomas
Saturday July 19, 2008
The Guardian


A central line train approaches the platform. Photograph: David Levene


At 9.45am on Saturday, June 23 2007, I killed a man. A perfectly ordinary man, on a perfectly ordinary summer's day. CCTV pictures show him entering the station, unremarkable among all the passengers going to the West End. He waited at the front of the platform until he could hear my train approaching, then he calmly stepped down on to the tracks and looked directly at me as he waited for the impact.

The impact was only a matter of seconds in coming, but those seconds felt like minutes. This wasn't how it was meant to be. It wasn't how I had imagined it during my years as a Central line train driver. We talk of "jumpers"; workmates tell of blurry images flashing in front of them, of the shock of the impact. I wasn't expecting to see a young man in jeans and a summer shirt waiting for death, looking me in the eye.

As I hit the emergency brake, I was thinking, "Please, get out of the way. Now. Please let it be a prank." Youngsters on the track are a regular event, though no less frightening for that, and for train drivers it's something we learn to live with.

But this wasn't a typical game of "chicken": he wasn't laughing and he wasn't with friends. When it became clear he wasn't going to move out of the way, I closed my eyes, covered my face and held my breath.

By the time we were stationary, four of my eight cars were in the platform and I was on autopilot. I told the passengers there would be a delay in opening the doors due to an "incident", and was calling the line controller for assistance when I heard a tap on my cab door. A smart man inquired, "Do you know there's a person under your train?" I looked at the blood on the windscreen momentarily before assuring him that, yes, I was aware.

He paused for a heartbeat, looked at his watch and said, "So, how long before we get on the move again?"

I was to look back on this exchange with amusement and also, strangely, comfort: in the midst of the horror, normality was briefly restored by a commuter asking for alternative travel arrangements.

I'd advised the passengers to stay where they were and not to try to open the doors because we weren't fully in the platform; amazingly, they all complied. I walked back through the carriages opening the adjoining doors and shouting: "Please leave the train, and leave the station as quickly as possible!" Terrorist attacks were still very much on people's minds, and as each carriage emptied I looked to the next, seeing anxious faces through the windows. No one tried to leave until I opened the doors. Only a few asked the reason, none complained. I was hugely impressed.

The next few hours were a blur of activity as the body was removed and service restored: station staff, police, firefighters, the emergency support unit and trauma counsellors all came and went in a smooth, well-practised exercise. I was reassured that it wasn't my fault, that there was nothing I could have done; it was his choice. All of which I knew, but it was good to hear from someone else.

As a child of the enlightenment, a rationalist and an atheist, I was sure I wouldn't be unduly affected by the death of a person unknown. I was told I'd need some time off in case of post-traumatic stress; I agreed to counselling to assess my fitness to resume work, but was convinced this would be a formality.

My return to work was speedy and for weeks I was seemingly unaffected. But in August a policeman came to brief me before the inquest and to show me the pictures. The unknown person now had a name, a family and a tragic story.

Henrik Alexandersson had moved from Sweden to find work in London; he was successful and popular, but had been unwell. For some reason, he'd convinced himself his illness was Aids-related and that week he had gone for a check-up to find out the truth. By that Saturday, he could bear to wait no longer: he called his parents in such a state of distress that they booked a flight to London (arriving just hours too late.) He left a suicide note, and headed off for his fateful meeting with me. Had he waited a day longer, he would have learned that the tests were negative.

I left work and went home in the full realisation that perhaps I am not such a rationalist after all, because I sobbed my heart out in the arms of my partner. A year has passed now, but I can still see Henrik standing on the track, awaiting the inevitable.

Rabidplaybunny87: Okay, so my neighbors officially hate me
GarbageStan23: why?
Rabidplaybunny87: Well, me, david and andrew were having a bonfire in the backyard, and we were making s'mores and all... and suddenly we here sirens, and see a firetruck turn into the street in front of us.
Rabidplaybunny87: So we all went running to see what was up, and our neigbor's house was on fire!
GarbageStan23: oh shit!
Rabidplaybunny87: Yeah, and when we got there, the wife was crying into her husbands arms, and we were just kinda standing there, and then she saw us, and then like for 10 seconds, gave us the dirtiest look ever
Rabidplaybunny87: Turns out, we were still holding our sticks with marshmallows on it, watching the fire....
Rabidplaybunny87: talk about bad timing...

