Dead men tell no tales

I don't know what this says about the state of society and/or modern police agencies but in the past couple of days two men have been discovered dead in their cars after being overlooked for days. One poor guy sat unoticed by the side of one of New Zealand's busiest highways for five days.

It's summer Down Under and after the body of Alvin Singh was finally noticed Detective inspector Mark Gutry casually remarked, "After that time in a hot car, it wasn't pleasant."

Meanwhile, half a world away in Kalamazoo, Michigan, somebody reported a suspicious vehicle that had been parked in the same spot for a couple of days or more. When police investigated they found the driver slumped dead behind the wheel.

They also found two parking tickets under the wiper blade on his windshield, about two feet from his corpse.

"The councilman works very hard to make his constituents gay."

 

Through the looking Glass

Google has a new product it is preparing for market. It's called Glass and at this point in our breathtakingly rapid technological evolution it's a mind-blower.

Explained simply: it's a pair of glasses that's a computer. It sees what you see. Want to preserve what you're looking at? Just say, "Take a picture" or "Take a video" and it will.

Share what you see in real-time.

Want information about something you're looking at? It will absorb what you're seeing and Google it automatically. You'll get details in a fraction of a second.

Need directions? Say your destination and it will put a map right in front of your face.


Incredible.

Check it out.

This will be no big deal in a few years but still, it's a wonderful time to be alive!

The Pastafarian

Pastafarian Aaron Williams

Motor vehicle workers in Dayton, New Jersey, called police on a man who insisted on wearing a pasta strainer on his head for his driver’s license photo.

Aaron Williams told motor vehicle workers the strainer was a religious head covering and he had a right to wear it.

Williams said he's a Pastafarian.

No, seriously.

Pastafarianism, or the Church of the Flying Spaghettic Monster, is a movement opposing teaching in schools of intelligent design and creationism. It's followers say they're dead serious but most bystanders say it's a satirical attack on more traditional religion.

Williams insists he's serious about the movement.

“I take it as seriously as anybody else when it comes to religious beliefs,” he said.

Niko Alm of Austria, Pastafarian

And this isn't the first time this has happened.

In Austria, self-described Pastafarian Niko Alm fought for three years for the right to wear a pasta strainer on his head in his driver's license photo.

He won his fight after officials performed a mental-health check.

Milking youth

I love this stuff.

As young adults we still have a lot of child in us living right near the surface. It's why we do stupid things when we're young. Some intentionally, some not.

And, like children we still play.

This is the latest craze among the college crowd in Britain. It's called "milking" for reasons that should be obvious.

Why we love radio call-in shows

You can't make this stuff up.

A woman named Donna called the Y94 Playhouse in North Dakota to complain about the "Deer Crossing" signs in her neighborhood.

She asked, "Why are we encouraging deer to cross the interstate?"

Listen for yourself.

A question that needs answering...

To pee or not to pee...

                

Did we really need to know that the most decorated Olympic athlete and greatest swimmer in the history of the world pees in the swimming pool? Really?

First it was Ryan Lochte’s mom telling the Today Show that Ryan goes out on one-night-stands. Ryan denied that but admitted peeing in the pool.

Then the breathless gaggle of reporters raced to Michael Phelps for comment. Does HE pee in the pool, too?

The bloody Wall Street Journal asked him that!

Of course, he said. Everybody does, he said.

I don’t know about you but there’s no suspense left in the games for me.

Thisaway and Thataway

People seem really wound up these days, don't they? If you ever worry that Americans have lost their sense of humor, relax. Take a road trip and read the signs.

For example, smack dab in the middle of Arkansas there is a tiny town called Yellville, where you'll find the intersection of Thisaway Rd. and Thataway Rd., just a quarter mile from Whichaway Rd. Wouldn't you love to hear somebody there giving directions to a lost family? Shades of Abbott and Costello.

Thataway and Thisaway isn't the only funny intersection you may come to. In an Arizona retirement community residents undoubtedly get a thousand laughs a day from living, as they do, at the corner of Stroke and Acoma Streets.

If you're depressed and feeling unloved in Albany, Georgia, you can hang out at the corner of Lonesome and Hardup.

Presidents are tempting fodder for street namers. Folks in Houston are true to their largely conservative perspective and their well-deserved reputation for being facetious by naming converging streets Clinton and Fidelity. In Ann Arbor, Michigan, people engaged in brief political commentary by creating the intersection of Nixon and Bluett.

You have to love Americans. We don't get as much credit as we deserve for having a national sense of humor. Just look at some of the street names scattered across our fruited plain:

There are several streets in the U.S. called Psycho Path.

In Story, Arkansas, the only way to get to Constipation Ridge is to drive up Farfrompoopen Road.



The scatalogical humor never ends. We're a nation of fourteen years old.

