SEE?! SEE?!
GREENSBURG, La. (AP) — Two teenagers were seriously hurt when they were thrown from a carnival ride during a high school fair in Greensburg.
The state Fire Marshal's office said the two had been on a ride called "the Zipper" — described as a huge oval frame that spins like a Ferris wheel with free -flipping cars. They were being removed from the ride when it went in motion, causing them to be thrown from the car and fall 15 feet.
Maj. Michael Martin of the St. Helena Parish Sheriff's Office said the brother and sister, ages 13 and 15, were hospitalized in Baton Rouge after the Saturday evening accident. The Fire Marshal's office said Sunday that the two were in stable condition.
No mechanical problems were found in an inspection of the ride.
The state Fire Marshal's office said the two had been on a ride called "the Zipper" — described as a huge oval frame that spins like a Ferris wheel with free -flipping cars. They were being removed from the ride when it went in motion, causing them to be thrown from the car and fall 15 feet.
Maj. Michael Martin of the St. Helena Parish Sheriff's Office said the brother and sister, ages 13 and 15, were hospitalized in Baton Rouge after the Saturday evening accident. The Fire Marshal's office said Sunday that the two were in stable condition.
No mechanical problems were found in an inspection of the ride.
WTF!?!?!?!
Disney Wants Trademark For 'Seal Team 6'.
Disney has come up with an idea to possibly capitalize on what are now famous military heroes, Seal Team 6.
The elite group within the U.S. Navy SEALs are responsible for killing Osama bin Laden.
According to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, Disney Enterprises Inc., submitted three applications for the trademark two days after bin Laden was killed.
In the application, the trademark would cover clothes, footwear, toys, games, Christmas ornaments, snow globes and other items.
Disney has come up with an idea to possibly capitalize on what are now famous military heroes, Seal Team 6.
The elite group within the U.S. Navy SEALs are responsible for killing Osama bin Laden.
According to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, Disney Enterprises Inc., submitted three applications for the trademark two days after bin Laden was killed.
In the application, the trademark would cover clothes, footwear, toys, games, Christmas ornaments, snow globes and other items.
Politics...
A few months ago, the Federal Communications Commission approved Comcast's purchase of NBC by a vote of 4-1. At the time, many people joked that the commissioners were all just securing themselves a gig at Comcast for their post-FCC careers. Today, that joke became less funny after Comcast confirmed it has indeed hired one of the four commissioners who approved the controversial deal.
After FCC Commissioner Meredith Attwell Baker's FCC term expires at the end of June, she will move over to Kabletown as Senior Vice President of Government Affairs, NBCUniversal.
"Commissioner Baker is one of the nation's leading authorities on communications policy and we're thrilled she's agreed to head the government relations operations for NBCUniversal," the President Comcast/NBCUniversal for Washington, DC, says. "Meredith's executive branch and business experience along with her exceptional relationships in Washington bring Comcast and NBCUniversal the perfect combination of skills."
Here's what the commish had to say: "I've been privileged to serve in government for the past seven years under President Obama at the FCC and President Bush at NTIA, I'm excited to embark on a new phase of my career with Comcast and NBCUniversal."
(Note: The press release for this announcement did not include a photo of the dump truck of money being back up to Atwell's front door.)
Consumer advocates are not too thrilled about this. Craig Aaron of the Free Press writes:
Less than four months after Commissioner Baker voted to approve Comcast's takeover of NBC Universal, she's reportedly departing the FCC to lobby for Comcast-NBC. This is just the latest -- though perhaps most blatant -- example of a so-called public servant cashing in at a company she is supposed to be regulating.
As recently as March, Commissioner Baker gave a speech lamenting that review of the Comcast-NBC deal 'took too long.' What we didn't know then was that she was in such a rush to start picking out the drapes in her new corner office.
After FCC Commissioner Meredith Attwell Baker's FCC term expires at the end of June, she will move over to Kabletown as Senior Vice President of Government Affairs, NBCUniversal.