Flip Flop Glue Prank - Watch more free videos

Email forwards - use at your own risk. Most of the forwards I get are urban myths from my aunt saying Starbucks hates the troops or toliet paper causes cancer. Every once in a while, there's a rare gem worth telling other people about. Adam McKay forwarded these to me - 9 Amazing Ads from the 30s. These are real. And they're so awesome, they're worth telling you about.

Which one is your favorite? I like "Eat eat eat and always stay thin. How? with sanitized tape worms!"

President Bush has asserted executive privilege to prevent Attorney General Michael Mukasey from having to comply with a House panel subpoena for material on the leak of CIA operative Valerie Plame's identity.

A House committee chairman, meanwhile, held off on a contempt citation of Mukasey — who had requested the privilege claim — but only as a courtesy to lawmakers not present.

Rep. Henry Waxman, chairman of the House Oversight Committee, rejected Mukasey's suggestion that Vice President Dick Cheney's FBI interview on the CIA leak should be protected by the privilege claim — and therefore not turned over to the panel.

"We'll act in the reasonable and appropriate period of time," Waxman, D-Calif., said. But he made clear that he thinks Mukasey has earned a contempt citation and that he'd schedule a vote on the matter soon.

"This unfounded assertion of executive privilege does not protect a principle; it protects a person," Waxman said. "If the vice president did nothing wrong, what is there to hide?"

The assertion of the privilege is not about hiding anything but rather protecting the separation of powers as well as the integrity of future Justice Department investigations of the White House, Mukasey wrote to Bush in a letter dated Tuesday. Several of the subpoenaed reports, he wrote, summarize conversations between Bush and advisers — are direct presidential communications protected by the privilege.

"I am greatly concerned about the chilling effect that compliance with the committee's subpoena would have on future White House deliberations and White House cooperation with future Justice Department investigations," Mukasey wrote to Bush. "I believe it is legally permissible for you to assert executive privilege with respect to the subpoenaed documents, and I respectfully request that you do so."

White House spokesman Tony Fratto said Bush invoked the privilege on Tuesday.

Waxman said he would wait to hold a vote on Mukasey's contempt citation until all members of the panel had a chance to read up on the matter.

The Bush administration had plenty of warning. Waxman warned last week that he would cite Mukasey with contempt unless the attorney general complied with the subpoena. The House Judiciary Committee also has subpoenaed some of the same documents from Mukasey, as well as information on the leak from other current and former administration officials.

Congressional Democrats want to shed light on the precise roles, if any, that Bush, Cheney and their aides may have played in the leak.

State Department official Richard Armitage first revealed Plame's identity as a CIA operative to columnist Robert Novak, who used former presidential counselor Karl Rove as a confirming source for a 2003 article. Around that time Plame's husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, was criticizing Bush's march to war in Iraq.

Cheney's then-chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, also was involved in the leak and was convicted of perjury, obstruction and lying to the FBI. Last July, Bush commuted Libby's 2 1/2-year sentence, sparing him from serving any prison time.

Libby told the FBI in 2003 that it was possible that Cheney ordered him to reveal Plame's identity to reporters.

http://rawstory.com/

Email Picture

From the Associated Press

Andy Dick, 42, was arrested today on suspicion of drug use and sexual battery in Murrieta.

The former 'NewsRadio' star allegedly fondled a teen and pulled down her tank top outside a restaurant. Police say they found marijuana and Xanax in his possession.

By David Kelly, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
July 17, 2008

Actor and comedian Andy Dick, who has a history of run-ins with the law, was arrested early Wednesday outside a Murrieta restaurant on suspicion of sexual battery and drug possession.

Police said Dick, who was heavily intoxicated, grabbed and fondled the breast of a 17-year-old girl before pulling her top down in the parking lot of the Buffalo Wild Wings Grill & Bar about 1:15 in the morning.

• 

  Photos: Celebrity mug shots

"The victim was traumatized by this," said Lt. Dennis Vrooman, spokesman for the Murrieta Police Department.

