today's news

[Chicken]

i did a little search but couldn't find a thread to showcase not-so-serious but interesting news. here's one today that prompted me to start this thread:

Big breasts win verdict for Japanese pin-up

Tue Mar 4, 12:17 AM ET

A Japanese pin-up model says that her big breasts have not only boosted her career -- they also helped her overturn a court verdict.

The bikini model, who goes by her professional name Serena Kozakura, was cleared after a court decided she was too well-endowed to squeeze into a room through a hole, as she had been found guilty of earlier.

"I used to hate my body so much," Kozakura, who has appeared in product commercials on television, told the private Asahi network in an interview aired Tuesday.

"But it was my breasts" that won in court, she said.

The case was splashed through the Japanese media on Tuesday, with the Asahi network even inviting her to demonstrate how she could not fit through the opening.

Kozakura, 38, was convicted last year of property destruction after a man said she kicked in the wooden door of his room and crawled inside, apparently because he was with another woman.

Kozakura had said the man made the hole himself.

In her appeal, the defence counsel held up a plate showing the size of the hole and said that she could not squeeze through with her 110-centimetre (44-inch) bust.

"The judges were very good-mannered as they showed no expressions on their faces. I guess they're well-trained," Kozakura said.

Tokyo High Court presiding judge Kunio Harada agreed and threw out the guilty verdict on Monday, saying there was reasonable doubt over the man's account.

[red]

Man in girl's uniform arrested for sneaking into Saitama school

Friday, February 22, 2008 at 10:23 EST

SAITAMA — Police on Thursday arrested a man for sneaking into a high school in Niiza City, Saitama Prefecture, while wearing a schoolgirl's uniform. Tetsunori Nanpei, 39, was caught by a teacher and handed over to police.

According to police investigations, the suspect was showing himself to students from inside his car outside the school. After he entered the school building, some students reported him to school officials. When he tried to flee, a teacher caught him.

The suspect was quoted by police as saying, "I bought the Niiza schoolgirl uniform at an online auction. I thought I could camouflage myself at school." Police said Nanpei was wearing make-up and a pink bra but no other underwear.

[chrisj]

http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5i2jwSPszI1IlakDw668Us3BnT2IgD8V2RAJO0

Singapore Terror Suspect Escapes

SINGAPORE (AP) — The suspected local leader of a Southeast Asian terrorist network, who allegedly plotted to crash a plane into Singapore's airport, escaped Wednesday from a detention center, authorities said.

Mas Selamat Kastari, said to be commander of the Jemaah Islamiyah militant group's Singapore arm, was allegedly involved in plans about seven years ago to attack Singapore targets including the U.S. Embassy, the American Club and government buildings.

"Mas Selamat was the leader of the Singapore (Jemaah Islamiyah) network. He walks with a limp and is presently at large," the Home Affairs Ministry said in a statement. "Extensive police resources have been deployed to track him down."

It did not say how he escaped.

Several riot police trucks were parked along main roads near the Whitley Road Detention Center, from which Mas Selamat escaped. Dozens of police officers checked passing cars.

Singapore, a close ally of the United States, was named as an al-Qaida target in a transcript from alleged al-Qaida operative Khalid Sheikh Mohamed's Combatant Status Review Tribunal, held last year at the U.S. military detention center in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

The ministry said Mas Selamat also plotted to hijack an airplane and crash it into Singapore's main airport, Changi, in retaliation for the country's arrest and detention of some of his fellow Jemaah Islamiyah members in a crackdown on the militant group's operatives here. The alleged schemes were never carried out.

Mas Selamat left Singapore in December 2001 following the arrests of nearly 40 other suspected Jemaah Islamiyah members.

The ministry's Web site said Indonesian authorities detained him in February 2003 on charges related to possession of falsified identification documents. They deported him to Singapore in February 2006, the ministry said.

Mas Selamat has since been held in custody under Singapore's Internal Security Act, which allows indefinite detention without trial.

Since 2002, Jemaah Islamiyah has been blamed for a series of terror attacks that killed more than 250 people, most of them in Indonesia. Scores of its suspected operatives have been arrested across Southeast Asia since 2000.

