Martin World News

ITEM:  So the French Connection goes on unabated, but something came up today that may or may not have something to do with it.  Do you get suspicious when someone with whom you have no known connection adds you on a social media site- for example, Google Plus?  Well today, I am suspicious- as someone named Phillipe Guenard just added me to his Google Plus circles.  I have looked at the profile, googled the name, and found no reason why this character would add me to his circle.  HOWever, I found out yesterday that this wave of French spam has an interesting feature- a feature I didn't realize until they just flat out made me lazy.  See, I get the e-mail notification from blogger of the spam post, and I usually hit "mark as spam" and delete.  Well, yesterday I just started deleting, figuring that I would have to deal with them on my blogger home page.  But guess what?  They don't show up on the Blogger dashboard at all- only on the e-mail notifications.  Unlike real comments, which will show up on both until I act on either e-mail or Blogger.  So I said to myself, "I wonder if they get their "click" FROM me marking them as spam?  So I just started to delete them from the e-mail and forgetting about it.  And then today, "Phillipe Guenard" knocks on my Google Plus door.

So here's the deal, Phillipe.  If you are real, let me know with a real comment.  If I don't hear, I'll "block" you and see if the French Connection suddenly dries up.


ITEM:  Lots of stuff today, so let's go down the list...

The world's richest and poorest nations, based on GDP per capita:

BABY YOU'RE A RICH MAN

1-Qatar
2- Luxembourg
3- Singapore (quite a trick, considering how many per capitas they have jammed in there)
4-Norway (all that putrefied fish they make, no doubt)
5- Brunei Darussalam (A hunk of jungle on Borneo about twice the size of Rhode Island)
6- Hong Kong
7- US of A
8- UAE
9- Switzerland
10- Australia (well, they are parked all over a whole continent...)

POOR SIDE OF TOWN

1- Congo Kinshasa (formerly known as Zaire, but they PCed it back to colonial times)
2- Zimbabwe (which still hasn't went back to being Rhodesia)
3- Burundi
4- Liberia (Ebola takes a lot out of you)
5- Eritrea (They could have been 14th from the bottom if they'd have just stayed part of Ethiopia)
6- Central African Republic (Which had a lot cooler name when those darn French called it "Ubangi Shari" until Shari filed a sex discrimination suit)
7- Niger
8- Malawi
9- Madagascar (must not have gotten any movie royalties from Disney)
10- Afghanistan

Hmm... a 9-outta-10 for Africa...

ITEM:  Squirrels leading the animalpocolypse, part one:

A "drunk" squirrel has caused hundreds of pounds of damage at a private members' club.
The secretary of Honeybourne Railway Club said he originally thought someone had broken into the premises, near Evesham in Worcestershire.
The floor was covered in beer and glasses and bottles smashed, Sam Boulter said.
Mr Boulter, 62, said he then saw a squirrel "staggering around" after coming out from behind a box of crisps.

He added: "There were bottles scattered around, money scattered around and he had obviously run across the bar's pumps and managed to turn on the Caffrey's tap.
"He must have flung himself on the handle and drank some as he was staggering around all over the place and moving a bit slowly.
"I've never seen a drunk squirrel before. He was sozzled and looked a bit worse for wear, shall we say."
Mr Boulter, who estimated he lost about £300  (around $467) in the incident, eventually caught the squirrel in a waste paper bin and released it out of the window.


ITEM:  Part two:

BOTTROP, Germany, July 16 (UPI) -- Police in Germany said a squirrel "arrested" for stalking a young woman showed signs of exhaustion and was fed apple slices and honey tea.
Police said a young woman called authorities Wednesday morning to report she was being stalked by a tenacious squirrel that resisted all of her attempts to evade it.

An officer brought the squirrel back to the police station, where it was determined to be showing signs of exhaustion.

This sounds like a couple of jobs for Bill Cosby... or else a couple cases OF Bill Cosby on the job...

ITEM:  Fun in those crazy post communist nations, part one:

Hackers have targeted Russia's public contracts website and posted a fake tender offering control of the country for six years, it's reported.
An official-looking notice appeared on the government-run site on Thursday calling for bids to "rule the Russian state and turn a profit for yourself, your friends and your relatives", the Ura.ru news website reports. The mock document has since been removed, but not before several news websites took screenshots. It offered control over the whole of Russia, "a population of 146 million people, lots of oil, gas, forests, land and whatnot".
The post had a clear political bent - for the hefty sum of 50.5 trillion roubles ($860bn; £570bn), the "winning" bidder would take control for six years, the same length as a presidential term, the Newsru website reports. It also described the country as being "burdened" with millions of officials "who also have the right to their share of the income from the Russian Federation".


The group responsible for putting the entire nation on the equivalent of Craigslist, called the Ural Cyber Partisans, apparently did the same thing earlier this year, trying to sell the Kremlin to raise funds for Eastern Ukrainian separatists.

