Woman whose body turns food into alcohol beats drink-drive charge

This is pretty interesting. There's a woman ... well, let me say apparently there are a lot of people, but this woman got herself tested, and she beat the system.
The woman from New York state suffers from ‘auto-brewery syndrome’ but blew four times over the limit despite claiming that she ‘never felt tipsy’
 In tests by doctors, the woman blew well over the legal limit even though she had not had any alcohol, her lawyer said.
 In tests by doctors, the woman blew well over the legal limit even though she had not had any alcohol, her lawyer said. Photograph: Jack Sullivan / Alamy/Alamy
Associated Press
Thursday 31 December 2015 00.15 GMT Last modified on Thursday 31 December 2015 00.17 GMT
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Drunken-driving charges against a woman in upstate New York have been dismissed based on an unusual defence: her body is a brewery.

The woman was arrested while driving with a blood-alcohol level more than four times the legal limit. She then discovered she has a rare condition called “auto-brewery syndrome”, in which her digestive system converts ordinary food into alcohol, her lawyer Joseph Marusak said.


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A town judge in the Buffalo suburb of Hamburg dismissed the charges after Marusak presented research by a doctor showing the woman had the previously undiagnosed condition in which high levels of yeast in her intestines fermented high-carbohydrate foods into alcohol.

The rare condition, also known as gut fermentation syndrome, was first documented in the 1970s in Japan, and both medical and legal experts in the US say it is being raised more frequently in drunken-driving cases as it is becomes more known.

“At first glance, it seems like a get-out-of-jail-free card,” said Jonathan Turley, a law professor at George Washington University. “But it’s not that easy. Courts tend to be sceptical of such claims. You have to be able to document the syndrome through recognised testing.”

The condition was first documented in the US by Barbara Cordell of Panola College in Texas, who published a case study in 2013 of a 61-year-old man who had been experiencing episodes of debilitating drunkenness without drinking liquor.

Marusak contacted Cordell for help with his client who insisted she had not had more than three drinks in the six hours before she was pulled over for erratic driving 11 October 2014. The woman was charged with driving while intoxicated when a breath test showed her blood-alcohol content to be 0.33%.

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Cordell referred Marusak to Dr Anup Kanodia of Columbus, Ohio, who eventually diagnosed the woman with auto-brewery syndrome and prescribed a low-carbohydrate diet that brought the situation under control. Her case was dismissed on 9 December, leaving her free to drive without restrictions.

During the long wait for an appointment, Marusak arranged to have two nurses and a physician’s assistant monitor his client for a day to document she drank no alcohol, and to take several blood samples for testing.

“At the end of the day, she had a blood-alcohol content of 0.36% without drinking any alcoholic beverages,” Marusak said. He said the woman, who cannot be named for reasons of medical confidentiality, also bought a breath test kit and blew into it every night for 18 days, registering around 0.20% every time.

The legal threshold for drunkenness in New York is 0.08%.

While people in cases described by Cordell sought help because they felt drunk and did not know why, Marusak said that was not true of his client. “She had no idea she had this condition. Never felt tipsy. Nothing,” he said.

NASA Erased First Moon Landing Tapes

The news is trickling out today that NASA, our government's space agency, apparently screwed up royally again a few decades ago by completely erasing over the original videotapes made on July 20, 1969 when Apollo 11 landed on the Moon. The first humans to ever set foot on the lunar surface, Americans Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, spent almost three hours outside the spacecraft collecting lunar material while astronaut Michael Collins piloted the command module in lunar orbit. All the action and suspense was duly videotaped by NASA's remarkable camera and recorded on 1-inch videotape for the world to cherish and remember forever. Or so we thought.

The television camera that recorded all the action was mounted onto the side of the Lunar Module. Armstrong was recorded stepping down onto the lunar surface, describing the event as "one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind." 

When the lunar module landed, it effectively ended the "Space Race" between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. and fulfilled a national goal proposed earlier in 1961 by President John F. Kennedy in a speech before Congress that the U.S. would land a man on the moon and return him safely to Earth "before this decade is out."

The broadcast of Armstrong setting foot on the moon and subsequent video of the astronauts on the Lunar surface was recorded by NASA on 1-inch magnetic tapes. NPR attempted to find the tapes in 2006 and reported to NASA that they appeared to be missing. NASA launched an exhaustive 3-year search to find the missing tapes and determined that they had been inadvertently erased. Apparently the original tapes were probably destroyed during a period when NASA was erasing old magnetic tapes and reusing them to record satellite data.

"We're all saddened that they're not there. We all wish we had 20-20 hindsight," says Dick Nafzger, a TV specialist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, who helped lead the search team. "I don't think anyone in the NASA organization did anything wrong," Nafzger says. "I think it slipped through the cracks, and nobody's happy about it."

Since then, NASA has arranged with a Hollywood digital restoration firm to enhance old television footage of the event so that the public can see the first moonwalk in more detail than ever before. But the lost tapes mean that the world will probably never again see the original images beamed back to Earth by the lunar camera that is now resting on the moon's dusty Sea of Tranquility, right where Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin left it.

Wait a go, NASA! ;-{

Priceless Lunar Rover Model Saved From Scrap

Last week there was a story in the news about a prototype lunar rover that was inexplicably sold by somebody in Alabama to a scrap yard and apparently destroyed. Yup, a one-of-a-kind 600 pound NASA model of the moon rover that we all remember bounced around over the surface of the moon during the Apollo missions of the late 1960's and early 1970's.

Apparently some retard at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville picked the thing up and sold it to a scrap yard dealer. When word got out last week, there was a massive outpouring of disbelief, but what was done, was done ... at least as far as everybody thought.

But wait! It turns out that the heroic scrap dealer recognized what the thing was and saved the buggy after all. From his picture above, the rover matches the description given by NASA in its investigatory documents. The prototype rover appears to be the same one that is in the smaller insert above being driven by none other than Saturn V rocket scientist Dr. Wernher von Braun.

According to Motherboard magazine, the scrap dealer says, "The man who originally bought it ... bought it at a NASA auction many years ago. NASA just discarded a lot of that stuff back then. When it was brought to my scrap facility, I set it aside because I knew what it was. The unit does exist today. It is not scrapped. I have that unit in storage."