[Chicken]

^ i was hoping for something a little more light-hearted.

like red's, which makes me wonder about the country i grew up in.

[6MT]

'Color Field' Artists Found a Different Way

NPR 3/4/08

Washington, D.C., is known for many things, but launching an art movement is not one of them. Still, starting in the 1950s, the federal city was a cradle for a group of artists who produced colorful, abstract, even joyful works. One art critic dubbed them "color field" painters. An exhibition of 39 of their works just went on view at the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

These artists had amazing, tradition-breaking techniques. They rarely used paint brushes. They didn't prime their huge canvases before putting on their paint. And some of them — like Gene Davis — couldn't even draw. He was a sportswriter, then went on to report on Presidents Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman. Yet Davis always wanted to make art.

"But he was in his 40s and he said, 'I'm much too old to learn to draw. I know how hard it is. So I am going to simply going to paint stripes,'" says Betsy Broun, director of the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

And so, Broun says, without doing a single drawing, Davis striped his way onto the walls of museums around the world. Using what looks to be a very long ruler, Davis set down a series of strictly drawn straight lines, and painted various vivid colors inside those lines.

Color as Expression

His main interest was color — what it could express, without representing anything. No apples, chairs or torsos. Just stripes of bright color.

"He said, 'I play by eye in the same way that a jazz musician plays by ear,' Broun says. "These are artists who came along very much in a postwar mood. The economy was doing well, the nation was all recovering and bouncing back."

Broun says the color field pioneers — Davis, Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland and Sam Gilliam among them — reflected the upbeat spirit of the 1950s and early '60s ... the stability of the Eisenhower years, the youthful possibilities of JFK.

"There is a kind of celebratory quality to a lot of these works," Broun says. "There was recently a Morris Louis show and a scholar named Alex Nemerov said, 'he looks like court painter to John F. Kennedy.'"

'Needs and Invention'

Their artistic inspiration was New York painter Helen Frankenthaler. Her pictures reacted to the ropey, anxious canvases of abstract expressionism.

"She was looking for a different way to get a more luminous quality in her painting," Broun says.

Frankenthaler was influenced by Jackson Pollock. She knew him, and watched him work in the early 1950s. She saw him put his canvases flat on the floor, and then rope and lasso skeins of enamel paint onto them.

"What I took from that was the gesture and the attitude and the floor working," Frankenthaler said in a 1988 NPR interview. "But I wanted to work with shapes in a very different way. And instead of being involved in his technique, what evolved for me out of my needs and invention had to do with pouring paint, and staining paint."

To do that, Frankenthaler diluted her paint, thinning it out so it melted into the weave of the canvas and became the canvas. And the canvas became the painting.

This was new.

A Life-Changing Experience

Two young Washington artists — Noland and Louis — rode a train up to Manhattan to visit an art critic friend named Clement Greenberg. He was Frankenthaler's lover at the time, and took the D.C. painters to her studio. There they saw her massive1952 work, "Mountains and Sea" — tinted with buckets of fast-drying, thinned out acrylic paint that she poured and dribbled and pooled onto unprimed canvas.

Smithsonian curator Joanna Marsh says it was a life-changing experience. The men went home to Washington and started to pour. Morris Louis did, anyway. Kenneth Noland was more symmetrical, sometimes straight-edged and geometric, with wonderful colors, put on flat — sometimes with a brush — in abstract shapes. Louis was freer, with radiant colors soaked into the canvas in light, translucent veils.

"Louis worked in his dining room in his home,'' Marsh says. "It was a very small space and he was quite secretive about his process. He didn't allow people to come in to see him while he was working."

Sometimes Louis' work was a secret to himself. For a series he called "Unfurled," made on wide, wide canvases, his small studio became a real issue.

"He had to work piecemeal," Marsh says. "He never saw the entire canvas, because the space was so confined. So he would work on one section, for instance the left side, and then he would move over to the right side of the canvas, but not be able to see what he had just done on the left."

