Troops to Teachers, a federal program that, over 15 years, has helped about 12,000 former service members transition into second careers in the classroom. Now, a bipartisan group in Congress is hoping to expand the program to allow more veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan to sign up, while also increasing the number of places in which they could find employment. READ THE FULL ARTICLE.
Find out more from the United States Department of Education.
Anti-Aging Substance Made from Human Sperm!
Spermine, a powerful anti-oxidant originally discovered in human sperm, is said to diminish wrinkles and smooth the skin.
The substance is now being synthesized in laboratories and sold by a Norwegian company called Bioforskning. Spermine facials cost $250 at Townhouse Spa, where the substance is penetrated with ultrasound and infrared light (a more basic treatment can be found for $125 at the nearby Graceful Services).
Source: Craigslist
Yes, I just spent the last 8 hours in the library. In a law library. Should the opportunity ever arise for you to go sit in a law library 4 days before law exams commence, don’t.
Let me clue you in. Law students are anal-retentive fucks. Well, most of them. The rest of them, me included, have coping mechanisms that basically involve us either screwing off or pissing everyone around us off. Usually both.
SO today I am trying to study. There is a ginormous sign on the wall that says no eating. No talking. No cell phone activity. Offenders will be removed, etc, etc. Really scary shit. I am high on adderall, (I am rotating between adderall and ritalin for studying. ON the plus side, I am still off the valium, xanax, and alcohol. Someday I will look back on sentences like that one and wonder when I became a junkie and a pillhead and when I actually acknowledged it. But Not yet.)
So I am trying to wrap my mind around the acceleration clause exception to the rule of anticipatory repudiation (it’s gone) and this girl sits down next to me at a little study booth. She unpacks. Everyone in the room huffs in annoyance as she settles in. It was the main noise all day. A hundred kids huffing in frustration at each other, mostly when people came and left.
We are all high on study drugs, crabby, and on a deadline. The girl next to me pulls OUT AN APPLE AND CRUNCHES INTO IT. CRUNCH, snorf, snorf, snorf, snorf, gulp. Smack. CRUNCH, snorf, snorf, snorf, snorf, gulp. Smack. CRUNCH, snorf, snorf, snorf, snorf, gulp. Smack. CRUNCH, snorf, snorf, snorf, snorf, gulp. Smack. CRUNCH… people are huffing. People are shooting her so many evil looks that some of them deflected off her and stuck to me, probably because she was hot and I was not.
I turn to her, smile politely, and whisper, “take the fucking apple outside or I am going to beat your ass.”
“EXCUUUUUUUSE ME?” she asks.
“SHHHHHHHH!” huffs everyone within 30 feet.
I pointed to the door.
“IF YOU HAVE SOMETHING TO SAY, SAY IT!” she yawps.
SHHHHH. SHHHHH. SHHHHH. SHHHHH.
I stand up. I am a tall gal. I have her by a good 6 inches. “TAKE. THE. MOTHERFUCKING. APPLE. OUTSIDE.”
She got up and ran outside. She returns with a security guard. I am back to anticipatory repudiation.
“HER!” she squawks. “SHE THREATENED ME!”
Point of information – a security guard at a law school has little to no power, KNOWS everyone looks down on him, and TAKES ADVANTAGE OF ANY CHANCE TO WIELD HIS SQUIRTGUN.
“I did not threaten her. I threatened her apple.”
He hitches up his pants. “I think we have a problem here.”
No shit, sherlock. It is statements like that that are the reason I am on THIS side of that uniform and you are on THAT side.
“Go eat a donut. Take the bitch with you so she can eat her apple. BUT SHUT THE FUCK UP SO THE REST OF US CAN STUDY!”
Everyone clapped – and then immediately shooshed each other for clapping.
Silence. The security guard tries to stare me down. THAT’s gonna happen. Sorority girl informs me she is going to “report me”. I have no idea what that means. I may get sent to the principals office. Do we have a principal? Security guard, also shorter than me, hisses that if he has to come back, he is going to forcefully remove me. I start laughing. Someone oinks. My first thought was that it was a veiled insult about my extra ten. Then I realized, no, everyone was on my side. Security guard goes over and starts fucking with the oinker. Someone else oinks. Someone else stretches and cracks a knuckle and is immediately and forcefully shooshed.
Sorority girl loudly gets her shit and moves. I guess I had cooties or something.
She sat down across the library, PULLED OUT HER PHONE AND CALLED HER FRIEND TO TELL HER WHAT A BITCH I WAS. Ahhhh, you should have heard the huffing and shishing. My friend and drug dealer came on shift at the front desk. He had her tossed.
