Posted by on May 18, 2009 in
Feloniousness,
Foolery,
Forteana It sounds wacky at first but it makes sense. Haunted Houses are businesses and as such need liability coverage. Recently I heard a comedian on the radio talking about the insurance coverage they had to protect them in the event an attendee at one of their shows choked or was otherwise harmed by the laughter or a reaction caused by the performer.
This is the actual image taken from the insurance company's site.
The info below is from INPRO Insurance Group Site
Haunted House Insurance and Themed Attractions Insurance
Haunted House Insurance Brochure
We understand the unique aspects of your industry. Whether you operate a year-round business or a seasonal attraction, InPro Insurance Group can provide the comprehensive coverage you need to put your mind at rest. Our carriers specialize in programs specifically for Themed or Haunted Attractions and their unique insurance needs.
Haunted House Insurance Concerns:
Liability
We can provide affordable General Liability coverage for a wide range of attractions, including Haunted Houses and other Haunted Attractions, Pumpkin Patches, Christmas displays and other special events. Coverage can be extended to landlords or property owners as well.
Excess Liability
InPro Insurance Group can provide limits in excess of the General Liability limits noted above. You have the option of purchasing additional coverage
Volunteer Accident Insurance
Your volunteers are important to you. Let them know that by purchasing an Accident & Health Policy to cover them while they are helping to make your attraction a success.
Haunted House Insurance Application (pdf)
Tags: haunted house
Posted by on May 17, 2009 in
Feloniousness,
Forteana With divorce as common as it is it’s about time, “parental alienation syndrome” were recognized, however as this story shows, how to handle it in a legal setting is still being figured out. For a story about the legal resolution of this case, click here. Kudos to P.F. for being an advocate for his younger siblings.
BRAINWASHING BATTLE
The 18-year-old who negotiated the truce between mom and dad
Son’s birthday pact with parents leads to ceasefire in bitter eight-year dispute
KIRK MAKIN | April 28, 2009 | JUSTICE REPORTER | www.theglobeandmail.com
When an 18-year-old man arrived for a birthday dinner at his mother’s house a few days ago, he never dreamed it would end one of the most bitter disputes in Canadian family court history.
Having barely spoken to one another in years, the young man and his Brampton, Ont., mother found themselves calmly discussing a resolution to an eight-year battle that caused a judge to order deprogramming therapy for the man’s two younger brothers and turned parental alienation syndrome into a nationally recognized phenomenon.
“We realized that we were talking all right with each other,” the young man, known as P.F., said in an interview yesterday. “We weren’t jumping at each other’s throats. The idea occurred to us that we might be able to work this out with each other.”
That birthday pact led directly to a firm agreement, signed over the weekend at an emotional meeting attended by lawyers and family members. Under its terms, the family’s three sons cannot be separated or forcibly sent to a parental alienation centre for treatment. All three children will live with their mother, and P.F. may contact his father freely.
His 12- and 14-year-old brothers can contact their father with their mother’s consent.
Read more…
Posted by on May 15, 2009 in
Foolery,
Forteana What a lovely quote. “There was meant to be a giant question mark beside the Dalek, but I ran out of bed linen.”
100ft Dalek appears on mountain
By Johnny Caldwell | BBC News | 2009/04/07
A 100ft Dalek has appeared on the side of a mountain which overlooks Belfast.
However, people living in the city are presumably safe enough from this particular inhabitant of Skaro as it is made from bed linen.
The ‘artwork’ was created on Black Mountain at the weekend by Denis Rush of the UT Events group.
The stunt comes ahead of a charity convention for fans of Doctor Who and a number of other sci-fi TV series at the Europa hotel in Belfast.
“There was meant to be a giant question mark beside the Dalek, but I ran out of bed linen,” said Denis speaking to BBC News.
“I got permission from the woman who owns the field to do it. She was only too happy to help when she heard that the convention is in aid of the Northern Ireland Children’s Hospice.”
Read more…
Posted by on May 14, 2009 in
Feloniousness,
Forteana 57 miles is a very very long distance and garbage trucks are not usually known for their speed and agility.
Man driving garbage truck leads police on 57-mile chase
April 28, 2009 | minnesota.publicradio.org |
Little Falls, Minn. — (AP) – A 40-year-old Onamia man is in jail after leading deputies on a 57-mile chase – driving a garbage truck.
At one point, a Morrison County sheriff’s deputy tried to stop the truck by firing a shotgun into its engine.
It started when authorities got a report Tuesday about an intoxicated man trying to get into a home in Lastrup. The man left, driving the truck, before deputies arrived.
Authorities say the driver swerved at squad cars and accelerated in reverse.
Deputies tried stopping the truck with stop sticks, but it kept going with several flat tires.
The driver pulled over in Crow Wing County. He was caught by a police dog as he ran into the woods.
The suspect was treated for dog bites, then jailed, pending charges.
(Copyright 2009 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)
Tags: lame chase
Posted by on May 13, 2009 in
Foolery,
Forteana How chemists get a good chuckle.
It's all down to the hairy tummies, guys (Image: Georg Steinhauser/Medical Hypotheses)
Scientist spends four years studying navel fluff
04:00 01 April 2009 | Graham Lawton | www.newscientist.com
Scientific navel-gazing has been taken to new heights by a chemist who claims he has solved one of the great mysteries of human biology: why men produce navel fluff, but women do not.
Georg Steinhauser of the Vienna University of Technology has spent the past four years studying navel fluff, or lint, and has concluded that it is created when abdominal hair catches fibres from clothing and channels them into the belly button, where they are “compacted to a felt-like matter”.
Read more…
Posted by on May 11, 2009 in
Forteana Hmm, if more frequent sunspot activity can cause radio and other electromagnetic interference maybe less isn’t a bad thing? Allegedly sunspots are one of the tools used by the OLD FARMER’S ALMANAC team to make long term weather predictions.
SOHO Shows Slower Sunspots
April 30, 2009 | www.satnews.com
Over the span of 11 years, the Sun’s activity waxes and wanes as magnetic field lines that are wound and tangled inside the Sun periodically break through to the surface.
Solar Cycle 23 peaked between 2000-2002, and Solar Cycle 24 began in early 2008. It’s normal for the old and new sunspot cycles to overlap for a time before the old one completely fades away, but Solar Cycle 24 has been very slow to ramp up. This pair of images from the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) spacecraft shows sunspots (bottom) and ultraviolet light (top) emitted by the Sun on April 29, 2009. The Sun continued its quiet behavior, with only two small sunspots visible at far right. If you map the location of the spots on the Sun’s surface over the course of a solar cycle, the pattern they make is shaped like a butterfly. The reason for the butterfly pattern is that the first sunspots of each new solar cycle occur mostly at the Sun’s mid-latitudes, but as the solar cycle progresses, the area of maximum sunspot production shifts toward the (solar) equator. The location of the April 29 sunspots near the solar equator is one sign that they belong to the previous cycle, however, and not the new one. The Solar Activity collection in our new World of Change series shows sunspot activity since 1999.
(Image credit: Sunspot images from MDI Data Services and Information. Ultraviolet images from SOHO Project Website.)
Posted by on May 8, 2009 in
Feloniousness,
Foolery,
Forteana I LOATHE having nothing but crap sources for a good story. The choice for sources on this story were the blog I quoted on NJ.com written by “George!” or “UFO Digest.” It gets worse.
For some reason Dan Akroyd has an opinion on this event and is selling booze and signing autographs at the local “Bottle King” read about it here.
Want to see a video of these guys explaining their prank-click here.
Chris Russo and his lawyer, Patrick Sages, at Morris Plains Municipal Court after sentencing in UFO case.
Joe Rudy and Chris Russo confer with their lawyers outside Morris Plains municipal court, where they received fines and community service for their UFO hoax.
Morris Plains judge fines UFO hoaxsters and sentences them to park-rec service
NJ.com | Tuesday April 07, 2009, 5:51 PM
UFO hoaxsters Joe Rudy and Chris Russo were fined $250 apiece and each sentenced to perform 50 hours of community service with the Hanover recreation department by Morris Plains Municipal Judge Michael Carlucci today.
The judge said he would have been more lenient if the men were 17. But they are in their late 20s, and the regional alarm over their balloon-flares–meant to poke fun at UFO believers–tied up area 911 lines, he said.
Last week, Morris County Prosecutor Robert Bianchi noted potential danger to aviation around Morristown Airport. Kelly Lavery of the Prosecutor’s Office signed off on this afternoon’s deal, in which Joe, of Chester, and Chris, of Morris Plains, each agreed to plea guilty to creating a disturbance.
The hoaxsters, who posted videos of their nighttime escapades online, along with an elaborate explanation of their mission, declined to comment after the brief hearing.
Read more…
Posted by on May 7, 2009 in
Forteana Gotta tell ya, this isn’t the first time that the researcher Mr Hwang has done something that made me go, hmmmm. In the words of another researcher “transgenesis is labourious, expensive and slow” and may I add, weird.
Fluorescent puppy is world’s first transgenic dog
www.newscientist.com | 23 April 2009 by Ewen Callaway
A cloned beagle named Ruppy – short for Ruby Puppy – is the world’s first transgenic dog. She and four other beagles all produce a fluorescent protein that glows red under ultraviolet light.
A team led by Byeong-Chun Lee of Seoul National University in South Korea created the dogs by cloning fibroblast cells that express a red fluorescent gene produced by sea anemones.
Lee and stem cell researcher Woo Suk Hwang were part of a team that created the first cloned dog, Snuppy in 2005. Much of Hwang’s work on human cells turned out to be fraudulent, but Snuppy was not, an investigation later concluded.
This new proof-of-principle experiment should open the door for transgenic dog models of human disease, says team member CheMyong Ko of the University of Kentucky in Lexington. “The next step for us is to generate a true disease model,” he says.
However, other researchers who study domestic dogs as stand-ins for human disease are less certain that transgenic dogs will become widespread in research.
Read more…
Posted by on May 6, 2009 in
Foolery,
Forteana,
Found photos Oh dear. Hey kids, this sort of typo is why we all have to sweat the details every day.
Typo circled in red.
Papers pulled after typo
chicagotribune.com | Paul Richter, Washington Bureau | April 8, 2009 | Utah
PROVO — Thousands of issues of Brigham Young University’s student newspaper were pulled from newsstands because a front-page photo caption misidentified leaders of the Mormon church as apostates instead of apostles.
An apostate is a person who has abandoned religious faith, principles or a cause.
The photo in The Daily Universe on Monday was of members of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, a governing body of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, at the weekend general conference.
The caption called the group the “Quorum of the Twelve Apostates.” The mistake happened when a copy editor ran a computer spell check and apostate was suggested as the replacement for a misspelling of apostle.
Tags: Mormon
Posted by on May 5, 2009 in
Fashion,
Foolery,
Retail Therapy Did ya hear men in kilts are hot? Not men in skirts but manly men, manly enough to wear a kilt. Two of the biggest online purveyors are Sportkilt.com and Utilikilts.com.
From Utilikilt.com
From Utilikilt.com
From Utilikilt.com
The gallery of photos sent in by kilt wearers at Utilikilts.com is very entertaining. Men in kilts are seen farming, camping, frolicing at the beach, and with a Stormtrooper. My all time favorite was the one legged man chopping wood with an axe while wearing a kilt. Go on, call it a skirt. Call the man with an axe a sissy, I dare you.
Hawaiian Tartan from sportkilts.com
Sportkilt.com offers a range of kilts, including Comfy, Commando, Hiking, and a spectrum of Traditional Tartans. Did you know there is a Hawaiian tartan? Utilikits specializes in the utilikilt, made of heavy fabric and loaded with pockets and loops it’s a bit like a well ventilated pair of cargo or painters pants. They also offer a Utilitux for a mere $566.00
Utilitux from Utilikilt.com
Utilikilts.com. knows it’s market well enough to offer kilts in what it calls it’s “Beer Gut Cut.” Read below for their description of this wonderful thing.
If you haven’t seen your shoes in a while, if bellying up to the bar leaves you shouting at the bartender, or if you’re regularly mistaken for Santa Claus, the Beer Gut cut is just for you.
This cut angles the waistband down in front to keep the bottom of your Utilikilt level.
So how do you know if you need the BGC?
Put on a pair of pants and take a look at yourself sideways in a mirror. If the front of your waistline is an inch and a half or more lower than the back, you need the BGC.
Viva la kilt.
Posted by on May 4, 2009 in
Feloniousness,
Forteana Get ‘em girl!
Random stock photo of girl with Baton.
Girl beats off muggers with marching band baton
Apr 30, 2009 | Information from: Antelope Valley Press, http://www.avpress.com | Copyright © 2009 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
QUARTZ HILL, Calif. (AP) — Don’t mess with the marching band. That’s what California authorities are saying after a 17-year-old girl used her marching band baton to beat back two would-be muggers.
Los Angeles County sheriff’s Deputy Michael Rust says the Quartz Hill girl was walking to school April 24 when two men approached her from behind, tried to grab her coat and demanded money.
Instead, one got a punch in the nose and the other a kick to the groin. Rust says the girl then beat both of them with her band baton before she ran away.
The men had not been caught. But Rust says there’s a clear message to take from the encounter:
“The moral to this story is don’t mess with the marching band girls, or you just might get what you deserve. Final score: marching band 2, thugs 0.”