In a way, that determination to "make it new" defined the art of all of the color field painters. Now their bright and shining new ideas can be seen at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington through May 26. The exhibition is called "Color as Field: American Painting, 1950-1975." It was organized by Karen Wilkin for the American Federation of Arts.

[6MT]

airborne doesn't work, settle lawsuit for 23.3 mil

http://money.cnn.com/2008/03/04/news/companies/airborne_settlement/index.htm?section=money_latest

[headcoat]

In today's news, Obama drops out of the race, giving Hillary the Democratic nomination for president.

McCain and Huckabee also drop out due to undisclosed reasons, giving Ron Paul the Republican nomination.

[Chicken]

airborne doesn't work, settle lawsuit for 23.3 mil

http://money.cnn.com/2008/03/04/news/companies/airborne_settlement/index.htm?section=money_latest

i guess it was all a placebo effect. too bad for people who thought it worked.

and too bad i didn't save my receipts.

[Anton]

tl;dr

news is so irrelevant.

[plongin]

An FCC official clarifies new broadcasting regulations that clear the way for more nude scenes featuring the beautiful, auburn-haired Alyson Hannigan.

http://www.theonion.com/content/video/fcc_okays_nudity_on_tv_if_it_s?utm_source=embedded_video"

[chantheman]

i guess it was all a placebo effect. too bad for people who thought it worked.

and too bad i didn't save my receipts.

agreed. my mom being a teacher and around germs all the time has been buying this non stop for years...no reciept= only like 6 bottles of credit.

[Spaghettini]

patrick swayze allegedly has 5 weeks left to live.

[Chicken]

i guess perhaps the biggest news for you right now, chan, is that brett finally announced his retirement. (i noticed your new sig.)

[sybaritical]

16ft saltwater crocodile almost eats very stupid Israeli backpacker.

What a gimp.

[Begåvningsreserven]

H&M buys Cheap monday.

Örjan and friends get 564 million SEK. Can now afford a trimmer for his beard.

H&M has acquired the privately owned Swedish fashion company Fabric Scandinavien AB that owns store chains Weekday and Monki. The group also designs and sells fashion through a number of own brands, such as Cheap Monday. The company will be run as a stand alone subsidiary within the H&M Group.

In a statement, Rolf Eriksen, CEO of H&M, said: “We have been impressed by Fabric Scandinavien's development for a long time and we see a potential to develop stores and concepts in other markets. By working together we can accelerate the growth further. We can also do it in a more efficient manner by drawing on H&M's experience and knowledge of for example production, logistics and establishmentâ€.

Fabric Scandinavien's CEO Lars Karlsson added: “H&M is a fantastic company and we have found that we share the same values. Together with H&M we will have better opportunities to truly develop our ideas within fashion and design. H&M's knowledge of for instance production and international expansion will be extremely valuable to usâ€.

[mojinho]

is this for real? if they started selling cheap monday at H&M i'd shit myself

[chantheman]

i guess perhaps the biggest news for you right now, chan, is that brett finally announced his retirement. (i noticed your new sig.)

i thought there was hope it was all a joke...as im watching him talk, he just looks exhausted...it was a good 16 years. hes all ive know as a packers fan for 15 years.

[Chicken]

spaghetti, apparently swayze has a pancreatic cancer, but the five weeks to live part is a rumor.

syb, i sometimes believe in survivial of the fittest. and i guess that guy is barely making it.

looks like begs is also on top of things again. it does seem true that h&m has bought cheap mondays. i wonder what that means to those jeans. i'd imagine the price point should remain pretty much the same as well as quality.

chan, looks like it might be for real this time.

on another news:

Federal Charges in Online Prostitution Ring

March 6, 2008, 1:37 pm

By Alan Feuer

Federal authorities have announced the arrests of four people accused of running an online prostitution ring that had clients in major cities from New York to Paris and took in more than $1 million in profits over four years.

The ring was known as the Emperor’s Club VIP and had 50 prostitutes available for appointments in New York, Paris, Washington, Miami and London, according to a federal complaint issued in United States District Court in Manhattan.