The junkyard owner told Motherboard that he had been planning to sell the rover before Motherboard published its story on Tuesday. He says he still plans to sell the rover. Anyone interested?

Army's NORAD Blimp Breaks Loose Causing Havoc

Here's another fine example of your tax dollars at work! Remember last year we told you about the billion dollar surveillance blimps that our government was planning to launch over Maryland? These things were supposed to protect us from a potential barrage of enemy missiles that might somehow be launched by evil villains presumably lying in wait off the Atlantic coast aimed at Washington or wherever.

Well, they actually did put a couple of the things up in the air and they've been hovering over I-95 northeast of Washington until, yup you guessed it, one of them decided to come loose yesterday morning and meander northward from its mooring base. On the way, it dragged along its 6,700 foot tether line about 150 miles up into Pennsylvania until it unceremoniously came down about four hours later in a densely wooded forest near Moreland Township. 

As the tether line bounced to and fro creating a path of destruction, school teachers herded children into their schools as the line raked across roads, bridges, highways, fields, homes and quite a few power lines causing about 35,000 to lose power in the Bloomsburg, PA area. The military scrambled helicopters and a couple of F-16 fighter jets came for a looksee from the New Jersey National Guard.

The 243-foot-long, helium-filled blimp that weighs about 10,000 pounds came loose from its mooring at the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland at 11:54 a.m. according to the Army. No one there has yet been able to explain why it broke free from its mooring. The tether line is supposed to keep these things safely secured to the ground in winds up to 100 mph. But this is our government at work, so you know that when a little rainstorm came through with winds around 45 mph, that was enough to break it loose. And off it went!

The blimp landed in a dense Pennsylvania forest at the top of some trees and the Army fired over 100 shotgun rounds to blow enough holes in the thing to let the last of the remaining helium escape and allow what was left of the $235 million blimp fall to the ground. An Army Chinook helicopter is planned to lift the blimp out of the forest. Local residents said they were thankful that the blimp missed a nearby nuclear power plant when it descended. (I guess so was the rest of the eastern seaboard!)

The $2.7 billion blimp program was recently profiled in a scathing report by the Los Angeles Times describing it as the "quintessential runaway Pentagon project."

Guatemala Elects Comedian As President

In the news today is the stunning decision by the Guatemalan voters to send a former television comedian to the office of president. Jimmy Morales, who has never before held public office, won a landslide victory in Guatemala’s presidential election Sunday by taking a whopping 70% of the votes.

It seems Mr. Morales' platform of "Not Corrupt, Not a Crook" resonated throughout the voting public. According to The New York Times, Guatemala's political system has been "broken" for quite awhile and there has been ongoing corruption at just about every level. 

"With this vote you made me president," said Morales in a short victory statement Sunday night. "The mandate of the people of Guatemala is to fight against the corruption that has consumed us.”

The former Guatemalan president, Otto Pérez Molina is currently in jail on charges that he was involved in a multimillion-dollar customs fraud case. 

Morales' closest opponent in the election, Sandra Torres, wife of another former President Álvaro Colom Caballeros, admitted defeat after it became clear that Morales had won with about 68% of the votes cast. "The people have made their choice," she said.

Numerous street protests have been going on throughout the early part of this year calling for Molina to resign because of the corruption. He did so in September and the election for a new president was held Sunday.

Morales' campaign was heavy on style but light on any solid policy proposals. Many said his campaign headquarters looked more like a television variety show, with a band and dancers, than a politician running for office. Morales' biggest pledge during the campaign was the same as everyone else's, to fight the entrenched corruption that caused Molina to resign. 

The new president rose to fame as a TV actor and comedian, and starred in the Guatemalan TV series Moralejas ("Morals") along with his brother Sammy.

Pro Tip: Don't Steal A Stick If You Can't Drive A Stick
The Huffington Post  |  By David Moye
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Posted: 06/19/2015 1:05 pm EDT Updated: 06/19/2015 1:59 pm EDT

Yes, it's happened once again. Something you've read and laughed about every time it occurs and wonder how in the world anyone can be so ... er ... inept? You'd think these people would get a life, but thankfully (at least for us) they don't, and we can sit back and marvel at their stupidity.

Providence, Utah police report that Mr. Alexander Katz, 19, and his girlfriend decided to steal a car. They found one that was sitting all by itself with the keys in the ignition, so they hopped in.

Mr. Katz then apparently looked in vain for the gear selection lever and the usual "D" for "Drive" in a little window somewhere. It just wasn't there. It seems the car was not an automatic but was operated by using what us older folks would call a "stick shift" transmission, something Mr. Katz apparently was not at all familiar with.

Police say that Katz and his girlfriend were able to get the car to go a few yards into a nearby supermarket parking lot but no further, where they jumped out, ran to the gas station next door and called a taxi to pick them up. (I can't help but wonder if the phone had been a dial-type instead of push-button, would Mr. Katz still be there?) 

YOU STOPPED HERE


. in a man tried to steal a car, then had to call a cab after he couldn't figured out how to use a stick shift.

Officers in Logan said they arrested Alexander Katz on Tuesday after the 19-year-old and his underage girlfriend allegedly stole a car with the keys still inside, the Deseret News reports.

Police said Katz' girlfriend knew how to drive a stick and attempted to walk him through the process.


"I'm not 100 percent certain why she doesn't just get around and get in the driver's seat so they can take the car and use it," Police Chief Gary Jensen said, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Eventually, the pair ditched the car at a supermarket parking lot in Providence. They fled on foot to a nearby gas station where they called a cab, HJNews.com reports.

When the duo saw police, they ran off again.

Katz's girlfriend was soon arrested. Police said she told them that she and Katz had started the evening looking for Benadryl before deciding to steal a car, according to the website.

Katz was arrested a few hours later after police found him using information he had given the taxi company, according to Newser.

Katz was arrested on suspicion of transferring a stolen vehicle, a second-degree felony, and failure to stop at the command of law enforcement, KSL.com reports. His teenage companion was released to her parents. Her case was transferred to juvenile court.

Top Gear's Clarkson & Team to Rake in Millions

It's been official for a couple of weeks now that Amazon has outbid Netflix and everybody else to hire the former Top Gear team of Jeremy Clarkson, James May, Richard Hammond and producer Andy Wilman to put together a brand new television program to replace our dearly loved but now departed Top Gear. 

