posted 06-28-2008 01:50 PM                       

How can anyone be this clueless in this day and age? Oh that's right, these are DMV people...

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What the ...? N.C. offers new license plates
If you know what WTF means in text-speak, you’ll understand why

WNCN-TV
updated 12:45 p.m. PT, Fri., June. 27, 2008

RALEIGH, N.C. - Thanks to some text message-savvy grandchildren, North Carolina drivers whose license plates have the potentially offensive “WTF” letter combination can replace the tags for free.

The News & Observer of Raleigh reported Tuesday that the state Division of Motor Vehicles has notified nearly 10,000 holders of license plates with the letter combination. Officials learned last year that the common acronym stands for a vulgar phrase in e-mail and cell phone text messages.

But this week, the DMV officials got another surprise when they learned that the same letters appeared on the agency’s own Web site on a sample personalized plate.

“I can’t believe it,” DMV Commissioner Bill Gore said Monday when told about the online glitch. “Obviously, I didn’t know it was there.”

Officials are working to remove the sample plate.

The WTF-5505 used on the Web site’s sample plate was the first random letter combination available when the DMV switched from blue- to red-lettered plates, officials said. DMV spokeswoman Marge Howell received a sample plate WTF-5506 to use as a prop for news stories about the switch.

A 60-year-old technology teacher from Fayetteville complained about the plate last July after her teenage grandchildren clued her in.

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posted 06-30-2008 11:03 AM                       

quote: BBC News Online, 30 June 2008

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An exam board is to review its marking guidance after one of its top examiners gave marks for a script which contained only a two-word sexual expletive.

The Times reported that Assessment and Qualifications Alliance chief examiner Peter Buckroyd gave a pupil two marks out of 27 for an English GCSE paper. He is quoted as saying the candidate had demonstrated more skills than one "who doesn't write anything at all". AQA said this was not in line with its guidelines, which would be clarified.

The pupil is reported to have written "fuck off", and would have had another mark for adding an exclamation point.

Mr Buckroyd is quoted by the Times as saying: "It would be wicked to give it a zero because it does show some very basic skills we are looking for - like conveying some meaning and some spelling."

An AQA spokeswoman said examiners were instructed to contact the board's offices where they would be advised in accordance with the guidelines of the Joint Council for Qualifications, which represents exam boards. She said: "As a result, an obscenity should either be disregarded, or action will be taken against the candidate, depending on the seriousness of the case.

"The example cited was unique in the experience of the senior examiner concerned and was used in a pre-training session to emphasise the importance of adhering to the mark scheme: i.e. if a candidate makes any sort of response to a question then it must be at least given consideration to be awarded a mark.

"We do not condone the use of obscenities in scripts: in the light of this incident we will be reviewing our instructions to examiners which will include reiterating the procedure to be followed when encountering obscenities in scripts."

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posted 07-03-2008 07:48 AM                    

quote:

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It's not been a good year for the groins of baseball players. Before the season even started we saw Felix Pie miss time with a twisted testicle and, on Monday, a fastball found Jose Molina's jewels. Molina's okay and it would appear he got off easy. On the same night, Diamondbacks catcher Chris Snyder took a foul tip to the groin. He went on the 15-day disabled list yesterday with a fractured left testicle.

I know what you're thinking, one of the things anyway, how can you fracture something that isn't a bone? Fairly easily, it seems.

Each testicle is surrounded by the tunica albuginea, a tough, fibrous covering that often takes the hit of trauma to the gland. Like the shell of an egg, it can be easily "fractured" or shattered when confronted by a blunt or violent force.

Kaz Matsui's anal fissures never sounded so good. We'll take a brief pause at this time to allow our male readers to take a deep breath and thank the heavens that they aren't Chris Snyder this morning.

And we're back! Snyder will have surgery to repair the injured testicle today and is, shockingly, not expected to miss much time. The D-Backs expect to have him back after the All-Star Game. I expect to stop grimacing in pain at the thought sometime this afternoon.

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posted 07-06-2008 01:31 PM                    

quote:

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Control Room: "South Wales Police, what's your emergency?"

Caller: "It's not really. I just need to inform you that across the mountain there's a bright stationary object."

Control room: "Right."

Caller: "If you've got a couple of minutes perhaps you could find out what it is? It's been there at least half an hour and it's still there."

