Another Reason to Demonize Smoking Weed… The Munchies can land you in Jail

Burglars Tracked By Trail Of Candy Wrappers

(AP) PASADENA, Md. Doctors often warn of the health risks of eating junk food, but it seems the treats can be a problem for burglars, too.

Four teenagers broke into a gas station early Wednesday and left a trail of candy bar wrappers along the road as they left, said Cpl. Mark Shawkey, a spokesman for the Anne Arundel County Police Department. A police dog located the teens a quarter-mile away.

“Never heard of a K-9 having that extra help in completing a track,” Shawkey said.

Three boys and a girl, ages 15 and 16, were charged with burglary and theft. They were not named because of their ages.

Shawkey said the teens stole candy, chips and cigars from the BP station. Most of the junk food was found scattered around the road where they were apprehended.

Did anybody ask the goat how it felt?

Accused Says He Was Just Milking Goat

(AP) TACOMA, Wash. A man accused of having sex with a goat is scheduled to be arraigned on Friday on a animal cruelty charge. Charging papers say a witness saw 63-year-old Arthur Lawton having sex with a goat May 8th in a barn at Eatonville’s Pioneer Farm Museum where he worked.

Lawton said he was trying to milk the goat.

Lawton missed a scheduled arraignment on August 3rd but turned himself in last night to Pierce County sheriff’s deputies.

He’s the second person charged in the county since the Legislature made bestiality a crime in response to the fatal injury to a man having sex with a horse in Enumclaw.

A man accused of having sex with the family pit bull dog was acquitted in May.

Goat Arthur Lawton said he was trying to milk the goat.

This has been my job all week!

comps down

Today’s Insults –

I’ll never forget the first time we met – although, I’ll keep trying. – anonymous

You’re so dumb, your fingers and toes are numbered. – anon

Hello – tall, dark and obnoxious! – Mary G. from Tucson

Sorry About No Posts Yesterday… We Lost Another Dog to Snakebite.

snake

Our woodpile was subjected to a search and destroy mission. The troops in Fallujah would have been proud of us.

Due to privacy issues… The body count will be published at a later date.

Something About This Just Bugs Me… I Like Salt & Vinegar Chips

Potato Chip Flavoring Boosts Longevity Of Concrete

Science Daily  The ingredient that helps give “salt & vinegar” potato chips that tangy snap is the key to a new waterproof coating for protecting concrete from water damage, according to a study scheduled for the August 1 issue of ACS’ Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research.

Awni Al-Otoom and colleagues in Jordan point out that concrete’s unique properties have made it the world’s most widely used structural material.

Concrete, however, is so porous that water soaks in, corroding steel reinforcing bars and meshes that strengthen concrete roads and buildings and causing cracks as water expands and contracts during freeze-thaw cycles. Sealants are commercially available, but they have serious shortcomings, the study notes.

In the new report, researchers describe the use of sodium acetate as an inexpensive and environmentally friendly concrete sealant. One of sodium acetate’s many uses is in flavored potato chips.

In laboratory studies using freshly made concrete, the researchers showed that sodium acetate seeps into pores in concrete and then hardens and crystallizes upon exposure to water. The resultant swelling blocks entry of additional moisture, they said. Under dry conditions, the crystals shrink back to their original size and allow moisture to evaporate.

The net result is “a significant reduction in water permeability,” that “can be expected to increase the service life of the concrete,” the report said.

Article: “Crystallization Technology for Reducing Water Permeability into Concrete”

Baby DVDs, Videos May Hinder, Not Help, Infants’ Language Development

Science Daily  Despite marketing claims, parents who want to give their infants a boost in learning language probably should limit the amount of time they expose their children to DVDs and videos such as “Baby Einstein” and “Brainy Baby.”

Rather than helping babies, the over-use of such productions actually may slow down infants eight to 16 months of age when it comes to acquiring vocabulary, according to a new study by researchers at the University of Washington and Seattle Children’s Hospital Research Institute.

