Are you TOO concerned about your food?

The test is simple: read this sign (recently photographed at my local Vancouver market, which is owned by Whole Foods) then gauge your response...

How Science Works / How Science Is Reported

Man's cell phone turns on stove - with video

First the superintendent and the handyman checked the oven from top to bottom. Then they tested the electrical outlet that supplied ignition power for the oven. Everything worked. Finally, they gave their verdict to the tenant, Andrei Melnikov.

It was simply not possible, they said, that his oven, a Magic Chef made by Maytag, had turned itself on full blast, as Mr. Melnikov maintained.

“Maybe you imagined it,” the handyman said.

Mr. Melnikov picked up a warped meat thermometer, its plastic casing melted.

“How did I imagine this?” he asked.

“He told me, ‘Probably you don’t remember pushing the button,’ ” Mr. Melnikov said.

Actually, Mr. Melnikov and his wife, Lina, almost never cook in the oven, which was new when they moved into their apartment in Gravesend, Brooklyn, three years ago. Like many people who live with more stuff than space, they store kitchenware in it.

On the day it turned itself on, Mr. Melnikov recalled, his cellphone had rung in the kitchen. He talked for about 10 minutes. Then he smelled smoke. The oven was roaring. The thermometer was in flames.

“Maybe the ringing cellphone turned it on,” Mr. Melnikov suggested to the two men.

They scoffed.

He laid the phone next to the stove. They dialed it. Suddenly, the electronic control on the stovetop beeped. The digital display changed from a clock to the word “high.” As the phone was ringing, the broiler was heating up.

You can just write me a check for your pet.

You've committed your life to Jesus. You know you're saved. But when the Rapture comes what's to become of your loving pets who are left behind? Eternal Earth-Bound Pets takes that burden off your mind.

We are a group of dedicated animal lovers, and atheists. Each Eternal Earth-Bound Pet representative is a confirmed atheist, and as such will still be here on Earth after you've received your reward. Our network of animal activists are committed to step in when you step up to Jesus.

A chimpanzee enjoys a magic show

I'm going to put this with my computer next time I fly

Survey Says!!

In a recent survey carried out for a leading toiletries firm (Brut), people from Detroit and Chicago have proved to be the most likely to have had sex in the shower! In the survey, 86% of Detroit 's and Chicago 's inner city residents (almost all of whom are registered Democrats) said that they have enjoyed sex in the shower.
The other 14% said they hadn't been to prison yet.

Must Pop Words

Scrabble + Tetris = Total Addiction

Hoping to go to a movie this weekend

Graffiti East of Helena

Bear Sign

A joke.

Mystery Team looks like a good movie

Map projector with built-in GPS

This handy portable map projector equipped with GPS makes getting lost a thing of the past. All you need is a surface to shine your map on. A friend's forehead would do.

1,000 cameras 'solve one crime'

Only one crime was solved by each 1,000 CCTV cameras in London last year, a report into the city's surveillance network has claimed.

The internal police report found the million-plus cameras in London rarely help catch criminals. In one month CCTV helped capture just eight out of 269 suspected robbers. David Davis MP, the former shadow home secretary, said: "It should provoke a long overdue rethink on where the crime prevention budget is being spent."

He added: "CCTV leads to massive expense and minimum effectiveness. "It creates a huge intrusion on privacy, yet provides little or no improvement in security.

Zoo adds new species

BIrd? Feeder

Good Thoughts

I don't understand the purpose of the line, "I don't need to drink to have fun." Great, no one does. But why start a fire with flint and sticks when they've invented the lighter?

I totally take back all those times I didn't want to nap when I was younger.

Sometimes, I'll watch a movie that I watched when I was younger and suddenly realize I had no idea what the f*** was going on when I first saw it.

I would rather try to carry 10 plastic grocery bags in each hand than take 2 trips to bring my groceries in.

A recent study has shown that playing beer pong contributes to the spread of mono and the flu. Yeah, if you suck at it.

Was learning cursive really necessary?

I have a hard time deciphering the fine line between boredom and hunger.

Whenever someone says "I'm not book smart, but I'm street smart", all I hear is "I'm not real smart, but I'm imaginary smart".

MapQuest really needs to start their directions on #5. Pretty sure I know how to get out of my neighborhood.

I find it hard to believe there are actually people who get in the shower first and THEN turn on the water.
Bad decisions make good stories

Can we all just agree to ignore whatever comes after DVDs? I don't want to have to restart my collection.

