Martin World News Special report

Okay, what's special is that I'm not doing a lot of travelling on this one, just 2 BBC stories and some meaningless personal fill-in.

ITEM:  One of the pics my daughter didn't get posted in time...

ITEM:  And I forgot to mention last week that the NHFFL All-Star Game ended in a record setting 76-35 win for the Purple division over the Gold.  That's 4 wins in 6 ASGs; Purple Division teams have also won 4 of 6 Super Bowls in those years (though not necessarily in matching years).

ITEM:  Okay, our first story involves an article titled "Ten truly bizzare Victorian deaths".  A reporter for BBC Magazine named Jeremy Clay found that the Victorian world wasn't all that safe.  Among his ten gruesome descents to room temperature are:

-1875, a factory full of women workers were confronted by... a MOUSE!  A dashing young man came to the rescue, leaping up onto a table and snagging the rodent.  But the mouse wasn't finished;  he escaped the dude's hand, ran up his shirtsleeve, out his open collar, in his open mouth, and proceeded to shred his pipes into a painful expiration.  Fifteen "Mouse-Sushi" bars were closed soon after.

-Mid 1880s, Sam Wardell had a problem.  He was the lamplighter for the NY community of Flatbush, and was a bit concerned he might miss his alarm clock waking him to go put the gas lights out at daybreak.  So he linked the clock to a lever on a shelf near his bed, onto which he set a ten-pound stone.  The clock sounded, the shelf dropped, the rock goes BAM!, Sam wakes up. 

You can see where this is going, right?  Eventually, during a family gathering, his bedroom arrangement got moved around, and he was too tired that night to re-position it.  Perhaps he should have called in before he went to bed...

-1869, A young lady, much like the young man in the first story had a problem with what they ate.  She developed a painful abdominal condition, and doctors were unable to save her.  And what, pray tell, was her disease?
 Whatever they imagined they might find, it can't possibly have been what they actually discovered - a solid lump, made up of human hair, weighing two pounds and looking for all the world like a black duck with a very long neck.

Later, the girl's sister mentioned to the docs that she had been eating her own hair for some dozen or so years.

The stories also included a pall bearer who tripped and was crushed by the coffin; Two maids who were torn to bits when their mistress's cat collection were caught in a fire; a Russian "corpse" that proved to be alive, at least until the townspeople, thinking he was a zombie, finished him off; a sailor who drowned because his rescuers were not allowed to strip down to dive in after him because there were ladies present; another Russian family killed by an alcoholic pet bear who wasn't interested in giving up a keg of vodka; a farmer from Laurel, Indiana, who laughed until he died from exhaustion; and two idiots who decided to find out who had the greater stamina, while drunk, in the hottest part of the summer, by walking six miles (which they never finished).

ITEM:  The next article, pieced together from news stories and linked to them, were "100 things you didn't know last year."  Among them were:

-A joint Spanish/English team that found that the exact same chocolate seemingly tastes better or worse depending on the color of the cup it's served in.

-2% of Europeans lack the gene for smelly armpits.  There's a gene for THAT?  Explain that, evolutionists!

-Due to stress, etc., women look their oldest Wednesday at 3:30 PM.  But fear not; By Thursday they are most ready to have sex.

-Female hawksbill turtles can store sperm for up to 75 days.

You see, I have this tiny freezer in my... you know...

-The most popular pornography search term in Syria is "Aunt."

-Some flowers and plants use trace amounts of caffeine and nicotine to keep bees coming back.

-The Norwegian version of the "roll over or under":  A TV show on preparing wood for fireplace use was inundated with calls and texts about whether to stack the split wood bark-up or bark-down.

-Among the baby names they will not let you use in New Zealand are V8, 4Real, Lucifer, and Justice, which has been rejected 62 times since 2001.  On a related note, you cannot call a Birmingham, UK, city councilman a "Commie" by e-mail- their system will block you.  However, you can apparently still call them a pinko, red, Bolshevik, leftie, Nazi, or fascist with no problem.

-There are only two escalators in Wyoming.

-Bill Clinton was taught a jiu-jitsu move in case Yasser Arafat tried to hug him.

Of course, Hillary had a special move for the Mrs....

-A universal law of urination means that elephants, cows, goats and dogs all take roughly 21 seconds to empty their bladders.  Judging by Scrappy, that's about right;  anyone got an elephant they can time?

-Lee Harvey Oswald still has an overdue book out from the Dallas Library.  I think I'd write that one off...

-As a young man, Pope Francis worked as a bouncer.  No word on what kind of club it was.

-A friend of mine just did a post on soul mates, so I'll throw this one in:  The odds of finding your soulmate is one in 10,000.

-Even mothers who can correctly estimate the height of their other children will think the youngest child is shorter than they really are.


Gee, I DIDN'T know that last year!

ITEM:  Time to clear the old junk e-mail box.

This first one caught my eye because it was a comment on an old post of mine, and had a somewhat curious hyperlink:

Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "Noah's ark... really?":

Way cool! Some extremely valid points! I appreciate you writing this post and the rest of the
site is extremely good.

Here is my web page: blogger.com
Needless to say, it didn't REALLY redirect to Blogger...  and why would you redirect to a site you ARE ALREADY USING to attract a potential spam victim, anyway?  Might have wanted to think that one out a bit more...  for example, you should try one like this:


Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "Lotsa Little bits Vol. 6":

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See?  Much more likely to get a response THAT way!

Finally, I got this one from "Credit Reporting Team" telling me my credit rating had changed.  And I can see where you might be able to rope some people in with this approach.  HOWEVER, you MIGHT not want to have this as the FIRST line of the e-mail:

To report this message as SPAM, CLICK HERE.

 

Okay spammers, there's your free tutoring for this time around.  See ya next time, folks!