"Commissioner Baker is one of the nation's leading authorities on communications policy and we're thrilled she's agreed to head the government relations operations for NBCUniversal," the President Comcast/NBCUniversal for Washington, DC, says. "Meredith's executive branch and business experience along with her exceptional relationships in Washington bring Comcast and NBCUniversal the perfect combination of skills."
Here's what the commish had to say: "I've been privileged to serve in government for the past seven years under President Obama at the FCC and President Bush at NTIA, I'm excited to embark on a new phase of my career with Comcast and NBCUniversal."
(Note: The press release for this announcement did not include a photo of the dump truck of money being back up to Atwell's front door.)
Consumer advocates are not too thrilled about this. Craig Aaron of the Free Press writes:
Less than four months after Commissioner Baker voted to approve Comcast's takeover of NBC Universal, she's reportedly departing the FCC to lobby for Comcast-NBC. This is just the latest -- though perhaps most blatant -- example of a so-called public servant cashing in at a company she is supposed to be regulating.
As recently as March, Commissioner Baker gave a speech lamenting that review of the Comcast-NBC deal 'took too long.' What we didn't know then was that she was in such a rush to start picking out the drapes in her new corner office.
It's a WAR ! ! ! ! ! !
WASHINGTON – Osama bin Laden was unarmed when Navy SEALs burst into his room and shot him to death, the White House said Tuesday, a change in the official account that raised questions about whether the U.S. ever planned to capture the terrorist leader alive.
=======================
Who cares? Not me. None of the civilians in the 9/11 attacks were armed.
Capturing him would have elevated his status in his twisted world.
He's dead. Quickly. Buried in accordance with Muslim tradition.
He got more than he deserved.
I would have cremated him and spread his ashes on a pig farm.
Had I had a shot on an unarmed Bin Laden I would have taken it without hesitation, malice or guilt.
He was a dog to be put down.
Had I the same shot on Hitler, same thing.
I am a liberal.
I would have shot his ass dead armed or not.
=======================
Who cares? Not me. None of the civilians in the 9/11 attacks were armed.
Capturing him would have elevated his status in his twisted world.
He's dead. Quickly. Buried in accordance with Muslim tradition.
He got more than he deserved.
I would have cremated him and spread his ashes on a pig farm.
Had I had a shot on an unarmed Bin Laden I would have taken it without hesitation, malice or guilt.
He was a dog to be put down.
Had I the same shot on Hitler, same thing.
I am a liberal.
I would have shot his ass dead armed or not.
For Rich...
How to Deliver a Baby in a Pinch
1. Don’t panic. Your wife is under a lot of stress right now. Standing there havy cavy or running around the house yelling like a little boy will not help her. Ease her stress by remaining completely calm.
2. Assess the situation. During labor your wife will experience contractions—the periodic tightening and relaxing of her uterine muscle. You’ll know your wife is experiencing one by the looks of discomfort on her face. If your wife’s contractions are less than two minutes apart, the baby is on its way, and you probably don’t have time to get to the doctor. If you can see the top of the baby’s head in the vagina, you definitely don’t have time.
3. Call for help. Just because you read something on the internet or watched Patches give birth to puppies when you were eight, does not make you an expert on delivering babies. Call an ambulance (or if you were planning on giving birth at home anyway, your midwife). Even if the baby comes before the ambulance gets there, someone can talk you through the process.
4. Get Mom comfortable. Because you’ve seen hundreds of television and movie births, your first reaction will probably be to have Mom lie on her back. This position isn’t actually the most comfortable or effective for delivery. If space is available, have her get on her hands and knees. This alleviates some of the pressure on her back. Some women also find it comfortable to stand or squat when giving birth, positions which allow gravity to aid in the birthing process. Just let nature dictate what she does. If Mom is in one of these vertical positions, keep an eye on the baby so he or she doesn’t squirm out into a free fall. If space isn’t available (say, in the back of a taxicab), the traditional on-the-back position will suffice.
