It sure seems Muslims have a religion that micromanages. How about focusing on “don’t kill people” or “don’t rape women.”
Woman (not allowed to show her hair) and poster of approved men's hairstyles in Iran. Image CNN
Short on the sides and back and uses gel, this hair is approved in Iran.
Long in the back-this haircut is not OK in Iran. This image is a reminder that a gentle mullet, with length and flow can be a thing of beauty.
Short on the sides and back and uses gel, this hair is approved in Iran.
Long in the back-this haircut is not OK in Iran.
Short on the sides and back and uses gel, this hair is approved in Iran.
Iran promotes ‘Islamic’ haircuts
Iran has laid down the law: mullets won’t make the cut.
July 8, 2010 | By Saeed Ahmed and Mitra Mobasherat | CNN
* Don’t: mullet
* Do: short on the front and sides
* Do: gel-slathered, combed-back
The Islamic regime, which strictly enforces head coverings for women, issued grooming guidelines for the guys this week.
Among the do’s that are now don’ts? The ’80’s Prince-style pompadour preferred by many young Iranian men, the Steven Seagal-style ponytail and the “business in the front, party in the back” sentiment of the mullet — also popular among the Persian populace.
The approved styles have a distinctly 1950s look to them: short on the front and sides for the most part. But the gel-slathered, combed-back 1980s look also received the government’s blessing.
What makes a man turn to his lawnmower for transportation?
Random image of a man with a beer on a lawn mower. Cheer up lawn mower guy!
Man on mower charged with DUI, fishing pole theft
The Daily Post-Athenian | 4/14/2010
ATHENS, Tenn. (AP) — An East Tennessee man driving a lawn mower in the road has been charged with DUI. Athens police said 30-year-old Jimmy Graham Jr. smelled like alcohol and failed a sobriety test Monday after an officer spotted him on the lawn mower. He told the officer he had consumed a beer and taken a stress reliever prescribed to him.
A jailer said Graham was in custody Tuesday and there was no record of him having a lawyer.
The Daily Post-Athenian in Athens reported that Graham was also charged with aggravated burglary and theft under $500.
A police report shows Graham told the officer he had stopped by a house to pick up some fishing poles. Police said the man who lives at the house where Graham had stopped on the mower told police the fishing poles were stolen from his garage.
This is an important story that says much about the society in which it happened.
It shows that the Vietnamese don’t hold women in high regard or respect the criminal nature of rape. It says even their communist government believes in traditional medicine over the rule of law and objective evidence. Then again, hiring an expert and paying for expert testimony has become standard procedure in court cases and their culture considers healers experts.
Surely Pham Thi Hong must have been compensated, perhaps VERY well compensated for her expert testimony and threat to immolate herself.
Currently Pham Thi Hong is the only traditional medicine practitioner in Vietnam who can give a virginity test by examining ones' ear. (AP Photo)
‘Virginity test’ helps free 3 in Vietnam rape case
TRAN VAN MINH | Jul 1, 2010 | AP
HANOI, Vietnam (AP) – An acupuncturist who claims she can detect a man’s virginity based on a small dot on the ear has become a minor celebrity in Vietnam, where she is credited with helping to free three convicted rapists from prison.
Traditional medicine practitioner Pham Thi Hong started lobbying for the men’s release, pleading their case all the way to the president, because she believes all three men are virgins and therefore could not be guilty of rape.
“They all had small red spots on the back of their ears,” said Hong, 54. “The spots should have disappeared if they had had sex. My many years of experience told me that these men did not have sex before.”
The classics are still a lively field of study, which is great news!
Statue of Greek philosopher Plato. (Credit: iStockphoto/Vasiliki Varvaki)
Science Historian Cracks the ‘Plato Code’
ScienceDaily | June 29, 2010
=Plato was the Einstein of Greece’s Golden Age and his work founded Western culture and science. Dr Jay Kennedy’s findings are set to revolutionise the history of the origins of Western thought.
Dr Kennedy, whose findings are published in the leading US journal Apeiron, reveals that Plato used a regular pattern of symbols, inherited from the ancient followers of Pythagoras, to give his books a musical structure. A century earlier, Pythagoras had declared that the planets and stars made an inaudible music, a ‘harmony of the spheres’. Plato imitated this hidden music in his books.
