Talk about a mammoth appetite, when most of the world’s large mammals went extinct roughly 10,000 years ago, the vast majority of the vanished species were herbivores. This of course meant that they were no longer around to eat the plants they otherwise would have, and - according to Christophers Doughty and Field from Oxford and Stanford Universities respectively – this freed up an extra 1.4 trillion kilos of food, roughly 2.5% of the net product of all Earth’s dry land. However, the researchers add, this excess had been ‘used up’ by burgeoning human numbers by around 1700 and today we consume six times as much as the Pleistocene critters ever did while simultaneously driving down land productivity by 10% (Nature)(PDF).
That’s not to say that our massive consumption doesn’t have it’s upside, As Vangelis Kapatos of Manhattan discovered when he attempted suicide by jumping from his ninth floor flat, only to survive when his fall was broken by a pile of uncollected garbage. Mr. Kapatos’ timing, from his perspective, couldn’t have been worse, the unusually large garbage pile was due to collections being suspended because of snow. They were due to resume the day after his impromptu dumpster dive (Today Online).
Mind you, we’re not the only animals prone to excess. After finding the bodies of dozens of starlings near the city of Constanta in Romania, locals were concerned that the cause might be bird flu, instead post-mortems of the birds have revealed that they in fact died of alcohol poisoning, having ‘drunk’ themselves to death on the discarded leftovers of the local winemaking industry. A least they died happy (BBC News).
Better than dying happy, though, is living happy, and the secret of that, says the UK’s Office for National Statistics, is having a job. But it’s not the pay but the job security that counts, say the government statisticians, which ironically are facing staff cuts themselves due to the economic downturn. Other key happiness factors, according to the preliminary report, are good personal health and a decent family life. What will we do without these people (Telegraph)?
Beer drinkers in Canada were calling it alcohol abuse when almost 8,500 gallons of beer and foam exploded out of a fermentation tank. Apparently a small crack had formed in the vat at the Okanagan Springs Brewery in Vernon, British Columbia. The pressurized metal silo was blown apart, causing structural damage and tearing an aluminum door off its hinges. Thousands of litres of beer foam poured across the parking lot and onto the road. Thankfully, no one was injured in the explosion, and rain has since washed most of the beer into the sewers.
Police in North Vernon, Indiana say it is obvious this man had a death wish. That may not be so uncommon for men his age and perhaps in his profession, but he accomplished it in a very disturbing fashion. I've followed the events in The North Vernon Plain Dealer & Sun, but I do find it somewhat unnerving that the story is making the rounds through many newspapers in central and southern Indiana, as I fear widespread dissemination of the story may open the door to copycats. UPDATE: Meth, unsuprisingly, played a role. Greensburg Daily News
Unrelated bonus mugshot from the same paper of Nikkiah C. Weddle, a loving mother, that just appears slothful. I feel that her having smoked marijuana three weeks earlier will play a heavy role in her defense, since we've all smoked a joint that we took almost a full month to recover from.
I have two news oddities to present from one of my local papers. The first from The Greensburg Daily News I didn't think was so odd, I would expect the electric company to do such things to avoid displacing wildlife, but I couldn't figure out if the 'secret technique' was really an extraordinary trade secret (I would actually expect them to want to share such info so other companies could put it to use), or just a case of a lazy reporter.
The second from the same paper details five new residents of the county jail. Alas, there is only one mugshot. These five actually had uniformed police knock on their door, and they didn't answer. So the police set up a perimeter around their apartment for two hours while waiting for the search warrant. With two hours to play with, none of the suspects noticed a cop banging on the door or the perimeter placed around their apartment? And they couldn't destroy a small amount of dope and paraphernalia in the meantime?
It’s an old excuse, whenever a man is caught eyeing-up another woman by his partner we’ll often claim that it’s not our fault, it’s just the way we’re wired. Well not according to neuroscientists at Gwinnett College in Georgia. Researchers there monitored the brain activity of 14 men while showing them pictures of women’s behinds taken before and after surgery designed to give them Beyonce like curves. The scans showed ‘reward areas’ of the men’s brains more commonly associated with drugs or alcohol lit up more in response to the redesigned rumps. In other words, we do it because we like it (Orange).