5. Scrub up and prepare the birthing area. You don’t want to risk giving the baby or Mom an infection by handling them with your grubby paws. Wash your hands and arms with hot water and plenty of antibacterial soap. Birth is a messy process, so make sure you place clean sheets or a shower curtain under Mom. You’ll also need to have some clean towels handy to wipe off and wrap up the newly arrived bundle of joy. If you’re in a taxi, you can use your shirt.
6. Watch and guide. Nature is pretty dang amazing. For the most part the baby doesn’t need much assistance to make it into the world. Avoid barking instructions for your wife to push and breathe. You’ll just stress her out and cause her to possibly push when she shouldn’t. Let her push when it feels natural. When the head makes it out of the vagina, the baby will turn to one side. That’s completely normal. He or she is just trying to get in the best position to make an escape. Simply place your hand under the baby’s head and gently guide it downward. Don’t try to speed the process along by pulling on the baby. Just gently guide the shoulders out, one at a time. As the baby makes his entrance into the world, be ready to receive him; babies are slippery!
7. Rub the baby down. Take that clean towel and gently rub the baby down to clean off the fluid and blood. The rubbing will also help stimulate the baby so it starts breathing. Wipe any fluids out of its nose and mouth. If you have a straw, take it and suction out the fluids by inserting the straw into the nostril and then placing your finger on the open end. No need for holding it upside down and slapping its tush. That practice went away along with polio and celebratory cigars in the waiting room. Just place the baby, skin to skin, on Mom’s chest and cover the new arrival with a towel or shirt.
8. Don’t cut or tie the cord. Wait for a trained professional to do this.
9. Deliver the placenta. About fifteen to thirty minutes after the baby is delivered, Mom will expel the placenta, the sack that’s been nurturing your baby for the past five months. When you see the placenta start coming out, don’t pull on it to make it come out faster; just let it slip out naturally. If it’s not coming out right away, you can massage the mother’s abdomen to help it along.
10. Get medical attention ASAP. By now the ambulance should be there. If not, get Mom and new baby to the hospital as soon as possible so doctors can take care of the umbilical cord and examine the goods.
11. Bully for you! You’re a dad. And you didn’t even have to boil any water!
1. Don’t panic. Your wife is under a lot of stress right now. Standing there havy cavy or running around the house yelling like a little boy will not help her. Ease her stress by remaining completely calm.
2. Assess the situation. During labor your wife will experience contractions—the periodic tightening and relaxing of her uterine muscle. You’ll know your wife is experiencing one by the looks of discomfort on her face. If your wife’s contractions are less than two minutes apart, the baby is on its way, and you probably don’t have time to get to the doctor. If you can see the top of the baby’s head in the vagina, you definitely don’t have time.
3. Call for help. Just because you read something on the internet or watched Patches give birth to puppies when you were eight, does not make you an expert on delivering babies. Call an ambulance (or if you were planning on giving birth at home anyway, your midwife). Even if the baby comes before the ambulance gets there, someone can talk you through the process.
4. Get Mom comfortable. Because you’ve seen hundreds of television and movie births, your first reaction will probably be to have Mom lie on her back. This position isn’t actually the most comfortable or effective for delivery. If space is available, have her get on her hands and knees. This alleviates some of the pressure on her back. Some women also find it comfortable to stand or squat when giving birth, positions which allow gravity to aid in the birthing process. Just let nature dictate what she does. If Mom is in one of these vertical positions, keep an eye on the baby so he or she doesn’t squirm out into a free fall. If space isn’t available (say, in the back of a taxicab), the traditional on-the-back position will suffice.
5. Scrub up and prepare the birthing area. You don’t want to risk giving the baby or Mom an infection by handling them with your grubby paws. Wash your hands and arms with hot water and plenty of antibacterial soap. Birth is a messy process, so make sure you place clean sheets or a shower curtain under Mom. You’ll also need to have some clean towels handy to wipe off and wrap up the newly arrived bundle of joy. If you’re in a taxi, you can use your shirt.