The appointments, made by way of on online booking service, cost between $1,000 and $5,500 an hour and could be paid for with cash, credit, wire transfers or money orders, the complaint said.

According to the United States attorney’s office in Manhattan, the leader of the ring was Mark Brener, 62, of New Jersey, who delegated day-to-day responsibility of the business to Cecil Suwal, 23, also of New Jersey. Ms. Suwal controlled the ring’s bank accounts and oversaw two booking agents, identified by the authorities as Tameka Rachelle Lewis, 32 of Brooklyn, and Tanya Hollander, 36, of Rhinebeck, N.Y., according to court papers.

If convicted of a conspiracy charge to violate federal prostitution laws, Ms. Lewis and Ms. Hollander could face a maximum of five years in prison. Mr. Brener and Ms. Suwal each face an additional 20 years in prison, if convicted on charges of laundering nearly $1 million dollars through two front companies, QAT Consulting Group Inc. and QAT International Inc.

i would've thought online prostitution ring will bring in way more than a mil in four years. and recommend those with spare time to check out feedbacks on this article here.

[hexapus]

Six-Legged Hexapus Claimed as World First in Britain

LONDON (AFP) - British marine experts have found what they claim is a world first -- a six-legged octopus, or "hexapus," whom they have christened Henry.

The unique sea creature, which has two limbs fewer than a normal octopus, is believed to be the result of a birth defect rather than an accident, say his keepers at the Blackpool Sea Life Centre in northwest England.

"We've scoured the Internet and talked to lots of other aquariums and no-one has ever heard of another case of a six-legged octopus," said supervisor Carey Duckhouse.

Henry was discovered in a lobster pot off the north Wales coast two weeks ago, and was one of eight creatures that Sea Life staff picked up from a local marine zoo there -- where staff hadn't noticed his missing legs.

It was only when he attached himself to the inside of a glass tank that Sea Life staff noticed he was two limbs short of a full set. Octopuses are renowned for having three hearts and blue blood, but not usually six legs.

"He's a lovely little thing," said a spokeswoman, adding that he will go on display to the public later this month.

[Chicken]

^ new sushi!

this article should also be posted on the weirdest animal thread.

[Biff15]

Dungeons & Dragons Inventor Dies

03:14 PM CST on Thursday, March 6, 2008

By MICHAEL MERSCHEL / The Dallas Morning News

[email protected]

The most common response to the news of Gary Gygax's death on Tuesday was probably, "Gary who?" His, after all, was not a household name.

Also Online Books blog: Share your thoughts about Gary Gygax

Dungeons & Dragons co-creator dies at 69

His was a rec-room name, a library-table name, a gaming-store-in-the-dark-corner-of-the-mall name. And for the people who recognized that name from the worn covers of thumbed-over gaming manuals, his passing evoked a flood of memories.

"It's kind of like the death of Elvis for me," one fan told a Canadian newspaper.

Mr. Gygax was the co-creator and most visible face of Dungeons & Dragons, a game as nerdy and misunderstood as the millions of adolescents who played it.

Its cultural significance is that it is the recognized spiritual ancestor of every adventure-themed video game – and, by extension, many of the movies – around today. J.R.R. Tolkien imagined much of the fantasy universe, but it was Mr. Gygax who let players move in.

And millions did. The New York Times reports that he sold $1 billion in books and equipment. But despite such gaudy numbers, the game and gamers were always pushed to the fringes of society, tainted by links to the occult even though the game was roughly as satanic as an episode of Bewitched.

OK, so Elizabeth Montgomery was not so much into smiting the undead with holy flame strikes or stealing magic items from lightning-breathing dragons. That kind of stuff went on all the time in D&D –all played out according to Mr. Gygax's charts, all safely simulated with the multicolored dice that became icons of the game.

And all in our imaginations, surrounded by like-minded and creative friends.

It's those friendships that are at the core of the hundreds of blog posts and e-mails being written in tribute this week.

There's no denying Mr. Gygax's game drew a certain kind of person – most of the time, we preferred books to basketballs, and the only time you would see us running on the football field is if we were trying to get away from a linebacker who was trying to give us a wedgie.

