Nonsuicidal man saved from not committing suicide

The story comes from the Mail Online, so perhaps needs to be taken with a grain of salt, but pending any corrections or retractions, here's how the story stands now:

Mark Moody was talking on his mobile phone and enjoying a smoke on the ledge when two policemen asked if he was trying to kill himself, even though he was just 12ft from the ground...

An indignant Mr Moody refused to let the police into his flat but they apparently forced their way in anyway and allegedly dragged him out of the window sill and threw him on his front before handcuffing him.

The trial lawyer from New York was then taken to a psychiatric hospital, where medics immediately realised the error and apologised...

Mr Moody had been smoking away on the window of his Peck Slip home on a warm August day when he caught the attention of the two policemen.

One allegedly asked: 'Are you about to commit suicide?'

Mr Moody replied sarcastically: 'If I was going to commit suicide, this would be a pretty dumb place to. If I jumped from here, I'd just sprain my ankle.'

He explained that he did not want to get smoke in the apartment...

More at the link, via Nothing to do with Arbroath.

Nipple tassles... for toddlers?

A company called Twisted Twee, Ltd. is selling these shirts for "nippers" ages 0-6 months. "Previously a mere piece of merchandise at £16. Now a piece of Art at £516."

Targeted at what audience? For rich people to send to the pedophile uncle in the family? It's not even funny.

Via CrunchGear's list of the ten worst toys of the season.

"Landscape with the corpse of a horse"

Who wouldn't want this subject matter gracing a prominent place in their home?  An oil painting by Gustave Courbet (~1855-60), currently in the St. Petersburg Hermitage.

Found at petrus.agricola's Flickr photostream, via Uncertain Times.

More nonsense re airport "security"

Although the X-ray and metal detector rigmarole is mandatory for pilots and flight attendants, many other airport workers, including those with regular access to aircraft -- to cabins, cockpits, galleys and freight compartments -- are exempt. That's correct. Uniformed pilots cannot carry butter knives onto an airplane, yet apron workers and contract ground support staff -- cargo loaders, baggage handlers, fuelers, cabin cleaners, caterers -- can, as a matter of routine, bypass TSA inspection entirely... here's what one apron worker at New York's Kennedy airport recently told me:

"All I need is my Port Authority ID, which I swipe through a turnstile. The 'sterile area' door is not watched over by any hired security or by TSA. I have worked at JFK for more than three years now and I have yet to be randomly searched. Really the only TSA presence we notice is when the blue-shirts come down to the cafeteria to get food."

From the "Ask the Pilot" column at Salon, via BoingBoing.

Offered without comment

Found at Maisie.

Hat

Offered without comment. 

Credit to Elizabeth Parker Hats, via Everlasting Blort.

These videos test whether you have latent acrophobia

Personally, I don't like going up a ladder to clean the house gutters, so this video blew me away.  The first couple minutes inside the structure are o.k. - reminded me of walking up a forestry service fire tower.  But then he goes outside.  And after that, it gets worse.  And still worse.

Did you pass the test?  Then try this amateur video of insane Russian students climbing a similar tower with no safety equipment.  I won't tell you what happens at the end...

41% of American babies are born to unwed mothers

This from an AP story carried in the StarTribune (and elsewhere, undoubtedly).  I believe the data cited in the article are national, rather than from Texas or Houston, but I can't be sure:

The black community's 72 percent rate eclipses that of most other groups: 17 percent of Asians, 29 percent of whites, 53 percent of Hispanics and 66 percent of Native Americans were born to unwed mothers in 2008, the most recent year for which government figures are available. The rate for the overall U.S. population was 41 percent.

The article addresses (but doesn't answer) the question of why this is happening and what significance it has.   I think it's a tragedy.

Whoonga

An excerpt from an article at Aljazeera:

Whoonga, as it's known, is a substance being smoked in poor township communities around Durban, and it's popping up in other parts of the country as well...

