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The first U-F-O is reported...over Basel, Switzerland. (1556)

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Networks Fight Rising Number Of FCC Fines
By AMY SCHATZ WSJ May 19, 2006; Page B1 Federal Communications Commission"[Bleep]". Last year 2005, the FCC received 233,531 complaints about indecent broadcasts, compared with 346 in 2001. Until 2003, indecency fines were relatively rare and usually low. In 2002, for example, the FCC proposed fines in seven radio complaints for a total of $99,400. That changed in 2003, however, when the FCC began responding to an increasing number of complaints, particularly about raunchy morning radio programs, by levying six-figure fines. The following year, both FCC Chairman Kevin Martin, who took over in 2005, has shown little patience for questionable programming. Consequently, the FCC is expected to continue proposing multimillion-dollar fines, and industry executives say it now makes financial sense to challenge them in court. They also worry Mr. Martin's FCC will expand its efforts to dictate standards, pointing to the commission's willingness in March to propose fines for graphic sexual content or the use of expletives that it deemed not "essential" to a show. silly me, I thought that was their job Industry executives argue that the FCC is injecting itself deeper into content decisions than has historically been the case. yeah, remember the SH"OCKING '70's! An FCC official, who declined to be named, said that "the recent orders are consistent with the guidance given by the courts." i always suspected that Clear Channel didn't think I was 'shocking' enough

 

 THE FIRST MAJOR BATTLE IN THE 1ST WAR OF THE 21st CENTURY WAS WON BY MEN ON HORSEBACK 

Sunday, Nov. 11, 2001
In the dead of night, horses poured from the hills. They came charging down from the craggy ridges in groups of 10, their riders dressed in flowing shalwar kameez and armed with AK-47s and grenade launchers. In the Kishindi Valley below, 35 miles south of the prized northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif, the few Taliban tanks in the area not destroyed by American bombs took aim at the Northern Alliance cavalry galloping toward them. But the 600 horsemen had been ordered to charge directly into the line of fire. "If you ride fast enough, you can get to them," The Alliance guys later explained. "You ride straight at them. The tank will only have time to get off one or two rounds before you get there." The rebels were told to leap on top of the tanks, pull the Taliban gunners out through the open hatches and kill them. The first land battle in the century's first war began with a showdown from a distant age: fearless men on horseback against modern artillery. America's money was on the ponies.

They won. According to accounts given to Time by Alliance officials, 3,500 rebels serving under Uzbek warlord Rashid Dostum, 47, pushed the Taliban out of Kishindi with a 16-hour assault that left 200 Taliban and an unknown number of Alliance troops dead. To the west, forces loyal to Ustad Atta Mohammed, another Alliance commander, lost 30 men in a barrage of Taliban tank fire but seized the outlying village of Aq Kuprik. From there the Alliance's long-promised and much delayed march on Mazar-i-Sharif gathered an irresistible momentum. For the first time, the Pentagon last week acknowledged that the U.S. has air-dropped guns and horse feed to Alliance forces.

Until last week the Northern Alliance showed few signs of war readiness. Three weeks ago, near Mazar-i-Sharif, a rebel charge was turned back by a Taliban counteroffensive because the Alliance's four rival commanders failed to coordinate their attacks. In the north, ethnic infighting, inexperience and customary drug use plague the Alliance's loose-knit guerrilla bands. The preferred narcotic is a potent, pungent hashish that is smoked by Alliance and Taliban soldiers alike from dinner until midnight. Alliance soldiers say they make up for their lack of Western-style military discipline with versatility. "We can do everything," says Fazel, a tank commander in the Farkhar district. "But we don't do anything very well."
okay, that was me.

CNN: anchor Bill Hemmer reported on breaking news that "U.S. ground troops are on the ground, and they are armed." Which is great, because you know our military is just not as effective without their guns and stuff.