Police later found one gram of marijuana and one Xanax anti-anxiety pill in Dick's pocket. He was arrested and later released on $5,000 bail.

It was the latest in a string of encounters that Dick, 42, has had with authorities. The former star of the comedy series "NewsRadio" was cited last year in Columbus, Ohio, for urinating in public. He was kicked off the set of "Jimmy Kimmel Live" for repeatedly touching fellow guest Ivanka Trump. In 1999 he drove his car into a telephone pole and was charged with possession of cocaine and marijuana.

Calls to his manager were not returned.

Vrooman said police had already warned Dick about his intoxication before he went to the restaurant. Officers had encountered the comedian while responding to an altercation at the Corner Pocket Sports Cafe in Murrieta about 9 p.m. Tuesday. They told him to leave or face possible arrest on public intoxication charges. He left with five or six friends.

Dick, who listed his address as Woodland Hills, told officers he was in town to attend the funeral of a friend's father.

Later that night, Dick and his entourage arrived at the Buffalo Wild Wings and began drinking, police said. He was recognized by several patrons, including the alleged victim, who approached him.

Vrooman said the girl, who is from Murrieta, tried to talk to Dick but backed off when she realized how intoxicated he was.

Sara Lidman, one of the restaurant managers, would say only that Dick was in the bar with friends.

Police said that when Dick left he spotted the girl and her friend in the parking lot and shouted, "There are the girls!"

"He groped her breast with his right hand, then pulled down her top," Vrooman said.

The teen's friend called police.

When they arrived, they found Dick in the front seat of a Honda pickup truck heading toward a nearby Sam's Club parking lot.

Officers stopped the truck and forced all the men inside to line up so the girl could identify the man who allegedly groped her. She pointed to Dick.

A search of his pockets turned up the Xanax and marijuana. He did not have a prescription for the Xanax, police said.

Vrooman said Dick was belligerent at first and then answered officers' questions.

On Saturday, Dick was spotted at Pepe's Mexican Restaurant and Cantina in Canyon Lake in Riverside County.

"My understanding was that he was drinking soda water and was not drunk," said Pepe's owner Marty Gibson. "There was no altercation that I heard of."

Dick was arrested on suspicion of sexual battery, possession of a controlled substance and possession of marijuana, and he may yet be charged with public intoxication, Vrooman said.

He is scheduled to be arraigned Aug. 12 in Murrieta.

david.kelly@latimes.com

Times staff writer Harriet Ryan contributed to this report.

http://www.latimes.com/

What would we do without memorable quotes to express our otherwise bottled up emotions? We might, for instance, have to actually ask for a raise rather than scream "Show me the money!" at our bosses. However, even though we use them so often, those movie quotes we hear repeated ad nauseum frequently aren't the real quotes at all. Years of repetition have turned them into easily recognizable, but inaccurate, misquotes. And none are more often mistaken than these 8 classics.

8. "Play it again, Sam!"

Casablanca may be one of the most well respected films of all time, but that doesn't stop people from misquoting it constantly. This line, supposedly said by Ingrid Bergman, may be what your drunken uncle yells at a wedding when he hears a song that gets his toes a-tapping, but you can scour the script of the film and never find it. Instead, you will find Ingrid saying "Play it Sam, for old times' sake, play 'As Time Goes By'." The misquoted line did show up in the Marx Brothers' movie A Night in Casablanca and acted as the title for Woody Allen's Play it Again, Sam, proving that as a culture we remember a lot more from people making fun of our classic works than the classics themselves.

7. "I'm out of order? You're out of order! This whole court is out of order!"

Has a greater, more dramatic line ever been uttered in a courtroom drama than this one? I guess so, since it was never said in ... And Justice For All, its supposed place of origin. In response to the Judge proclaiming he is out of order, Al Pacino actually snaps back "You're out of order! You're out of order! The whole trial is out of order! They're out of order!" The same point is made, but in a much less quotable way. Thank god courtroom parodies ever since have pounded this altered line into the popular subconscious.

6. "You dirty rat!"

