News for 04/03/2008

It seems like it’s been forever, and I’ve got a huge backlog of stuff, so… LET’S DO THE NEWS!

Singer Bobby Brown is writing a tell-all book… in which he claims that it was Whitney that drove him to do drugs (and not the other way around, as many of us have assumed). Naomi Campbell done got herself arrested again and New Kids On The Block are getting back together. The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away, I guess.

In case you haven’t heard, there’s a nationwide recall of cantaloupe sold by Dole and Chiquita , so if you see any in your local store, please don’t buy any!

Researchers at Harvard University have discovered bacteria in the ground that not only aren’t affected by antibiotics… they actually eat them! This explains why scientists have generally not found high levels of antibiotics in soil samples, even in fields spread with manure from cows treated with antibiotics. The really scary thing about all this is that many of the bacteria wouldn’t die until they were given 50 to 100 times the amount of bacteria that would kill a human. Although these bacteria are so far harmless to humans, let’s hope that these traits don’t cross over to other types of bacteria any time soon.

In travel news, the Westin Casuarina Hotel & Spa in Las Vegas has started charging convention attendees the fee their organization would have paid to host the event. Let me explain: an Austin, Texas-based group called “The Coaching Center” wanted to have a convention in Las Vegas. The Westin charged them a $50,000 fee to hold the convention, but when The Coaching Center didn’t pay its bill, the Westin started adding $600 to $1200 to each attendee’s bill. Classy, Westin! And you’ve probably heard about the disaster that is the new “T5” terminal at London’s Heathrow Airport. The $8 billion expansion was supposed to be “state of the art”, but has been a nightmare for travelers. The high-tech luggage system has broken down multiple times, causing British Airways (BA) to cancel hundreds of flights. The luggage situation is so dire, in fact, that BA is shipping 28,000 pieces of luggage to Italy, where they’ll be sorted by hand. The whole fiasco has cost BA £16 million so far, although Deutsche Bank estimates it’ll cost BA £150 million when all’s said and done.

Don’t get all smug at BA’s misfortunes, though. By now you’ve probably heard about the poor woman in Lubbock, Texas who was forced to remove her nipple rings by TSA agents. In reading some of the comments by people online, I was struck by how many people have no idea how body piercings work. Yes, most body piercings are removable, but body piercings aren’t meant to be removed once they’ve in. In most cases, body piercings aren’t like an ear ring that can easily be popped in and out. Earrings are holes made in cartilage that may never close up, even if the wearer goes months without putting a ring in their ear. Body piercings, on the other hard, are usually through skin, which may start to close up in minutes. Nipple piercings are particularly problematic; I once knew a girl that took her nipple rings out for some reason, and she found that the holes had already partially healed within a few hours. She had to go back to the tattoo parlor and get the piercing redone, which she said was unbelievably painful. As is happened, the poor girl in Lubbock had to ask the TSA agents for some pliers to get the ring out, and some jerk-ass male agents sat around and snickered at her whilst she took the ring out. This is close to torture, folks. Seriously. Imagine that your big toe set off the metal detector at your local airport, and a TSA agent asked you to pull your toenail off so he\she could examine you in detail. OK, removing a nipple ring isn’t quite that painful, but it’s not far off. When will the U.S. government stop this insane and pointless “security theatre” and let people get back to living their lives?

In case you don’t have enough to worry about, one of the newest scams out there combines identify theft with mortgage fraud to make… house stealing! As The Consumerist summarizes it, “thieves find house, figure out who owns it, assume their identity, forge signatures on the paperwork, get the deed transferred over to themselves, and then quickly sell it and run off”. Great! Thankfully, the FBI says that this isn’t common… yet.

Some jerk-ass hackers broke into the Epilepsy Foundation’s website and filled it with flashing GIFs and links to pages filled with bright, flashing lights and color patterns (around 3% of people with epilepsy can have  seizures based on visual simulation… like flashing lights and colors).  Humanity, it seems, has sunk to a new low.

And lastly, do you remember getting those small “sample boxes” of cereal in the mail? The site Photoshop Disasters has this great picture of a box of General Mill’s “Curves” cereal. Curves is apparently aimed at women on diets, as the box has a picture of a woman leaping (for joy, I assume). Only the woman has a black face and white stomach. Photoshop disaster, indeed!

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.