6. Watch and guide. Nature is pretty dang amazing. For the most part the baby doesn’t need much assistance to make it into the world. Avoid barking instructions for your wife to push and breathe. You’ll just stress her out and cause her to possibly push when she shouldn’t. Let her push when it feels natural. When the head makes it out of the vagina, the baby will turn to one side. That’s completely normal. He or she is just trying to get in the best position to make an escape. Simply place your hand under the baby’s head and gently guide it downward. Don’t try to speed the process along by pulling on the baby. Just gently guide the shoulders out, one at a time. As the baby makes his entrance into the world, be ready to receive him; babies are slippery!
7. Rub the baby down. Take that clean towel and gently rub the baby down to clean off the fluid and blood. The rubbing will also help stimulate the baby so it starts breathing. Wipe any fluids out of its nose and mouth. If you have a straw, take it and suction out the fluids by inserting the straw into the nostril and then placing your finger on the open end. No need for holding it upside down and slapping its tush. That practice went away along with polio and celebratory cigars in the waiting room. Just place the baby, skin to skin, on Mom’s chest and cover the new arrival with a towel or shirt.
8. Don’t cut or tie the cord. Wait for a trained professional to do this.
9. Deliver the placenta. About fifteen to thirty minutes after the baby is delivered, Mom will expel the placenta, the sack that’s been nurturing your baby for the past five months. When you see the placenta start coming out, don’t pull on it to make it come out faster; just let it slip out naturally. If it’s not coming out right away, you can massage the mother’s abdomen to help it along.
10. Get medical attention ASAP. By now the ambulance should be there. If not, get Mom and new baby to the hospital as soon as possible so doctors can take care of the umbilical cord and examine the goods.
11. Bully for you! You’re a dad. And you didn’t even have to boil any water!
Dad Stuff...
The terrorist leader Osama bin Laden is (as you may have heard) dead, and few would argue that the world is not a better place for his absence. That being said, however, and whatever your stance on capital punishment is, it is still a strange and somewhat unsettling thing to be cheering the death of another human being. I think most parents want their children to grow up with a respect for death — to acknowledge that it comes for everyone in time, and that we should in general take no more pleasure in someone else’s death than we would want someone to take in our own.
How, then, do you explain to those same children the cheering, the rejoicing at bin Laden’s death? It’s no easy task, because you first have to teach them about evil, which is tough in itself because if you’re honest you have to admit that no human being is ever purely evil or purely good. It’s hard enough to admit that to yourself — that you actually have something in common with detestable mass-murderers like bin Laden, let alone monsters like Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, and Pol Pot — that it’s extremely difficult to get kids to understand it. Don’t worry to admit that you don’t know the answer to the question “Why?” — or use whatever explanation fits your religious beliefs (if any) to fill in the blanks. Make sure you make it clear (or at least try to) that, whatever Yoda might have to say on the subject, it’s not negative thoughts that make us evil, but rather what we choose to do with those thoughts.
And of course you need to tell them about 9/11, if you haven’t already. Stick to the basic facts — now isn’t the time to go into a lot of detail, because you’d run the risk of overwhelming your kids with information — and especially note that nearly 3,000 innocent people were killed that day, and that al-Qaeda was the group responsible for it all. Tell them that we know this to a certainty, because members of al-Qaeda have not only admitted their culpability but have actually bragged about it.
“All men have an emotion to kill; when they strongly dislike some one they involuntarily wish he was dead. I have never killed any one, but I have read some obituary notices with great satisfaction.” – Clarence Darrow
Then explain what’s happened since then in the hunt for bin Laden: that it’s been nearly ten years since 9/11, more than ten since the USS Cole bombing, and more than twelve since the U.S. embassy bombings in East Africa, and for all that time the U.S. military has been hunting for Osama bin Laden so that he could be brought to justice for his crimes and so that al-Qaeda would lose its most important member. And then explain that, last night, President Obama announced to the nation and the world that, at his direction, last night a team of brave, elite members of the U.S. military acted on intelligence information about bin Laden’s location and attacked, killing bin Laden in the process. Whether you should mention the newly-released information that this mission’s goal was explicitly to kill bin Laden, not try to capture him is a dicier question — my advice would be not to mention it unless asked about it.
