Sex toys of the deep

Deep-sea researchers claim to have discovered a treasure trove of sex toys, perhaps left behind by citizens of the lost city of Atlantis. Or maybe they just fell overboard from a Kennedy family yacht. We attempt to identify and catalog them here.

The Spade

"The Spade" is believed to have been intended for the beginner in sexual self-gratification. This device is "reversible" in that either end could be employed, depending on the experience level of the user, or the amount of stimulation desired.

The Day Tripper

"The Day Tripper" is thought to be a "fire and forget" type of self-gratification device. We believe the wing-like protuberances hold the device in place and the motion of the wearer throughout the day takes care of the rest.

His And Hers

"The His And Hers" is clearly intended for both men and women to enjoy (but probably not at the same time, unfortunately).

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

"Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" is apparently meant for only the most experienced user. Another reversible device, the user can choose which end to employ depending on the level of pleasure - or pain - desired. It can also be enjoyed (or endured, depending on the rock/paper/scissors outcome) by two at the same time.

OK, maybe I just made all that stuff up.

Biden creating or saving lots of auto body repair jobs

A brief exchange on Twitter today with @VRWCTexan revealed that it may have been dangerous to hunt with Dick Cheney, but if Joe Biden ever invites you on a road trip, you might consider politely declining.

November 11:
Two Secret Service vehicles used by Vice President Joe Biden allegedly struck and killed a pedestrian at an intersection on Washington, DC's Suitland Parkway in the early morning hours of Wednesday, news reports say.

November 16:
A sheriff's deputy was taken to an Albuquerque hospital after being involved in an accident while working the motorcade for Vice President Joe Biden, who spoke at a campaign fundraiser to benefit two New Mexico Democrats.

November 17:
A car responsible for clearing a path for Vice President Biden’s motorcade was involved in a West Side collision that sent three people to the hospital today, sources said.

How many more, Joe? How many more?

Welcome to All Nippon Airways. Please pee before boarding

All Nippon Airways has hit upon yet another way to cut down on weight, reduce carbon emissions and annoy the shit out of their passengers.

A Japanese airline has started asking passengers to go to the toilet before boarding in a bid to reduce carbon emissions.

All Nippon Airways (ANA) claims that empty bladders mean lighter passengers, a lighter aircraft and thus lower fuel use.

Airline staff will be present at boarding gates in terminals to ask passengers waiting to fly to relieve themselves before boarding, The Independent reported.

Here's something you can take to the bank: If a company asks its customers or employees to do something for the sake of the environment, you can bet your first-born child that the environment is the last thing on their minds.

How many times have you stayed at a hotel where there's a card in the bathroom inviting you to hang your towel up if you wish to reuse it? There's always some environmentally conscious message on the card along with an environmentally inspiring nature picture. The impact to the environment of washing those towels is negligible, but the money saved by washing a few thousand less towels a day system-wide is considerable.

What ANA is doing here is more of the same. An airplane relieved of 100 or so pounds of piss isn't going to consume a lot less fuel, but the lavatory servicing costs are sure going to be lower.

Hat tip to AB for e-mailing me this one.

Dude's gonna really enjoy prison life

There's got to be a less elaborate way for a latent homosexual to go about getting his rocks off.

An Arizona man faces criminal charges for allegedly posing as a fertility doctor so he could sexually molest men while pretending to give them physical examinations, MyFOXLa.com has reported.

Jeffrey Graybill, 40, advertised online, offering people up to $4,000 monthly for sperm donations to support stem cell research, police said.

Swine Flu stalking minor celebrities

Marilyn Manson: A bit more feverish than usual

It looks like H1N1, more popularly known as Swine Flu, might become better known for pushing minor celebrities back into the news than for killing people. Besides Colombia President Alvaro Uribe, swine flu has now claimed among its victims Marilyn Manson, Rachel Maddow, Rupert Grint, and Dr. Sanjay Gupta.

I guess having failed to kill people in large enough numbers, Swine Flu needed to do something to grab some headlines. What an attention whore.

Washington money

Each Labor Day, the Washington Post runs a feature listing salaries for various jobs in and around Washington, DC. A few interesting ones:

Marion Barry, City Councilman, Washington, D.C.: $125,583
$125K a year will buy a lot of crack!

Stephen Dumaine, Tuba Player, National Symphony Orchestra, Washington, D.C.: $125,000
That salary makes getting your ass kicked in high school worth it, I guess.

Gustavo Carpio, Shoe Shiner, Ashburn, VA: $32,000
32 grand a year for shining shoes?

Jimmy McKennelly, Panhandler, Washington, D.C.: $20 a day
$7,300 a year may not sound like much, but he's got low overhead.

Alexander Ovechkin, Hockey Player, Washington Capitals: $9 million
But his dental expenses consume half of it.

Josh Wicks, Goalkeeper, D.C. United (Soccer), Washington, D.C.: $42,000
Should've taken up hockey instead.