I still have no idea what anticipatory repudiation is, and my adderall is wearing off and my head hurts.
But yes, I am still winning friends and influencing people and spreading joy wherever I go.
SOURCE: The New York Times
Warren E. Buffett, the billionaire investor who supported Barack Obama during the presidential campaign, might be more than just an informal adviser to the president: He might also be his distant cousin, according to a new study of Mr. Obama’s family tree.
Genealogists at Ancestry.com, the online genealogy site, reported Tuesday that Mr. Buffett and Mr. Obama are seventh cousins, three times removed, and share a great-grandfather who owned slaves in Maryland.
The ancestor, Mareen Duvall, emigrated from France to Maryland as an indentured servant in the 1650s, the genealogists reported. By 1659, Mr. Duvall had purchased property in Anne Arundel County, Maryland, which he later named “Middle Plantation,” the report said.
According to historical records, Duvall belonged to a religious sect called the Jacobites, was a slave owner, planter and merchant and was “conservative in his political life.”
Spokesmen from the White House and Mr. Buffett’s office did not respond to requests for comment about the online site’s findings.
“We’ve all watched Pres. Obama and Warren Buffett’s ongoing association, from Buffett’s official endorsement of Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign to their sometimes differing views on economic
policy,” Anastasia Tyler, a genealogist at Ancestry.com, said in a statement. “Like most family members, the President and Buffett may not always agree on everything, but this latest discovery confirming they are related may shed light on why the two seem to see eye-to-eye on many issues.
“I worry about you, and your religion. For if your dubious proposition that ‘God hath created Man in His own image’ is true, how offended must He be to contemplate his reflection?
For I am entirely confident that vastly more than 99% of all people are but obstacles to progress. And while I have neither the time nor interest to calculate the precise value to the right of that decimal, suffice it to say that those who do not lack vision—and the courage to pursue it—are frighteningly few in number. The “ambitious” likely constitute a mere rounding error.
Indeed, the very best of that uninspired supermajority serve as nothing more than witnesses to history, and even that may be too kind a characterization. Most aren’t even this worthy. With eyes open are they still asleep, disengaged and anonymous, yet nonetheless able to drool at their high-definition televisions.
This world is fueled by that which they lack: vision, so supplied by the elite cadre of voracious, muscular, project-oriented dreamers who discover early on that the only thing more insulting to God than anonymity in life is, of course, anonymity in death.
I blame you for this, the unimaginative extent of our collective potential. Oh, nevermind; you serve your purpose, I suppose. For how could I be sure of my own existence were you not there to read about it in the morning post?”
On this, the first night of Hanukkah, we are pleased to present you with a delightful dose of Mormon senatorial spirituality. As The New York Times put it:
“The canon of Hanukkah songs written by Mormon senators from Utah just got a little bigger.”
(Click HERE for the article.)
Indeed, Senator Orrin G. Hatch, the solemn-faced Republican, has penned a catchy holiday tune: “Eight Days of Hanukkah.” Read the story on how this came to be.
CHECK THE VIDEO: “Eight Days of Hanukkah”
Well, perhaps he’s on to something. As Michael Feinstein writes in his New York Times Op-Ed:
“We live in a multicultural time and the mixing, and mixing up, of traditions is an inevitable result. Hence we have the almost century-old custom of American Jews creating a lot more Christmas music than Hanukkah music.”
Dock Ellis & The LSD No-No by James Blagden
November 11, 2009
In celebration of the greatest athletic achievement by a man on a psychedelic journey, No Mas and artist James Blagden proudly present the animated tale of Dock Ellis’ legendary LSD no-hitter. Of the 263 no-hitters ever thrown in the Big Leagues, we can only guess how many were aided by steroids, but we can say without question that only one was ever thrown on acid.
Sadly, the great Dock Ellis died last December at 63. A year before, radio producers Donnell Alexander and Neille Ilel, recorded an interview with Ellis in which the former Pirate gave a moment by moment account of his June 12, 1970, no-hitter against the San Diego Padres. The original four minute piece appeared March 29, 2008 on NPRs Weekend America.
Most Unparliamentary Language
December 11, 2009
LIVE FROM IRELAND!
The Green Party’s Paul Gogarty releases a torrent of abuse at Labour’s Emmet Stagg during a Dail Budget debate. Gogarty later apologised for his language claiming it was patriotism that had fired him.
Top 60 Ghetto Lady Names
January 9, 2009
FROM MEDIA CREATOR:
This is the ORIGINAL video. The rest are parodies.
