Thursday’s News Dump

– Hummel Figurines used to be worth a fair amount of money, oftentimes selling for $350 (or more) on eBay. Although there are still a few highly collectible figures selling in the thousands of dollars, most Hummel figurines are lucky to fetch $50 on eBay… and that’s on a good day. Why? Because the people who collected the things are dying off.

– Bradley Cooper is having a sex change. No, not that Bradley Cooper.

– Some idiots in Chattanooga stole some computers from a local school, then took them to Best Buy to have Geek Squad reset the passwords. When the geeks noticed that the domain name was the same as the school name, they called the cops, and the thieves were arrested.

– Some people seem to think that America has a monopoly on stupid. Not so. In a recent study, 26% of British children under sixteen thought bacon came from sheep, 29% thought that oats grew on trees, and 17% of all respondents (adults and children) thought that the main ingredient of bread was eggs. Read all about it here.

– Jessica Simpson likes to keep it classy by farting during business meetings. Nice.

– Wanna know why tech support people are always in a bad mood? Read this article at cracked.com; although it’s a humor site, there’s a lot of awful truth in what they guy says.

– Some Holiday Inns in the UK are offering a “pre-warming” service in which someone in “footie” pajamas will get in your bed and stay in it until the temperature reaches 68F.

– Lastly… the current estimated budget deficit for the United States government is $1.35 trillion dollars. Ever wonder how much that really is? Well, Alex Rodriguez is the highest paid player in baseball, and he gets $33 million a year. $1.35 trillion dollars could pay the same salary to 40,000 people for a year. If a dollar were a mile long, $1.35 trillion could circle the earth 54 million times. Heck, the earth has only been around 4.5 billion years; 1.35 trillion years is 300 earth life times. The Washington Monument is 555 feet tall; stacked end to end, it would take 2.4 billion copies of the monument to equal 1.35 trillion feet, which is significantly more than double the distance from the earth to the sun.