I never thought I’d see the day…

A proposed initiative has passed validation and will be included on the ballot in California this November:

California voters will decide whether to legalize recreational marijuana use for adults, after the secretary of state on Wednesday certified the initiative for the November ballot.

It would become the first state to legalize recreational marijuana use if the proposition is approved. Marijuana use is legal for medicinal purposes in California and 14 other states, but the drug is illegal under federal law.

Secretary of State Debra Bowen certified that the petitions seeking to place the question on the ballot had more than 433,971 valid voter signatures, the minimum number needed to qualify.

After all these years, could it really be happening?

Read more here.

Thursday’s Random Stuff Post

– Ever wonder what life’s like for people who pirate Windows? Windows expert Ed Bott decided to “go underground” and see how pirated copies of Windows 7 actually work. The results are pretty interesting and worth a read, even if you’re not a tech person.

– Starting St. Patrick’s Day, Continental Airlines will offer flyers “a new option allowing you to purchase seat assignments for unreserved, Economy Class seats that feature extra legroom.” In other words, they’re going to start charging more for exit row seats.

– Speaking of St. Patrick’s Day, head over to this site to find a McDonald’s near you that offers Shamrock Shakes!

– The NFL has released their new conference logos, playoff logos, pre- and post-season logos, Super Bowl logos, and conference championship trophy designs. And they’re absolutely horrible. The new AFC logo, in particular, is pretty awful. What say you?

– Research in the academic journal Psychological Science shows that darkness increases dishonest behavior. It’s not just that darkness provides practical advantages (like “cover” for criminal activity); people genuinely think that the darkness can provide a measure of anonymity and invisibility… like a kid closing her eyes whilst hiding in a game of “Hide and Seek”.

– Lots of movie and TV stars get their starts in corporate training videos. Here’s a clip of Lost’s Michael Emerson… in a prison training video from 1992!

Wednesday’s Off-The-Wall News

– DMV employees in New York state are now in deep trouble for selling fake IDs. The gang, which netted over $1 million from the scam, didn’t sell the otherwise legitimate IDs to teenagers wanting to buy beer or get into nightclubs. For $7,000 to $10,000 a pop, the officials were selling them to convicted felons and sex offenders! Read more about it here.

– Internet Explorer 6, long hated due to security holes and the various tricks web developers had to use to get it to work with other browsers – has died. Well, not really. But on March 1, 2010, Google will kill IE6 support on Google Docs and Google sites (other Google sites will discontinue support sometime shortly after that). And YouTube is killing IE 6 support on March 13, 2010. So a company in Denver, Colorado called the Aten Design Group will hold a “funeral” for the browser on March 1 at 7pm. If you’re in or near Denver and wish to attend, read more about it here.

– Researchers at Georgia Gwinnett College have found that looking at pictures of curvy women actually activates the same pleasure centers in the male brain that drugs and alcohol do. In the study, 14 men were shown “before” pictures of the naked asses of seven women. They were then shown “after” pictures of the same asses after they had undergone cosmetic surgery to move fat from their waists to the buttocks. While it might seem like frivolous research, researchers are hopeful that the information sheds light on pornography additions, infidelity, and erectile dysfunctions in the absence of pornography. I’d also like to point out that I’d never heard of “Georgia Gwinnett College” before reading this article. Apparently, after I moved to Charlotte, the Georgia legislature voted to create a new four-year college to replace Gwinnett University Center, a large complex where various universities (including the University [sic] of Georgia, Georgia Tech and Georgia State) offered various classes. Ya learn something new every day!

– Could dolphins hold the cure for diabetes? It seems that everyone’s favorite maritime mammal can turn the disease on and off, depending on how plentiful the food supply is.

– The Daily Mail has artist’s drawings of the new US embassy in London. It seems that the old embassy in Grosvenor Square is too small, too old, and too insecure. And personally, I think the old embassy has all the charm of heartless, 1950s Eastern European designs. The new embassy will be mostly glass and airy, and will be energy neutral, thanks to millions of solar cells placed on the exterior. I also like that the clever landscaping (terraced on one side; a pond on the other) negates the need for ugly security walls. What say you?

Wednesday’s (Almost All British) Roundup

– Remember this post, where I talked about how I always seem to miss anniversaries on this site? Well, Monday was the 25th anniversary of the release of The Breakfast Club. Yes, I’m old.

– The BBC has sent more people to the 2010 Olympics than Great Britain sent athletes! For the record, there are 74 BBC employees covering 52 British athletes at the Vancouver games. Whether this is a commentary on the largess of the BBC or the woeful state of British sports is open to interpretation.

– Last week, Professor Phil Jones – the British scientist at the center of the “Climategate” scandal – flat out admitted that there has been no evidence of Global Warming since 1995. It’s interesting (to me) how this has been such a non-event in the American media, yet has been all over the British papers for months now. Admittedly, the scandal involves British researchers, but still… oh wait – this goes against liberal dogma, so of course the American media haven’t reported on it.

– Yesterday was Shrove Tuesday, also known as “Pancake Day” in the rest of the English-speaking world. Similar to Mardi Gras, Pancake Day is a day when you’re supposed to use up all your rich ingredients – like butter, milk and eggs – before Ash Wednesday and Lent kicks in. Throughout England there is a tradition of holding “pancake races” on this day. At least as far back as 1445, people have run through the streets of English towns and villages holding a pan, in which they flipped a pancake as they ran. But not in St. Albans this year. Health and Safety officers (derisively referred to as “‘Elf n’ Safety” by many in the UK) banned running… during a footrace… because people might get hurt. Somehow, this tradition managed to survive at least 565 years without overzealous safety wonks making a mockery of it… but not now. It’s hard to believe that this is the same country that once ruled the largest empire in human history.