This phrase has become the cornerstone of any 1920's gangster impersonator's vocabulary. Attributed to the late great (and easily impersonated) James Cagney, the line is even some times followed by the tag "You killed my brother!" But what Cagney movie is it really from? None, of course. Cagney once called another gangster a "dirty, double-crossing rat" in Blonde Crazy, but that's as close as he came to the famous accusation. The line actually comes from none other than the Riddler himself. Yep, Frank Gorshin, famous for playing the Riddler on the Batman TV show, created the line himself as part of his own impeccable James Cagney impression.

5. "If you build it, they will come."

When a voice in your head tells you to build a baseball field so that ghosts can come play on it, that voice better be saying something pretty damn convincing. And how much more convincing and ominous can you get than this oft-repeated quote from Field of Dreams? Too bad a single pronoun is off. Even though a horde of dead baseball players show up to play on the field, only one player really matters to the main character: his father, with whom he plays a tearful round of catch with in the movie's finale. Hence the actual quote if "If you build it, he will come."

4. "Mirror, mirror on the wall, who's the fairest of them all?"

Yes, that line you say in front of your own mirror every morning to inflate your ego for the day might do the trick, but it's not an actual movie quote. The jealous Queen berating her magical mirror over the fact that it has proclaimed Snow White the fairest person in the kingdom is an incredibly memorable scene and the instigator for the entire plot of the film. However, the actual line is "Magic Mirror on the wall, who is the fairest one of all?" Until you get a magic mirror, you might as well stick with the altered version during your own narcissistic self-adoration.

3. "Hello, Clarice."

Although this line from The Silence of the Lambs gets repeated constantly, much to the chagrin of anyone named Clarice, it's never actually spoken by Anthony Hopkins in the film. For a guy that eats human flesh, Hannibal Lector does have a classy disposition, so the only such greeting is the much more polished "Good evening, Clarice." They did manage to squeeze the line into the follow-up movie Hannibal after it was already in the popular lexicon, but who remembers anything from Hannibal besides Ray Liotta getting his brains eaten?

2. "Do you feel lucky, punk?"

Clint Eastwood is a badass. We all know it. And there really isn't a better line to have his entire, badass persona distilled into than this one. The only problem is that he never said it. The real line comes at the end of Dirty Harry, when Cagney's answer to whether or not he shot five or six bullets, which he ends with the query, "You've got to ask yourself a question: Do I feel lucky? Well, do ya, PUNK?" But unless you're a theatre major trying to brand yourself as the tough guy and using this during audition, who has the time to memorize an entire monologue? We just want to ask punks whether they feel lucky, in bad Clint Eastwood impressions.

1. "Luke, I am your father."

This is probably the most quoted line from one of the most famous trilogies of all time, but as any Star Wars nerd is quick to point out, most of us still haven't got it right. The moment when Darth Vader reveals himself to be Luke's father is one of the greatest twists in cinematic history, but the actual line Vader belts out between wheezes isn't quite as quotable as this condensed version with the inserted Luke so we all know who the hell the line refers to. The actual line following Luke's accusation of Vader about killing his father is "No. I am your father." Makes more sense in context, but without the same ring. But now you know. I hope I've managed to save some of your nerd cred.

http://www.flixster.com/

http://abstrusegoose.com/34

venganza.org — Rejoice, my brothers and sisters. The Spaghetti Monster is with you. Blessed are you among sauces, and blessed is the spice from your shaker. Heated meatsauce, monster of taste, pray for us non-pirates now and at the hour of our hunger. RAmen

This poor Pug is only trying to get some snacks off of the couch. The cat is not having it though!


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Don't let the pink t-shirts fool you, this is not a pizza store you want to rob.


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itsecurity.com — For all of the places that Google Maps allows you to see, there are plenty of places that are off-limits. Whether it's due to government restrictions, personal-privacy lawsuits or mistakes, Google Maps has slapped a "Prohibited" sign on the following 51 places.

The photo below captures everything that Americans wanted to believe about the Iraq war in the earliest days of the invasion in 2003. Pfc. Joseph Dwyer, an Army medic whose unit was fighting its way up the Euphrates to Baghdad, cradles a wounded boy. The child is half-naked and helpless, but trusting. Private Dwyer’s face is strained but calm.