Control: "It's been there for half an hour. Right. Is it actually on the mountain or in the sky?"

Caller: "It's in the air."

Control: "I will send someone up there now to check it out."

Caller: "OK."

The mystery was soon solved, as the exchange between control and an officer at the scene, makes clear.

Control: "Alpha Zulu 20, this object in the sky, did anyone have a look at it?"

Officer: "Yes, it's the moon. Over."

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posted 07-15-2008 04:33 PM                       

quote: London Evening Standard, 14 July 2008

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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. 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.

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posted 07-15-2008 04:57 PM                 

quote: Gay Wired magazine

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While Forrest Gump isn’t one of my favorite films, the line “stupid is as stupid does” has always stuck with me. In fact, it came flying back to me quite recently when the following American Family Association foible came to light.
It seems that AFA, headquartered in Tupelo, Mississippi, has an automatic word filter on the stories it picks up and runs on its news site, OneNewsNow. When sprinter Tyson Gay qualified for the 2008 Olympics, AFA ran the story renaming the runner, Tyson Homosexual.

To quote—“Tyson Homosexual was a blur in blue, sprinting 100 meters faster than anyone ever has.”

How stupid is this? The AFA thinks the word gay gives us a positive spin. A spokesperson for the AFA said “We don’t object to the word ‘gay’ except when it refers to people who practice a homosexual lifestyle.” The AFA think the “G” word, as they put it, has “been co-opted by a particular group of people.”

They’ve also renamed professional basketball player Rudy Gay, Rudy Homosexual.

I’ve been reading the blogs about this and folks have come up with some doozies if we take the AFA’s linguistic stupidity to its logical conclusion.

Enola Homosexual dropped the atomic bomb on Japan.

A typhoon named homosexual caused all that damage in Thailand and eastern India in 1989

In Virginia, we now have Homosexual Mountain and Homosexual Farms, there’s a Homosexual Spring in Tennessee, Georgia, Michigan and West Virginia now have towns called Homosexual, South Dakota sports a Homosexualville, Texas has a Homosexual Hollow and well we all know that in Massachusetts’ the folks in Martha’s Vineyard have a Homosexual Head.

I really want to know how the AFA handles Christmas caroling. Do they don homosexual apparel? Do they change Beach Boys Christmas Day lyric to “And so many hearts are homosexual?” Does the AFA tell all of its Irish supporters that “When Irish hearts are happy all the world seems bright and homosexual?” Do they tell their Kentucky members that when they sing their official state song, “My Old Kentucky Home” they need to sing “Tis summer, the people are homosexual?”

More on next page...
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(continued)

Do they refer to the author as Homosexual Talese? Does the AFA tell its arthritic members to go out and buy Ben Homosexual?

I could go on. But there’s something more important lurking here. It’s the fact, plain and simple, that organizations like the American Family Association and Focus on the Family and the Family Research Council will stoop to any level to demonize us, to cast us as second class citizens, to characterize us as simply sex driven without any regard to who we are as people.

They don’t want to recognize that we’re doctors and lawyers, teachers and accountants; that we’re parents and partners; that we’re fire fighters and police officers; that we serve in the armed forces—albeit having to hide who we really are. We’re rich, middle class and poor. We’re workers and owners. We’re corporate execs and carpenters. We practice every religion and our skin color is just as diverse. We’re Democrats and yes, we’re even Republicans. We’re your neighbors and friends. We’re just human beings just like everyone else.

What defines us as different is who we love; who we wake up with every morning. That’s it. And, it’s that simple fact that we love as our life partners people of the same sex that gets the American Family Association so paranoid about portraying us in any kind of positive light that they change the word gay to homosexual.

What a waste of energy. So is AFA’s latest quixotic boycott. It seems McDonald’s is their newest target. Yes, according to the AFA, the golden arches are now rainbow tinged because the burger giant has become a corporate partner of the National Gay and Lesbian Chamber of Commerce. That simple act is defined by AFA as McDonald’s taking sides in “the culture wars” and actively supporting the “homosexual agenda.”

How about it just being a good business decision? We eat. Many of us have kids. Put the two facts together and McDonald’s as well as Burger King, who is also a NGLCC corporate partner, are going to get some of our business. Coors, Pepsi, Marriott, Citibank, Coldwell Banker and Xerox are also among the organization’s multitude of corporate partners.

