Bacon Alarm Clock

"wakes you up with the smell of real cooked bacon"

Chess Boxing

A RUSSIAN man has been crowned world champion in the novelty sport of chess boxing, a game that requires equal skill at moving pawns and throwing punches.

Mathematics student Nikolai Sazhin, 19, competing under the name "The President'' knocked out a 37-year-old German policeman Frank Stoldt, who served as a peacekeeper in Kosovo until recently.

The loser said he was simply too punch-drunk to fend off checkmate.

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Worst Job Interview Mistakes

From CareerBuilder.com's annual survey of the worst interview mistakes:

• Candidate answered cell phone and asked the interviewer to leave her own office because it was a "private" conversation.

• Applicant told the interviewer he wouldn't be able to stay with the job long because he thought he might get an inheritance if his uncle died - and his uncle wasn't "looking too good."

• The job seeker asked the interviewer for a ride home after the interview.

• The applicant smelled his armpits on the way to the interview room.

• Candidate said she could not provide a writing sample because all of her writing had been for the CIA and it was "classified."

• Candidate told the interviewer he was fired for beating up his last boss.

• When the applicant was offered food before the interview, he declined saying he didn't want to line his stomach with grease before going out drinking.

• An applicant said she was a "people person" not a "numbers person" -- in her interview for an accounting position.

• During a phone interview the candidate flushed the toilet while talking to hiring manager.

Professor Threatens to Sue 'Anti-Intellectual' Students

Wall Street Journal:

Often it seems as though American higher education exists only to provide gag material for the outside world. The latest spectacle is an Ivy League professor threatening to sue her students because, she claims, their "anti-intellectualism" violated her civil rights.

Priya Venkatesan taught English at Dartmouth College. She maintains that some of her students were so unreceptive of "French narrative theory" that it amounted to a hostile working environment. She is also readying lawsuits against her superiors, who she says papered over the harassment, as well as a confessional exposé, which she promises will "name names."

Ms. Venkatesan lectured in freshman composition, intended to introduce undergraduates to the rigors of expository argument. "My students were very bully-ish, very aggressive, and very disrespectful," she told Tyler Brace of the Dartmouth Review. "They'd argue with your ideas." This caused "subversiveness", a principle English professors usually favor.

Ms. Venkatesan's scholarly specialty is "science studies," which, as she wrote in a journal article last year, "teaches that scientific knowledge has suspect access to truth." She continues: "Scientific facts do not correspond to a natural reality but conform to a social construct."

The agenda of Ms. Venkatesan's seminar, then, was to "problematize" technology and the life sciences. Students told me that most of the "problems" owed to her impenetrable lectures and various eruptions when students indicated skepticism of literary theory. She counters that such skepticism was "intolerant of ideas" and "questioned my knowledge in very inappropriate ways."...

Persecuted by Aliens

Ananova:

A Bosnian man whose home has been hit an incredible five times by meteorites believes he is being targeted by aliens.

Experts at Belgrade University have confirmed that all the rocks Radivoje Lajic has handed over were meteorites.

They are now investigating local magnetic fields to try and work out what makes the property so attractive to the heavenly bodies.

But Mr Lajic, who has had a steel girder reinforced roof put on the house he owns in the northern village of Gornja Lamovite, has an alternative explanation.

He said: "I am obviously being targeted by extraterrestrials. I don't know what I have done to annoy them but there is no other explanation that makes sense. The chance of being hit by a meteorite is so small that getting hit five times has to be deliberate."

50 Weird Science Titbits & Oddities

Science News Review

New Glasses Can Find Lost Car Keys

Ananova.com:

Scientists have invented a pair of glasses that will help you remember where you put your car keys.

The Smart Goggle records everything the wearer sees - and can recognise objects...

Inventor Yasuo Kuniyoshi and his team at Tokyo University have created the world's most advanced object recognition software.

If a user initially tells the glasses the name of everything he or she looks at, the glasses will remember.

They can then locate the last time the object was seen if it is misplaced, and replay the footage.

In the future, the glasses will be more intelligent than the wearer, able to identify objects their owner doesn't even recognise.

In theory, the only question that the glasses will not be able to answer is: "Where have I put my glasses?".

Did Hitler Draw Disney Characters?

Daily Telegraph:

The director of a Norwegian museum claimed yesterday to have discovered cartoons drawn by Adolf Hitler during the Second World War.

William Hakvaag, the director of a war museum in northern Norway, said he found the drawings hidden in a painting signed "A. Hitler" that he bought at an auction in Germany...

20 Optical Illusions

1. Blivert
A blivet, also known as a poiuyt, is an undecipherable figure, an optical illusion and an impossible object. It appears to have three cylindrical prongs at one end which then mysteriously transform into two rectangular prongs at the other end.

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Dave Barry's Year in Review: 2007

It was a year that strode boldly into the stall of human events and took a wide stance astride the porcelain bowl of history.

It was year in which roughly 17,000 leading presidential contenders, plus of course Dennis Kucinich, held roughly 63,000 debates, during which they spewed out roughly 153 trillion words; and yet the only truly memorable phrase emitted in any political context was ``Don't tase me, Bro!''