Warren Zinn/Army Times, via Associated Press

If there are better images of the strength and selflessness of the American soldier, I can’t think of any. It is easy to understand why newspapers and magazines around the country ran the photo big, making Private Dwyer an instant hero, back when the war was a triumphal tale of Iraqi liberation.

That story turned bitter years ago, of course. And the mountain of sorrows keeps growing: Mr. Dwyer died last month in North Carolina. He was 31 and very sick. For years he had been in and out of treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder and addiction. He was seized by fearful delusions and fits of violence and rage. His wife left him to save herself and their young daughter. When the police were called to Mr. Dwyer’s apartment on June 28, he was alone. They broke down the door and found him dying among pill bottles and cans of cleaning solvent that friends said he sniffed to deaden his pain.

He had been heading for a disastrous end ever since he came home.

Two of his best friends were Angela Minor and Dionne Knapp, fellow medics at Fort Bliss, near El Paso, Tex. For a while, they were part of a small, inseparable group that worked together, ate out, went to movies and called one another by their first names, which is not the military habit.

Joseph was a rock, Ms. Minor said, a guy who would change your oil and check your tires unasked and pick you up by your broken-down car at 3 a.m. Ms. Knapp said he was like an uncle to her son, Justin, who was having trouble in kindergarten and brightened whenever Mr. Dwyer went there to check on him.

Ms. Knapp was called up to Iraq, but Mr. Dwyer insisted on taking her place, because she was a single mom. He had no children at the time, and besides, he had enlisted right after 9/11 just for this. He went and stunned everybody by getting his picture all over the newspapers and TV.

A few months later, he was home. He was shy about his celebrity. He was also skinny and haunted. Ms. Minor said he was afraid. Ms. Knapp said paranoid was more like it.

It didn’t help that El Paso looked a lot like Iraq. Once he totaled his car. He said had seen a box in the road and thought it was a bomb. He couldn’t go to the movies anymore: too many people. In restaurants, he sat with his back to the wall.

He said that Iraqis were coming to get him. He would call Angela and Dionne at all hours, to talk vaguely about the “demons” that followed him all day and in his dreams. He became a Baptist, doggedly searching Scripture on his lunch hour — for solace. His friends knew he was also getting high with spray cans bought at computer stores.

“He would call me in the middle of the day,” Ms. Minor said. “I’d be like: ‘Why are you at Best Buy? Why aren’t you at work?’ I could tell he’d been drinking and huffing again.”

His friends tried an intervention, showing up at his door in October 2005 and demanding his guns and cans of solvent. He refused to give them up.

Hours later, gripped by delusions, he shot up his apartment. He was glad when the SWAT team arrived, Ms. Knapp said, because then he could tell them where the Iraqis were. He was arrested and discharged, and later moved to Pinehurst, N.C. His parents tried to get him help, but nothing worked. “He just couldn’t get over the war,” his mother, Maureen, told a reporter. “Joseph never came home.”

It’s not clear what therapy and medication could have saved Mr. Dwyer. He admitted lying on a post-deployment questionnaire about what he had seen and suffered because he just wanted to get back to his family. Ms. Minor said he sometimes skipped therapy appointments in El Paso. One thing that did seem to help, Ms. Knapp and Ms. Minor said, was peer counseling from a fellow veteran, a man who had been ambushed in Iraq and knew about fear and death. But that was too little, too late, and both women say they are frustrated with the military for letting Mr. Dwyer slip away.

Private Dwyer, who survived rocket-propelled grenades and shocking violence, made his way back to his family and friends. But part of him was also stuck forever on a road in Iraq, helpless and terrified, with nobody to carry him to safety.

http://www.nytimes.com/

When Gary Crutchley started taking pictures of his children playing on an inflatable slide he thought they would be happy reminders of a family day out.

But the innocent snaps of seven-year-old Cory, and Miles, five, led to him being called a ‘pervert’.

The woman running the slide at Wolverhampton Show asked him what he was doing and other families waiting in the queue demanded that he stop.

Picture of innocence: The photograph Gary Crutchley took of his sons Cory and Miles

One even accused him of photographing youngsters to put the pictures on the internet.