As you probably know, the BBC dumped Clarkson after an altercation last March when Clarkson allegedly hit one of the Top Gear producers during an argument at a restaurant. After a thorough review, the BBC decided to let Clarkson go and May, Hammond and Wilman followed suit by leaving the show as well.

Top Gear was generating enormous profits for the BBC bringing in revenues of nearly 150 million pounds (about US $230 million) each year with an estimated 350 million viewers in 214 countries worldwide, making it the most watched factual TV program in the history of television, according to the Guinness Book of Records. The BBC is known for making top quality programs and documentaries but no factual program has ever managed to reach Top Gear's astounding number of viewers.

Top Gear will continue on the BBC but will be hosted by British Radio 2 DJ Chris Evans, an avid car fan who's been a guest on the show countless times over the past few years. Evans has signed a three year contract to front Top Gear and is currently advertising for co-hosts to help him run the show. The general consensus is that the show will never garner the viewer numbers or loyalty as the original show designed and hosted by Clarkson.

Now that the new Amazon program is officially in the works, some financial details about the new show have come to light. Clarkson, who was earning about $1.5 million a year from the BBC, will be making a bit over $15 million each year with Amazon. Hammond and May, who were earning around $800,000 a year with Top Gear, will now be making around $10 million each, while Willmon will be producing the show and receiving a sum estimated between $10 and $11 million a year.

The new Amazon contract runs for three years. While each episode of the old Top Gear show cost the BBC about $1.5 million to produce, the new show with Amazon is being estimated to cost just under $7 million per episode, with about half of that going to salaries. That's quite a jump in salary for everybody concerned and for the show itself, so all Top Gear lovers around the world are anxiously waiting to see what sort of new show we'll be getting with Amazon's money.

The new show has no name yet but the first show is expected to be shown in the Fall of 2016 and will be broadcast exclusively to Amazon Prime subscribers.

Rio! The Raw Sewage Capital of the Summer Olympics!

Pee-Yew! And welcome to Rio de Janeiro and the Summer Olympics of 2016.  Won't the swimming events be Uber Cool!

Yes, according to the AP, all the athletes that will be coming to beautiful Rio next year for the Summer Olympics will be swimming and boating in water that's so contaminated with human feces that they'll become so violently ill that they won't even be able to compete in the games.

It seems that extreme water pollution is common all over Brazil and that most of the sewage isn't treated; it just runs down the hills through open-air ditches into the streams and rivers that feed the nice new Olympic water venues. And that's where over 10,000 athletes from over 200 nations will be competing in next year's Summer Olympics. About 1,400 of these boys and girls will be sailing in the polluted waters in Guanabara Bay, canoeing and rowing on the filthy waters of the Rodrigo de Freitas lake and swimming off renowned but polluted Copacabana beach.

"Dangerously high levels of viruses and bacteria from human sewage," are everywhere in all the Olympic and Paralympic venues, according to the AP report. The results have alarmed competitors who are already in Rio for training, and some of whom already have gotten sick with fevers, vomiting and diarrhea, according to the report.

Brazilian officials have been pledging to clean the mess up for years, but the latest reports say the stench of raw sewage is still in the air when travelers land at Rio's international airport. Most of Brazil's prime beaches are completely deserted because the surf is thick with putrid sludge, and the official Olympic lake is currently littered with dead and rotting fish. Some tests measure up to 1.7 million times the level that would be considered hazardous in the U.S.

"This is by far the worst water quality we've ever seen in our sailing careers" says Ivan Bulaja, the coach of Austria's sailing team. Austria's sailors have already become sick with vomiting and diarrhea and have lost valuable training days because of the sickening water quality.

Medical experts say that most of the people in Rio have been so exposed over the years to the viruses in the water that they've built up antibodies in their systems, but foreign tourists and athletes who are visiting for the first time won't have that protection. Many will become violently ill as soon as they come near the polluted water venues.

Biologist Mario Moscatelli says that Brazilian authorities "promised the moon" so that they could win their Olympic bid, and now they aren't making good on their promises. Meanwhile, Rio says they will try to clean things up, but the Governor of Rio, Luiz Fernando Pezao, says there simply isn't time to clean up the water before the games begin.

Huh? Roads made out of Plastic?

America's roads suck. They're in terrible condition and most of the time they're being torn up by road crews just when we need to get somewhere else. The government says it'll cost 100 billion dollars every year just to maintain our current road system, much less upgrade it.

Meanwhile, there's something else you might have noticed in the environmental news lately, that we humans have been dumping plastic trash into our oceans for about half a century now and it's actually been piling up. Big time.

Researchers say that around 15% to 40% of our plastic litter goes directly into the oceans each year. That works out to from 4 million to 12 million metric tons of the stuff every single year, enough to cover every foot of coastline on the planet.  And what's worse, scientists don't even know where about 99% of the ocean plastic debris is actually winding up, meaning that it's probably having a godawful effect on marine life and eventually our own food supplies. Plus, they say the annual amount of this junk is probably going to double over the next 10 years.

Yup, we are doomed.

Unless, of course, somebody comes up with a solution. And that's what a Dutch construction company called VolkerWessels wants to do. They've gotten together with the city of Rotterdam to take that same plastic waste and pull it out of the ocean to make, are you ready? Plastic roads!

If the idea works, these roads would be durable, quick to construct, and work a lot better than good old Arabian oil-based asphalt, because they are supposed to last three times longer than conventional roads.

Of course they'll be more expensive, but if they last three times longer, make utility access easier, can be built off-site and then can be installed quicker, these plastic roads might actually turn out to be cheaper in the long run.

The next step is to build a few and test them in the laboratory to make sure they work in wet and slippery conditions, etc. The city of Rotterdam has embraced the idea wholeheartedly and is ready to help put together a pilot project.

The company is planning to install one of the roads in Rotterdam’s street laboratory, and as soon as it's shown to be workable, we may be seeing the solution to one of our problems coming from fixing another one of our problems. How neat is that? Sometimes the human race may actually not be as stupid as everybody else thinks we are!

The Biggest White Elephant in Human History?