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Temple Jeni yields up her secrets

 Jeni, full name: Tjenmutengebtiu; was a priestess or temple singer. Mummified nearly 3,000 years ago at the famous Egyptian temple at Karnak. On display in London's British Museum, she was encased in a priceless coffin, decorated with hieroglyphics and a golden death mask.

For years, the temptress has tantalized horny young scientists. Finally, Australian researchers (leave it to the Australians) smuggled her out and used CAT scanning to look at her naked her without disturbing the coffin.

Back at the university, 115 cross-section pictures were fed into a supercomputer. Officially, anthropology professor Richard Wright of Sydney University took skull measurements, and fed them into a program comparing the skull with 2,000 others from around the world to establish Jeni's geographical group. Answer: as likely as not, she was an Egyptian.

Unofficially, rumor has it, I'm told, - They found her boobs are fake and she had a thing in her tongue.

"The really amazing thing," says Professor Wright, "is that none of us has (actually) seen Jeni's bones." And she hasn't seen theirs .>><< They had done it with a CAT scan.

I think the really amazing thing is that they have 3D images fed into a supercomputer. My money says they are building a life-sized model right now.

Diwali is a festival that marks the victory of good over evil.

Most people remember that Bill Clinton was one of only two Presidents in American history to be impeached, but few seem to know the actual definition of the word "impeach," and even fewer remember that he was acquitted by a vote of the United States Senate on February 12, 1999. Perhaps they don't know what the word "acquit" means either.

Nasa coffee
Kauai Coffee Company wanted a cheaper way to monitor the ripeness of its coffee beans, the federal government helped out.

Starting 2002, the sky over America's largest coffee plantation will be dotted with an unmanned NASA aircraft. It'll hover over Kauai Coffee's Hawaiian crops, monitor the ripeness of the beans and inform executives when it's the perfect time for the harvest.

The NASA-funded team, based at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, received a $3.76 million grant from the federal government to purchase and maintain the unmanned solar-powered aircraft. A NASA statement says the project will let Kauai Coffee "know, down to the day, the best time for harvesting the beans, bringing the best flavor to consumers."

Not wanting to be left out of the new Coffee Space Race, Juan Valdez is already strapping rockets to the ass of his donkey.

Talk about a vote of confidence.
On June 2, 1987 President Reagan nominated
Dr. Alan C. Greenspan, PhD, KBE as a successor to Paul Volcker as Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve, and the Senate confirmed him on August 11, 1987. After the nomination, bond markets experienced their biggest one-day drop in 5 years. Just two months after his confirmation -- the 1987 stock market crash.

The new discoveries at Blombos Cave, 200 miles east of Cape Town

\Grys"bok\n. [D. grijs gray + bok buck.] (Zo["o]l.) A small South African antelope

70,000 years ago, people occupied a cave in a high cliff facing the Indian Ocean at the tip of South Africa. They hunted grysbok, springbok and other game. They ate fish from the waters below them. In body and brain size, these cave dwellers were definitely anatomically modern humans. (Except they had smaller penises.)

They had at least enough brain power to do this-

>>scatrap<<

Archaeologists are now finding persuasive evidence that these people were taking another important step toward modernity. They were turning animal bones into tools and finely worked weapon points, a skill more advanced in concept and application than the making of the usual stone tools. They were also engraving some artifacts with symbolic marks — manifestations of abstract and creative thought and, presumably, communication through articulate speech.

Until now, modern human behavior was widely assumed to have been a very late and abrupt development that seemed to have originated in a kind of "creative explosion" in Europe after modern Homo sapiens arrived there from Africa about 40,000 years ago. However Ja'Rule CD's, boom boxes, and half smoked blunts found in the cave suggest otherwise.
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BAD Robots