We countdown the top 60 ghettoest and blackest names.
Bill Dance’s classic bloopers….
“Kill yourself, you know?”
Those are probably not the words you’d want to hear after submitting a less than professional (admittedly) production of a hip hop video to the world. Those words, however, were the repeated response to apsiring rapper Bangs’s art: his own hip hop song that he posted on YouTube.
While Bangs’s song may not be the most conventional piece of hip hop, it certainly is the product of one man’s enthusiasm. Bangs took a love of his–hip hop–and turned it into a visual presentation; a presentation that was shatted on by numerous callers on a Shade 45 XM radio show. Wow.
“Haters,” as they were naturally called, commanded the airwaves for a good number of minutes. The callers would not only bash what Bangs presented, but they suggest he bash his own head in over the lyrics wrote.
http://thisis50.com/profiles/blogs/wowshade45-callers-go-in-on
What’s the problem here, though? Isn’t this what rappers have presented over the years? Isn’t this what artists have communicated to the masses? Oh…I guess living the dream isn’t the dream afterall.
Randy
Full Dispatches coming in 2010. Contributors wanted!
Washington, DC (United States)
Playing the part is the first and only step to successfully punking the media and politicos. This is the State Dinner-style iteration of the Balloon Boy escapades. Reality TV is close to defining Reality Reality… like a toddler grasping the significance of the baby in the mirror, so too do we seek the affirmation of existence that only the camera and YouTube exposure provide.
ALSO: Federal data shows that since 2004, the water provided to more than 49 million people has contained illegal concentrations of chemicals like arsenic or radioactive substances like uranium, as well as dangerous bacteria often found in sewage.
Pacific Ocean
Groundbreaking footage captures the deepest undersea volcano eruption ever recorded.
Cameras capture a tool-using invertebrate; is the octopus smarter than your average American confederate?
Japan
Roger Cohen on Japanese Obsessions: “I’m not aware of any other nation where fantasy, escapism and the cyber world have fused with such intensity. Indeed, there’s a Japanese word, otaku, denoting a whole universe of monomaniacal geek-like obsession, whether with an electronic game, some odd hobby, or the cartoonlike “manga” comic books devoted to everything from kamikazes to kinky sex.”
South/North Korea
The government has broken ground on a $19.2 billion public works project to remake the country’s four longest rivers. It is an ambitious and controversial undertaking that has spurred a national debate over what constitutes green development.
The People’s Republic of China
China has banned individuals from registering internet domain names and launched a review of millions of existing personal websites in the toughest government censorship drive to date.
The New York Times reports on the “sense of disquiet, even in developing Asian nations in Beijing’s orbit, over the implications of China’s swift, seemingly boundless economic growth.”
BONUS: Check out the Taishan Towers.
Tajikistan
Afghanistan
Our Afghanistan dispatch actually finds us in Oslo, where President Barack Obama accepted his Nobel Peace Prize fewer than two weeks after his announced 30,000 troop surge in Afghanistan. Elaborating on the concepts of a “just peace” and “necessary wars,” the man outlined what will likely become a guiding glibal military strategy.
You can download the President’s speech here: The Obama Doctrine.
Uzbekistan
Turkmenistan
Iran
A revolution corrupted is under attack by the dreamers who staged it. But this time, a legitimate opposition may not withstand the fatal forces of hypocrisy. (See also: The tyrant eternally silences the whisteblower who exposes the rape and torture of dissidents.)
Meanwhile, a secret memo leaked to a British newspaper reports that Iranian scientists are conducting tests on a neutron initiator, one of the final technical hurdles in making a nuclear warhead. Yet most Iranians are concerned less with their country’s nuclear ambitions than they are with the government’s risky plan to phase out Iran’s decade-old system of state subsidies.
Finally, a hero is lost… Ayatollah Montazeri has died.
Turkey
Greece
Italy
Italian Premier Silvio Berlusconi was punched in the face at the end of a rally by a man wielding a small statue, leaving the 73-year-old media mogul stunned with a bloodied mouth. The 42-year-old man accused of attacking Berlusconi in Milan as he signed autographs was immediately taken into custody.
Watch the Video
This fashion of physically engaging political leaders seems to be all the rage these days… check out the Christmas Eve assault Pope Benedict endured at the hands of another unstable Italian.
Watch the Video
Spain
We’re stretching this category to encompass the Spanish-speaking nation of Chile, where “[j]ust 9.2 percent of 18-to-29-year-olds are registered to vote.” Read the disheartening article here.
Portugal
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