What makes whoonga different - a fine white powder, added to marijuana and smoked - is its composition.  It's a blend of detergent powder, rat poison and, crucially, crushed up ARVs, or antiretroviral drugs distributed free to HIV sufferers...

Whoonga is cheap, bought from a dealer for just 20 rand or $3 a hit. But 40 per cent of all South Africans survive on little more than $2 a day...  Worst of all, it means people in need of ARVs to save or prolong their lives are sometimes going without.  They're being mugged for their pills as they leave the clinic.

Some are willing to sell them - the free ARVs now have a value more pressing to the poorest than even their lifesaving properties...

And if that's not shocking enough, perhaps the very worst aspect of whoonga is that many addicts, I'm told, actually seek to become HIV positive, because then they'll get their supply for free. No need to bother committing a crime...

One group is making a difference, albeit a tiny one.  Vumani Gwala runs Project Whoonga, a community support group operating in one small corner of a giant township outside Durban called Kwadebeka, where whoonga thrives and grows every day.  There are no figures available yet for the scale of whoonga use, but Gwala estimates it's easily in the several thousands in Kwadebeka alone.  Project Whoonga needs all the help it can get. Contact them at www.whoonga.za.org.

Addendum: Video report here.

Schools may allow advertising on students' lockers. And on the walls. And on the floor.

I'm absolutely appalled by this.

School lockers are becoming the latest venue for bombarding kids with advertising.

Just what that will look like is on display at the north suburban Centennial school administration building: four lockers wrapped in a bubblegum pink ad for the Mall of America's "Underwater Adventures" aquarium.

On Nov. 1, the school board is slated to decide whether it will allow the ads on up to 10 percent of the available surfaces in all of the district's seven schools. That includes lockers, walls and floors. The take for the district? $184,000 a year.

In a bleak economy, with dim prospects for any new state school funding, Centennial -- with $3.6 million in cuts this year and more likely on the way next year -- is just the latest school district looking at the ads as an alternative way to generate some cash. Paul Miller, president of Coon Rapids-based School Media's, the company that would install the ads, said he expects to have nine Twin Cities school districts signed up by the end of the year.

The rest of the story is at the StarTribune.

U.S. nukes reportedly compromised by aliens

Aliens from outer space, to be more precise.  I first saw the story at Reuters last week, in a piece dated September 15:

Witness testimony from more than 120 former or retired military personnel points to an ongoing and alarming intervention by unidentified aerial objects at nuclear weapons sites, as recently as 2003. In some cases, several nuclear missiles simultaneously and inexplicably malfunctioned while a disc-shaped object silently hovered nearby.  Six former U.S. Air Force officers and one former enlisted man will break their silence about these events at the National Press Club and urge the government to publicly confirm their reality.

One of them, ICBM launch officer Captain Robert Salas, was on duty during one missile disruption incident at  Malmstrom Air Force Base and was ordered to never discuss it. Another participant, retired Col. Charles Halt, observed a disc-shaped object directing beams of light down into the RAF Bentwaters airbase in England and heard on the radio that they landed in the nuclear weapons storage area. Both men will provide stunning details about these events, and reveal how the U.S. military responded. 

More at the link.  I didn't know what to think of it.  Today the story was picked up by the Telegraph - re British nuclear weapons sites:

Col Charles Halt said he saw a UFO at the former military base RAF Bentwaters, near Ipswich, 30 years ago, during which he saw beams of light fired into the base then heard on the military radio that aliens had landed inside the nuclear storage area.

He said: "I believe that the security services of both the United States and the United Kingdom have attempted - both then and now - to subvert the significance of what occurred at RAF Bentwaters by the use of well-practised methods of disinformation." 

The testimony was supposed to take place today.  I'll defer any commentary, except to say I'd be delighted if it's true.

The insanity of a "nanny state"

I long ago gave up trying to post all the WTF stories that pop up (especially from Britain) about government overprotecting its citizens - but fortunately Kev at Nothing to do with Arbroath continues to document them.  Here are just two of the ones from today's posting.

