A San Francisco sunset one woman will never forget! It’s a funny flying video of how a seagull stole her GoPro camera, flew over the water in front of Golden Gate Bridge and how the camera incredibly managed to survive, recording everything!
In addition to the parental advisory label on Chris Brown’s new album, copies of “Fortune” sold in one of London’s HMV stores were temporarily plastered with another warning. Just in case you somehow forgot that the singer assaulted Rihanna in 2009, a bright yellow sticker proclaimed, “Warning Do Not Buy This Album! This Man Beats Women.”
A representative for HMV told E! News last week the stickers had “nothing to do with HMV or representing our views. It would appear a member of the public popped into one of our stores yesterday and stickered a handful of CDs.
“These were spotted and quickly removed, but, before we could act, the individual concerned must have taken a photo and sent it to the media. To our knowledge there are no further stickers in our stores now.”
McDonald’s Delays Cult Favorite to Boost December Comps
It seems the economy, weird weather and other 2011 / 2012 oddities have affected every aspect of our lives. Now even the Mcrib sandwich from McDonalds has been affected. I am no fan of McDonalds due to their continued spiral of quality of their products. The hamburger meat no longer tastes like meat, specially my previous favorites the quarter pounder. I stopped ordering it with cheese many years ago when the cheeses started to resemble and taste like plastic. Now I dont order them at all because the meat tastes and feels like some sort of reconstituted saw dust mixed with gristle and grease. But there was always one stand by, something I always looked forward to each year.. Though not completely untouched by the product quality raping, it was still in my opinion the best sandwich they had created. You either love a Mcrib or you hate it. I’ll agree its an odd texture, mix of sour and sweet contrasted by the pickles and real onion slices. Living as a kid for a portion of my life in the south may be a big part of this craving for this sandwich. I’ve been known to eat two in a setting. Interestingly, I am no fan of pork products other than very thinly sliced and super crispy bacon. But even that I rarely partake.
But the McRib comes but only once a year, usually from late October through early November. This year McRib fans like me will have to wait until late December for McDonald’s pork-sandwich-turned-cult-hit. For that, they can blame the weather. Or, more specifically, last year’s weather.
A comparison of how often speakers at the two presidential nominating conventions used different words and phrases, based on an analysis of transcripts from the Federal News Service.
Over all, the word ‘science’ was used only three times at the Republican convention, and eight times at the Democratic convention.
A woman in Texas is putting her money where her mouth is, suing Walmart after a cashier and manager intentionally ripped two of her $100 bills and detained her for hours after they suspected the currency was counterfeit.
According to a document from the 150th Judicial District Court in Bexar County, TX, Julia Garcia said she was Christmas shopping for her children at a Walmart store in the San Antonio area on Dec. 12, 2010.
Garcia just sold her vehicle and had two $100 and $50 bills to pay for her items. When she checked out of the store at 2 a.m., she gave the cashier one of each.
A number of neuroscientists, working today with simple model organisms, are investigating the hypothesis that chemical brain preservation may inexpensively preserve the organism’s memories and mental states after death. Chemically preserved brains can be stored at room temperature in cemeteries, contract storage, even private homes. Our 501c3 nonprofit organization, the Brain Preservation Foundation (http://brainpreservation.org), is offering a $100,000 prize to the first scientific team to demonstrate that the entire synaptic connectivity (“connectome”) of mammalian brains can be perfectly preserved using either chemical preservation (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemical_brain_preservation) or more expensive cryopreservation (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryonics) techniques.
Such preserved brains may be “read” in the future, analogous to the way a computer hard drive is read today, so that either memories or the complete identities of the preserved individuals can be restored or “uploaded” in computer form. Chemical preservation techniques are already being used to scan and upload the connectomes of very small animal brains (C. elegans and http://www.openworm.org, zebrafish, soon flies). Though these scans are not yet sufficiently complex to extract memories from the uploaded organisms, give them a little more time, we’re very close now to cracking long term memory. We just need to know a bit more about this process at the protein/receptor/gene level: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-term_potentiation
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is ready for a zombie apocalypse. Gun owners got prepared for a zombie apocalypse. Now, the military and law enforcement are getting ready.
And next month, they’ll begin training.
Security firm HALO Corp. announced yesterday that about 1,000 military personnel, police officials, medical experts and federal workers will learn the ins and outs of a zombie apocalypse, as part of an annual counter-terrorism summit , according to the Military Times.
Sure, the lesson is tongue-in-cheek — and only a small part of the summit’s more serious course load — but a zombie-like virus outbreak is a good training scenario. Visitors will learn to deal with a worldwide pandemic, where people become crazy, violent and fearful. Zombies will roam the summit grounds in San Diego, Calif. harassing troops and first-aid teams that will be participating.