There's no worse feeling than that millisecond you're sure you are going to die after leaning your chair back a little too far.

"Do not machine wash or tumble dry" means I will never wash this ever.

It should probably be called Unplanned Parenthood.

I think that if, years down the road when I’m trying to have a kid, I find out that I’m sterile, most of my disappointment will stem from the fact that I was not aware of my condition in college.

My 4-year old son asked me in the car the other day "Dad what would happen if you ran over a ninja?" How the hell do I respond to that?

I think the freezer deserves a light as well.

I disagree with Kay Jewelers. I would bet on any given Friday or Saturday night more kisses begin with Miller Lites than Kay.

While I was away . . .

"During the Summer of 2007, I had the opportunity to backpack around Europe for 2 weeks. I talked about it often before I left. My girlfriend however, although great in many respects, was not the world's greatest listener. I left on Friday June 1st. Despite even calling her to say goodbye the night before, she never realized I left. When I arrived home 2 weeks later, I had several emails from her, waiting in my inbox...

We're going camping.

Danger Room in Afghanistan: Hansel and Gretel vs. Roadside Bombs

CAMP LEATHERNECK, AFGHANISTAN — The Marines in southern Afghanistan have largely left the roads, to avoid improvised bombs. But they’re still getting hit as they carve tracks through the desert. A reporter-turned-lieutenant may have found at least a partial answer, though: off-the-shelf GPS units, combined with a British tactic from the counterinsurgency in Northern Ireland.

Former Wall Street Journal reporter Matt Pottinger came up with the answer earlier this year, working for the Marines’ Combat Logistics Battalion 3, based out of Camp Leatherneck in Helmand Province. The battalion was driving as much as 110 kilometers off-road to resupply outlying bases. To keep from getting attacked, they tried to vary their paths through the desert. But the Taliban always seemed to know where they were going to be next.

So Pottinger hooked the battalion’s vehicles up with commercial Garmin GPS trackers, to record where they were driving. After a few runs, he plotted the routes on top of military imagery databases. “You’d get this spaghetti network of track, and they’d converge in these places,” he says. Turns out the Marines weren’t changing up their routes nearly
as much as they thought they were.

Small, almost imperceptible changes in the terrain were forcing the battalion’s vehicles into natural chokepoints. Near the town of Jamal Ghar, for example, there appeared to be nearly three kilometers between a mountain and an irrigation ditch. But Pottinger saw that all the vehicles were driving right on top of each other; most of those three kilometers was taken up by farmland. The Taliban had a natural point where they could plant bombs. And they did, attacking the Marines repeatedly.

Never scoop dog poop again!

Barney Frank responds appropriately to town hall protester. (Video)

Read Closely.

There is something very, very wrong here.

Hello Cougar!

A Year Later, Swiss Town Rebuilds From Giant Dog Poo Attack

Want It! Garage Door Murals

Don't tell my dog about this.

JERUSALEM, Aug. 5 (UPI) -- Unwilling to fly without her pooch by her side, an Israeli woman purchased the entire business section of an El Al flight from Paris to Israel.
The woman identified as Rivka, told the Channel 10 television network Wednesday afternoon, she could not bear the thought of her eight-year-old boxer dog being placed in a cage in the cargo hold of the plane for the duration of the flight.

"He is my baby, and I asked El Al to rent out the business section and paid $32,000 to ensure my dog, Or (light in Hebrew), would be able to sit next to me for the entire flight," she told the television.

Rivka said it is the first time the two have flown since 2006. In the past her pet suffered from severe anxiety after flying alone in the cargo section, she said. This time she decided to purchase the entire business section of the jetliner and enjoy the dog's company for the four-hour flight from Paris to Israel.

Do redheads feel more pain?

Nobody likes going to the dentist, but redheads may have good reason.

A growing body of research shows that people with red hair need larger doses of anesthesia and often are resistant to local pain blockers like Novocaine. As a result, redheads tend to be particularly nervous about dental procedures and are twice as likely to avoid going to the dentist as people with other hair colors, according to new research published in The Journal of the American Dental Association.

Researchers believe redheads are more sensitive to pain because of a mutation in a gene that affects hair color. In people with brown, black and blond hair, the gene, for the melanocortin-1 receptor, produces melanin. But a mutation in the MC1R gene results in the production of a substance called pheomelanin that results in red hair and fair skin.