We would grow up to be engineers, artists and maybe a journalist or two. But back then, the game gave us a safe harbor during the stormy passage from youth to adulthood. More accurately, the people we played with – on our parents' castoff dining room tables, with bags of chips and liters of soda almost crowding out the gaming materials – became both anchor and shelter.

Mr. Gygax himself said the essence of a role-playing game such as D&D is that it is "a group, cooperative experience." And in a 21st century when society is more wired but less connected than ever, Mr. Gygax deserves credit not only for inventing a fantasy game, but for fostering millions of real-life friendships.

So amid all the imaginary tributes being offered – tips of magic helmets, lifting of flagons of ale – one friend suggested to me that a memorial game, complete with Dr Pepper, Doritos and picante sauce – might be in order.

Mr. Gygax would certainly approve.

[rome1]

no more dirty dancing???

[Guest chemi]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080312/ap_on_re_us/woman_in_bathroom

WICHITA, Kan. - Authorities are considering charges in the bizarre case of a woman who sat on her boyfriend's toilet for two years — so long that her body was stuck to the seat by the time the boyfriend finally called police.

Ness County Sheriff Bryan Whipple said it appeared the 35-year-old Ness City woman's skin had grown around the seat. She initially refused emergency medical services but was finally convinced by responders and her boyfriend that she needed to be checked out at a hospital.

"We pried the toilet seat off with a pry bar and the seat went with her to the hospital," Whipple said. "The hospital removed it."

:confused::confused::confused::confused::confused::confused:

[Chicken]

^ that is one bizarre story. (is this why sufu crashed?)

doesn't your limbs rot and fall off after something like 8 hours without circulation?

how could she sit on the can for two friggin years?

[mojinho]

bitch must've been fat

[DüM]

A 19-year-old man was arrested Sunday night for singing the lyrics to a profane rap song as he walked on a Florida street. Christopher Holder was nabbed after a woman complained to police that her two children (ages five and 14) heard Holder repeatedly reciting the words "mother fucker," according to a Hernando County Sheriff's Office report, a copy of which you'll find here. When questioned by deputies, Holder "immediately began arguing that he did nothing wrong," and explained that he was merely covering a song by Louisiana rapper Lil' Boosie, whose most recent album, "Bad Azz," includes cuts like "My Nigga" and "Fuck You." But Holder, pictured in the below mug shot, added that he "agreed that he did not believe children needed to hear language such as that being hollered down the road." Holder was charged with disorderly conduct, a misdemeanor."

[DüM]

The teens call their public orgies ponceo. On a typical Friday afternoon in the Chilean capital of Santiago, hundreds gather in a leafy urban park for a few hours of sexual experimentation. Surrounded by passing strollers, they trade partners multiple times—mostly engaging in anonymous rounds of oral sex. When the party is over, no contact information is exchanged. Same-gender interactions are commonplace, as the lines between hetero- and homosexuality are blurred, partly by the alcohol and drugs consumed, but also by shifting social mores held by Chilean youth, in contrast to their conservative parents. "Ponceo is about having fun," says Natalia Fernandez, a 15-year-old with pink hair and a pierced chin. "This time I had seven partners."

Fernandez, like many others in the park, is wearing an anime T-shirt. Drawing inspiration from Japanese anime culture, the teens refer to themselves as "Pokemones." Their behavior, though, doesn't quite resemble that of the cartoon characters that once obsessed young TV watchers around the world. "It's shameless," says Gina Mazzini Aliste, a middle-aged woman in the park that day. "They act like ponceo is a competitive sport."

Not surprisingly, the Pokemones have become the subject of a national debate in the media, as the conservative Catholic society grapples with this new affront to its traditional values. In a country where abortion is banned and divorce was legalized only a few years ago, and where the specter of Augusto Pinochet's authoritarian regime still hovers over political discourse, the Pokemones are at once radical and inevitable. Radical because they are shocking Chilean society to its core. Inevitable because they are darlings of a booming neoliberal economy, which has provided them with all the material accoutrements necessary to be Pokemones. Yet along with sexual rebellion, these teens are also defined by their consumerism, a characteristic that neatly conforms to Chile's free-market ideals.