Mr Crutchley, 39, who had taken pictures only of his own children, was so enraged that he found two policemen who confirmed he had done nothing wrong.

Yesterday he said: ‘What is the world coming to when anybody seen with a camera is assumed to be doing things that they should not?

‘This parental paranoia is getting completely out of hand. I was so shocked. One of the police officers told me that it was just the way society is these days. He agreed with me that it was madness.’

Father-of-three Mr Crutchley, a consultant for a rubber manufacturer from Walsall, West Midlands, was with his wife Tracey and their sons when the pleasant Sunday afternoon out turned sour.

He said: ‘The children wanted to go on an inflatable slide and I started taking photos of them having a good time. Moments later the woman running the slide told me to stop.

‘When I asked why, she told me I could not take pictures of other people’s children. I explained I was only interested in taking photos of my own children and pointed out that this was taking place in a public park.

‘I showed her the photos I had taken to prove my point. Then another woman joined in and said her child was also on the slide and did not want me taking pictures of the youngster.

All together now, smile: Gary and Tracey with Cory, left, and Miles

‘I repeated that the only people being photographed were my own children. She said I could be taking pictures of just any child to put on the internet and called me a pervert. We immediately left the show.’

Mrs Crutchley, 37, a teaching support assistant and qualified nursery nurse, said: ‘I was shocked by the reaction of those women.

'It is very sad when every man with a camera enjoying a Sunday afternoon out in the park with his children is automatically assumed to be a pervert.’

The slide was run by Tracey Dukes, 35, whose father Malcolm Gwinnett has an inflatables hire company.

Mr Gwinnett, 58, a LibDem councillor in Wolverhampton, said: ‘Our policy is to ask people taking photos whether they have children on the slide. If they do, then that is fine.

‘But on this occasion another customer took exception to what the man was doing and an argument developed between those two people that continued without any further involvement from staff on the slide.’

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/

A ‘vulnerable’ man cut off his own head with a chainsaw after being ordered to move out of his home to make way for developers, police believe.

David Phyall’s severed head was found beside the power tool inside his housing association flat shortly after receiving his eviction notice.

Detectives were today investigating the possibility that the 58-year-old killed himself rather than leave his home of eight years.

Grisly: David Phyall's body and severed head were found in his flat, above

He was the last resident living on an estate earmarked for demolition. All 71 surrounding flats were empty.

Paramedics and police made the gruesome find after receiving a 999 call.

An inquest is now being carried out into the exact cause of death and what had happened to Mr Phyall, described as ‘vulnerable’, beforehand.

It is understood police are not treating his death as suspicious.

Mr Phyall had lived in his flat at Bishopstoke in Eastleigh, Eastley, Hants, since 2000 and was fighting to stay there despite plans to bulldoze the entire area and rebuild it.

Many flats had already been boarded up.

Mr Phyall rented the property from Atlantic Housing Ltd.

He had been unhappy since the plans to level the flats and rebuild them were passed in 2006.

It is thought that he may have even been served with an eviction notice issued through the courts shortly before his death.

An inquest opened and adjourned by deputy central Hampshire coroner Simon Burge.

It listed the possible cause of death of Mr Phyall as ‘complete transaction of the neck’ and ‘chainsaw wound to the neck.’

An ambulance service spokesman said: ‘We were called to an address in Bishopstoke to reports to a “concerns for welfare.”

‘A rapid response vehicle attended and a search found a patient had sustained serious injuries.’

Ron Turtle, chairman of the Stoke Residents’ Association, said there was one tenant left whom he believed to be a disabled man who rented a ground-floor flat from Atlantic Housing.

He said: ‘They had offered him several places that were similar but he just didn’t want to move. In the end they had to go to court.’

Lib Dem Bishopstoke Parish Council chairman Anne Winstanley said: ‘The last I heard they were still negotiating with him to try to provide what he required to move into as an alternative.

‘It sounds very tragic for whatever the reason he met his death.’

Councillor Winstanley added that Bodmin Road had become a target for vandalism and nuisance behaviour in recent months.