The MC1R gene belongs to a family of receptors that include pain receptors in the brain, and as a result, a mutation in the gene appears to influence the body’s sensitivity to pain. A 2004 study showed that redheads require, on average, about 20 percent more general anesthesia than people with dark hair or blond coloring. And in 2005, researchers found that redheads are more resistant to the effects of local anesthesia, such as the numbing drugs used by dentists.

Want It! ???

Ever have this happen: You've just put your earbuds in. Noise reduction, of course. Three seconds after you've put your media player in your pocket and are in danger of enjoying what you're listening to, someone comes up to you and appears to be saying something interesting and vital to you. You either take your earbuds out or dig in your pocket to pause and then take your earbuds out. They will invariably act pissed off when you ask them to repeat themselves.

This brilliant invention puts an end to all that. Because who is going to talk to a 280-lb white guy wearing cat ears?

Want It!

Amazing!! I saw this.

The largest and most comprehensive exhibition of Pulitzer Prize-winning photographs ever shown in the United States will open Friday, Aug. 7, at the Montana Museum of Art & Culture and the Gallery of Visual Arts at The University of Montana.
“Capture the Moment: The Pulitzer Prize Photographs” features 143 color and black-and-white photographs of some of the world’s most iconic images. Included are a huge variety of photographs of pivotal moments in history, politics, sports, war and much more. The exhibition will be at MMAC’s Paxson and Meloy galleries, located in UM’s Performing Arts and Radio-Television Center, and at the Gallery of Visual Arts, located on the first floor of the University’s Social Science Building, through Friday, Oct. 23.

Forty years after Woodstock, Bob Dylan mistaken for homeless man.

"We got a call for a suspicious person,'' Buble said. "It was pouring rain outside, and I was right around the corner so I responded. By that time he was walking down the street. I asked him what he was doing in the neighborhood and he said he was looking at a house for sale."

"I asked him what his name was and he said, 'Bob Dylan,' Buble said. "Now, I've seen pictures of Bob Dylan from a long time ago and he didn't look like Bob Dylan to me at all. He was wearing black sweatpants tucked into black rain boots, and two raincoats with the hood pulled down over his head.

"So I said, 'OK Bob, what are you doing in Long Branch?' He said he was touring the country with Willie Nelson and John Mellencamp. So now I'm really a little fishy about his story. I did not know what to believe or where he was coming from, or even who he was.

Want It!

"The rust-resistant tools feature tungsten-carbide cutting blades (for cutting braided wire) and foamy, soft-grip ergonomic handles that float. The loud colors help you find the suckers if you knock them off the boat as you reach for your beverage."

Consumers In U.S., Canada Pay More For Wireless. Wireless industry respectfully requests that you ignore this.

The latest OECD data suggests consumers in Canada, Spain and the United States pay the most for calls and text messages of all 30 ranked OECD nations. Unlike Europe, callers in Canada and the US pay to receive messages -- but even factored in North American customers are paying considerably more than dozens of other countries. On average, the OECD found that Americans pay $635.85 on cell phone service, compared to $131.44 per year in the Netherlands or $137.94 per year in Sweden.

Interesting Book

In 1851 Olive Oatman was a thirteen-year old pioneer traveling west toward Zion, with her Mormon family. Within a decade, she was a white Indian with a chin tattoo, caught between cultures. The Blue Tattoo tells the harrowing story of this forgotten heroine of frontier America. Orphaned when her family was brutally killed by Yavapai Indians, Oatman lived as a slave to her captors for a year before being traded to the Mohave, who tattooed her face and raised her as their own. She was fully assimilated and perfectly happy when, at nineteen, she was ransomed back to white society. She became an instant celebrity, but the price of fame was high and the pain of her ruptured childhood lasted a lifetime.

This should happen in many places

Food consumption by type, over time, in Britain.

It's fun interactive infoporn.

Hacker with Asperger’s Sentenced to 55 Months for Trucking Scheme

For over three years the pair hacked into a Department of Transportation website called Safersys.org, which maintains a list of licensed interstate trucking companies and brokers, according to an affidavit (.pdf) filed by a department investigator. There, they would temporarily change the contact information for a legitimate trucking company to an address and phone number under their control.

The men then took to the web-based “load boards” where brokers advertise cargo in need of transportation. They’d negotiate a deal, for example, to transport cargo from American Canyon, California, to Jessup, Maryland, for $3,500.

But instead of transporting the load, Lakes and Berkovich would outsource the job to another trucking company, the feds say, posing as the legitimate company whose identity they’d hijacked. Once the cargo was delivered, the men invoiced their customer and pocketed the funds. But when the company that actually drove the truck tried to get paid, they’d eventually discover that the firm who’d supposedly hired them didn’t know anything about it.

