Category: News

It’s official: Conservative candidate Boris Johnson has defeated “Red Ken” Livingston to become London’s first Tory mayor. Johnson’s win caps off an excellent election day for the Tories… and a bloodbath for Gordon Brown’s Labour Party. Labour lost an incredible 331 seats on local councils, 256 of which were picked up by the Tories.

This is devastating news for Brown, since local elections are much more closely intertwined with national politics in the UK. In fact, this could be the beginning of the end for Labour’s current 11-year reign. If trends continue the way they’re going, the Conservatives will be back in power at Number 10 in the next two years.

Perhaps the most amazing thing about the mayoral race is that Boris Johnson won the seat for the Tories. Johnson almost always appears aloof and disheveled, with his tie askew and his hair looking like he just got out of bed. Two years ago, the idea of “Mayor Boris” would have sent most any Londoner into fits of laughter… but not now.

THREE CHEERS FOR THE TORIES!
HIP HIP.. HOORAY! HIP HIP… HOORAY! HIP HIP… HOORAY!

Read more about it:

The Evening Standard’s article about Johnson’s Win
An op-ed piece called “Now the writing really is on the wall for Labour”
The BBC’s 2008 elections page
MSNBC’s lame UK Election Coverage page
BBC political commentator Nick Robinson’s Newslog

As if having awful doughnuts and Rachael Ray as your spokesperson wasn’t bad enough, Dunkin’ Donuts is now on my “shit list” for muscling out smaller franchisees as well.

It seems that the company wants to expand from their current 5,505 locations to over 15,000 stores in the next few years. Why? The company wants to take on Starbucks. Just as there seems to be a Starbucks on every corner, so Dunkin’ wants their stores on every corner too.

To meet their goal of tripling the number of Dunkin’ locations in the US, the company needs major franchisees, the kind of people that can afford to open a dozen Dunkin’ Donut stores at once. The only problem with the company’s plan is that there are existing franchisees that can’t do this – in many areas, “Mom and Pop” franchisees own 2 or 3 Dunkin’ stores, yet have exclusive rights to those geographic locations.

So, for example, let’s say that Lisa and I own the franchise rights to Dunkin’ Donuts in the metro Charlotte area. We’re a small company, only able to run 2 or 3 stores at once. Dunkin’ just can’t come in and open a bunch of new stores in the Charlotte area – that would violate the franchise contact that Lisa and I signed with the company. But Dunkin’ is itching to sell our rights to Charlotte Mega Donut Corp, who plan to open 100 new Dunkin’ stores as soon as we’re out of the picture. So how does Dunkin’ get us out of the picture?

By suing us, of course! Dunkin’ has apparently sued 154 franchisees in the US since 2006. Compare that to McDonalds (which has sued 5 franchisees) and Subway (which has sued only 12 franchisees in the same time period, even though they have over 21,000 US locations to Dunkin’s 5500!).

Screw you, Dunkin’ Donuts. Krispy Kreme for life, yo!

Albert Hofmann, the Swiss chemist that discovered the hallucinogenic properties of LSD, died at his home in Basel on Tuesday. He was 102.

Hofmann didn’t start out looking for a way to alter his consciousness. He was researching “medically useful ergot alkaloid derivatives” (ergot is a fungus that infects grains; some think that the Salem Witch Trials were caused, in part, by an ergot infection of the colonists’ grain stores). When conducting one experiment in particular, he accidentally spilled a tiny amount of the chemical lysergic acid diethylamide on his hand. He reported that he “became dizzy and was forced to stop work”. He then went home and was “affected by a ‘remarkable restlessness, combined with a slight dizziness’. He got into bed and “sank into a not unpleasant ‘intoxicated like condition’ which was characterized by an extremely stimulated imagination”. He stated that he was in “a dreamlike state, and with his eyes closed he could see uninterrupted streams of ‘fantastic pictures, extraordinary shapes with intense, kaleidoscopic play of colors’. The condition lasted about two hours after which it faded away.”