It was a year filled with bizarre, insane, destructive behavior, an alarming amount of which involved astronauts...

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NY Cops Leave Wallets Around City in Attempt to Catch Petty Thieves

Radley Balko:

Police in New York City are leaving baited wallets and purses around the city, then arresting people who pick them up and walk by a police officer without turning them over. If the wallet or purse contains a credit card, the thief/possible-good-Samaritan could get four years in state prison. Never mind that walking past a police officer with found property isn't even a crime...

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Delhi's Monkey Menace

Daily Telegraph:

A rogue monkey has been blamed for terrorising a slum area of eastern New Delhi, biting children and even grabbing a two-month-old baby from the arms of its mother.

Women and children queued up to show off their wounds after being treated in hospital after the monkey attacked in the Shashtri Park area of the Indian capital, breaking into houses through roofs and along balconies.

"I thought it was a man at first," one resident told The Times of India. "It got hold of my son's leg and was carrying him away but I managed to snatch him back..

It is less than a month since the Delhi's former deputy mayor was killed after falling from the balcony of his New Delhi residence as he tried to fight off several monkeys who had ganged up on him...

25 Photographs Taken at the Exact Right Time

A good set of pictures, despite a photoshop or two:

Sawse.com

Ostrich Gunned Down in Act of Revenge

Reuters:

A US man was sentenced to five months in jail after he and a friend, acting on wounded pride, gunned down an ostrich named Gaylord that had kicked them as their female companions laughed, a newspaper reported.

"This whole thing is about male pride,'' prosecutor Steve Wagstaffe said, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.

The powerful flightless bird kicked Timothy McKevitt, 19, and Jonathon Porter, 21, last October when they trespassed on an ostrich ranch south of San Francisco after a night of drinking, the paper cited lawyers as saying.

As the startled bird attacked, the women began to laugh, prosecutors said. McKevitt was kicked in the ribs and knocked over, while Porter suffered scrapes and bruises.

The two men returned with a rifle and shotgun seeking revenge, the Chronicle said. They fired at least seven shots at Gaylord, according to a police report.

Man Accused of Theft of Alligator

from the Maryland Herald-Mail:

A Chambersburg man was charged with retail theft after allegedly stealing an alligator last month, Pennsylvania State Police said.

Joseph Stephens Jr., 21, was charged Thursday with the April 7 theft of the American alligator from The Pet Store at 1710 Lincoln Way East. Police said store security videotapes showed a man removing the foot-long alligator from its tank, police said.

An employee of the store was able to identify Stephens, who is shown on the video hiding the alligator in his clothing and leaving the store, police said. On April 11, an employee from Franklin Feed Co. in Chambersburg called police and told them a man was at the business' pet store asking about alligator supplies, police said.

(H/T Dave Barry)

World Trade Centre Survivor Hoax

Tania Head’s story, as shared over the years with reporters, students, friends and hundreds of visitors to ground zero, was a remarkable account of both life and death.

She had, she said, survived the terror attack on the World Trade Center despite having been badly burned when the plane crashed into the upper floors of the south tower.

Crawling through the chaos and carnage on the 78th floor that morning, she said, she encountered a dying man who handed her his inscribed wedding ring, which she later returned to his widow.

Her own life was saved, she said, by a selfless volunteer who stanched the flames on her burning clothes before she was helped down the stairs. It was a journey she said she had the strength to make because she kept thinking of a beautiful white dress she was to wear at her coming marriage ceremony to a man named Dave.

But later she would discover, she said, that Dave, her fiancé, and in some versions her husband, had perished in the north tower...

New York Times

Man Decapitates Hotel Duck

After allegedly ripping off the head a duck in the indoor pond of the Embassy Suites hotel, Scott D. Clark asked police if he was in trouble.

Yes, they said.

"Why?" he asked, according to a criminal complaint filed Monday. "Because I killed it out of season? Big deal, it's just a ... duck."

As bystanders watched, Clark said, "I'm hungry. I'm going to eat it," according to police...

full story: Denver Post

6 Die From Brain-Eating Amoeba

Associated Press:

It sounds like science fiction but it's true: A killer amoeba living in lakes enters the body through the nose and attacks the brain where it feeds until you die.

Even though encounters with the microscopic bug are extraordinarily rare, it's killed six boys and young men this year. The spike in cases has health officials concerned, and they are predicting more cases in the future...

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The Magnanimous Thomas Carlyle

Colby Cosh on the new online Thomas Carlyle archive of letters, and on the occasion when his close friend John Stuart Mill accidentally destroyed Carlyle's just-completed manuscript The French Revolution:

C Cosh

Wanted: Gullible Lawyers

"This is the story in which you learn how a graduate of Columbia Law School—that’s me—and almost 80 other people, who really should have known better, got suckered into giving away all our personal details as well as up to two months of our lives for “jobs” that never actually existed. And then you learn why it all happened the way it did.

An intriguing Craigslist job ad turned up on June 21 of this year at a time when I was feeling particularly bleak. I had spent the better part of that morning losing at online Scrabble and wondering if I had enough money to get a small falafel for lunch. Here is the ad; if you had been in my shoes, you’d have perked up at it, too:

full story: Washington City Paper