The Trillion Dollar F-35 Stealth Fighter is once again in the news. You remember the F-35, right? A plane that's supposed to be so technologically advanced that it would give the U.S. absolute air superiority in any future conflict. The world’s most advanced stealth fighter jet that's ever been created! And, of course you also remember that costs and delays on the thing have spiraled so far out of control that one commentator has warned that "our skies and seas are vulnerable."

Well there's news out today that this massive boondoggle of a fighter plane can't even fight. One of the F-35's test pilot has written a scathing five-page brief saying the plane can't turn or climb fast enough to hit an enemy plane if it's in a dogfight or even dodge the enemy's own gunfire.

The "official use only" document says that the pilot flew an F-35A in a mock exercise with an F-16 over the Pacific Ocean near Edwards Air Force Base in California on January 14, 2015 and the stealth fighter was too sluggish "for every engagement."

According to the report, the two jets played the roles of opposing fighters in a pretend air battle, designed by the Air Force to test the F-35’s effectiveness as a close-range dogfighter. The F-35 pilot would fly his jet hard, trying to maneuver his plane in order to “shoot down” the F-16, while the F-16 pilot would do his best to evade and shoot down the F-35.

The pilot stated that his plane, the F-35, was flying “clean,” and had no weapons in its bomb bay or under its wings and fuselage, while the F-16 was heavily loaded with two bulky underwing drop tanks, which should have put the F-16 at a distinct aerodynamic disadvantage.

But the F-35 pilot says his fighter was so sluggish it couldn't reliably defeat the F-16, even when the older jet was carrying extra fuel tanks.

The pilot of the F-35 tried to target the F-16 with the plane's 25-millimeter cannon, but the smaller F-16 easily dodged. Meanwhile, when the pilot of the F-16 turned the tables on the F-35 and had the stealth plane in his own gunsight, the F-35 pilot couldn't maneuver out of the way.

The F-35 pilot writes that there's no point in trying to fly the plane in a sustained, close turning battle with another fighter. "God help you if the enemy surprises you and you have no choice but to turn."

He also had some pretty nasty comments about the cockpit of the F-35. He said he discovered that he couldn’t even comfortably move his head inside the radar-evading jet’s cramped cockpit. “The helmet was too large for the space inside the canopy to adequately see behind the aircraft.” That, he says, allowed the F-16 to sneak up on him.

The F-35 is the only new fighter jet the U.S. and its allies are currently developing . The F-16, meanwhile, has been around since the late 1970s.

The test pilot explained that he has also flown 1980s-vintage F-15E fighter-bombers and found the F-35 to be “substantially inferior” to the older plane when it comes to managing energy in a close battle.

Criticism of the F-35 program in the U.S. has been mounting for years. Last month the Government Accountability Office (GAO) stated, "The F-35’s engine’s reliability is very poor,” and reported that the total cost of the program is up from $233 billion in 2001 to $391 billion last year, making it the US Department of Defense’s “most costly and ambitious acquisition program.” 

Current estimates are that the F-35 fleet will cost a grand total of $1 trillion to operate and support in its lifetime. Yup, it's another example of your tax dollars at work.

Guy Cuts Everything in Half After Split with Wife

You've heard the saying about hell hath no fury like a woman scorned? Well, in Germany apparently it applies to at least one fellow who was recently divorced by his wife of 12 years.

It seems the guy who uses the name of "Der Juli" wasn't too happy when his wife told him she wanted a divorce. At the court proceedings, the judge told him he had to split everything up equally so each one would get their fair share. So, he got out all his cutting tools and really did divide everything they mutually owned in half. Literally.

Mr. Juli went online and posted a video on YouTube that showcases him going through the process of cutting up their chairs, beds, laptops, their Opel Corsa, an Apple Macbook Pro, mailbox and even a beloved teddy bear, exactly in half, so each of them could go their separate ways without having to argue about who got what. 

The caption to the video reads, "Thank you for 12 'beautiful years,' Laura! You've really earned half. Greetings also to my successor."

He shipped the ex-wife her halves and then decided to post his half of everything on the German version of eBay with the (translated) description, "From my half I must now separate, fond memories you can not remove."

If you're interested, here are the prices (in Euros) for the front or left side of a few of the items he kept:

Bicycle	40,50
Digital TV	27,60
Opel Corsa	671,66
Sofa	22,50
Teddy Bear	74,00
Apple MacBook Pro	91,00
DVD Player	20,50

Unfortunately, he isn't offering to ship anything to the U.S. so you'll have to go to Germany to pick up whatever you had your heart set on. And, honestly, I would doubt that if you got the other half of something from his ex-wife, you could put the two halves back together again and get it to work. By the way, he's only accepting cash. Maybe he needs to buy himself a few replacements?

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Naked Tourists Jailed for Causing Earthquake

This is one of those stories you have to wonder if sometimes we've awakened on the wrong planet in the universe. It seems a small group of about ten tourists from Canada, the U.K. and the Netherlands decided to hike up to the top of Mount Kinabalu, a UNESCO World Heritage site that's 13,435 feet tall and is the highest peak in Malaysia.

They apparently were so excited upon reaching the peak that everybody decided to throw their clothes down on the ground, urinate on the mountain top and prance around, even though their guide told them to stop. To make sure this historical event was recorded for posterity, they took a bunch of nice Instagram pictures of the unruly scene and, naturally, they went viral on the Internet.

A few days later, a 5.9-magnitude earthquake struck the region, killing 18 residents who reported "boulders raining down” the side of the mountain into their villages.

A couple of Malaysian government officials quickly called a press conference and blamed the earthquake on the tourists, accusing them of angering the spirits of the sacred mountain. According to the Deputy Chief Minister of the state where the mountain is located, "It is a sacred mountain and you cannot take it lightly! ... There is almost certainly a connection. We have to take this as a reminder that local beliefs and customs are not to be disrespected."

During the next few days, anger spread throughout the entire country. Five of the hikers were arrested and detained, each facing a fine and up to three months in prison. The rest apparently were able to escape. A park ranger at the mountain, Daikin Anam, who first reported the hikers and their nudity to the police, says that the group should be severely punished for their actions after they deliberately “insulted the mountain spirit.” Calling Mount Kinabalu a holy mountain, he says the tourists showed "disrespect to our mountain and our people."