Pictured above is Isabelle McCullough and her father, Mark, who "has been reprimanded by council bosses for letting his seven-year-old daughter walk 20 metres alone to catch the bus to school."

On the left is Jose Williams, next to the stump of a crabapple tree.  "Council staff who came to hack down the six leafy crab apple trees outside Jose Williams' home in Keld Close, Newby, said they had been told to do so because the falling fruit was dangerous..."

Nipple-zapping student sues his school

A New Hampshire high school student taking an electrical trades class "attached an electrical clamp to one nipple while another student attached another clamp to the other. A third student plugged in the cord."

He and his family are suing the school, claiming that the teacher "did not warn Dubois and other students of the dangers of the electrical demonstration cords..."

The thumbnail at left is a screengrab of a cell phone video, from the Boston Herald, which has additional details re the actions of the teacher, some of which appear to offer justification for a lawsuit.

Shoot the President, win a prize

Because of what he now calls "an error in judgment," a Lehigh Valley carnival operator has sparked an outcry by running at summer church carnivals and fire department fund-raisers a shooting-gallery game that featured a President Obama-like figure...

Then, at a July 24 carnival at Our Lady of Mount Carmel in Roseto, Kathryn Chapman, there with her family, noticed that one of the win-a-prize painted targets was a black man wearing a suit with a rolled-up "health bill" in one hand - and an eagle-emblazoned belt buckle reading, "The Prez Says."

More details at J-Walk.

Totally bogus products receive "Energy Star" certification

This story was reported by Popular Mechanics several months ago.  The EPA gave their seal of approval to 15 out of 20 bogus products.

To perform this investigation, the Government Accountability Office's (GAO) March 26, 2010, report states that it "used four bogus manufacturing firms and fictitious individuals to apply for Energy Star partnership." All four qualified.

The Feather-Duster Fly-Strip Air Freshener

Ostensibly an indoor air purifier, this item is actually a standard space heater spangled in strips of flypaper, with a feather duster perched up top.

The product was submitted without a standard safety file number from the Underwriters' Laboratories. Plus, the product's website did not include a disclaimer required for Energy Star certification. Last but not least, the garish photo submitted with the product's application portrays what is clearly a feather duster rigged to space heater. Nevertheless, these obstacles proved surmountable—the product was approved in 11 days and became listed on the Energy Star website.

More at the link, including the "gasoline-powered alarm clock"

How to break your wrist - on purpose!

The web is a seemingly unending source of weirdness.  A thread at Reddit today links to a website called "BlurtIt" where ?teens exchange information and ideas.  Here's the top entry under "How To Break Your Wrist" -

Keep hitting it every night and then like do it for two nights and then wake up 1 morn then hit it xtra hard then hit it with a spoon or sumin then tell your mum that ur wrist reli hurts then ask if you can go to the doc he will give you a cast! If you have an x ray there will be sum fracture there! And if you dont get cast tell ur doc that is reli sencitif and that it hurts when you touch it THEN you will get a cast
im doing it right now and this is the second night now so tomoz im going to complain and get a cast YAY!!!

Oh and here are sum things u cud say
u fell and hurt it
u banged it on the table
u jamed it in da door
im using i fell and hurt it

im getting a cast!

I certainly don't understand; it doesn't appear to be a self-harm trend in the usual sense - more of an attention-getting device.  Among the more salient comments in the Reddit thread is this one: "Oh god. I'm never letting my kids ever meet any other kids."  There is also a site called "How To Break Your Bones!"

HRH, Prince Arthur, Duke of... WTF???

He was the Duke of Connaught and Strathearn, and he died in 1942 as the last living son of Queen Victoria -- but why is he wearing a leopard on his head and shoulders?  A quick web search turns up no related stories, or any history of his having tertiary lues.

Image: For the Love of Queen Vic!, via Fuck Yeah, Victorians!