Since “Botox Limits Ability to Feel Emotions” and to express emotions, it’s a good thing no one in Hollywood uses it!
Two photos of actress Nicole Kidman taken at very different times in her career. Please note, Botox® does not affect the size of one's teeth, nose or hair.
Botox Limits Ability to Feel Emotions
By Clara Moskowitz, LiveScience Senior Writer | www.livescience.com | 22 June
A well-known side effect of Botox is the inability to fully express emotions. Now research reveals another side effect: the inability to fully feel emotions.
Botox, a popular cosmetic injection used to fight facial wrinkles, is made of an extremely toxic protein called Botulinum toxin. Botox works by temporarily paralyzing muscles that cause wrinkles.
That means no unsightly wrinkles, but also no moving those muscles at all — which could have more significant consequences than simply looking frozen, the researchers found.
Add this to the list of the many things we don’t know.
Deepwater travellers: A) deepwater slipskin and B) gonate squid
An out of place rattail
Deep sea fish ‘mystery migration’
By Matt Walker | Editor, Earth News | BBC.com | 3 June 2010
Deep sea fish species found in the north Pacific Ocean have mysteriously been caught in the southwest Atlantic, on the other side of the world.
It is unclear how the animals, a giant rattail grenadier, pelagic eelpout and deep sea squid, travelled so far.
Their discovery 15,000km from their usual home raises the possibility that deep sea currents can transport animals from one polar region to another.
Details are published in the journal Deep Sea Research part I.
“These findings were completely unexpected,” says Dr Alexander Arkhipkin of the Falkland Islands Fisheries Department, based in Stanley, on the Falkland
I guess The Clash was right, Shareef don’t like it. It makes me sad to see something a simple, universal and wonderful as music banned.
Single or 45 rpm record of The Clash's "Rock the Casbah"
Members of The Clash. Left Joe Strummer, right bassist Paul Simenon.
When music is outlawed only outlaws will have music.
Hardline Somali militants ban music on airwaves
www.ohio.com | Associated Press | Apr 13, 2010
MOGADISHU, Somalia: Rock, rap and love songs once filled the airwaves in Somalia’s war-torn capital, one of the few pleasures residents had. But Islamist militants ordered music off the air Tuesday, labeling it un-Islamic in a hardline edict reminiscent of the Taliban.
Stations immediately complied, fearful that disc jockeys would face the harsh punishment militants mete out here: amputations and stonings. The edict is the latest unpopular order from the Islamists, who also have banned bras, musical ringtones and movies.
Seriously, it’s not booze, so what’s the big deal? She obviously just needed a nap, so why not nap in front of the middle school? Who needs to stand, walk or speak to be able to drive? I cringe to think she was picking up her kid, but drunks are selfish. She has 2 previous DUIs but that doesn’t mean she has a problem, I bet she has creative, elaborate excuses for each DUI.
This is classic desperate, wheedling, drunk behavior. In an Agatha Christie book I read about a “lady” who drank herself to death on Lavender Water. Booze is booze and addicts are addicts.
A grocery receipt for 2 8-ounce bottles of vanilla extract was found in this ladies’ car. Vanilla in addition to being dainty and tasty is easily available and not subject to blue laws. I predict next she’ll take up mouthwash or wise up and become a modern addict and move on to a “back injury” and the subsequent hundreds of percocets and oxy she can get with a simple prescription.
Germantown Mom Released on Bond
Friday, 02 Jul 2010 | www.myfoxmemphis.com
SHELBY COUNTY, Tenn. – A Germantown mother who is accused of being intoxicated by vanilla extract and Diet Coke has been released on $1,000 bond.
Shelby County Sheriff’s deputies responded to a call about a woman suspiciously slumped over the steering wheel in a white car parked in front of Arlington Middle School. 48-year-old Kelly Moss was in the driver’s seat of the vehicle, partially parked on the school’s driveway and the sidewalk, officers said.