Lonnie Wade Jr., Dead Animal Operator, Department of Public Works, Washington, D.C.: $38,000
I guess just figuring out how to operate a dead animal is worth $38 grand to the city.

Serial rabbit murderer follow-up

Remember this item from last summer about a serial rabbit murdered in the Dortmund, Germany area? This morning while looking for something else I happened upon this article in Germany's edition of The Local. It seems they've caught the fiend:

A suspect in a series of grisly rabbit killings has been arrested from a neglected apartment full of animals – both dead and alive, Dortmund police reported on Friday.

Since early 2008, residents in the area have reported a large number of mysterious and disturbing rabbit killings. But investigators didn’t have any solid evidence until Friday morning at 2 am, when they found what they called their “first concrete lead.”

They arrested a 26-year-old suspect who was standing in front of his home with two animal transport boxes full of 11 guinea pigs.

That should help curb the price of hassenpfeffer a bit.

That sucks

Anyone who's worked in a USAF aircraft maintenance shop knows about "FOD walks" along runways and flightlines, in which personnel fan out and walk along areas traveled by aircraft to search for loose foreign objects which might get sucked into an engine resulting in foreign object damage, or FOD.

I'm thinking this bit of FOD would have been hard to miss.

Beginning of time looks depressingly like 8-bit graphics

Yeah, crappy 8-bit graphics seem like something from the distant past now, but I had no idea how distant.

A newly found primordial blob may represent the most massive object ever discovered in the early universe, researchers announced today.

The gas cloud, spotted from 12.9 billion light-years away, could signal the earliest stages of galaxy formation back when the universe was just 800 million years old.

Actor assaults cameraman; thought he was a zombie

Actor Woody Harrelson assaulted a paparazzi cameraman at New York's LaGuardia airport in an apparent case of mistaken identity. It seems he thought the photographer was a zombie.

"I wrapped a movie called 'Zombieland,' in which I was constantly under assault by zombies, then flew to New York, still very much in character," Harrelson said in a statement issued Friday by his publicist.

"With my daughter at the airport I was startled by a paparazzo, who I quite understandably mistook for a zombie," he said.

Yes, quite understandable. The way those guys pursue celebrity pictures is creepily similar to the way a zombie pursues brains.

Banana-mania

Odd things in banana shipments seems to be a theme around here today. In Germany, a grocery store worker discovered over 60 pounds of cocaine packed in a shipment of bananas she was unpacking.

The 26-year-old woman in the Bavarian town of Illertissen alerted police immediately after making the find on Wednesday. Officers confiscated the two bins, packed full of the drug in yellow bags just below a thin layer of fruit.

The boxes had been part of a three-pallet fruit delivery that was distributed between several different supermarket chains in the states of Baden-Württemberg and Bavaria. The shipment originated in Colombia and went through Antwerp, Belgium.

"Some dealers must have picked up the wrong boxes," Bavarian police spokesperson Ludwig Waldinger told news agency AFP, adding that he’d love to get a look at their faces when the drug dealers tried to get their fix from the fruit snack.

Somewhere there's a very pissed-off drug dealer.

Deadly - yet fun! - Brazilian spider found in US

A Brazilian Wandering Spider, considered the most deadly for having caused the most human deaths from spider bite envenomation, was found in a shipment of bananas from Brazil - whoops, Honduras - at a Tulsa, Oklahoma Whole Foods store. An astute - and in retrospect, very lucky - employee captured the spider in a jar and turned it over to bug nerds who identified it. Oh yeah, the fun part:

Oddly, the Brazilian spider delivers more than a painful bite that sends most victims to the hospital. Researchers have found its venom also stimulates an hours-long erection in men.

[ ... ]

"The erection is a side effect that everybody who gets stung by this spider will experience along with the pain and discomfort," said study team member Romulo Leite of the Medical College of Georgia, presumably speaking only about male bite victims. "We're hoping eventually this will end up in the development of real drugs for the treatment of erectile dysfunction."

In a cruel twist of irony, however, women bitten by the spider end up with an hours-long headache.

OK, I might have made up that last part.

(Yes, Kris, I put up that picture just for you.)

Update: FOX News updated their article later in the day, and some other bug nerd disputes a couple of things, namely that the Brazilian Wandering Spider is the deadliest and that the spider in question was even one of them:

But a Tulsa Zoo official disputed the findings, saying his analysis through video and photos he'd seen led him to believe that it was a Huntsman spider — which is harmless to humans.

[ ... ]

In addition, Downer and Grantham disagreed with Childs' characterization of the danger of a Brazilian wandering spider.

Death from its bite is rare, and only victims with compromised immune systems, such as babies or older people, would be at risk, they said.

But according to Wikipedia:

The Brazilian wandering spiders appear in Guinness World Records 2007 as the world's most venomous spiders, and are considered to be responsible for the most human deaths due to envenomation from spider bites.

And the debate rages on.

