MWN and fun

So if you are tired of Dale's comments on the last post (and I know I am), I will only add to that the following.  First, a hearty thanks to Dale for proving most everything I said in the original post through sheer stick-to-it-iveness.  Second, I'd like to share a comment I made on a long ago post on trolls and troll-hood back in the day;

Trolls are nice. They make the merely intelligent look like geniuses.

And God knows I could use the help.  So I thought I might mix a little MWN....

with a look back at some past pics, as I have not been feeling right (blaming the Lipitor, which I have just been told to cut the dosage in half) and haven't been out much.

ITEM: Look before you leap- In Singapore, a young man died from a Snapchat stunt gone wrong.  Apparently, he and his lady friend thought a ledge on the other side of a railing was concrete, but...

“We both thought the ledge was made of concrete, but when he jumped, he fell straight through,” Ruth said. “I knew it was dangerous, but before I could stop him, he already jumped over.”

She said that the 17-year-old came up for the idea for the stunt while they were clothes shopping at the mall. “Help me take a Snapchat video and I’ll jump,” she said Chow told her.

Apparently the young man couldn't tell the difference between concrete and plasterboard- a four story mistake that cost him his life.  Yep, social media really brings out the best in all of us!

Two years ago tomorrow, we were digging out of a snow the likes of which we haven't had since.

ITEM:  Explaining that whole "wet-foot dry-foot" thing:  2015 MLB Rookie of the Year Jose Abreu testified under immunity on how he entered the country illegally way back then in order to meet a deadline to sign his contract.  Instead of trying to get a waiver to do things the right way, he got false documents from a pair who are now on trial for running a ring on this principle.  He was instructed to destroy the document once he was in flight- and once he landed without documents, he was free to go under this wet-foot rule.  But the amusing thing is HOW he destroyed the document:

It was Latouff (a third man indicted in the ring), Abreu testified, who got him the passport and booked the Air France flight, telling the ballplayer to destroy the document on the plane. But instead of tearing it up and tossing it in the garbage, Abreu said he ordered a Heineken beer and chewed it up in his seat.

"Little by little I swallowed that first page of the passport. I could not arrive in the United States with a false passport," he said.

Would like to see Neil Patrick Harris do THAT on a commercial...

Roughly the same spot, just under one year later...

ITEM:  A little greed can really bite you:  I don't rightly remember if I ran this story at the beginning, but a while back, Bulgarian National Radio got in a dust up with music copyrighter Musicautor.  It seems that Bulgaria couldn't afford to pay the copyright fees and had to revert to playing only music 70 years old or older.  What the original story didn't exactly point out was that Musicautor had TRIPLED their fees for the latest sign-up.

Well, the good news is, BNR and Musicautor have reached an agreement, where the raise will now be phased in over several years.  HOWever...


However, BNR is now thinking twice about reverting to its old style of music programming in the aftermath of the new agreement. Balkan Insight reports that latest ratings show that its audience increased by around 20% during the dispute, and the new interest in classics could mean changes at the radio, including the possibility of new stations. "We will not change the profiles of the programmes, we will rather launch new channels with various types of music," BNR's Velev told reporters.


So Musicautor gets to raise the rates on a lot LESS music played.  God bless the USA Bulgaria!

Three years ago, it was snowy but nice enough to check out the new boardwalk to Shoaff.

ITEM:But aren't they, y'know, kinda indisposed?

Anton Bakov, a former MP who now leads the Monarchist Party (in the island nation of Kiribati), had offered the Kiribati government an investment of $350m (£280m) to build a tourist resort, Radio New Zealand reports. However, the government in Tarawa rejected his demand that the deal include sovereign rights over three of the nation's uninhabited islands - Malden, Starbuck and Millennium Islands - in Kiribati's eastern island chain in order to re-establish the Romanov dynasty which was overthrown in the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, Papua New Guinea Today says.


I realize we all have some skewed ideas about what "the good ol' days" constitute, but re-establishing a dynasty that was murdered 100 years and 7,000 miles away as a tourist resort?

And people think having a resort chain based on ME is strange...

Apparently I was occupied elsewhere at the turn of the month, 2013.  I had to go back to mid-February to share this squirrel with you.  He was subsequently eaten by a fox that summer.  Rest in peace!

ITEM:  Sauce  bratwurst for the goose...


A German city council is kicking up a fuss over a vegetarian street festival because it won't be serving local meaty delicacies.
Councillors in Kassel, in the central Hesse region, want the event's organisers to ditch its veggie theme and allow stalls to sell popular regional sausages, including the cured ahle wurst, the Hessenschau website reports. The festival is being organised by environmental group UmweltHaus to mark Earth Day on 23 April.
At a meeting on Monday, councillors backed a motion asking UmweltHaus to serve local organic meat at the event. It frames the sausage ban as an affront to the city's identity, although some of those present noted a whiff of politics in the air, as Kassel is in the midst of a mayoral election campaign.
"This is an issue that is close to people's hearts, and for that reason it is of course something we can't ignore in local politics," said Dominique Kalb, mayoral candidate for the conservative CDU party. He added that ahle wurst is "simply an essential part" of local street festivals.
The Greens abstained from voting and their candidate, Eva Koch, suggested people shouldn't get too worked up over sausages. But she conceded that for some the meat-free event would be "a real kick in the guts".


That is the height of laughing at the PC police- demand sausage at a veggie Earth Day celebration!  I think we should keep this great idea in mind...

"Th-th-that's all, folks!"