Indeed, the Pokemones are outfitted with the latest clothing and technological gadgets. Their look is androgynous and exaggerated: clad in low-slung, tight-fitting jeans, both boys and girls wear multiple piercings, dyed and waxed hair, and thick black eyeliner. They have their own Web sites, even their own slang, but what does it really mean to be a Pokemon? Curiously, the teenagers do not seem to hold any particular convictions about their identity in a political or sexual sense. Instead, their movement is mostly about image. "It's basically a fashion thing," says Raul Barra, a tall 19-year-old with piercings down the sides of his nose. "A Pokemon has a certain style and does ponceo."

Despite the group's controversial implications for identity and sexuality in the 21st century, there is virtually no discussion of a common cause at gatherings or on their Web sites and blogs. The Pokemones do not have a political creed, preferring apathy to engagement. Yet their existence as a movement is fundamentally political because of the contrast it marks vis-à-vis the dictatorship, under which freedoms were violently suppressed. "I guess we don't really think about politics or anything," says Valentina Espinosa, a petite 16-year-old whose teased platinum hair adds about six inches to her tiny stature. "We're not for anything, but we're not against anything, either—well, except our parents getting mad at us for being Pokemones."

Sociologists have labeled the Pokemones an "urban tribe," a term they have also applied to hippies, punks, and goths. But unlike those that came before it, this is the first "urban tribe" here born in the Internet age. As such, communication technology is key—Pokemones have hundreds of contacts on instant-messaging programs, and they regularly upload videos and photos to sites like YouTube and Fotolog. But despite the expanded capacity for communication, theirs may be the first movement in which debate about its goals is noticeably absent.

The hippies and their successors stood firmly in opposition to the status quo, but there is only one dimension of the Pokemones that seems to advance an agenda, if unintentionally. The movement has changed the rules that govern the way teenage girls interact with their male counterparts. Girls count up their partners just as boys do, and the bisexual activity, along with the Pokemon aesthetic, suggests that gender roles are not clearly defined. "I'm just having fun. I'm only 16, and I won't get hurt through ponceo because I don't go hoping to find a boyfriend," says Isidora Fernandez, who insisted on being called Frambuesa (Spanish for raspberry).

Still, though the scene may appear egalitarian, community psychologist Juan Bastian, advocacy director at the Chilean Family Planning Association, suggests that it does not represent any significant progress for women. Women here have made considerable advances; more are in the workforce than ever before, having children later in life as access to contraceptives improves. But, Bastian says, "the question still remains whether this is just a different form of the same inequality as before," this time with boys taking advantage of girls in a situation where a premium is placed on looking cool.

Bastian also worries that the teens' newfound sexual liberation has not been accompanied by an increase in information about sexual responsibility and health. Surveys reveal that while many of the teens say they refrain from actual intercourse to avoid pregnancy, they know very little about the spread of sexually transmitted diseases. "Sex education in Chile is limited and stigmatized," says Bastian. "These adolescents are rejecting the conservatism of their parents but are also endangering their health."

Strangely, their parents' conservatism may be what holds the movement together. The Pokemones, having inherited the economy bestowed by Pinochet's free-market reforms, are part of a burgeoning middle class with imprudent spending habits. The introduction of the credit card into the economy has translated into staggering personal debt for many Chileans, but the quest continues to own the newest televisions, computers, and cars. Pokemones take their cue from their parents. "'To be' is now interchangeable with 'to have,' so teens measure their self-worth according to how much they've got—in this case, how many partners they can rack up or how many friends they have on MSN," says Bastian. "Sexuality becomes another iteration of the same model their parents follow: identity expressed through quantity."

The group's consumerist tendencies have not been lost on the retail goods industry, which ferociously markets its products to the Pokemon demographic. Commercials for hair straighteners, MP3 players and cell phones run during talk shows that feature Pokemones complaining about their overprotective parents or catty best friends. "This week I bought two T-shirts and a webcam," says Pablo Gutierrez, 18. Sticking out his tongue to reveal a piercing, he adds, "And a new tongue ring. I was sick of my old one."