Hofmann believed that LSD was useful in analysis of how the mind works, and hoped that it could be used to recognize and treat illnesses like schizophrenia. Over the years, he defended his “wonder drug” and “problem child” after it was banned in the 1960s.

RIP, Albert!

From today’s Page Six:

April 29, 2008 — WHICHEVER lucky guy ends up marrying Kristen Bell, the luscious blonde from “Forgetting Sarah Marshall,” he’s in for a treat after the ceremony. Bell tells next month’s Vegas magazine she’s kept her Catholic high school uniform for the past decade with a grand purpose. “I tucked that away when I was 18,” she says. “I’m going to wear it on my wedding night.” Maybe Dax Shepard, who she’s rumored to be dating, should take note.

Thanks, Kristen Bell! You owe me a new keyboard!

Yes, friends, one of our favorite Bittorrent trackers – Demonoid – is back!

Yaaaaaaaaaaaa!

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!

When you’ve got nothing else to post… post another beautiful picture of Amy Winehouse:

Winehouse is suffering from a bacterial infection called impetigo. The disease, which is normally found in grade school children, is “usually caused by the same streptococcus strain that causes strep throat, Streptococcus pyogenes“. Interestingly, the disease is spread by either “direct contact” or by “nasal carriers”. So, ummmm, you could get it by sharing a straw with an infected cokehead. Would Amy do that? Naaaaaaaaa!

Many computer users (including yours truly) have whined about the crappy performance of Windows Vista. Many (again including yours truly) have wondered aloud what Vista’s successor will be like, and if it’ll be as awful as Windows Vista. Well guess what? The successor to Vista just arrived, and it’s called Windows Server 2008. Apparently the folks over at informationweek.com have put Server 2008 through its paces and found that, after some tweaking to make Server act more like a desktop OS, Server 2008 ran 20% faster than Vista on the same hardware. The post’s author, David Methvin, calls “Windows Workstation 2008”, the “speediest and most secure version of Windows to come along in a decade”. Hmmmm.. I’ll have to check that out!

Pour a bit of your 40 on the ground for the F-117 fighter jet. On April 21st, all remaining F-117s will depart from Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico for their final resting place: Tonopah Test Range Airfield in Nevada. This brilliant piece of military technology is being retired to make way for the Air Force’s newest badass fighter, the F-22 Raptor. We’re sad to see the F-117 go… but since the F-22 is reputed to be “the most outstanding fighter plane ever built”, we’re not worried.

Speaking of “new tech”, the TSA screeners at one airport could not believe that a man’s AirBook was actually a real, functioning computer. Several agents huddled around the mysterious device, confused by the thin size, lack of ports of the back, and the lack of an internal hard drive. Eventually the agents let the guy go (with the laptop), but not before the poor schlub missed his flight.

The British continue their Orwellian march towards INGSOC with the ThruVision camera system, a device that the BBC says uses “terahertz rays, or T-rays” to passively scan people for metal objects. It can see through clothes and find any number of objects, including weapons and drugs. The scary device has already been ordered by the Dubai Mercantile Exchange and Canary Wharf in London.

System administrators might want to change their tune about Bitorrent. According to this article at Ars Technica, a university in the Netherlands was able to send 22TB worth of patches to 6,500 computers in 4 hours using a Bittorrent-based technology. If you’re at all involved in system administration, you’re going to want to read this article; it’s simply astounding what these folks put together.

Lastly for today… Dawn Wells, who played the perky “Mary Ann” on Gilligan’s Island, is apparently a pothead.

So… I was watching a downloaded version of the British show Dispatches last night. It’s a news\documentary program, similar to 60 Minutes or 20/20, although unlike those two shows, Dispatches focuses on one topic per episode.

The episode I watched last night was all about the horrible state of Britain’s airports (well, specifically, the airports owned by BAA, the private company that runs Heathrow, Gatwick, and Stansted airports, among others). At one point in the show, a YouTube video was shown of the unbelievably long security line at Heathrow. I freeze-framed the opening shot to get the name of the video… which is “The World’s Unofficial Longest Line”… and I believe that the subject matter lives up to the promise of its title: