Nancy Pelosi drilling policy explained

Cartoon by Michael Ramirez

Fifteen teens rescued from overloaded dorm elevator

Fifteen boys piled into a dormitory elevator at Eastern Michigan University and it got stuck between floors for about an hour.

The boys were attending a Brigham Young University Especially for Youth camp at the university.

Ypsilanti Fire Capt. Max Anthouard said that when firefighters arrived shortly after 11 p.m. at EMU's Walton Hall, two of the 15 boys stuck in the elevator were having difficulty breathing and five or six of them showed signs of significant dehydration.

All of them were released after being examined and treated.

Whatever happened to cramming into a phone booth? At least they don’t get stuck between floors.

Link

Denver homeless will disappear during Democrat Convention

With the Democratic National Convention in town next month, an advocacy group plans to make the unsightly street people in Denver disappear.

The Colorado Coalition for the Homeless plans to get 500 movie tickets as well as passes to the Denver Zoo, Denver Museum of Nature and Science and other cultural facilities to get city street people out of sight during the convention.

They will be given bus tickets for events out of walking distance. Anything to get them out of sight.

A more sure way to get them off the streets is to give them beer money and send them to LoDo (Lower Downtown) bars. How long would a wino agree to stay at the Zoo or Museum of Nature and Science?

Link

The Brett Favre soap opera

When the Brett Favre soap opera finally ends will The Chicago Bears have their first real quarterback in decades?

Favre (pictured), the future Hall of Famer, apparently is struggling with his March retirement announcement, specifically the part of the announcement in which he said he was, you know, retiring. Sources have told

Chicago sports writer Rick Morrissey says Brett Favre “will unretire, or whatever it is you do when you have told the world you never will play football again, only to later wonder whether the ‘itch’ you're feeling will require more than a mere scratch.”

Two things strike me about the Brett Favre story:

1. The 36-year-old future Hall of Famer has been a premier quarterback in the NFL for years and is still able to play the game at a high level.

2. I was saddened by his childish appearances on TV trying to explain his change of heart and his frustration with the Green Bay Packers. At 3:00 a.m., during a bout with insomnia, I watched a re-run his interview with Greta Van Susteren on Fox.

A film of this interview can be found here.

As the interview progressed, I became increasingly more embarrassed for Favre as he kept wallowing in self-pity. Too bad Greta didn’t mercifully cut the interview short.

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Time to enjoy a nice summer afternoon

Most crowded swimming pool in the world

The pool shown below is in Penglai, Sichuan in western China.

(click on picture to enlarge)

If you want to swim a lap or two -- forget it!

Best you can hope for is treading water. And, of course, trying to find room for you and your rubber ring.

Link

He rode in easy chair to Golden Gate Bridge

Tyler MacNiven of San Francisco put wheels under his recliner and asked strangers for a push.

His goal was be pushed from his Mission District home to the Golden Gate Bridge.



The trip began at 9:00 a.m. and he arrived at the bridge by 4:45 p.m. with the help of strangers.



Wonder how long it took him to push his empty chair back to the Mission District?

Link

Feedback rule still has eBay sellers seething

Sellers on eBay are now banned from posting negative or neutral feedback to buyers no matter how badly the transaction went.

When a buyer or seller wants to post feedback, the following notice appears on the computer screen:

Important changes to feedback

Buyers, you can no longer receive negative or neutral Feedback from sellers.

You should leave honest and accurate Feedback without the fear of receiving negative or neutral ratings.

It’s an invitation for buyers to give bad feedback and at the very least, treat sellers with no regard for courtesy or fair dealing.

But then, eBay has always catered to the buyer. eBay has never had a problem getting a steady stream of sellers. It is hoards of buyers that eBay must have to remain successful.

Link

Flood aftermath: toxic sludge

A report at the link below says that runoff from sewage plants, gas stations and other sites turns water toxic.

As floodwaters begin to recede in some of the most devastated parts of the Midwest, residents there are shifting their focus toward recovery.

In hundreds of homes, a layer of toxic sludge has covered everything, brought into the houses after floodwaters ran through gas stations, paint stores, sewage plants and farms that house fertilizer and pesticides. Its pungent smell is the least of homeowners' problems.

"We found some elevated levels of bacteria, e-coli, and some industrial chemicals, some motor oil and diesel fuel," said Michael Wichman, Associate Director of Environmental Health at the University of Iowa, where the sludge was tested.

More of the story here.

Poll: congressional approval is lowest ever

Congressional approval falls to single digits for the first time ever.

A Rasmussen poll found that only 9% of respondents say Congress is doing a good or excellent job.

Not exactly a rousing endorsement for a congress controlled by Democrats.

Link

Amuse friends with backward running clock

Hang this on your office wall and stop your co-workers in their tracks with this clock that runs backwards.