But if what most attracts men is a great set of lady bumps, what would top women’s list of desirable traits in their perfect man? That’s what online matchmakers UKDating wanted to know, so they analysed the responses of 83,000 lovelorn women to find the top ten most wanted male characteristics. And number one was… a salary over £50k ($75k). Bizarrely, being good looking came in at number 9, just above being 5’11” tall and five places below owning an Audi TT. But do girls really only like cars and money, or does this finding perhaps explain why these particular girls had to resort to a dating service in the first place (News:Lite)?
The economics of relationships also features in the new book from Karyn Langhorne Folan. In Don’t Bring Home A White Boy, Folan describes today’s black women as being stuck in “market failure”, with college educated black women outnumbering their male counterparts by 3 to 1. This severely restricts the women’s options unless they look outside their own race. “In this case, we are the commodity and the new market is men of other races,” states Foley, who is herself a Harvard-educated lawyer, “it’s Econ 101 for the single, educated black woman” (STL Today).
Mind you, women aren’t always a commodity, sometimes they’re the consumer. At least that’s what Cuban cigar maker Habanos is hoping. In an effort to boost sales in a market hit hard by anti-smoking legislation the world-over, Habanos have produced what they’re billing as the first Cuban cigar specifically for female smokers. Their new Julieta brand is smaller and milder in hopes of being more appealing to women, but still manages to keep that phallic edge to its image (Sky News).
When the O'Gorman family encountered still opposition to their proposal to demolish the Edwardian house they owned and use the land for six modern properties they were probably a little miffed, or more than a little, if the name they chose to give the development is anything to go by. Having been given a green light by the local council, the O'Gormans announced that the new cul-de-sac was to be called "Pogue Muhone Court". Pogue Muhone is a phonetic English equivalent to the Gaelic "pog mo thoin", which means "kiss my ass" (Telegraph).
And if kissing ass isn’t your thing, perhaps you’d like to crawl through one instead? You can at a new exhibit called Grossology, which opens at the Museum of Discovery and Science in Fort Lauderdale on Saturday. Subtitled “The (Impolite) Science of the Human Body” the exhibits also include a tour of the nose, a giant replica of human skin and an interactive experiment in flatulence called “Burp Man” (Miami Herald).
Not kissing but kicking ass are the pensioners of Bavaria in Germany, who decided not to take the credit crunch lying down. After their financial adviser, James Amburn, handed them losses in excess of 2.3 million euros, five OAPs tracked him to his home in Speyer, kidnapped him, and tortured him into faxing a Swiss bank for the money to pay them back. Instead he managed to alert the police. Mr. Amburn later confided that his four day ordeal was perhaps extended by his kidnappers having to stop a while when they ran out of breath (Mirror).
Also taking a little longer than usual were the German actors appearing in Erofeev’s satirical play “Moscow to the End of the Line”, alternatively billed as a “crazy depiction of one of the most famous alcoholic benders in world literature”. In an ill-considered attempt at method acting four of the performers decided to swap the water in the props for real vodka “as an experiment", only to fall off their chairs, and the stage, before inviting audience members to take a swig. They were later taken to hospital under a police escort to have their stomachs pumped (Guardian).
More outrage now, this time from Great Britain, where in a clear breach of their normal high standards of decorum, British mums have been seen shopping in the Tesco supermarket chain in pyjamas and slippers. In fact more outrage seems to have been directed at Tescos, who have implemented a dress code and now escort anyone so attired from their premises, than at the mums, They should all just be thankful they don’t have Walmarts, that’s all I’m saying (Mirror).
Category: PSA's, Etiquette and Formal Behavior, Hygiene, Body Fluids, Inebriation and Intoxicants, Travel, Transportation, Advertising