– An e. coli vaccine is now being tested on cows in the United States. If successful, the vaccine could reduce the overall presence of e. coli bacteria by 65-75%. And lest you think you’re safe because you’re a vegetarian, remember that recent e. coli outbreaks involved spinach, tomatoes, and green onions. I do not know if the vaccine would cut down on these outbreaks too (because cow manure was used to fertilize the vegetables) or not (because the e. coli came from another source).

R.I.P. Doug Fieger

Doug Fieger, lead singer of The Knack (of “My Sharona” fame) has died. He was 57:

Doug Fieger was made to be a rock star.

With a keen musical ear and an early love of the stage, Fieger was a student at Oak Park’s Clinton Junior High when he started his first professional band — launching the path that would ultimately lead him to the top of the pop charts.

Fieger, best known as the founding vocalist-guitarist of the Knack, died this morning at home in Woodland Hills, Calif., after a six-year battle with cancer. He was 57.

Read more here.

Sunday’s Random Stuff

– If you watch a lot of movies, you’ve probably noticed Morley cigarettes, a fake brand of smokes closely resembling Marlboro. What you might not know is how many movies and TV shows the fake smokes have appeared in: everything from Beverly Hills, 90210 and Burn Notice to The Twilight Zone and The X-Files. In fact, the earliest known use of “Morleys” was in that 1963 Twilight Zone episode, when William Shatner pulls out a Morley on a plane and begins to light it, only to be stopped by his wife, who points out that the “No Smoking” sign is still on. Check out Wikipedia’s exhaustive list of Morley appearances here.

– Remember the song “Purple People Eater”? It was a #1 hit in 1958 for character actor Sheb Wooley, and the song still appears on compilations of “goofy songs” (think Dr. Demento), children’s albums, and in the Minnesota area (the Minnesota Vikings colors are purple and white, and their defense was called the “Purple People Eaters” from the late 1960s to the late 1970s). But did you know that Wooley is also credited as the voice behind the infamous Wilhelm Scream, a sound effect used in hundreds (if not thousands) of movies and TV shows? Every Star Wars and Indiana Jones film features the Wilhelm Scream at least once, and the scream is also heard in episodes of Battlestar Galactica, Family Guy, Lost, Human Target, Community, CSI: NY, and the films Titanic, There’s Something About Mary, Spider Man, Reservoir Dogs, and more. Who knew?

– The “Havana Brown” breed of cat is also known as the “Swiss Mountain cat”… and it originated in Britain. I don’t get it.

– In 1974, a giant ship ostensibly owned by Howard Hughes headed out into the Pacific Ocean in what was publicly called a “deep sea mining experiment”. What the public didn’t know until later was that the whole thing was funded by the CIA, and the actual goal of the ship was to raise a sunken Soviet sub. Called “Project Azorian”, the mission was a mixed success. It failed to bring up the entire sub as planned, but parts were indeed salvaged (along with the bodies of six Soviet sailors, which the US forces buried at sea with full military honors). Although the project was supposed to be secret, Seymour Hersh of the New York Times and columnist Jack Anderson blew the lid off the (mis)adventure less than a year later. The whole story is back in the news because the CIA has just released an article about the project, which it had published in an internal publication back in 1985. The article seems to agree with the US Navy… who at the time felt that the whole thing was a giant waste of time and money.

– I don’t get this, either:

Gravy Special

Saturday’s Random Stuff

A lot of this stuff has been building up over the past few days, and much of it isn’t even news:

– English supermarket chain Waitrose recently unveiled a new “super deluxe” brand of toilet paper… that has cashmere in it!

– Contrary to popular belief, Henry VIII didn’t kill all (or even most) of his wives. He famously divorced Katherine of Aragon. He then executed Anne Boleyn on very flimsy grounds. Jane Seymour died shortly after giving birth to his only son. He annulled his marriage to Anne of Cleves, as he found her incredibly ugly. He executed Kathryn Howard (who, unlike Anne, really was having affairs with just about everyone behind his back). He was then survived by Katherine Parr. An easy way to remember the fates of his wives is the rhyme “Divorced, beheaded, died; divorced, beheaded, survived”.

– Gregorio Iniguez, general director of the Chilean Mint, has been fired after the mint produced thousands of 50 peso coins that had “Republica de Chiie” stamped on them. Misspelling your own country’s name is a pretty big blunder… but what’s more amazing is that it took authorities a year to notice the problem!

Continue reading “Saturday’s Random Stuff”

A Sad Day

Phil HarrisI’m sad… because Phil Harris, captain of the fishing vessel Cornelia Marie on the Discovery Channel’s popular show Deadliest Catch, has passed away. He was 53.

As I reported last week, Harris had just brought his ship into port to offload a catch when he fell victim to a stroke. Although he showed signs of improvement last week, he nevertheless passed away yesterday. I was initially a fan of Sig, a rival captain on the show. But Phil’s preternatural ability to find crab, his gruff (but lovable) personality, he cigarette-affected voice and laugh, and the tough love he showed his sons Jake and Josh (also fishermen on the show) quickly won me over. When I first read of his passing, I almost shed a genuine tear. You will be missed, Phil!

Rest in peace, brother!

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.