In fact, one of the Pokemones' main meeting spots is outside the television studio where their favorite program, "Diario de Eva," is filmed. The channel is owned by right-wing presidential candidate Sebastian Piñera, a billionaire businessman who, incidentally, made much of his fortune by helping bring credit cards to Chile. The irony is lost on the Pokemones, however, as they gather on the lawn near the studio's entrance.

They truly are rebels without a cause, but unlike melancholy James Dean in the cushy post-WWII boom, the Pokemones seem all too content to lounge about in their glossy cocoons. Back at the park Frambuesa huddles with a group of friends and pulls out a new digital camera from her anime-decorated purse. "Let's take a picture!" she squeals. Immediately makeup and mirrors materialize, lips are reglossed, eyes are relined, hair is reteased. After a long delay she finally asks, "Everyone ready?" The group leans into pose, and Victor Nuyoa, a 14-year-old who is new to the Pokemon scene, makes a peace sign. An older teen pushes down Nuyoa's hand and laughs, teasing, "What are you, a hippie?" For this group, it's only gadgets and ponceo that make the statements that matter.

[Chicken]

[Chicken]

Ray jumps, kills boater off Florida Keys

Thu Mar 20, 2008 6:41pm EDT

By Jane Sutton

MIAMI (Reuters) - A ray leaped onto a boat off the Florida Keys on Thursday and knocked a woman to the deck, killing her, wildlife investigators said.

"It's a bizarre accident," said Jorge Pino, an officer with the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission.

The woman and her family were aboard a boat in the Atlantic Ocean, off the city of Marathon in the Florida Keys, he said.

"A large ray jumped out of the water and collided with the victim," Pino said.

The impact threw the woman backward and she hit her head on the vessel, he said. Investigators initially said one of the animal's venomous barbs had stabbed her, but they later said there was no sign of a puncture.

An autopsy was pending.

"We believe she died as a result of the impact between herself and the spotted eagle ray," said Gabriella Ferraro, a spokeswoman for the wildlife commission.

The ray weighed about 80 pounds (36 kg) and had a wingspan of 5 to 6 feet, Ferraro said. The boat was traveling at about 25 mph (40 kph) when the animal collided with the woman, killing both, she said.

Investigators identified the woman as Judy Kay Zagorski, 57, of Pigeon, Michigan.

Spotted eagle rays are common in warm or tropical waters and are often seen near coral reefs. The can grow to more than 8 feet across and have two to six short, venomous barbs near the base of their whip-like tails, according to the Florida Museum of Natural History's Web site.

The rays often swim near the water's surface and can leap out, especially when pursued, but are generally shy of humans.

"All rays leap out of the water from time to time but certainly to see one collide with a vessel is extremely unusual," Pino said.

In 2006, a spotted eagle ray leaped onto another boat in Florida waters off the Fort Lauderdale area and pierced the heart of an 81-year-old man with its barb. He survived.

Steve Irwin, the host of the "Crocodile Hunter" television show, was killed by another type of ray while filming underwater on Australia's Great Barrier Reef in 2006. He died when a stingray's barb pierced his heart.

[sybaritical]

POLICE are investigating after a man built a "robot" suicide machine - which he used to shoot himself. The 81-year-old obtained plans for the machine by surfing websites - and he tragically used it yesterday, The Gold Coast Bulletin reports.

Notes left behind reveal he was battling to come to terms with demands by interstate relatives that he move out his home - where he lived alone - and into care.

The documents show the Burleigh Heads man spent hours searching the internet for a way to kill himself, downloaded what he needed and then built a complex machine that would remotely fire a .22 semi-automatic pistol loaded with four bullets.

He set the device up in his driveway about 7am yesterday, placed himself in front of it and set it in motion.

His notes explained that he chose the driveway as he knew there were tradesmen working next door who would find his body. The plan worked as the workmen heard the gunshots and ran to investigate.