Fags, Goo, Fish, DIY and an orgy

The tribe is doing well: there are now a couple of goats (who will mow the lawn for me) and other livestock, I look forward to the harvest.

First up:
I know the American Government is a bit short of cash but:

Smoking makes you bankrupt

A New Hampshire man has said he swiped his debit card at a gas station to buy a pack of cigarettes and was charged over $23 quadrillion (£14 quadrillion).

Josh Muszynski checked his account online a few hours after the purchase and saw the 17-digit number – a stunning $23,148,855,308,184,500 (twenty-three quadrillion, one hundred forty-eight trillion, eight hundred fifty-five billion, three hundred eight million, one hundred eighty-four thousand, five hundred dollars).

Mr Muszynski told WMUR-TV that he spent two hours on the phone with Bank of America trying to sort out the string of numbers – and the $15 overdraft fee.

Now that is a credit limit.

God’s Sneeze

Something big and strange is floating on the Chukchi Sea between Wainwright and Barrow.

Hunters from Wainwright first started noticing the stuff sometime probably early last week. It's thick and dark and "gooey" and is drifting for miles in the cold Arctic waters, according to Gordon Brower with the North Slope Borough's Planning and Community Services Department.

Brower and other borough officials, joined by the U.S. Coast Guard, flew out to Wainwright to investigate. The agencies found "globs" of the stuff floating miles offshore Friday and collected samples for testing.

Later, Brower said, the North Slope team in a borough helicopter spotted a long strand of the stuff and followed it for about 15 miles, shooting video from the air.

Nobody knows for sure what the gunk is, but Petty Officer 1st Class Terry Hasenauer says the Coast Guard is sure what it is not.

"It's certainly biological," Hasenauer said. "It's definitely not an oil product of any kind. It has no characteristics of oil, or a hazardous substance, for that matter.

"It's definitely, by the smell and the makeup of it, it's some sort of naturally occurring organic or otherwise marine organism."

Meanwhile, the brownish-blackish gunk is drifting along the coast to the northeast, Brower said.

"This stuff is moving with the current," he said. "It's now on beyond Barrow and probably going north at this point. And people are still encountering it out here off Barrow."



As the sub title suggests, I think God has sneezed because he has swine flu.

How many Chips would you need?

Schoolgirl angler Jessica Wanstall netted a record when she hooked this monster fish that was more than twice her size.

The plucky youngster spent 20 minutes fighting the beast and needed a helping hand from dad Mark to heave it out of the water.

Jessica was nearly dragged into the water when the catfish weighing nearly 200lbs took her bait.

At nearly 9ft long and weighing 13.7 stones, the impressive specimen dwarfed 11-year-old Jessica, who stands at 4ft 10ins and weighs 5.7 stones.

She is now broken the record for the biggest freshwater fish caught by a child in Europe.

Jessica, from Sittingbourne, Kent, hooked the fish during a trip to Spain's River Ebro.

That’s what you call a big pussy (fish)

Why DIY?

A German who tried to fix his leaky air mattress blew up his apartment instead, the fire brigade in the western city of Düsseldorf said on Wednesday.

The 45-year-old man used tyre repair solvent to plug a hole in his aired and left it overnight.

But it blew up when he went to inflate it the next day.

"A spark from the electric air pump ignited it," a fire brigade spokesman said.

The blast pushed his living room wall into the building's stairwell and caused extensive damage to walls, windows and furniture.

Fire fighters evacuated the 12-apartment building and a neighbouring housing block while they checked for structural damage.

One born every minute.


And finally:

They are all at it!

The owner of a 17th Century manor house called the police after an upper-class masked ball turned into an orgy.

Halswell House in Somerset was hired for £9,000 by a group of 350 revellers who arrived a fleet of Porsches, BMWs and Aston Martins.

They were all wearing long cloaks and masks and the party continued normally until midnight - when they stripped down to leather pants, corsets and suspenders.

The guests then started kissing and a mass orgy ensued with couples having sex "everywhere".

Halswell House owner Grahame Bond, a multi-millionaire estate agent, was forced to send some of his teenage staff home because of the explicit activities.

He called the police but was told officers were powerless to intervene because it was on a private dwelling between consenting adults.

It later emerged that the party had been organised by a Dutch events company which specialises in sexy 'adults-only' parties.

Mr Bond, 45, who brought the property for £1.94 million in 2004, said the evening suddenly turned into an orgy "as if a switch had been flicked on".

He said: "The party started normally and it all seemed pretty harmless - people were drinking but everyone was very well behaved and pleasant.

"The whole group were dressed in these great costumes and it looked exactly like something out of Eyes Wide Shut.

"But then one of the organisers announced: 'The moment has come. The spell has begun' and everyone began kissing and having sex.

"The guests were all public-school types and I jokingly said to one: 'I suppose you are a High Court judge.' He replied: 'You're not far off the mark'."