The scientists found that for every hour per day spent watching baby DVDs and videos, infants understood an average of six to eight fewer words than infants who did not watch them. Baby DVDs and videos had no positive or negative effect on the vocabularies on toddlers 17 to 24 months of age. The study was just published in the Journal of Pediatrics.

“The most important fact to come from this study is there is no clear evidence of a benefit coming from baby DVDs and videos and there is some suggestion of harm,” said Frederick Zimmerman, lead author of the study and a UW associate professor of health services. “The bottom line is the more a child watches baby DVDs and videos the bigger the effect. The amount of viewing does matter.”

READ MORE

How We as Humans Went From Poverty To Affluence… And It’s Consequences.

For thousands of years, most people on earth lived in abject poverty, first as hunters and gatherers, then as peasants or laborers. But with the Industrial Revolution, some societies traded this ancient poverty for amazing affluence.

Historians and economists have long struggled to understand how this transition occurred and why it took place only in some countries. A scholar who has spent the last 20 years scanning medieval English archives has now emerged with startling answers for both questions.

Gregory Clark, an economic historian at the University of California, Davis, believes that the Industrial Revolution — the surge in economic growth that occurred first in England around 1800 — occurred because of a change in the nature of the human population. The change was one in which people gradually developed the strange new behaviors required to make a modern economy work. The middle-class values of nonviolence, literacy, long working hours and a willingness to save emerged only recently in human history, Dr. Clark argues.

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Only 1 Post Today… Snake Bit Dog.

bearskin shave

A few cool signs

balls

no laptop toilet kid coffe dog

I wasn’t going to put anything negative up today…But…

White House High-Security Locks Broken: Bumped and Picked at DefCon

Medeco_m3_deadbolt A group of researchers has cracked the security features in what are supposed to be the world’s most secure locks — locks that are used at the White House, the Pentagon, embassies and other critical locations.They presented their complete findings for the first time at the DefCon hacker conference this weekend and showed how they could easily bump and pick the newest high-security M3 locks made by Medeco, a company that owns an estimated 70 percent of the lock market. In addition to bumping and picking Medeco’s M3 cylinder locks, they also succeeded only in the last few weeks to crack a Medeco M3 deadbolt lock — considered to be one of the highest security lock in the world. Tobias and his group showed Wired News how to open Medeco’s M3 deadbolt in less than a minute using nothing more than a modified $2 screwdriver and a wire shim. They asked that we not publish the details, however.

READ MORE

PostSecret

cpncrunch

PostSecret

Today’s Insults –

You’d be out of your depth in a parking lot puddle. -anon

You are an indescribably dissolute slattern and a vapid, chromosome deficient mental midget with the natural grace of a swamp rat. – unknown

Whose horrible image doth unfix my hair and make my seated heart knock at my ribs? – Shakespeare

Hear!! Hear!!… You Betcha!

bridge

I usually don’t agree with Charles… But he’s got it right here!

 Charles Krauthammer

Krauthammer ColumnsRSS Feeds RSS Feed Politics Headlines Opinion Index

Lit Up For Liftoff?

By Charles Krauthammer

Friday, August 3, 2007; Page A15

Someone’s gotta do it. No one’s gonna do it. So I’ll do it. Your honor, I rise in defense of drunken astronauts.

You’ve all heard the reports, delivered in scandalized tones on the evening news or as guaranteed punch lines for the late-night comics, that at least two astronauts had alcohol in their systems before flights. A stern and sober NASA has assured an anxious nation that this matter, uncovered by a NASA-commissioned study, will be thoroughly looked into and appropriately dealt with.