Now back to explaining the joy at bin Laden’s passing, and why it’s OK: There’s been a quotation making the rounds on Twitter and Facebook since the announcement last night of bin Laden’s death, though it’s been misattributed to Mark Twain and misquoted to boot: the real quotation, by famed lawyer Clarence Darrow, is (with the line before it that improves it) “All men have an emotion to kill; when they strongly dislike some one they involuntarily wish he was dead. I have never killed any one, but I have read some obituary notices with great satisfaction.” That really sums it up nicely: You don’t have to think that someone deserved to die to be pleased at their passing. I told my kids, truthfully, that I cheer for bin Laden’s death not because a human being is dead but because a man who in my mind was far more evil than good, and who was responsible for the murder of thousands of innocent people, will never be able to hurt anyone ever again. And that is surely a good thing.
How, then, do you explain to those same children the cheering, the rejoicing at bin Laden’s death? It’s no easy task, because you first have to teach them about evil, which is tough in itself because if you’re honest you have to admit that no human being is ever purely evil or purely good. It’s hard enough to admit that to yourself — that you actually have something in common with detestable mass-murderers like bin Laden, let alone monsters like Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, and Pol Pot — that it’s extremely difficult to get kids to understand it. Don’t worry to admit that you don’t know the answer to the question “Why?” — or use whatever explanation fits your religious beliefs (if any) to fill in the blanks. Make sure you make it clear (or at least try to) that, whatever Yoda might have to say on the subject, it’s not negative thoughts that make us evil, but rather what we choose to do with those thoughts.
And of course you need to tell them about 9/11, if you haven’t already. Stick to the basic facts — now isn’t the time to go into a lot of detail, because you’d run the risk of overwhelming your kids with information — and especially note that nearly 3,000 innocent people were killed that day, and that al-Qaeda was the group responsible for it all. Tell them that we know this to a certainty, because members of al-Qaeda have not only admitted their culpability but have actually bragged about it.
“All men have an emotion to kill; when they strongly dislike some one they involuntarily wish he was dead. I have never killed any one, but I have read some obituary notices with great satisfaction.” – Clarence Darrow
Then explain what’s happened since then in the hunt for bin Laden: that it’s been nearly ten years since 9/11, more than ten since the USS Cole bombing, and more than twelve since the U.S. embassy bombings in East Africa, and for all that time the U.S. military has been hunting for Osama bin Laden so that he could be brought to justice for his crimes and so that al-Qaeda would lose its most important member. And then explain that, last night, President Obama announced to the nation and the world that, at his direction, last night a team of brave, elite members of the U.S. military acted on intelligence information about bin Laden’s location and attacked, killing bin Laden in the process. Whether you should mention the newly-released information that this mission’s goal was explicitly to kill bin Laden, not try to capture him is a dicier question — my advice would be not to mention it unless asked about it.
Now back to explaining the joy at bin Laden’s passing, and why it’s OK: There’s been a quotation making the rounds on Twitter and Facebook since the announcement last night of bin Laden’s death, though it’s been misattributed to Mark Twain and misquoted to boot: the real quotation, by famed lawyer Clarence Darrow, is (with the line before it that improves it) “All men have an emotion to kill; when they strongly dislike some one they involuntarily wish he was dead. I have never killed any one, but I have read some obituary notices with great satisfaction.” That really sums it up nicely: You don’t have to think that someone deserved to die to be pleased at their passing. I told my kids, truthfully, that I cheer for bin Laden’s death not because a human being is dead but because a man who in my mind was far more evil than good, and who was responsible for the murder of thousands of innocent people, will never be able to hurt anyone ever again. And that is surely a good thing.
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