The flats are thought to have been built in the 1960s but Atlantic Housing had revealed it would cost them more to repair than rebuild.

Southampton building firm Drew Smith were awarded a 7.8m pounds contract to design and build 54 replacement flats and 24 houses.

Three of the flats at Bodmin Road had been purchased by tenants under the right to buy but were repurchased by Atlantic Housing to enable the redevelopment to take place.

Atlantic Housing was unavailable for comment.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk

Octopuses have an amazing ability to squeeze through tiny crevices, cracks and holes. My fall BIOS independent studies student, Raymond Deckel is investigating just how small a hole Octopus macropus can fit through as well as how long it takes them to squeeze through different sizes of holes. CAABS intern Rowena Day, NSF-REU intern Jared Kibele as well as teaching assistant Abel Valdivia help wrangle the 232 g octopus, Ray times it’s escape through a 1 inch hole while I shot video clips for later analysis. Location: Whalebone Bay, St. George’s, Bermuda. Dr. James B. Wood - BIOS The Cephalopod Page

http://video.google.com/

lanpartyguide.com — Some fans have put together a hi-res texture pack, and a cel-shade pack for Zelda Ocarina of Time. This website made a nice mouse-over demo to compare the original, hi-res and cel-shade textures.

See more funny videos at Funny or Die

Halo Kid- The New Star Wars Kid? - Watch more free videos

Awesome image of a foggy Dubai morning taken from the Burj Dubai Tower.

I have to admit that I've done this before, but minus the cell and all the traffic.


Crazy Biker On Cellphone Lying Down - Watch more free videos

Cupertino, California (Agencies). In a surprising move that is set to stun consumers all over the world, Apple has cancelled all orders for the iPhone 3G today. People who already bought the phones will get them replaced by Apple's new wonderproduct, the iBrick 3G. "We think it's the best thing we can do for our customers worldwide," Apple CEO Steve Jobs declared in a conference call with analysts, "I mean, they won't really notice the difference after trying to activate their iPhone 3G for the billionth time, would they? WOULD THEY?"

Apple and bass fishing expert Gene Munster agreed with Jobs, saying that following the absolutely disaster of the iPhone 3G activation, this move makes complete sense. "In fact, it's absolutely brilliant," he added, "think about it. They switch the iPhone 3G for iBrick 3G, which my infallible sources tell me that it doesn't require any activation, and they end up with exactly the same functionality!" While asked about what functionality was that, Munster mumbled something about Apple's stock price skyrocketing to $651 per share by year's end before leaving in his Munstermobile.

"I'm sure some of our great customers won't get it, but really, even if it's not compatible with our stunning iPhone 3G videoconferencing kit, this product will destroy windows," VP for Worldwide Marketing and Cuddly Guy at Large Phil Schiller said during the conference call. "Get it? Brick? Windows? No? Sheeesh... come on, that was a good one!" he added, laughing out loud while his Keynote presentation showed a big "LOLZ."

According to sources, while Phil was closing the conference call, some analysts heard Steve Jobs shouting on the distance: "Some people are going to get so fired. Oh yes. OH YES! Phil? PHIL? Where's my surgeon kit?"

(Yes, in case you are seriously moronic, this is not real. It's just that I'm pissed off: I'm here in Madrid, trying to activate three iPhone 3G that my dad and my brother have managed to score today. This is the 1,254 times (combined) that we have tried to activate it since we got them about six hours ago, and still no result, even leaving our iPhone connected. Update: One has been activated.)

Apparently, this eBay business is huge. But not nearly as huge as the ripping-people-off-on-eBay business. Yes, misleading pictures, tricky language and exorbitant shipping sums have screwed people out of money time and time again.

We asked you to take a stab at photoshopping a vision of eBay where everyone had to tell the truth, even eBay. The winner of this week's cash prize is below, but first the runners up:

#11.

by Quagmar

#10.

by Chaunticleer

#9.

by Mauso

#8.

by meanelliot

#7.

by damnluckydog

#6.

by Pwalex

#5.

by Mauso

#4.

by brahman

#3.

by Free_Sample

#2.

by brahman

And the winner is...

by Mauso

Congratulations, Mauso. You win money.

http://www.cracked.com/