Now THIS is corruption. One wonders what US policy makers have in mind in giving so much aid to Pakistan. Pakistan is almost assuredly where bad guy Osama Bin Laden has been hiding and their human rights record is grim.
A security guard standing at the entrance of a Mercedes-Benz dealer in Islamabad. Image New York Times.
Pakistan’s Elite Pay Few Taxes, Widening Gap
By SABRINA TAVERNISE | July 18, 2010 | www.nytimes.com
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Much of Pakistan’s capital city looks like a rich Los Angeles suburb. Shiny sport utility vehicles purr down gated driveways. Elegant multistory homes are tended by servants. Laundry is never hung out to dry.
But behind the opulence lurks a troubling fact. Very few of these households pay income tax. That is mostly because the politicians who make the rules are also the country’s richest citizens, and are skilled at finding ways to exempt themselves.
That would be a problem in any country. But in Pakistan, the lack of a workable tax system feeds something more menacing: a festering inequality in Pakistani society, where the wealth of its most powerful members is never redistributed or put to use for public good. That is creating conditions that have helped spread an insurgency that is tormenting the country and complicating American policy in the region.
With record heat across America this summer, this kind of injury could be on the rise. Careful out there cats and kittens. Humans didn’t evolve walking on blacktop and most people have sweet, soft, white feet from wearing shoes all the time not the tough callouses that would offer some protection from extreme temps.
We wish this guy the best.
Arizona man suffers second degree burns on both feet from extremely hot pavement
by Mike Murasarz, ABC News | WHAS11.com | July 19, 2010 at 2:27 PM
(ABC News) The extreme heat sent an Arizona man to the hospital with severe burns on his feet.
Seventy-eight-year-old James Wankul suffered second degree burns on his feet, just for walking on the sidewalk with no shoes on. He had gone outside to run after the mailman. Wankul said the pain brought him to his knees. A neighbor ran after him, after seeing him fall in the street.
Terri Cyran, the neighbor, said “By the time he turned around, he couldn’t run back to the grass. So he fell down and then he was burning his knees and his hands so we had to, both of us, had to pick him up by his arms and then run him to the grass.”
This information, if proven true, literally changes everything.
In a measuring chamber for protons: the muon beam moves through the ring-shaped electrodes from the left. In the space between the two grey-metallic bars under the pane of glass the muons impact on gaseous hydrogen - and displace the electrons from some of the atoms. The apparatus registers this process and fires a laser through the hole in the bottom bar onto the muonic hydrogen in order to reveal details of the atomic structure and thus ultimately the radius of the proton. (Credit: Randolf Pohl / MPI of Quantum Optics)
The Proton — Smaller Than Thought: Scientists Measure Charge Radius of Hydrogen Nucleus and Stumble Across Physics Mysteries
ScienceDaily | July 12, 2010 | www.sciencedaily.com
Big problems sometimes come in small packages. The problem with which physicists must now concern themselves measures a mere 0.0350 millionth of a millionth of a millimetre. This is precisely the difference between the new, smaller, dimension of the proton, the nucleus of the hydrogen atom, and the value which has been assumed so far. Instead of 0.8768 femtometres, it measures only 0.8418 femtometres.
At the Paul Scherrer Institute in Switzerland, an international team of researchers including physicists from the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics has now measured this in experiments which are ten times more accurate than all previous ones. They thus present physics with some tough problems: at least one fundamental constant now changes. And physicists have also to check the calculations of quantum electrodynamics. This theory is assumed to be very well proven, but its predictions do not agree with these latest measurements.
Hair of dog helps, but ups dependency
May 10, 2010 at 11:44 PM
SOUTHAMPTON, England, May 10 (UPI) — A study in worms found withdrawal symptoms of alcohol could be relieved by small doses of alcohol, but it increased dependency, British researchers said.
Study leader Lindy Holden-Dye, a neuroscientist of the University of Southampton’s School of Biological Sciences, said the findings showed evidence a class of brain-signaling molecule — the neuropeptide — is required for the chronic effect of alcohol on the worm’s nervous system.
The simple brain of C. elegans worms have 302 nerve cells, but exhibits similar alcohol-dependent behaviors as humans, Holden-Dye said.