If you work in a cubicle farm, hang it on your cube wall beside your desk.

Start your day at the end and work back.

Cost is 11 British pounds which is about $20.40. Shipping from the UK is extra.

Link

Law of Inverse Correlation

The chance of an open-faced jelly sandwich landing face down on a floor is directly correlated to the newness and cost of the carpet

New Yorker cover: Obama in Oval Office with Osama on wall

Satire is not new to the New Yorker magazine.

When it comes to the July 21 The New Yorker cover, the campaign of Barack Hussein Obama thinks it went beyond satire. They called it “tasteless and offensive.”



The cartoon cover shows Michelle dressed as militant radical and Barack wearing a turban and robe celebrating with a fist bump in the Oval Office in front of a portrait of Osama bin Laden on the wall and an American flag burning in the fireplace.

Barack Obama had no response to the cover of the July 21st issue of New Yorker Magazine, seen above, except to shrug incredulously and tell reporters, “I have no response to that.”

Link

Cops find 50 pounds of cocaine hidden in one of their police cars

Dallas police seized a 2004 black Infiniti automobile at a drug house earlier this year.

The Infiniti was placed into service as an undercover car on May 7.

Two months later an officer cleaning out the car found nearly 50 pounds of cocaine carefully hidden in hydraulically controlled compartments.

"These compartments have recently been more and more popular with drug operations," said Deputy Chief Julian Bernal, commander of the narcotics division.

Link

China takes dog meat off menu at Olympics

Dog meat is eaten in some Asian countries. However, to avoid offending foreign visitors, China has ordered dog meat to be taken off the menu at its 112 official Olympic restaurants.

Any restaurant found violating the ban would be black-listed, the state-run Xinhua news agency reported.

The ban, issued by the Beijing Catering Trade Association, forbids all designated Olympic restaurants from offering dog and urges other food outlets to remove the meat from menus.

Rover is off the menu in Beijing -- for a short time anyway.

Link

Isle seat, window seat or next to corpse?

Passenger deaths on airliners received renewed attention last winter when a 44-year-old woman died on a flight from Haiti to New York.

Actually, hundreds of people have died on planes in recent years.

It can be a traumatizing experience for family members and fellow passengers who are forced to take a close-up look at frailty and death and share their journey in close quarters with a corpse.

"It's one of the most overwhelmingly emotional situations possible," said Heidi MacFarlane, a spokeswoman for MedAire, a company that has doctors available on the ground to advise flight crews in a medical emergency. "When you're the one sitting next to the remains, it can be shocking and upsetting."

If the person dies, the crew often throws a blanket over the corpse or puts it in a body bag, an item routinely kept on some planes.

The dead passenger is sometimes placed on the floor in a galley area, or kept buckled in his or her seat, since a corpse cannot be allowed to block certain emergency exits.

Pilots may consider making an emergency landing, but often they keep going.

Airlines are not required to track or report the medical incidents they handle, so an exact tally of in-flight deaths is hard to find. But fatalities and serious illnesses on planes are rare when compared to the large number of people who fly.

Link

Man breaks record: sits in 39,250 seats in Rose Bowl

A new world record was broken as a 56-year-old man only took 48 hours to sit in 39,250 seats in the Rose Bowl stadium.

Jim Purol took a seat at the Rose Bowl, and then another, and then another, until he broke a world record.

The Anaheim man set a Guiness World Record on Wednesday for "Most Seats Sat in 48 Hours" by sitting in 39,250 seats.

The feat has taken a toll on his body and his cleanliness, as soot on the seats rubbed off on his clothes. He says he loves the Rose Bowl but calls the place "filthy."

He began the task Monday morning, and he's still going, hoping to rest his tush in each of the stadium's 92,542 seats by sometime this week.

Link

First looks at McCain’s home as a POW

There are pictures at the link below of cell that was the home of John McCain (pictured) as a POW in Vietnam.

These are the never-before-seen last known photos of Sen. John McCain’s Hoa Lo prison cell, images that prove that even after being cleaned up for an American historical filmmaker, the terror of the Hanoi Hilton is real.

These pictures and a video were taken in 1993 and 1994 before this and other areas of the century-old prison were destroyed.

Link

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John McCain is truly an American hero. It is providential that these pictures are coming to light now in time to refute General Wesley Clark, and others in the Barack Hussein Obama campaign, who have claimed that anyone can steer a plane around the sky and get shot down and that McCain’s military experiences do not qualify him to be president.

Obama’s only qualification is the 153 days (fewest of nearly any other Senator) he has appeared in the U.S. Senate.

Would Mr. Obama have stayed strong after years of captivity as a POW or would he have folded like a cheap tent in a gale?