The revellers arrived at Halswell House at 9pm on Saturday and partied to music provided by a DJ until the orgy began at midnight.

Well I never saw the advert (I could have watched).


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OH DEAR

There’s trouble in the west-country Cornwall Gets Nasty Over Devon's Pasty Prize a pie maker in Devon has been given the prize for…..Britain’s best Cornish pasty.

The decision prompted anger among bakers in Cornwall, who said that firms from the neighbouring county should be barred from entering the competition.

An appeal to disqualify the winners, Chunk of Devon, failed. Some Cornish bakers are now threatening to boycott next year's ceremony.

Chunk was given the top prize at the inaugural British Pie Awards ceremony last week.

Matthew O'Callaghan, the chairman of the Melton Mowbray Pork Pie Association, who organised the competition, admitted that to have been eligible, pasties should have been made in Cornwall.

"There was supposed to be a disclaimer on the application form which stated all entrants to the Cornish Pasty competition must come from Cornwall," he said.
"It wasn't done and I have to admit it was an administrative cock-up."

However, Les Merton, the author of the Official Encyclopaedia of the Cornish Pasty, argued that cave drawings show that pasties, wrapped in leaves rather than pastry, were eaten in Cornwall as early as 8,000BC.

Yes, I’ve had one that tasted that old.



From a bit farther afield China orders officials to smoke Officials in a county in central China have been told to smoke nearly a quarter million packs of locally made cigarettes annually or risk being fined, state media reported.

The Gong'an county government in Hubei province has ordered its staff to puff their way through 230,000 packs of Hubei-produced cigarette brands a year, the Global Times said.

Departments that fail to meet their targets will be fined, according to the report.
"The regulation will boost the local economy via the cigarette tax," said Chen Nianzu, a member of the Gong'an cigarette market supervision team, according to the paper.

More than half of all male doctors in China smoke, but the government is now trying harder to get them to kick the habit in order to set an example for others, state media reported recently.

Make your bloody mind up!



A Swedish man and a Singaporean woman have been fined for strolling naked through a busy upscale bar and restaurant area for a stunt after a few drinks.

Jan Philip, 21, an exchange student with a local university, and Eng Kai Er, a 24-year-old Singaporean studying in Sweden, were each fined 2,000 Singapore dollars (1,300 US) for committing an obscene act, the Straits Times said.

In January, the two attracted much attention when they strolled naked through Holland Village, a place popular among expatriates for its bars and al fresco restaurants, apparently after drinking beer.

Singapore has strict laws on nudity and even magazines such as Playboy are banned in the city-state.

The two were fully clothed and wore sunglasses when they appeared in court on Thursday.

Maybe they should be banned from drinking.




Angola's flag carrier TAAG, already banned from flying to Europe, said Friday it had suspended a pilot and his co-pilot for landing at the wrong airport in Lusaka, the capital of Zambia.

The pilot landed the Boeing 737 at Lusaka City Airport when he should have landed at Lusaka International Airport during a regular stopover from Harare to Luanda on April 17, TAAG said in a statement.

"Because this is a serious incident, Angola's Aviation Authority and TAAG have opened an investigation into the matter," it said.

"TAAG regrets the grief this has caused to passengers and reiterates its promise to deliver a service with the highest security standards."

The state carrier was banned from EU airspace in 2007, the same year one of its planes crashed, killing six people on board. The government fired TAAG's board last year and created a commission to investigate and improve safety.

Angola expects the airline to be allowed to fly to Europe later this year.

Watch out Ryanair.


And finally:

Would you want one of these?

In a development that Darwin himself could not have foreseen, a beagle has become the world's first transgenic dog - and it glows in the dark,
The dog called Ruppy - short for Ruby Puppy - has been created by scientists in South Korea.

The puppy was bred to produce a fluorescent protein that glows red under ultraviolet light, but its red skin colour can also be clearly seen in daylight.

Byeong-Chun Lee, of the Seoul National University, headed the team that created Ruppy and her four beagle siblings, each possessing the bizarre fluorescent bodies.
Lee was also part of the team responsible for the very first cloned dog, Snuppy, born in 2005.

Team member CheMyong Ko of the University of Kentucky in Lexington, said of the breakthrough: "The next step for us is to generate a true disease model."

The hope is that, following the Ruppy breakthrough, transgenic dogs will become more effective stand-ins for the study of human disease.

Greg Barsh, a geneticist at Stanford University, said the creation of a transgenic dog was "an important accomplishment".

But he did not know of "specific situations where the ability to produce transgenic dogs represents an immediate experimental opportunity".

Nathan Sutter, of Cornell University in New York, said working with laboratory-reared dogs was "not on my horizon as a dog geneticist at all", claiming "transgenesis is laborious, expensive and slow."

Remember a glowing dog is not just for Christmas,


“If you don't know the trees you may be lost in the forest, but if you don't know the stories you may be lost in life.” Anon


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