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Facial Recognition Technology almost came to the Virginia Beach oceanfront in the Spring of 2002. All but one council member voted to approve the program, at the time. It uses cameras to scan people on the street and in crowds and compares faces to ones in a computer database of suspected criminals. It was later rejected.
Stay healthy with the toilet 'doctor' At the first sign of a medical condition, the Versatile Interactive Pan (VIP) would contact a GP via the internet. The VIP concept has been produced by the bathroom manufacturers Twyford. With a voice-activated seat, automatic flush and the ability to detect health problems, the company says it is a "major breakthrough" in toilet technology. Coming Soon: Security Update for Microsoft Twyford XP (835732)- A vulnerability will exist in the Negotiate Security Software Provider (SSP) interface that could allow remote code execution. This vulnerability will exist because of the way the Negotiate SSP interface will validate a value that is used during authentication protocol selection. An attacker who successfully exploits this vulnerability will take a complete urine and feces sample from affected systems, and compare them to data from Facial Recognition Technology and e-mail all relevant information directly to the Department of Homeland Morality.

Speaking of SPORTS...
Baseball bats turn up in riots from Amsterdam and Ankara to the tumultuous Group of Eight summit in Genoa, 2001. The Irish Republican Army uses bats. So have Kurdish militants in Europe, skinheads in Slovakia and teen-age gangsters in Portugal. A spokeswoman for the Genoa police, said six baseball bats -- and 30 hockey sticks -- were found during a cleanup of the stadium where demonstrators camped out during the G-8 meeting. Athletic Stores Inc. in central Belfast, Northern Ireland, sells 10 to 15 bats a week. "Funnily enough, I don't know of any baseball teams" in the area, said John Miskimmon, a salesman at the store. "They don't really ask you about nothing, they just take it off the rack, bring it over. They don't really ask you about the quality of the bats, what the differences are or anything," he said. "Probably just the cheapest." Baseball bat assaults have cropped up in other non-baseball-playing countries too. Human rights groups have reported them being used against inmates at prisons in Jamaica and Turkey. Bill Williams, a spokesman for Hillerich & Bradsby, which makes Louisville Slugger bats- "A baseball bat obviously is a type of product that unfortunately has some uses that we would not approve of, There's really not much you can do about it," he said.   The Louisville, Ky.-based company makes about 3 million wood and aluminum bats a year, and exports them to more than 50 countries, including Britain.
Hey SpOrTs FaNS
A new gravity map of the Earth
Suggests that if you want to kick a 90-yard field goal you should go to India, where the pull of gravity is slightly less than it is elsewhere on the planet. You and the football would be slightly less than 1% lighter there. The low gravity off the coast of India is thought to be due to the remains of some old tectonic feature, which was left over from the collision of the Indian sub-continent into the Eurasian tectonic plate that gave rise to the Himalayas.
There is also a strong region of gravity in the South Pacific, which is thought to be due to structures in the Earth's mantle.
New Satellite called "Grace" will produce a new map every month

'scuse me ..while my head explodes!

AN AUSTRALIAN former commando is preparing to leap from a balloon floating in near-space 25 miles above the ground in an attempt to become the world's highest skydiver. Unless you include Jimi hendrix in his paratrooper days Rodd Millner, 37, hopes to freefall for six minutes before opening his parachute and touching down within 30 miles of Ayers Rock in central Australia.

Millner plans to ascend in a gondola beneath a specially built balloon that will inflate as it rises until it becomes as wide as two jumbo jets. At 130,000ft - about 25 miles up - he will jump out.

The unofficial world record for the highest skydive was set at 102,000ft by Joe Kittinger, an American, in 1960.

Boeing 747s rarely fly higher than 35,000ft. "Anything beyond 60,000ft is known as the dead zone," said a spokesman for the Space Jump project's scientific team.

"No one really knows what might happen to Rodd. That's why he needs a pressurised spacesuit - he'll be diving from the edge of space." Insert bonus Jimi Hendrix joke here He said: "A man in space has never achieved this, but research indicates the transition will be safe and smooth."

He appears undaunted by warnings from scientists that the descent through near-space could be so fast that his head will explode.

Millner plans to make the jump early next year wearing a pressurised spacesuit, and will have a camera attached to his body so that millions of viewers can watch his head explode live on television.

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