{ Monthly Archives }
http://www.digg.com/celebrity/Choose_Baghdad_Iraq_is_your_city_for_Spicegirls_to_play_in
The Spicegirls website has created a vote-poll style thing to vote for a city for them to play in. Everyone vote for Baghdad, Iraq (make sure the B is upper-case), you have to input an email, but don’t worry you can just put a fake one as you do not need to confirm it.
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Just returned from the Simpsons; Marjorie and I were guffawing for regularly for the first half and intermittently later on. All told, it was a great matinee experience.
The movie was head and shoulders above anything they’ve been putting on TV for a while.
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http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/we-need-quarters/bally-pong-makes-gambling-even-more-addictive-283607.php
Atari’s Pong is stealing our quarters once again, recently approved for use in a slot machine made by Bally: “Bally Pong.” A cabinet decorated with chrome fixtures and retro fonts will be a pretty standard 5-line slot, though featuring two knobs for the 1-in-70 occurrence of a 45-second Pong minigame. And while earnings at this point are “skill based,” will expert Pongers see a real payout advantage?
Yes. Those who succeed in the minigame will see a payout up to 7% higher—which is a huge amount in Vegas where the minimum payout is 75%. We’re not big on the slots, but with PONG and the possibility of Breakout coming down the line, our mad gaming skills could pay off…literally. In all reality, we’ll just be losing 7% less than all of our money.
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O’Neal said Tillman, a corporal, threw a smoke grenade to identify themselves to fellow soldiers who were firing at them. Tillman was waving his arms shouting “Cease fire, friendlies, I am Pat [expletive] Tillman, damn it!” again and again when he was killed, O’Neal said.
A chaplain who debriefed the entire unit days after Tillman’s death later described this exchange to investigators conducting a criminal probe of the incident. But O’Neal strongly disputes portions of the chaplain’s testimony, outlined in some 2,300 pages of transcripts released to the AP this week by the Defense Department in response to a Freedom of Information Act request.
The chaplain told investigators that O’Neal said Tillman was harsh in his last moments, snapping, ‘Would you shut your [expletive] mouth? God’s not going to help you; you need to do something for yourself, you sniveling …”
“He never would have called me ’sniveling,”‘ O’Neal said. “I don’t remember ever speaking to this chaplain, and I find this characterization of Pat really upsetting. He never once degraded me. He’s the only person I ever worked for who didn’t degrade anyone. He wasn’t that sort of person.”
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http://wral.com/traffic/story/1613867/
The new extension of I-540 south of Interstate 40, called N.C. 540, was supposed to ease morning bottlenecking where I-540 connects with westbound I-40. It gives drivers more options for getting into Research Triangle Park.
But to accommodate new 540 lanes, engineers eliminated an exit lane, causing long lines on the exit ramp where vehicles are trying to exit for both east and west on I-40.
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NWS thumbnails on the same page: http://www.foundrymusic.com/video.cfm?id=15408
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Although a sudden outgassing of CO2 had occurred at Lake Monoun in 1984, killing 37 local residents, a similar threat from Lake Nyos was not anticipated. However, on August 21, 1986, a limnic eruption occurred at Lake Nyos which triggered the sudden release of about 1.6 million tonnes of CO2. The gas rushed down two nearby valleys, displacing all the air and suffocating up to 1,800 people within 20 km of the lake, mostly rural villagers, as well as 3,500 livestock. About 4,000 inhabitants fled the area, and many of these developed respiratory problems, burns, and paralysis as a result of the gases.
It is not known what triggered the catastrophic outgassing. Most geologists suspect a landslide, but some believe that a small volcanic eruption may have occurred on the bed of the lake. A third possibility is that cool rainwater falling on one side of the lake triggered the overturn. Whatever the cause, the event resulted in the rapid mixing of the supersaturated deep water with the upper layers of the lake, where the reduced pressure allowed the stored CO2 to effervesce out of solution.
It is believed that up to a cubic kilometre of gas was released. Because pure CO2 is denser than air, the gas flowed off the mountainous flank in which Lake Nyos rests and down two adjoining valleys in a layer tens of metres deep, displacing the air and suffocating all the people and animals before it could dissipate. The normally blue waters of the lake turned a deep red after the outgassing, due to iron-rich water from the deep rising to the surface and being oxidised by the air. The level of the lake dropped by about a metre, representing the volume of gas released. The outgassing probably also caused an overflow of the waters of the lake. Trees near the lake were knocked down.
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