Tribal elders of the region agreed that the hikers should be punished in their native court in a more traditional way. One elder said, "To appease the mountain protector, the 10 western tourists who stripped and urinated on Mount Kinabalu should be fined 10 head of buffalo, according to local customs. According to local beliefs, the spirit of the mountain is very angry." 

However, the four hikers who were detained were released from jail after pleading guilty to committing obscene acts in public. They were sentenced to three days in prison, which was the time they had served since their arrests on June 9th, and fined 5,000 Malaysian Ringgit (what a great name for a currency!) which works out to about $1,350. I'll bet they never go back and take another tour to Malaysia again.

Attack of the Bladeless Wind Turbines!

Well, here it is, folks, the future of wind turbines. Yup, no blades, so the spotted owls and birdies will be safe to fly around them. And, you can put a couple of these in the same space as a regular whirling & spinning wind turbine. It's a no-brainer. The future is here and now. Well, almost.

We've all grown accustomed to seeing those 100-foot pinwheels that are popping up everywhere there's wind to generate electricity. They spin in the breezes as you drive down the highway, spinning and chopping up endangered birdies and whatever else happens to fly through them into tiny pieces to make pretty much a bloody mess on the ground below. 

But guess what? Now somebody has a better idea. A Spanish company by the name of Vortex Bladeless has figured out a way to generate electricity from the power of the winds in a radical new way. In a few years you just might be seeing a bunch of these gizmos on the horizon instead of blades up in the sky and, apparently, yes, they actually do produce electricity.

Of course, the things look like giant rolled marijuana joints shooting up into the sky, but what the hey. These things are supposed to do the same as the windmills but instead they turn the breezes into kinetic energy by the miracle of "vorticity".

Instead of capturing energy from the winds by a giant propeller, vorticity is an aerodynamic effect of spinning vortices that's long been considered the enemy of architects and engineers who normally try to figure out how to design their buildings so these whirlpools of wind don't rip them apart. Apparently, vorticity can start an oscillating motion in structures (if the wind is strong enough) and things will break apart and collapse. That's not such a good thing if you're making a building, but apparently if you use the energy and funnel it the right way, you can make it wobble around and produce electricity.

That's what the founders of Vortex Bladeless think. They take that energy and try to use it instead of avoiding it by turning it into something productive.

The idea of Vortex’s shape came about by using computers to make sure the spinning wind occurs all together at the right times and places along the entire gigantic joint, er, mast. In the current prototype, the elongated cone, mast, joint, or whatever it is, is made of carbon fiber and fiberglass which lets it vibrate even more normal. Then there are some repelling magnets at the bottom that jerk each other back and forth and all that kinetic energy is then converted into electricity. Really!

What a great idea! No gears or bolts or anything mechanical moving around. That makes it cheaper to manufacture and maintain. The guys who put the company together say the "Vortex Mini" will be about 41 feet tall and can capture about 40 percent of the same wind that a regular windmill would, but since you can put twice as many of these in the space of a propeller turbine, it works out pretty close to the same thing.

The company already has about $1 million raised from the Spanish government and from private capital and they're planning to try raising more funds in the U.S. soon.

Next, I'll bet they'll be painting the things so they even look more like giant smoking marijuana joints and sell advertising on them to the pot industries in Colorado where it's legal. Oh my! What would our parents think?

New Ban on Chinese Funeral Strippers 

A rather odd custom seems to have emerged in China during the latter part of the 20th Century that the Chinese government has now decided to completely ban. It seems that when people die and their families wanted to make sure there are plenty of mourners at the funeral to show that the person had been well known and respected by the masses, strippers were hired to sing and dance and remove their clothing. Some of the strippers even performed with snakes in order to attract larger crowds to the deceased’s funeral. This brought a lot of people to the services. A lot. And it made the guy look like he had been extremely popular, and loved by everyone, so of course this made the families happy in their grief. 

According to Chinese custom, a large crowd at a funeral would also be a harbinger that good fortune would come to the deceased in his afterlife. “It’s to give them face,” according to one villager, “otherwise almost no one would come to the funeral."

The practice might seem a bit strange to you and me, but apparently it made sense to the Chinese, and stripper performances became rather commonplace, at least until the mid 1980's when the government passed laws against full nudity in public. Even so, the practice continued to occur regularly with professional singing and dancing groups over the next few decades until last Thursday when the Chinese Ministry of Culture told police to crack down on the performances.

Pictures that were taken last month during a funeral in the city of Handan were widely circulated over the Internet showing a dancer removing her bra in front of parents and children of the recently deceased. A spokesperson for The Ministry of Culture also cited “obscene” performances in Jiangsu, another Chinese province, and warned the public that there would be a crackdown on these "lascivious last rites."

In the Handan incident, the Red Rose Song and Dance Troupe performed a strip-tease after the funeral. The group took off their clothes after performing a traditional song-and-dance routine, the ministry said. Six of the performers were cited for violating public security regulations. The group's manager, surnamed Li, was jailed for 15 days and fined 70,000 yuan (over $11,000) by authorities for "corrupting the social atmosphere."

Ah, it seems this healthy and, er, unnatural tradition may be coming to a close. What a shame. I wonder if the deceased will miss the attention. Maybe not?

Lucas to Build Low-Income Housing for Neighborhood

George Lucas has a pretty big stretch of land behind his house in Marin County California and a couple of years ago he thought it would be a great idea to build a film studio there. Unfortunately, his neighbors thought otherwise. So, when he presented his plans for the studio to the county, his neighbors argued against his vision saying that the area is zoned for residential use and a film studio simply wouldn't be acceptable. After all, just about everybody in the neighborhood has a million-dollar home and a film studio belongs in Hollywood, not out in the prestigious suburbs where his wealthy neighbors live.

Well, apparently George didn't appreciate being thwarted about his pet project, so it looks like he simmered for a couple of years until he came up with a dandy new idea: Build something else his neighbors would surely love! Instead of building his wonderful new film studio, and since the land is zoned for residential use, why not put up a neat new complex to house some of Marin Counties needy families.

