Evel is gone from the world Robert Craig "Evel" Knievel, Jr. (October 17, 1938 - November 30, 2007) was a motorcycle daredevil who has been a household name since the late 1960s, and arguably the most iconic motorbike stuntman of all time. Evel Knievel's highly publicized motorcycle jumps, including his attempt to jump over the Snake River Canyon, claim four of the top 20 most-watched Wide World of Sports events of all time. He enjoyed a lengthy career in this extreme sport despite suffering a series of major injuries during stunts.
November 2007 Archives
Funny Cracked article about nine "badass" parts of the Bible. (When did Sylvester P. Smythe's humor magazine start using such naughty words?)
We've all been there. You're walking along, minding your own business, when a gang of cocky, young bastards start hurling abuse at you. Most of us would just keep walking, or maybe, yell some insults back or flip them the bird. Elisha (commonly regarded as the Luke Skywalker to the Prophet Elijah's Obi-Wan Kenobi), however, decides to take it one step further. Invoking the name of God, he summons motherfucking bears to come and claw the shit out of them.
Christians are constantly asking for prayer in schools to help get today's kids in line, but we beg to differ. We need bears in schools. If every teacher had the power to summon a pair of child-maiming grizzly avengers, you can bet that schoolchildren nowadays would be the most well-behaved, polite children, ever. It's a simple choice: listen to the biology lesson, or get first-hand knowledge of the digestive system of Ursus horribilis.
"Officer, I don't know why you're doing what you're doing."
Refusing to sign a speeding citation in Vernal, Utah? That's a tasing. Requesting an investigation of the incident? That sounds like a job for YouTube.
Refusing to sign a speeding citation in Vernal, Utah? That's a tasing. Requesting an investigation of the incident? That sounds like a job for YouTube.
And if you sit through the entire thing, you can hear the officer creatively describe the encounter to a fellow officer--"I told him to turn around or I'd tase him." In other news, the tasee has asked those making death threats against the officer on youtube (which are being investigated by the FBI) to please stop.
I was also struck by the bizarre levels of politeness demonstrated by both parties during the incident.
The researchers discovered that the Par-4 gene kills cancer cells, but not normal cells. There are very few molecules that specifically fight against cancer cells, giving it a potentially therapeutic application.
A British government minister has promised to "consider" a redesign of the Union Jack Apparently, the Welsh aren't happy because their country isn't represented in the current design. So they want to put a dragon on it. Yep, a dragon.
Here's a video of the distraught non-Engish speaking man from Poland who died from being tasered at the Vancouver Airport. He can be seen throwing a chair and trying break other things. When security arrives, he calms down and doesn't appear to be acting in a threatening manner. It's hard to tell though, because the video was taken through a pane of glass with glare.
Recently police at the Vancouver airport were attempting to question a recent immigrant that could not speak English. They tasered him after 24 seconds of speaking with him. The man had spent 10 hours stuck in the airport with no-one helping him.
The 40-year-old construction worker, who had never left Poland before, was immigrating to Canada to join his mother, 61, who lives in Kamloops, about a five-hour drive from Vancouver.
They had arranged to meet at the baggage carousel in the international terminal at YVR....
Mr. Dziekanski arrived at about 3 p.m. on Sunday, Oct. 14.
"He made his way to primary customs in the ordinary fashion … he went through there in the normal time frame … he then proceeded through and was directed to secondary customs, which is normal for someone who doesn't speak English and is immigrating to the country," Mr. Kosteckyj said. His papers were in order and he proceeded without difficulty.
But what happened after that was far from normal. For nearly 10 hours, Mr. Dziekanski stayed in the Arrivals Hall, growing increasingly frustrated and eventually becoming frantic.
Outside, in the public area, his mother spent nearly six hours pacing the corridors and, in broken English, asking airport officials for help in locating her son.
Mr. Kosteckyj said she visited one booth in international arrivals "at least three to four times and conveyed to them that she was concerned about her son being in the area and she wanted to get a message to him and how could she do that? They wrote her name down and said that they would make inquiries."
At about 10 p.m., she was told he wasn't there. She made the long drive home, only to find a phone message waiting, saying her son had been found.
"She called back to immigration when she got in, which would have been around 2 a.m., and spoke to someone there and was advised that her son was somewhere in the area and was fine. And she advised, you know, 'Please take care of him because he can't speak English and I'll get there as soon as I can.' And of course he had died, been killed really, some time on or about 1 or 1:30," Mr. Kosteckyj said.
From the BBC: The Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) in England is investigating an incident involving police who tasered a man in a coma because he was unresponsive.
Mr Gaubert said he was on his way to meet friends when he suffered a hypoglycaemic fit on the bus which left him slumped on his seat clutching his rucksack.
Armed police were called to the bus depot in Headingley and when he failed to respond to their challenges he was shot with the Taser.
He said as this was happening, another officer was pointing a real gun at his head.
He was restrained and eventually came round in the police van.
He said it was only then that the officers realised it was a medical emergency, despite him wearing a medical tag round his neck to warn of his condition, and took him to hospital.
Donald Kerr, the US Principal Deputy Director of Intelligence, has decided to kill privacy. He says that human beings can no longer expect governments and companies not to spy on them; instead "privacy" will now mean having the right to expect that governments and companies won't tell other people what they learn when they spy on you.