The AFA can waste their time breathing life into Forrest’s immortal “stupid is as stupid does.” The rest of us will just do what we do best—live our lives and possibly have a Big Mac meal while we’re at it.

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posted 07-21-2008 11:38 AM                       

quote: Daily Telegraph, 21 July 2008

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By Chris Irvine
Last Updated: 9:36AM BST 21/07/2008

A designer has caused outrage with a set of knitting instructions which allow you to create woolly models of Adolf Hitler and some of the world's other most famous dictators.

Rachael Matthews, credited for starting a new celebrity knitting craze, calls the doll of the Nazi leader Knitler.

Her new book has designs for a number of dictators, including Saddam Hussein, Cambodia's Pol Pot, and Ugandan Idi Amin, who was portrayed by Forest Whitaker in The Last King of Scotland.

A spokesman for the Jewish Network said: "You would hope people would have more sense than to take a cuddly Hitler into work."

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posted 07-27-2008 08:46 AM                    

quote: arstechnica.com/

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In about two weeks, Redmond has managed to turn a marketing idea into something that may just shock you. Microsoft blogger Ina Fried is reporting that Microsoft managed to trick XP users in San Francisco into loving Vista simply by telling them a small fib. The company told these users that they were using a new version of Windows, codenamed "Mojave." When asked about their experience with using Mojave, over 90 percent said they were impressed with what they saw. Then Microsoft told them they had been using Vista all along.

The company hasn't figured out how it will use this to market Vista (the company has video footage of users exclaiming "wow!" and so on), but the Mojave project will likely help in Microsoft's plan to tell the "real Vista story." This is some real ammo here: these are XP lovers saying they love Vista, not just more Microsoft employees giving statements to sell the software giant's latest operating system.

Bill Veghte, Microsoft's senior vice president of Online Services & Windows Business Group and the man who recently outlined the Windows roadmap, strongly believes that Vista's negative opinion by many users is due to poor perceptions created by the media, from Apple's anti-Vista ads to many journalists spewing Vista hate because it brings in the hits. Mojave is a perfect example of this—to an extent. Microsoft has time and again admitted that Vista has its problems, but has also emphasized that the majority of problems have been fixed. What's your take on the Mojave story?

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posted 07-27-2008 05:02 PM                       

quote: Sunday Telegraph, 27 July 2008

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By Laura Clout
Last Updated: 8:30PM BST 27 Jul 2008

A man was airlifted to hospital after he blew up his garage attempting to make biodiesel.

The chemical explosion in Middleton Cheney, Northamptonshire, left the man with burns to his face, arms and torso.

Fire crews rescued the man using specialist breathing gear, after they were called to reports of a chemical fire just after 3pm on Saturday.

A spokesman for Oxfordshire County Council Fire and Rescue Service urged people to take "extreme caution" if attempting such chemical mixtures in their own home.

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posted 07-31-2008 03:44 PM                       

quote: BBC News Online, 31 July 2008

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A Kent car dealer who was sent flying when a van struck a barrier was shocked to discover the driver was the German ex-Formula 1 ace, Michael Schumacher. Martin Kingham, 39, said he was closing the security gate at his premises in Lydd on Sunday afternoon when a Fiat van struck the end of it.

The barrier hit his leg "sending him spinning" on to the bonnet of a car. Police called to the incident said they helped both men to swap details and no further action was needed. Mr Kingham was unhurt, while only minor damage was caused to Schumacher's van in the collision outside Millfield Motors, just before 1600 BST.

He recalled how the police officer called to the scene said: "That chap is claiming to be Michael Schumacher, and I said, 'You know what, he doesn't half look like him'. "Then the penny suddenly dropped. When I phoned my business partner later and told him that you'll never guess who I've been run over by, he wouldn't believe me.

"Obviously being a car salesman we do like a wind up but the difference with this story is that it is actually true. Michael's entourage turned up and he left."

A spokesman for the seven-time Formula 1 world champion confirmed the incident had taken place and that Schumacher had co-operated with police.

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WTF was Schumacher doing in a Fiat van in the arse end of Kent? IIRC there's an airport at Lydd which is used by millionaires' private jets quite a lot, but that still wouldn't explain the Fiat. A bit of a comedown from a Ferrari F1 car, to put it mildly!