The project, which was submitted to the Marin County Planning Commission last Wednesday, would span about 52 acres and cost around $200 million. The community will begin just a few meters away from George's own Skywalker Ranch property, and consist of two complexes. The first complex will have 120 two- and three-bedroom homes where local low-income families will live. The second complex will consist of a nice four-story tall apartment building for pensioners, with 104 one- and two-bedroom apartments.

Since George will be funding the project all by himself, his lawyers say he can select whoever he wants to live there. Of course, his representatives are insisting the project isn't any sort of retaliation against his million-dollar homeowner neighbors. "We've got enough millionaires here," he says. "What we need is some houses for regular working people."

There appears to be huge support from the local low-income community, so his wealthy neighbors probably will have a hard time blocking the proposal. What a great plan for the neighborhood! Property values are sure to soar! Just ask the neighbors.

Project Loon to Provide Web Access to Everybody

Google has come up with a loony idea that might actually work. It seems that although the Internet might seem to be an all invasive part of just about everybody's life, we're in the minority. About two-thirds of the rest of the world doesn't have any Internet access at all. 

Google wants to change that. So, what they've come up with is called Project Loon. Yes, you read that right: Project LOON. They call it Project Loon because, being Google you know, they know it's a crazy idea but since Google has more money than they know what to do with, why not try changing the world anyway.

Project Loon is a network of 50-foot high balloons that travel about 13 miles up in the sky on the edge of space. When all the balloons are in place, and if everything works right, they'll eventually beam down Internet access to every single corner of the earth. The balloons have to be that high because not only are the winds there pretty much predictable, but they'll be out of everybody's way, circling around the earth about twice as high as commercial planes go so nobody should slam into any of them.

Each balloon will be able to provide Internet connectivity to a ground area about 25 miles in diameter, so it's going to take a lot of them whizzing around the planet. But, put enough of them up in the sky and you've got continual Internet coverage for everybody.

To make everything work, the electronics they've devised electronically connects all the balloons together so they provide a continuous Internet connection, like cell towers do right now on land. When one balloon moves away from a location, another balloon moves into its place so the link continues working. One balloon may provide connectivity in one place and when it moves away to another location, it provides a connection there while another balloon moves into the original space.

All the tests are coming out positive and more balloons are being launched all the time. Yes, of course the balloons come down. About every 100 days or so. So when one is taken "out of service," the gas inside is released to bring it back down in a controlled descent. If one drops a little too quickly, it will deploy a parachute to slow its descent. I guess there will be lots of Google employees driving around using their Google Maps and GPS devices to pick these things up and take them back for refurbishing at Google retrieval stations, right? 

Project Loon began in June 2013 on New Zealand's South Island with 30 balloons being launched in a pilot test. Google says they intend to continue expanding the project and hope to establish a continuous ring of uninterrupted service at latitudes in the Southern Hemisphere within a year or so. After that, the rest of the world is waiting. 

Whoever figured all this out has to be a genius.

US Navy to Replace Fighter Jets with Drones

Better go find that DVD copy of Top Gun and put it away for the grand kids to see, that is if you want them to know what a Navy fighter jet looks like taking off from or landing on an aircraft carrier. The US Navy is getting ready to mothball fighter jets, replacing them with unmanned aerial systems and drones, according to US Navy Secretary Ray Mabus. 

According to Secretary Mabus, these new unmanned flying weapons will be the wave of the future. Meanwhile, the F-35 Lightning II jet fighter plane, a product of the infamous Joint Strike Fighter program, will apparently be the last crewed strike fighter aircraft that the Navy will ever buy or fly.

It's no wonder. The F-35 has been plagued with problems from day one. It's now 7 years behind schedule and is the most expensive acquisition ever in military history. It's $167 BILLION over budget and will probably cost the country over a trillion dollars before it's finally put out to pasture.

Secretary Mabus, apparently seeing the writing on the wall, says unmanned aircraft can perform missions quite adequately on land, at sea, as well as in the air. Plus, they'll cost a heck of a lot less too. And, by removing the human factor from flying the machines, he says the Navy won't have to worry about factoring in the pilot's safety, which currently extends the time and cost of every project they are now working on. 

And they'll have a lot more room to experiment with more risk, plus be able to improve systems much faster over time, and be able to get them to the fleet at a much faster pace than ever before.

Secretary Mabus says he's planning to create a new naval office for "Unmanned Systems” and plans to appoint a deputy assistant director soon to head things up.

Still, a swaggering Tom Cruise being replaced by a handful of drones being launched off the deck of an aircraft carrier just isn't going to have quite the same visceral impact.

TSA Screeners Fired for Groping Passengers

A couple of TSA screeners have been fired for having a little too much fun with one of their screening machines at the Denver airport. It seems these screening machines are smart enough to scan a passenger and determine if they're concealing something by scanning the person and spotting those telltale bulges (or the lack thereof) we're all aware of that exist between the sexes.

So, the TSA fellow in our story decided it would be hilarious that when he spotted a nice looking male passenger coming in through the gate, he'd motion over to his cohort, the female screener, to tell the machine the passenger was female and not male.

The machine would then scan the passenger thinking he (she) was female and register an anomaly when it spotted a suspicious bulge in the passenger's groin area.

The machine's alarm would then go off indicating that he (she) might be concealing something illegal, like a bomb or firearm, and the male passenger would be pulled out of line to be checked more closely. 

The TSA fellow would then pat down the poor guy supposedly looking for the illegal something by touching the passenger's groin and buttocks areas, explaining that this was standard procedure. He was lying, of course, because doing this is actually a rather serious violation of TSA policy.

The TSA figured out what the screeners were doing after being told about it by someone anonymously back in February, and now both screeners have been fired. However, no charges are apparently going to be filed against them because none of the victims of the searches has come forth with a complaint, and the TSA has been unable to identify the passenger who was groped back in the February incident.

Ah, the hilarity in what these ingenious pranksters can think of! Now, I guess, the jokes on them!

CEO Stuns Employees with Gigantic Raise

Dan Price started up a credit card processing business called Gravity Payments about ten years ago when he was 19 and it's grown very well over the last few years. The firm is now expected to turn a profit this year of a little over two million dollars, so he's got to be pretty proud of himself, his business and his employees.