Compensatory vacation for time required to get dressed

Excerpts from a story at The Telegraph:

Martin Schauder, 44, calculated to the second how long it took to don his regulation undershirt, trousers, thruncheon-holding belt, handcuffs, weapon and gas canister, overshirt, tunic, boots, protective kneepads (when on riot control), hat and gloves.

He claimed it took 15 minutes each morning outside his paid shift hours to get dressed, and 15 minutes at the end of each shift to undress, which a Münster administrative court agreed constituted overtime.

The officer in the north-west German city had argued with his superiors for months, demanding either getting a pay rise or time off in lieu for what he said amounted to 45 hours of his time he was giving to his employers each year. They refused on both counts, saying it was part of his duties as a policeman.

So he took the force to the city's administrative court - and won...

More at the link.  I swear there are days when I think the whole world is going crazy.  

Via Arbroath.

A hat tip to Pete for pointing out that "donning and doffing compensation" is a big deal in this country as well.  I never knew that.  But it's confirmed here, and in a boatload of other web resources.   Now I'm even more bummed out...

"Flashbood" - injecting the blood of another addict

It's for items like this that I maintain a "WTF" category in TYWKIWDBI...

Desperate heroin users in a few African cities have begun engaging in a practice that is so dangerous it is almost unthinkable: they deliberately inject themselves with another addict’s blood, researchers say, in an effort to share the high or stave off the pangs of withdrawal.

The practice, called flashblood or sometimes flushblood, is not common, but has been reported in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, on the island of Zanzibar and in Mombasa, Kenya...

Most of the addicts she has interviewed who practice flashblood, Dr. McCurdy said, are women. For them, sharing blood is more of an act of kindness than an attempt to get high: a woman who has made enough money to buy a sachet of heroin will share blood to help a friend avoid withdrawal. The friend is often a fellow sex worker who has become too old or sick to find customers...

Whether or not someone can actually a get drug rush from such a relatively tiny amount of blood has never been tested, Dr. McCurdy said. Humans have about five quarts of blood and the flashblood-user injects less than a teaspoon.

“They say they do,” she said. “They pass out as if they just got a high. But I’ve talked to doctors who say that could be entirely the placebo effect.”

One possibility, she said, is that traces of the drug are still in the syringe.

Words fail me.  You can read the rest of the story at The New York Times.

Winston Churchill, nonsmoker. WTF??

The above photo was recently displayed above the entrance to a London museum.  Anyone with even a modicum of knowledge of 20th century history would know that this image has been digitally altered.  The classic photo looked like this:

No one admits to having perpetrated this travesty:

The Winston Churchill's Britain At War Experience, in South-East London, confessed to being astonished to discover that the image may have been doctored...

So just who did pinch the great man's Havana?

It wasn't the anti-smoking lobby, which has had no known contact with the museum; it certainly wasn't Churchill's family - his grandson Nicholas Soames said 'it doesn't matter one way or the other'; and it wasn't the museum itself - in fact it's got wartime posters advertising cigarettes on the walls.

But intriguingly the museum, which gives all profits to charity, declined to name who put together the display and, crucially, who enlarged the image for the poster.

Museum manager John Welsh was astonished to be told the image was missing one vital ingredient.

I'm a nonsmoking ex-smoker, and I'm frankly tired of this kind of manipulation of history for the sake of  modern political correctness.  The United States did the same thing when they honored Bette Davis on a postage stamp, using an image with a deleted cigarette:

Rogert Ebert offered some trenchant commentary:

Depriving Bette Davis of her cigarette reminds me of Soviet revisionism, when disgraced party officials disappeared from official photographs. Might as well strip away the toupees of Fred Astaire and Jimmy Stewart...

...Movies can't rewrite reality. The MPAA cautiously mentions smoking in their descriptions of movie ratings (even if it's the Cheshire Cat and his hookah). If, by the time you're old enough to sit through a movie, you haven't heard that smoking is bad for you, you don't need a movie rating, you need a foster home.