To which I say: Come off it. I know NASA has to get grim and do the responsible thing, but as counsel for the defense — the only counsel for the defense, as far as I can tell — I place before the jury the following considerations:

Have you ever been to the shuttle launch pad? Have you ever seen that beautiful and preposterous thing the astronauts ride? Imagine it’s you sitting on top of a 12-story winged tube bolted to a gigantic canister filled with 2 million liters of liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen. Then picture your own buddies — the “closeout crew” — who met you at the pad, fastened your emergency chute, strapped you into your launch seat, sealed the hatch and waved smiling to you through the window. Having left you lashed to what is the largest bomb on planet Earth, they then proceed 200 feet down the elevator and drive not one, not two, but three miles away to watch as the button is pressed that lights the candle that ignites the fuel that blows you into space.

Three miles! That’s how far they calculate they must go to be beyond the radius of incineration should anything go awry on the launch pad on which, I remind you, these insanely brave people are sitting. Would you not want to be a bit soused? Would you be all aflutter if you discovered that a couple of astronauts — out of dozens — were mildly so? I dare say that if the standards of today’s fussy flight surgeons had been applied to pilots showing up for morning duty in the Battle of Britain, the signs in Piccadilly would today be in German.

Cut these cowboys some slack. These are not wobbly Northwest Airlines pilots trying to get off the runway and steer through clouds and densely occupied airspace. An ascending space shuttle, I assure you, encounters very little traffic. And for much of liftoff, the astronaut is little more than spam in a can — not pilot but guinea pig. With opposable thumbs, to be sure, yet with only one specific task: to come out alive.

And by the time the astronauts get to the part of the journey that requires delicate and skillful maneuvering — docking with the international space station, outdoor plumbing repairs in zero-G — they will long ago have peed the demon rum into their recycling units.

Okay?

The most dismaying part of this brouhaha is not the tipsy Captain Kirk or two but the fact that space makes the news today only as mini-scandal or farce. It all started out as a great romance in the 1960s, yet by the 1970s — indeed, the morning after the 1969 moon landing — romance had turned to boredom.

When the Apollo 13 astronauts gave their live broadcast from space, not a single network carried it. No interest. Until, that is, the explosion that nearly killed them, at which point the world tuned in with rapt and morbid attention.

Well, we are now in stage three of our space odyssey: mockery and amusement. The last big space story was the crazed lady astronaut on her diapered drive to a fatal-attraction rendezvous.

It’s hard to entirely blame this state of affairs on a fickle public. Blame also belongs to the idiot politicians who decided 30 years ago to abandon the moon and send us on a pointless and endless journey into low Earth orbit. President Bush has sensibly called an end to this nonsense and committed us to going back to the moon and, ultimately, to Mars. If his successors don’t screw it up, within 10 years NASA will have us back to where we belong — on other worlds.

At which point, we’ll remember why we did this in the first place. And when we once again thrill at seeing humans on the moon — this time, making it their home — we won’t much care whether the extra bounce in their gait is the effect of the one-sixth gravity or a touch of moonshine.

letters@charleskrauthammer.com

TGIF!!!

play naked

This is how I feel today.

fat cat

Not that I’m a flasher… But I know how this guy feels!

flasher

Hmmmm….

Here are the first three verses of Genesis:

1 In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

2 And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.

3 And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.

Pick any word in the first verse, count its letters, and move ahead by the corresponding number of words. For example, if you start at beginning, you’d count 9 letters and move ahead 9 words, landing on the in the second verse. Count that word’s letters and continue in this manner until you’ve entered the third verse.

You’ll always arrive at God.

(Discovered by Martin Gardner.)

Light Posts Today

#1 Son has car trouble… Flood Related?.. He won’t say.http://www.richard-seaman.com/USA/States/NewJersey/SouthBoundbrook/FloodOf99/FloodedCars/Car.jpg

bananas

Today’s Insults

You’re just another Internet-addicted idiot suffering from diarrhea of the mouth and constipation of the mind. - unknown

Hang, beg, starve, die in the streets. – Shakespeare

Is thy name Mouldy? – Shakespeare

Some cause happiness wherever they go; others whenever they go.– Oscar WildeÂÂ