Privacy no longer can mean anonymity, says Donald Kerr, the principal deputy director of national intelligence. Instead, it should mean that government and businesses properly safeguard people's private communications and financial information...
He noted that government employees face up to five years in prison and $100,000 in fines if convicted of misusing private information.
Wow, we shoulda gone south...
The number of vehicles being bought in the United States by Canadians has exploded since the loonie shot even with the U.S. dollar, new figures show, even as a growing number of carmakers here dangle cash goodies to buyers to prevent cross-border shopping.
Canadians imported 24,873 vehicles north in October alone, according to figures provided this week by the North American Automobile Trade Association, a trade group of vehicle importers and exporters. That's a 68% increase from September, when the loonie matched the greenback for the first time since 1976.
Find that going to work is a drag, and nothing seems to make you want to go? Well how about deciding to refuse to sit around at home and keeping working just because you're 'bored'. I reckon that is an unusual reason to work your life away. Especially if it happens to be your birthday. Oh, and even more so if you just happen to be 100 years old.
unless you're doing the second quest. Found at the ever-useful vgmaps.com
Tobacco is a member of the Solanaceae or nightshade family. This family includes tomato, pepper, eggplant, Irish potato, and a number of other plants. Tobacco belongs to the genus Nicotiana, and almost all commercial tobacco is of the tabacum species. The Nicotiana rustica species was commonly used by American Indians and may still be used for ceremonial purposes in some areas. Many homeowners wish to grow a few plants of tobacco in their yard or garden for ornamental purposes or for personal use. Tobacco plants are usually no more difficult to grow than many other garden plants.
On November 11, 1880, Ned Kelly, Australia's most famous bushranger, was hanged at the Melbourne Gaol with the last words "Such is life." And so today, on the anniversary of his death and as his gun is due to go under the hammer, now is an excellent time to look at the history of the man sometime referred to as Australia's answer to Robin Hood. Many more Ned Kelly resources are to be found inside.
Ned Kelly is something of an Australian icon and the story of the Kelly Gang is firmly placed in the history of Australia, so much so that it inspired the world's first ever feature length film, as well as a less well received film starring Heath Ledger and Orlando Bloom). There are even many traditional ballads inspired by Kelly and his gang.
There are many Ned Kelly resources online for those interested in learning more about Australia's most famous bushranger. For instance, Picture Australia also has many images of him while the State Library of Victoria has an online version of the Jerilderie Letter, a letter written (or perhaps dictated) by Kelly describing his view of his activities and the treatment of his family and, more generally, the treatment of Irish Catholics by the police.
Kelly had had originally written the letter to a politician known only as 'Cameron', but that correspondence was suppressed from the public and was not made public until it was published by the Melbourne Herald in 1930. If you found the version I lined to earlier hard to read, here is another site dedicated to that letter, with the text of the letter in both HTML and flash formats. The letter has inspired much debate about whether Kelly was truly an outlaw or a hero.
There is an excellent site dedicated to Kelly's famous last stand at Glenrowan, and another good site which has collected most of the research on the evolution of the Kelly gang.
Here are some more sites you may find useful or interesting.
Timeline of the Kelly gang.
Another Ned Kelly biography.
More photos.
Ned Kelly's stay at Beechworth.
And when you're done with all of that, why not take a small quiz to see how much you've remembered!
A 68 year old. 145 lb. man with a neurological condition was tasered by Royal Canadian Mounted Police officers following a dispute over double parking. The man was picking up his wife, who was delivering newspapers. This happened less than a month after the RCMP tasered a Polish man who had spent 10 frustrating hours trying to find his mother in the Vancouver International Airport following 15 hours of travel. He died on the scene.
When the first man's wife told the RCMP officers of her husband's neurological condition, the officer told her, "We don’t have to know about people’s medical conditions." The Polish man who died was tasered 24 seconds after meeting the RCMP officers. He did not speak English.
Frat House (60 minutes, Google video, )
Lawyers representing several fraternity organizations and frat brothers charged that Phillips and Gurland, among other things, staged events, recreated scenes, and that the frat featured in the most severe segments doesn't pledge during the spring semester when the footage was shot.
In interviews, the filmmakers stood by their work, saying the only questionable matter was that some of the pledges were in fact already members of the fraternity.
In order to get a firsthand view of the happenings, Phillips and Gurland pledged and went through Hell Week at two northeastern U.S. schools. I'm not going to spoil the way it turns out, but it's a compelling and interesting watch. Whether or not it was fabricated, the film is a horrifying and realistic exploration of a side of undergrad life that most of us happily avoided.
Todd Phillips had previously directed Hated: G.G. Allin and & the Murder Junkies and then went on to the big time, helming such... um... classics as Road Trip and Old School. Andrew Gurland went on to make Mail Order Wife, a verry well done and... well, fake documentary.
"Puppies Behind Bars" gives cute lil pups to hardened prison inmates, who train them to eventually be guide dogs and police bomb sniffers. The puppies teach the convicts as much, if not more. Being responsible 24/7 for a dog can turn the most hardened criminal's life around. "This is my way of doing something to reparate," says one murderer. Some say it's their first taste of unconditional love. "The strongest guy in here's going to get that lump in his throat," says an inmate. The dogs get weekend furloughs to NYC so they can get used to city streets. No convict who trained a puppy has gone back to prison after being paroled.
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