Sarah Palin = Batshit Insane

"The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s ‘death panel’ so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their ‘level of productivity in society,’ whether they are worthy of health care."

How well husbands hear.

Do you need Snuggies?

What can Paul do with no hands that Trevon uses one hand?

A handsome man who has caught fish.

Driving home from vacation

Driving to work

A Joke

A Woman was out golfing one day when she hit the ball into the woods.

She went into the woods to look for it and found a frog in a trap.

The frog said to her, 'If you release me from this trap, I will grant you three wishes.'

The woman freed the frog, and the frog said, 'Thank you, but I failed to mention that there was a condition to your wishes.

Whatever you wish for, your husband will get times ten!'

The woman said, 'That's okay.'

For her first wish, she wanted to be the most beautiful woman in the world.

The frog warned her, 'You do realize that this wish will also make your husband the most handsome man in the world, an Adonis whom women will flock to'.

The woman replied, 'That's okay, because I will be the most beautiful Woman and he will have eye s only for me.'

So, KAZAM-she's the most beautiful Woman in the world!

For her second wish, she wanted to be the richest woman in the world.

The frog said, 'That will make your husband the richest man in the world. And he will be ten times richer than you.'

The woman said, 'That's okay, because what's mine is his and what's his is mine.' So, KAZAM-she's the richest woman in the world!

The frog then inquired about her third wish, and she answered, 'I'd like a mild heart attack.'

Moral of the story: Women are clever. Don't mess with them.

Attention female readers : This is the end of the joke for you. Stop here and continue feeling good.

Male readers :
Please scroll down.

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The man had a heart attack ten times milder than his wife.

Moral of the story : Women are really dumb but think they're really smart.

Let them continue to think that way and just enjoy the show.

PS: If you are a woman and are still reading this; it only goes to show that women never listen

Want to show someone was born in Kenya? Make them a birth certificate.

Want It!

How to unparalyze a rat

Fifteen minutes after this rat was paralyzed, researchers injected the rodent with Brilliant Blue G dye, a derivative of common food coloring Blue Number One. The dye reduced inflammation of the spinal cord, which allowed the rats to take clumsy steps—but not walk—within weeks, a new study says.

In both rats and people, secondary inflammation following spinal cord trauma causes more lasting damage than the initial injury: Swelling sparks a small "stroke," which stops blood flow and eventually kills off the surrounding tissue.

Other than blue skin and eyes, "we can find no clinical effect on the rat," said Maiken Nedergaard, a neuroscientist at the University of Rochester Medical Center in Rochester, New York.

That lack of side effects may also help make the blue dye a boon to paralyzed humans down the road. "The beauty of it is that it wouldn't harm you," Nedergaard said—unlike previous compounds used to treat spinal cord injuries, which had toxic effects.

Infoporn about online solicitation of teens

Infoporn: Visually appealing presentations of data, often using "Web 2.0" interactivity to suck the viewer in.

Great New iPhone App

More Republican shenanigans

Add a new item to the long list of political shenanigans that backfire once discovered. Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX) has decided to run for Texas governor against incumbent Rick Perry, and her new campaign website contained hidden text that read "rick perry gay." The resulting flap led to the firing of the Web development firm involved, drew heated responses from Perry's office, and (perhaps worst of all) saw Hutchison's campaign website yanked from Google's search index.

Texas newspapers uncovered the hidden text last week. The "rick perry gay" reference was one of only thousands of phrases tucked into the source code for Hutchison's site, apparently to help draw search engine traffic.

Hutchison's campaign initially told the Austin American-Statesman that "a vendor sold them on a tool that generates the phrases hourly or less in an attempt to divine the most frequent Web searches made by individuals who search online using one or all of the terms 'Rick Perry,' 'Kay Bailey Hutchison' and 'Texas'"—and plenty of people search for "rick perry gay."

The tool was allegedly used to help make banner ad buying decision, said the campaign, a claim that makes little sense on its face. Why would such a list be inserted in the website's source code unless the goal was to draw search traffic to the site?

Whatever the reason for it, the Hutchison campaign blamed the vendor who developed the site and removed the Perry reference. On July 30, Google removed the campaign's site from its search index as a penalty for using more than 2,000 hidden terms. Yahoo then followed suit.

One very strange yoga video

My new favorite song - Choctaw Bingo

Five days of vacation driving

900 miles and never more than 150 miles from Helena.

Rainbow