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Nuns Commit Heresy, Oh My!

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Wacko Alert Spector Mistrial Video

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Los Angeles, you are on TOP of Wacko Nation tonight, as looney Phil Spector is declared a mistrial.  If I had a Wacko rating system right now, I'd give this a WWWWW - 5 stars worth of wacko.
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On This Day in History!

September 26, 1966 - General Motors introduced the first Chevy Camero in an attemp to compete with the Ford Mustang.

Find Out How General Motors and the United Automobile Workers Union Are Celebrating

He was down on one knee asking for her hand in marriage. She had just said yes. Then, WHAM, out of the bushes jumped a mugger with a gun! Let's just say that their life together started with a bang, but nobody got hurt.


Central Park Lovers Get Engaged, Mugged

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Buckminster Fuller, Photo from Buckminster Fuller Institute

It was announced today that Standford has purchased a large interview archive from New Dimensions, and plans to digitize content to make it available online.  New Dimensions is a non-profit organization who has spent the last few decades interviewing and broadcasting session with the world's more innovative thinkers.  The collection that Stanford bought includes interviews with Buckminster Fuller, Timothy Leary, Deepok Chopra, Maya Angelou, and tons of others.

READ ABOUT IT HERE

If you don't know about New Dimensions, and all of their wonderful podcasts and Internet Radio options, you should. So here you go. Go forth, and become enlightened!

New Dimensions Podcast Subscriptions
New Dimensions Internet Radio
Buy New Dimensions MP3s for $1.99
New Dimensiona Audio Club

 

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Oh boy. Bring out your crazy, 24 Hour Fitness. A Houston woman went to work out at 24 Hour Fitness Center where she had been a member for 3 years, and got locked inside when the gym closed around midnight.  She wound up calling police who coached her through finding the building's emergency exit, where she was able to escape.  She didn't realize the gym had operating hours. I wonder why. It might have something to do with the name of the company - 24 Hour Fitness. Ya think?

Read the Local Channel 13 Story About the Incident

Last week, the New York Times Online boldly abandoned it's subsciption model, and is now offering all of the site content without the need to login. This opened up the site's archives, and all other columnist based content to the entire web viewing audience.  Analysts are now closely watching the actions of Rupert Murdoch to determine if the Wall Street Journal will follow in the Times footsteps once the Journal is officially under his control.

Signs point to Yes!

I guess the newspaper organizations have finally woken up and smelled the coffee Google and AOL have been brewing for the past decade.  Free the content, and the advertisers will take care of the rest.

The Snoop is in the Pudding

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San Jose startup, PuddingMedia, has come up with a new way to make money from phone calls connected via the Internet: having software listen to the calls, then displaying ads on the callers' computer screens based on what's being talked about. The company announced today that their free internet calling service, ThePudding.com, will launch on Monday October 1, 2007.  But beware, someone will be listening to your calls.

ThePudding.com will provide 100% free calling to any phone number in North America without the need to download software to your computer.  You simply dial in over ThePudding.com's website, and talk over the pudding VOIP network.  Voice recognition software, VoiceSense (TM),  hosted on PuddingMedia servers will translate your conversation, and content will be served to you on ThePudding.com that is relevant to the conversation you are having with the person on the other end of the line.

Talking about movies? You might see local movie listings and times served to you on ThePudding.com. Discussing what food you need to bring to an upcoming office party, and you're served recipes or ad from local take out restaurants.

The company's privacy policy claims that they do not collect, record, or store any conversations, and that they  "implement reasonable and appropriate security safeguards" to secure your data. Well, that's comforting. I will be interested to see how this product plays out.  Sounds a lot like snooping to me. (Oh, and by the way, the Privacy Policy and FAQ are MS Word documents that you have to download to read. Argh.)

Read More will take you to the Press Release from PuddingMedia.

Happy BIrthday, Jetsons

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On This Day in History!

On September 23, 1962 the first episode of The Jetsons aired.