Further details are unclear, but the Military Times made sure to note that zombies are not real.
The training comes at a time when the term “zombie apocalypse” is so viral that several branches of government have released statements on the matter. Earlier this month, the Department of Homeland Security reported that “the zombies are coming” as part of a hilarious bid to get citizens to prepare for a real disaster.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg says the social network is already handling a billion search queries per day, and that it is interested in launching a social search engine powered by the activity of its users — something that could turn out to be Google’s worst nightmare.
During an interview at the Disrupt conference on Tuesday — the first since Facebook’s underwhelming IPO and subsequent stock slide — co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerbergtalked a lot about the social network’s strategy in a number of areas, including a defence of the company’s approach to mobile and an explanation of why the company moved away from HTML5 for its apps. But while those comments were interesting, I thought the most revealing part of the interview came when Zuckerberg talked about search. Although he didn’t go into a lot of detail, it was clearly intended as a shot across Google’s bow: the underlying message was that Facebook is going to do social search, and soon — and it already has most of the ingredients necessary to mount a significant challenge to the search giant.
PayPal President David Marcus responded to mounting criticism from customers by promising that things are changing at the online payments company.
“There’s a massive culture change happening at PayPal right now,” Marcus said. “If we suck at something, we now face it, and we do something about it.”
Marcus’s response was prompted by a blog post written by a customer earlier in the week, who was outraged after funds were frozen in his account. The post was then listed on Y Combinator’s Hacker News site, where it attracted dozens more comments — mostly negative. The original post, written by Elliot Jay Stocks, a small business owner, was titled “Good riddance, PayPal.”
Just 24 hours after posting it, Stocks said the post found its way “to the powers-that-be at PayPal HQ” and he had received a phone call telling him that he could now now access all his funds. But it wasn’t enough. He still is switching his account over to a bank.
A PayPal spokesperson confirmed the authenticity of Marcus’s statement on Hacker News, but would not disclose the company’s upcoming plans.
It be just a matter o’ a smatterin’ o’ HOURS now! Prepare to unleash yer PIRATTITUDE on an unsuspectin’ world! International Talk Like a Pirate Day is coming – THIS WEDNESDAY! What are YE doin’!?! Check out our map for piratical doin’s near ye!
Easy tip number one, if you want to talk like a pirate: Add “me hearties” to the end of any sentence.
Mark Summers, aka Cap’n Slappy, left, and John Baur, known as Ol’ Chumbucket, created Talk Like a Pirate Day.
The meaning is simple — “my friends, my mates” — said John “Ol’ Chumbucket” Baur, before offering as way of example, “Turn your head and cough, me hearties. Or, fill it up with regular, me hearties.”
Wednesday marks “Talk Like a Pirate Day,” an observance that has been recognized on all seven continents and beyond. It inspires dress and behavior — of the Long John Silver variety — in seedy bars, staid workplaces and even the International Space Station. It has fueled fundraisers, been the topic for a New York Times crossword puzzle and mentioned on various game shows.
It was an idea born in 1995 on an Albany, Oregon, YMCA racquetball court. Baur, 54, and his friend Mark “Cap’n Slappy” Summers, 46, began unleashing insults at one another, as pirates might.
“We just grew up in a time and place where we saw the wrong movies, read the wrong books,” Baur said from his current home in St. Croix, Virgin Islands. Putting their deep-thinking noggins together, the two decided the world needed in on this, too.
International Talk Like a Pirate Day is the only holiday on the calendar that encourages people to babble like buccaneers for the sheer, anarchic fun of it. It’s been celebrated by millions of people on all seven continents – yes, even at the South Pole – and on the International Space Station!
The holiday was the brainchild (if that’s the right word) of John Baur and Mark Summers, two friends fr
om Albany, Oregon, who were playing racquetball back in 1995 when, for reasons that aren’t clear to either of them now, they started insulting each other in pirate jargon. They decided to start Talk Like a Pirate Day, and picked September 19th because it is Summers’ ex-wife’s birthday.From such unlikely seeds – with a little help from Miami Herald columnist Dave Barry, who wrote about the holiday in 2002 – was born an international sensation.
Five A’s of pirate speak
- Ahoy — Hello.
- Avast — Stand and give attention; listen up.
- Aye — I heartily agree with everything you said or did.
- Aye Aye — Yeah, boss, I’ll get on that as soon as I finish this coffee or rum.
- Aarrr — Not to be confused with Arrgh (a sign of pain), it’s a way of announcing yourself to the world, telling everyone you’re here and alive. It could mean don’t look at my girlfriend that way, or I’m enjoying this hamburger.
