Ouch!

Yep – this is real:

Neck Stab

The woman, 22 year-old Julia Popova, was stabbed during a mugging in the Russian capital of Moscow. Amazingly, the knife missed her spinal cord and any major arteries. Popova walked home without even knowing anything was wrong… until her parents saw the knife sticking in her neck! It’s thought that Popova spent ten days in the hospital and made a full recovery.

The TOTALLY Random Stuff post

– A 15-year-old girl from the African nation of Lesotho who did not have a functioning vagina nevertheless became pregnant after having oral sex. Yeah, it’s complicated. Apparently she performed oral sex on someone and was shortly thereafter stabbed in a bar fight. The knife pieced her stomach in two places, and doctors surmise that the sperm spilled into her guts and somehow made its way to her fallopian tubes.

– A 24 year-old British woman was carded when trying to buy a slice of quiche from a Tesco grocery store. The cashier claimed that the “ID check” was triggered by the computerized cash register; the chain claims that the quiche was never on their “restricted items” list.  So – stupid and\or angry cashier, or computer glitch at the home office? You decide.

– Speaking of British stupidity, the Brown government now wants to ban “logos, images and graphics” from cigarette packs, create “Smoke Free Communities” where people would be banned from smoking in their own cars and homes, and have the Thought Police helpful government ministers chat about the “dangers” of secondhand smoke with parents who smoke.

– Is stupidity generic? Australia has not only upheld its ban on cartoon child porn, but the government of South Australia also attempted to ban anonymous political speech on the Internet. A law would have required anyone posting political content during an election season to include their real name and address, or face a fine of up to AUS$1250. Most frightening? The law would only apply to bloggers and commenters, and not to “online journals” (i.e. the websites of “real” magazines and newspapers). When Internet users revolted, the government backed down. The funniest thing about this story? That South Australia’s Attorney General, Michael Atkinson, went on the radio and confidently declared that an Internet poster named “Aaron Fornarino of West Croydon” was a fictitious person made up by an opposition party. A couple of days after Atkinson’s declaration, Aaron Fornarino was found to be a genuine human being… who lives 500 meters (1640 feet) from Atkinson’s office.

– Fans of the canceled show Reaper might want to check out this article, in which the show’s creators talk about how the show would have ended.

– A guy is in the frozen foods aisle of his local grocery store. He spots a Healthy Choice frozen dinner, which has a promotional offer giving 1000 frequent flier miles for every ten Healthy Choice UPC codes collected. The frozen dinner is $2, so the deal isn’t that great… but a few aisles over he spots some Healthy Choice soup for 90¢ a can. He fills his cart with cans of soup. He then visits a discount store looking for more cans of soup. There, he finds Healthy Choice pudding cups for only 25¢ each. The man buys every pudding cup he can find at all ten stores in his area. He even has a store manager order two pallets of pudding for him. Soon, he was 12,150 pudding cups. The man enlists a food bank and the Salvation Army to help him open the pudding cups for their UPC codes. He mails all the UPC codes to Healthy Choice. He soon begins receiving envelope after envelope of frequent filer coupons. The man eventually ends up with 1,253,000 frequent filer miles. The man gets lifetime Gold Status on American Airlines, and gets enough frequent flier miles for “31 round-trip coach tickets to Europe, or 42 tickets to Hawaii, or 21 tickets to Australia, or 50 tickets anywhere in the US”. The man paid $3,150 for the pudding, but got an $815 tax write-off for donating it to the food bank. The bottom line: each ticket to Europe set him back $75. And it’s all true.

Abuse, detailed

The funny thing about The Episcopal Church is that the more “inclusive” it becomes, the more orthodox Anglicans are literally kicked out of the church.

Well, the American Anglican Council has tracked all of the abuses by the current leadership of TEC and condensed them down into one easily-readable paper. You can read their press release about the paper here and the paper itself here (PDF).

The paper is very well done, and it clearly and concisely explains the pain that orthodox Anglicans are feeling under the “reign of terror” of the current TEC “leadership”.

If you’re new to this whole “Episcopal Church tearing itself apart” thing, or if you’ve heard about it but don’t know much in the way of detail, then this paper is an excellent resource for getting caught up.

Get well soon, Phil!

Phil Harris, one of my favorite captains on the show Deadliest Catch, has suffered a massive stroke and is now in a coma.

Harris had just brought his ship, the Cornelia Marie, in to port to offload a catch when the stroke occurred. He was flown to a hospital in Anchorage, where doctors worked on him for 12 hours before putting him into a coma in hopes of reducing brain swelling.

You might remember Phil as the captain who had a blood clot in his lung in a previous season of Deadliest Catch. There’s no word at this time as to whether the blood clots and the stroke are directly related.

Here’s hoping you get better soon, Phil!

Quote of the Day

“It’s completely different – they’re manufactured people now… like ice cream. Every now and then somebody comes out and I really like them – I really like this Lady Gaga.”

– Ozzy Osbourne, on the state of the music industry