Dan started Gravity in his dormitory room at Seattle Pacific University using money borrowed from his older brother. The idea struck him a couple of years earlier when he was playing in a rock band at a local coffee shop. The shop's owner was having trouble paying the exorbitant fees charged by the company that processed their credit card payments. He looked into the matter and realized he could form a company that did the process cheaper, more efficiently and even provide better customer service at the same time.

Now that the company's become so successful, Dan's proud of his employees and he decided to do something special for the 120 people working under him. He's giving everybody a really big raise. And not just a few bucks here and there. He's decided to set a minimum salary for his workers of $70,000 a year, regardless of how much they're making now.

Dan says he came up with the idea when he read an article on employees and how happy they actually were. The article said that people who earn less than $70,000 a year always seem to need a little extra money to be truly happy. 

So he decided that his employees deserved to be happy and so, over the next three years, he's raising the salaries of everybody, even the lowest paid clerk, salesman and customer service rep to a minimum of $70,000. The raises will affect about 70 employees with 30 of them doubling their pay since the average salary at Gravity right now is $48,000 a year.

He made the announcement at an employee meeting the other day and just about everybody "freaked out," according to one. After the clapping and whooping died out, there were a few moments of what he said were "stunned silence."

Dan says he'll pay for the wage increases by cutting his own salary from about $1 million to $70,000 and then taking a big chunk out of the company's anticipated $2.2 million profit this year. There's no question everybody at Gravity is happy with the idea. Wait a go, Dan. Wait a go!

Human Head Transplant Coming Soon

There are a bunch of elite surgeons scattered all around the world that have been working on a medical first - a complete human head transplant. No, I'm not talking about a movie, this is the real thing.

There's a guy in Russia with an incurable disease, Werdnig-Hoffman. It's a form of spinal atrophy, and there isn't any cure for it. Valery Spiridonov is 30 years old and apparently quite willing to let them see if they can save his life by transplanting his head onto the body of another person, presumably dead from some sort of head injury, while the rest of the donor is in pretty much healthy condition.

Meanwhile, the team of surgeons have been itching to try out a new procedure they've been working on, and an Italian surgeon by the name of Sergio Canavero is going to take on the task of chopping off Mr. Spiridonov's head and playing a 21st Century Dr. Jekyll, putting it onto the body of somebody else. Yes, they say it's really going to happen. Nobody, of course, is sure the final result will be successful, but at least one person, Mr. Apiridonov, has high hopes that it will.

The operation is supposed to take a total of 36 hours or so and the operating room will be really crowded with about 150 medical staff giving their support. The plan is to take Mr. Spiridonov’s head along with the new body and cool them both down to a pretty chilly point to slow down the rate of cell decomposition. After that, doctors are supposed to hook up each of the major blood vessels in the neck to machines. That's supposed to keep everything flowing just right while they're transferring the head part.

Then they plan to sever the spinal cord and attach Mr. Spiridonov's head to the new body. Dr. Canavero says he'll use a water-soluble glue to connect the cells together and then connect the muscles, nerves and blood vessels.

Assuming everything goes as planned, the doctors say it will take up to a year for Mr. Spiridonov’s spinal cord to fuse completely with the new body. Of course, nobody knows what the brain is going to think about all this and the different electrical and chemical signals will probably be a problem, but Mr. Spiridonov and Dr. Canavero say they're ready for the procedure anyway.

Staff for the procedure will be hired starting in June and the operation may be scheduled as early as next year. I wonder if it will be televised?

Updates About the Miracles of Coffee 

It seems that all-of-a-sudden over the last few months there has been an enormous amount of news about the benefits of drinking coffee. The latest says that researchers have found it lowers your risk of getting liver cancer. Of course we all know it wakes you up in the morning and makes you feel more alert, but coffee also appears to help fight toxins in the body and reduce inflammation in the liver along with lots of other areas as well.

Coffee contains around a thousand antioxidants, and when you roast the coffee beans a few hundred more develop. That's more than green tea or cocoa, both of which are supposed to be the greatest superstars of antioxidants. Antioxidants fight inflammation, not only in the liver but they're also a great help with heart disease, arthritis, dementia and many cancers. Plus, there are a bunch of nutrients in coffee, including niacin, magnesium, potassium, manganese, riboflavin and pantothenic acid just to name a few.

Several studies report that coffee decreases Type 2 diabetes and reduces the risk of breast, prostate, endometrial, colon and rectal cancer.

Coffee not only wakes your brain up in the morning, it also helps your memory and concentration, actually making you at least seem to be a little smarter. 

Coffee also enhances your exercise performance by battling fatigue. It staves off depression by activating neurotransmitters in your brain that reduce your perception of pain. It helps you burn away far, and there's even a study that says coffee decreases your chances of getting gout!

For all its good points, there are some negatives. For some people coffee causes irritability and nervousness, and we all know it can cause insomnia and keep you awake at night. Switching to decaf can moderate these symptoms, but you may not get all of the above benefits since caffeine plays a part in some of them. 

How much coffee you can drink safely depends on the individual. For some, one or two cups is the limit; for others four or more each day is no problem. If you're looking for the benefits though, stay away from the sugary fat-filled varieties and stick with basic black or maybe with some added skim milk. Otherwise, you'll negate a lot of the advantages and put yourself at risk with additional health problems instead of the extraordinary benefits of this miraculous and unique beverage.

Prisoner Escapes by Emailing his own Release Order

Well, by golly, you knew it had to happen someday. A man by the name of Neil Moore who was in a British pokey for fraud and escape from custody (they should have known!) found himself a mobile phone and sent instructions to the prison staff to release him. Guess what? They did!

Yup, it seems that officers at Wandsworth Prison in London allowed Mr. Moore to walk out the prison gates based on some bogus bail instructions he'd sent them from a fake e-mail address that he created by using his phone. 

Officials admitted the plot was pretty much "ingenious" and I'm wondering why somebody hasn't tried the ploy before. His bogus email address identified himself as a senior court clerk and the message went on to tell prison staff that his bail had been paid and to release the prisoner. And so they did.

They only found out about the deception when solicitors went into the prison to find him for an interview three days later and discovered he wasn't there anymore. Oops!