ITEM:  Part Two:

Most people hate them, but mosquitoes are being honoured with their own festival in one Russian town.
Residents of Berezniki, in the Ural mountains, will gather at a local pond to celebrate the bloodsucking insects for three days from 17 July,
the Interfax news agency reports
. Perhaps the oddest part of the event is the "most delicious girl" competition, in which women will be judged based on how many mosquito bites they receive after standing around in shorts and vests for 20 minutes. "An expert panel of judges, including a doctor, will examine their bodies and the winner will be the one with the most bites," says organiser Natalya Paramonova. In 2013, the "winner" was apparently covered in more than 100 bites.


Man, and I saved my vacation until NEXT week.


ITEM:  Part Three:

My news source at The Epoch Times came up with a list dubbed "‘Benefits of Smog’ and 10 Other Absurd Claims by China’s Propaganda Machine".  Among the items on this list:


While Chinese people lament the grayness of China’s skies and the stifling effects of air pollution, China Central Television (CCTV), China’s state broadcaster, conjured a list of five supposed benefits of smog.

Smog unifies the Chinese people with a universal problem to complain about.
It equalizes the populace, as both the rich and the poor are vulnerable.
It raises awareness about the cost of rapid progress.
It facilitates humor in the form of smog-related jokes.
It educates people: “Our knowledge of meteorology, geography, physics, chemistry and history has progressed.”

A government run paper later added to this that smog gives China a "military advantage" by hiding it from spy satellites...


ITEM:  And from the Canadian Department of Bi-linguality:

A spokesman for the city of Fredericton said officials are planning to review the signs after residents pointed out the French text, "Trous d'homme sur éléves," translates to, "Men's holes are over-elevated."


Is that a hemorrhoid thing?


ITEM:  Crime pays...


A hungry grizzly mounted a daring raid on a bakery, wolfing down 38 pies in the process.

The burgling bear stole in during the middle of the night and chomped its way through 24 cherry and 14 apple pies - even taking two with it for a snack later on.

With the stealth of a covert agent, the eager ursine broke in through a window, then enjoyed a midnight feast in the only corner of the room not covered by security cameras - thus remaining unrecorded.

But the bear was obviously a fussy eater; it left the strawberry-and-rhubarb pies completely untouched.

The alleged burglar...

Mikaela Lenhart, the owner, wonders if there might be a silver lining to this break-in:

“I’m looking for servers, so maybe if he wants to come back, because that’s talent to get two pies into the back yard."


ITEM:  Or does it...

Los Angeles police are looking for a suspect in a home burglary who took a selfie with the victim's phone.

According to the Los Angeles Police Department the suspect entered the home around 7 a.m. on July 11 and dug through the home while two 15-year-old girls and a woman were sleeping in a bedroom.

KTLA, a local LA news station, reported that while rummaging, the burglar picked up an iPhone and "accidentally activated a video application, which recorded him standing in the victims' living room."

So what does this button do...?

ITEM:  The dumbest thing about this story lies in the criteria:  the "Grooming Lounge Blog" came up with a list of the ten "most handsome cities in the US of A".  Before you go packing your bags, ladies, it had little to do with most Lenny DiCaprio lookalikes in the MSMA.  Here are the criteria...

- Amount spent on personal care products per man annually

- Amount spent on personal care services per man annually

- Amount spent on shaving products (which apparently don't qualify as "personal care products") per man annually

- Amount spent on apparel per man annually

- And last but certainly not least, where your city ranks on the list of the nation's fittest cities.

So basically this is actually a list of the most vain cities in the US of A, and now that we have the false advertising beaten from it, here are your winners:

1- Seattle

2- San Francisco

3- Washington DC

4- Boston

5- Denver

6- NYC

7- Austin

8- Nashville

9- Atlanta

10- Minneapolis?  Really?

ITEM:  Okay, this is running long, so let me get to something I mentioned in passing on the Sunday "I went to Cincinnati and all I got was this much nicer hat" post:

I found an article which purported to have surveyed what areas of the country used which cuss phrase the most.  The article can be found here on BroBible and surveyed the nation for M-F-er, F--k, $#!t, A-hole, and just to keep the peace, gosh.  Here in Northern Indiana, we scored low on the first two as well as $#!t, but got leader of the pack scores on A-hole and Gosh.  I told KC, to me it seems I know more people around here that interject $#!t into every possible corner of daily life than AH.  Perhaps the failure of the survey was in that in our area, $#!t is more of a general purpose noun than a cuss word, and respondants didn't list it as a cuss word.  I myself can go days without using the "A" word (Now, douchebag is another story...), but I don't think my best day since seventh grade has not heard me use the "general purpose noun" at some point or another.