Inmate placed in cell with convict he testified against meets predictable end

Prison officials at Oklahoma State Penitentiary moved an inmate into a cell housing another inmate he'd previously testified against, with predictable results.

An inmate was beaten and found dead Wednesday night just 15 minutes after being placed in a cell with a man he had testified against, a state prisons spokesman said.

Paul David Duran Jr., 23, had been in an altercation with another cellmate and then was placed in a cell with Jessie James Dalton, 32, at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary, state Department of Corrections spokesman Jerry Massie said. Only Dalton walked out alive.

With a name like that, he was born to be in prison.

Born to play the guitar

As someone struggling to learn guitar at an age later than most, I'm jealous.

A baby boy was born in California with six fingers on each hand and six toes on each foot, KTVU-TV in San Francisco reported.

Kamani Hubbard, the baby boy born to a couple in Daly City, has a condition called "polydactyly" — a genetic trait that causes the appearance of extra fingers and toes, according to the station.

Hand that kid a guitar as soon as he's old enough. Do you know how many times I've said to myself "Yeah, I could make that chord if I had another finger"?

Skip breakfast, get laid

A Japanese study suggests that kids who skip breakfast lose their virginity earlier. Well, duh, they have more time.

Japanese researchers studied 3,000 people and said that teens who skip breakfast lose their virginity earlier than those who start their days off with some food, Agence France-Presse reported Friday.

I guess this will lead to millions of kids with raging hormones rushing out the door each morning without eating in the hope that they won't have to wait quite so long for that first roll in the hay.

Blog fodder

I've been looking for something to post today that hadn't already been covered at length by my betters, but without much luck. Let's see...Supreme Court declines to hear stupid Obama birth certificate case? Done. Major MSM outlet goes Tango Uniform? Done. Khalid Sheik Mohammed and others want to "confess" at Gitmo? Done. Detroit bailout? Done, done and done. Even the Joe Satriani sues Coldplay for copyright infringement story...done, as well as the Boy George arrested after freaky gay sex story...done.

Just as I'd despaired of finding something newsworthy or just plain weird that hadn't already been done by the Big 3...manna from heaven.

Several UK internet providers have blocked access to a Wikipedia page about German heavy metal band Scorpions due to an album cover that features a nude prepubescent girl, news agency AP reported on Monday.

The site was placed on the Internet Watch Foundation’s list of forbidden websites last week, spokesperson Sarah Robertson told AP. Many of the country’s internet service providers use the foundation’s list to guide them in choosing which sites to block, she said. Internet users first tipped the Internet Watch Foundation off to the image, and the organization concluded that it could possibly be considered child pornography.

The 32-year-old cover of the “Virgin Killer” cover features a naked pre-teen girl, and was met with so much criticism when it was released in 1976 that the band re-released the album with a different cover in several countries. The new cover featured the five band members.

Here's the Wikipedia entry in question.

Now, if references to "nude", "naked", "pre-teen", "prepubescent" and "freaky gay sex" don't drive up my Google hit count, I give up.

Uh, dude...you gonna smoke that, or what?

Who says you can't take it with you?

An ancient Caucasian people, probably the Indo-European-speaking Yuezhi whose fair-haired mummies keep turning up in Xinjiang province, seem to have buried one of their shamans with a whopping 789 grams of high-potency pot 2,700 years ago.

That's about 28 ounces of killer green bud, worth perhaps $8,000 at today's street prices, and enough to keep Harold and Kumar happy for a couple of days.

No word on whether the tomb reeked of patchouli.

The supersonic hurricane neutralizer

Could stopping a hurricane before it hits landfall be this simple?

In a patent application, Leonov and colleagues say that they can put a spanner in the atmospheric works by flying supersonic jet aircraft in concentric circles around a hurricane's eye, the calm area around which the storm rotates.

The idea is that the sonic-boom shockwave would dramatically raise air pressure in the eye, disrupting the upward flow of warm air that drives the hurricane.

But how many planes would you need? Sonic booms spread out as they travel away from an aircraft, so even a small number of relatively small aircraft could do the job, say Leonov and colleagues.

"Two F-4 jet fighters flying at approximately Mach 1.5 are sufficient to suppress, mitigate and/or destroy a typical sized hurricane/typhoon," they claim in their application.

If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. But hey, who knows. It's not like the technology doesn't exist today to try it out, so it'd be interesting to see if this actually works.

Premature worm food

Possibly the worst thing I've read this week month year. OK, well after the news of Obama's election win.

Doctors in Arizona thought a Phoenix-area woman had a possible brain tumor, but it turned out there was something else penetrating her brain – a worm.

Far be it from me to copy the shtick of a certain blogger at Hot Air, but...dude.

Sigh of relief: Danish high court affirms right to beach nudity

A Danish Eastern High Court ruling has upheld a lower court's decision that nude sunbathing is to be permitted on all Danish public beaches. But such nudity must be kept at least 50 meters from private residences.

And no public sex.