Mr. Moore had used four different aliases earlier in order to commit fraud. That's why he was in the pokey in the first place. He was convicted of having posed as a staff member of several British banks and somehow managed to persuade some really big companies to give the bank (him!) money for some reason or another and apparently the deceptions worked rather well. His take, according to court records, totaled around $2 million.

The judge in the case was quite impressed, describing his behavior as "ingenious criminality." Apparently Mr. Moore seems to be quite good at this sort of thing. Perhaps he should think about getting himself a "real" job?

Russia May Build Massive Corridor from London to New York

I don't know who came up with this idea, but it's so crazy and far-fetched ... and interesting ... that it might even work out. Well, Russia has decided that since they no longer have any friends because of the Ukrainian mess and the ruble plummeting over 40% because the U.S. crashed the price of oil, their main source of revenue, Russia has decided to bail themselves out of all this trouble by constructing a multi-trillion dollar super highway from London to New York.

The route they've chosen goes the wrong way, of course, eastward from London through Moscow and out across the vast stretches of the frozen Siberian tundra. Then, somehow, it jumps over the Bering Strait, crosses Alaska east of Nome where there's no road at all right now, and then winds its way through western Canada to end up in The Big Apple.

Well, maybe the route isn't as important as the massive economic returns that will begin piling up once it's in operation, according to Vladimir Yakunin, the head of Russian Railways. It will link to just about everybody's existing transportation network throughout Europe and Asia, and they'll also include a nice high-speed railway for bullet trains to zoom alongside your Lada.

The giant project will be called the Trans-Eurasian Belt Development project or TEPR for short, and if all the pieces in the puzzle come together, the total distance it will cover will be just a shade under 13,000 miles. About half of that will be across Siberia, which if I remember correctly, is known for its really awful winters, so fixing all the potholes each spring will probably cost a pretty penny, or maybe ruble?

In addition to a new highway and high-speed railroad, the corridor will also carry oil and gas pipelines, electricity and water services. I guess that means when one of the gas pipelines in Siberia ruptures, not only will the cars and trains stop with nowhere to go, but the water and power will go out too while you're getting a tan at your posh vacation hideaway in the Caspians.

No timetable for construction of the new venture has yet been announced. Mr. Yakunin optimistically says that the new transportation corridor will make Mother Russia "a world leader in technological development." Yeah, right. Best of luck, Vlad!

Scientific Study Says There are Too Many Scientific Studies

There's a new report out that says in a recent scientific study a serious discussion was held about scientific studies, and the conclusion of the report was that there are too many scientific studies. Somehow I think we all pretty much knew this, but it's nice to see a genuinely clever and insightful scientific study from some learned scientists coming to the exact same conclusion.

Apparently scientists just aren't able to keep up with all of the studies that are being done in their fields of endeavor. The report, "Attention Decay in Science," says that what's going on is that the exponential growth occurring in the total volume of scientific papers is making it harder and harder for researchers to track all the stuff they need to know about in their fields so they can be up to date with their work.

It's all probably the fault of the Internet and all the tons of information that we're subjected to every second of the day. So what's happening is that all the people who are trying to understand this onslaught of information are winding up tossing everything away that they're exposed to at a much faster rate because there isn't time to absorb it properly before a new onslaught of information comes crashing down on top of them.

And guess what? Yes, of course, it's getting worse! The paper notes that scholars are tending to 'forget' stuff a lot easier than they used to because of the "exponential growth" in all the publications that are continually coming out.

The chief economist of the prestigious Bank of England, Andy Haldane, says that we're clearly in the middle of a new revolution of information. Nearly 99 percent of the entire mass of information that has ever been created on earth has been generated in just the past century.

There are benefits, of course, but the costs include shorter attention spans and the tenure of relationships and jobs is declining. In other words, we're in a mell of a hess and it's going to continue getting worse and worse. Welcome to the 21st Century!

Inmates Escape as Brazilian Guards Expect 'Orgy'

A rather interesting story has popped up in the news about an unusual jailbreak that occurred at the Nova Mutum public jail near Cuiaba in central Brazil. It seems one of the inmates, Bruno Amorim, 18, who was in jail on a robbery and attempted murder conviction, convinced his girlfriend and a couple of her friends to put on some rather skimpy clothing and invite the guards to party together. The idea was to offer them some spiked booze, and when they passed out, grab the cell keys and "vámonos" together.


Police found the three guards naked and handcuffed the next morning after the breakout. The women appear to have donned black lingerie and dominatrix police uniforms and convinced the guards they were going to have a wild orgy. 

Apparently the gals were pretty convincing and the guards reportedly were eager to walk away from their posts and accompany the girls to the staff's sleeping quarters.

However, after a few sips of the gals' spiked drinks, the guards passed out and none of them could remember a thing the next morning when they were found handcuffed and drugged. One was found dizzy while another was still sound asleep by late afternoon.

The prisoners escaped taking several 12 caliber shotguns and some 38 caliber pistols along with ammunition. Meanwhile, the three seductresses left behind several articles of black lingerie and their dominatrix police uniforms.

The prison guards have have been arrested and charged with "facilitating a jailbreak" along with "culpable embezzlement."

A few photos of one the naked guards were apparently leaked by amused police officers and uploaded to social media sites.

"Nut Rage" Korean Air Daughter Gets Prison Sentence

You might remember the news story a few months ago about this high-and-mighty young woman, the oldest daughter of the owner of Korean Air Lines, was on a KAL flight getting ready to take off from JFK in New York when she forced the plane to turn around because she was served some macadamia nuts in a bag instead of on a dish.

Cho Hyun-ah, the oldest daughter of Korean Airlines chairman Cho Yang-ho, treated the airline staff like "feudal slaves," according to court documents, when she ordered the airline's chief flight attendant off the plane after demanding that the guy read over the airline's proper nut-handling guidelines.

It seems the incident created quite a stir in South Korea and since forcing a flight to change its route, obstructing the flight's captain, forcing crew members off a plane along with assaulting an airline crew member are all legitimate criminal offenses, she's now been sentenced by a South Korean court to serve a not-so-comfortable one-year term in the slammer.

In court, Cho wiped away tears and expressing remorse but the court showed little mercy in sentencing the heiress, much to the glee of the courtroom audience since incidents like this have usually been dismissed in South Korea where most of the economy is dominated by family-run conglomerates that historically have been able to act above the law.