Thanks to priceytv for posting the Jetson's intro on YouTube!

  


Thanks to daftmahatma for posting this clip from the early Jetsons.
 
I was thrilled to discover that you can buy individual Jetsons episodes  for $1.99 from Amazon using their  Amazon Unbox service. I downloaded a few episodes to my TiVo this weekend so that I could introduce this Hannah Barbara classic to my 3 year old, Beckett.  He watched enthusiastically, and wanted to play space family when it was over. 
 
While we are definitely not living the space age life of the Jetson famliy, we did pay homage to them by naming our iRobot Scooba, Rosie. Oh, how I love you, Rosie! 

Oh! Beware before you use Amazon's Unbox service. Boing Boing doesn't like it one bit!  I personally decided to go for it since it integrates effortlessly with TiVo, and my TiVo's Kid Zone. I have been waiting for years for TiVo to make a deal with a distributor so that we could use our TiVo service to watch rented content.  I was so excited, I took the plunge, and so far I've been happy with the choice.

I grew up in the South, and still live here. So, I'm about as Southern bred and biscuit fed as a girl can get. I've always felt at home among Southern sayings, and have been known to describe myself as as "nervous as a long tailed cat in a room full of rockers" on occassion.  You can imagine how happy I was this morning to read that the Southern Drawl is apparently spreading across the country, and it is now estimated that up to 50% of Americans now use linguistic clues that are Southern Drawl in origin.

Of course there are some naysayers out there that believe that we are actually moving to a more monotone "American" dialect.  What do you think? Spend some time this week listening to the people around you.  Are they gliding their diphthongs or using a quieter "R" sound?  Do they say, "I'm fixin' to turn down the bed?" or "I'm about to pull back the sheets."  Do they tell you, "We're going down 85 to the Burger King?" or "We're taking the 85 to Burger King?"

Dr. Phil is certainly helping the Southern Drawl become more of a part of mainstream culture, and uses Texas sayings he learned during his time growing up in Texas, such as "You're about as happy as a tick on a fat dog."  These Southern style expressions are fun, folksy, and I think every person in Wacko Nation should have at least tucked in their pocket for a rainy day.

Here are a few to choose from:

Try this pick up line:  "You're finer than frog hair split four ways."

Use this one the next time somebody tries to pull a fast one on you: "Don't piss on my foot, and tell me it's rainin'!"

Drop tihs one at will: "Honey, this ain' my first rodeo."

>> Go here to find more Southern Expressions

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Wow, what a rush it must have been for Forsgate Country Club in New Jersey this week, as two golfers got back to back hole in ones on the course. "I've never heard of that happening anywhere in the world," Jim Woods, director of golf at Forsgate Country Club in Monroe Township, said Thursday.  And what's more remarkable? The two men were playing in the same group.  I'm sure there were many martinis served at the 19th hole after that round!  Way to go, Thomas Brady & Dennis Gerhart!

>> Read All About the Two Hole in Ones on CBS News.com

Take a Ride on the SLUT

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SLUT.jpgGet your mind out of the gutter.
 Seattle's South Lake Union Streetcar has developed a quite unfortunate name around the local neighborhood. Locals know the mass transit system as the South Lake Union Trolley, or The SLUT.

A local coffee shop, Kapow! Coffee, had 100 tee shirts printed reading "Ride the SLUT", which sold out in a matter of days. But don't fret. They have reordered.

"We're welcoming the SLUT into the neighborhood," said Jerry Johnson, 29, a part-time barista.

>> Read All About It Here on Chron.com

>> Visit DJC.com to Find Out More About South Lake Union

 

 

"I DO", But Only For Seven Years

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Click to View on CNN.com

Member of Germany's parliament are proposing (ha!) that legal marriages expire after seven years. Could this be the answer to the 50% divorce rate in America?

According to the video, spouses would have the option to extend their marriage contract at the end of the 7 year stretch, or they could simply let their marriage expire. This gives a whole new meaning to the Seven Year Itch.

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