Folks in Central Pennsylvania can direct you to Cowshit Ln. if you will kindly refrain from stealing the street sign. It seems to happen a lot. In fact, that's why the merchants of Amador City, California, years ago began selling copies of their iconic Pig Turd Alley sign, hoping that it would stop thefts of the actual sign. That must have worked. I bought one.

Some street namers seem to be completely baffled and give up...



...while others just seem to lack interest.

 



 There are some streets you should steer clear of...

...and the famous road less traveled.



Wherever your adventures take you, keep smiling. We live in a very funny country.

© Copyright 2012 by Dave Williams, all rights reserved.

Craig's caveat

Craigslist is not only a source of great buys and opportunities to be ripped off by scam artists, it's also a great place to find some real knuckleheads! For your Thursday reading and sharing pleasure, a few real Craigslist ads:

 

The true Olympic flame

I usually just go for easy laughs here. But this morning I offer you smiling tears of heartbreaking joy.

Trust me. It's a great way to start the day.

Classic headlines

Headlines are designed to grab our attention and compel us to read the entire story but in some cases there's just no point, anything that follows would just be anti-climactic.

Here are some of the best headlines ever::

New Olympic sport: Water balloon tossing!

Not really, but it wouldn't be a shock.

We see some pretty silly competitions in Olympics events. Frankly, my hide would be chapped if I had booked a flight to London to learn that ping-pong was the only event I could get a ticket to see.

But it could be worse. Consider the list of some competitions that were actually Olympic sports at one time:

Tug-of-war was an event for eight-man teams at five Olympics, 1900, '04, '08, '12 and '20. A Vince McMahon-hosted international battle royal would probably be more to our liking today.

Poodle clipping. You can't make this stuff up. In the 1900 summer games some 6,000 spectators assembled at a park in western Paris to breathlessly watch 128 competitors race to trim the most poodles in a two hour period. The gold medalist was a French woman named Avril Lafoule, who snipped 17 dogs. Sadly, she wasn't invited back four years later because the event was, uh, cut.

Firefighting, another trial event in 1900, had both amateur and professional divisions. Details of the specifics are a bit fuzzy but you have to assume folks weren't as anal about air pollution back then. The event was flambéed thereafter.

Delivery van driving. This was a race through the streets of Paris. Yes, in delivery vans. I should mention that the 1900 games ran concurrently with the World Fair which was also going on in Paris at the time. It gave the unhappy customers who couldn't get a ticket to watch poodle clipping something else to do.

Roque. Okay. We know it now as croquet. This thrill-packed event was held only once, 1904 in St. Louis but Americans won all the medals! Possibly because no other country competed.

Motor boating first appeared in those wacky 1900 Parisian games but the thrill was gone after 1908. Apparently the big problem was that nobody but the contestants themselves could see what was going on. Oh, and nobody cared.

Swimming obstacle race. Say, how many events did they have in 1900? Did anybody run or jump? Anyway, this actually sounds pretty exciting. Contestants had to swim against the current of the Seine River, climb over some poles, scramble across the top of a row of boats and swim under another row of boats. Hey, wait a minute. That's the reality TV show called Wipe Out!

Live pigeon shooting. Yep. Paris, 1900 and never thereafter. Imagine the thrill for the children, watching clumps of bloodied feathers tumble from the sky! Still, it must have made for a plethora of inexpensive squab daily specials on Parisian restaurant menus that summer.

So, when you find yourself in front of the TV watching pretty girls bouncing around waving a ribbon or a bunch of guys in Spandex ® shooting bb-guns and you think, "This is stupid," remember the great stuff you missed.

© 2012, Dave Williams. All rights reserved.

Der fuhrer, laughing in Hell

Two items offered without comment from the original sources (linked.)  Condensed but not embellished.

Toronto Mayor Rob Ford’s office responded to criticism Thursday after a photo of the mayor posing with white supremacist surfaced on the Internet. In the photo, which was posted on a blog called Anti-Racist Canada, Ford is seen standing next to Jon Latvis, who is dressed in a military uniform and is sporting a moustache.

A statement released by the Office of the Mayor said that this picture was one of up to 750 pictures taken with the mayor that day.

“At no time was the mayor aware of allegations that this individual had made racist, hateful or otherwise offensive comments/"

According to a band webpage, Latvis played lead guitar in a heavy metal group called Rahowa and has performed with another band called Aryan. The term Rahowa is a word used by white supremacists to describe a war against Jews and other races that they view as undesirable.

Source: CTV News, Toronto

A German teenager who can’t help making Nazi salutes because he suffers from Tourette’s syndrome was beaten unconscious by a black man who thought he was insulting him.

Gerrit Oeller, 16, tried to explain to the enraged man that the salute was not meant as an insult, and that he could not control his arm.

Gerrit said: 'He asked me if I thought it was funny and it made me nervous, which made me clench my teeth and he thought I was grinning at him. That was when he hit me. I went out like a light.'

By the time police arrived the man had gone.

Source: London Daily Mail