Archives for June 2005

I saw this initially on Jewzoo and it really made me a little sad.

There is a story that goes alongside the picture and explains why this woman allowed her forehead to be purchased for ad space.

“Smith’s ad is a labor of love and actually a positive in her life, something she says her life hasn’t been filled with lately: a failed marriage and deaths of several family members — most recently, her sister in a car crash April 18.
Smith said the money will give her son the education boost she believes he needs after falling behind in school since the accident.
“For the all the sacrifices everyone makes, this is a very small one,” she said. “It’s a small sacrifice to build a better future for my son.”
Still, Smith said she knows most people won’t understand why she’s sold her forehead as advertising space.
“I really want to do this,” she said. “To everyone else, it seems like a stupid thing to do. To me, $10,000 is like $1 million. I only live once, and I’m doing it for my son.”
Brouse didn’t understand it, either.
In his 24 years, he’s turned away a lot of customers who want to get tattoos that can’t be covered up with clothing. He and his staff spent nearly seven hours Wednesday trying to talk Smith out of it.

Her resolve won out. The one thing Brouse could do with inch-tall letters in the prominent spot was to make them less so by keeping them as close to her hairline for those occasions when bangs or a hat might be the more appropriate message.
Smith’s boyfriend, Jeremy Williams, said the couple discussed the idea for more than three weeks before deciding to go through with it. And when they did, Smith’s eBay auction attracted more than 27,000 hits and 1,000 watchers.
Bidding reached $999.99 before Goldenpalace.com, an Internet gambling company in the Mohawk Territory of Kahnawake, Canada, clicked “buy now,” meeting Smith’s $10,000 asking price and ending the auction two days early.
Smith said she talked to several companies and received multiple offers, but she decided Goldenpalace.com would be the best choice.
“We decided to go with these guys because they work with a lot of charities,” she said. “I want this to mean something.”

I think that there is just something sad about a woman who feels like this is necessary. As a parent I can understand the drive to try and provide for your children. I really hope that this makes a difference because she sold that space for very little and it will take some time to see if there is a price that she will have to pay for having done so.

These are just a few of the things that have caught my attention today:

“Newborn dolphins, killer whales never sleep -study

A study has shown the young of those two species do not sleep at all during the first month of life. They are active 24 hours a day — and their mothers have learned to cope.

“Somehow these seafaring mammals have found a way to cope with sleep deprivation, facilitating rather than hindering a crucial phase of development for their offspring,” Dr Jerome Siegel, a neuroscientist at the University of California – Los Angeles (UCLA), said in a statement.

Siegel and his colleagues said the developmental pattern they discovered in the dolphins and whales is different from all other mammals.

As the calves of both species grow, their sleep gradually increases to adult levels.

“Their bodies have found a way to cope, offering evidence that sleep isn’t necessary for development and raising the question of whether humans and other mammals have untapped physiological potential for coping without sleep,” Siegel said.”

And

In Ireland, few safe havens for an ancient tongue

“Irish Gaelic is still the native tongue of some 55,000 people who live mostly along the west coast. But it is under siege. Even Inis Meáin, one of three Aran Islands off the coast of County Galway famed for old-fashioned ways, is no longer a safe haven.

“Irish is in trouble,” says Cuomhán Ó Fátharta, Inis Meáin’s sole shopkeeper. “When I was young, you had to learn English in school because there was no TV. I couldn’t really speak English until I was 12, but now the kids are all picking it up young.”

As Ireland’s mother tongue struggles to survive, the government has stepped up its contentious efforts to save the language, known here simply as Irish.”

What about this one:

We’re going to eat out of a WHAT?

“TAIPEI (Reuters) – It may take a strong stomach to eat curry or chocolate ice cream out of a toilet bowl, but a commode-themed restaurant in Taiwan does booming business serving up just that.

The Martun, or toilet in Chinese, restaurant in the southern port city of Kaohsiung boasts lengthy queues on weekends as diners wait for a toilet seat in its brightly colored tile interior.

Food arrives in bowls shaped like Western-style toilets or Asian-style “squat pots.”

Manager Hung Lin-wen said the original inspiration came from a toilet-shaped spaceship in a Japanese cartoon. The theme has attracted droves of novelty-seeking young people who come to play with their food and gross out their friends.”

It is a wild and wacky world that we live in.

Went to the gym last night to play ball. I found two partners and we ran the court for a couple of hours. Basketball can be a very simple game to play, especially if you do what I did and find teammates who are exceptionally good. It makes the game very easy. I like simplicity.

Last week I jammed the index finger on my right hand and then last night I added to my laundry list of aches and pains by jamming my middle finger. The upside is that it takes a large finger and makes it obscenely large so that there is no misunderstanding what I try to say to passing motorists.

The index finger healed relatively quickly. I was surprised, pleasantly I might add because these things tend to be nagging injuries.

Spent some time in the steamroom to unwind and exchanged war stories with the boys. Again I am convinced that the thing that scares me the most about being a father is not the usual mix of pedophiles, thieves and rapists, but one thing, ME.

When I think about the stupid things I did and how much dumb luck I had I cringe. When I think about being a teenage boy and how we looked at girls I think that I might have to lock my daughter up or hire professional bodyguards because her brother won’t work.

He’ll be caring and loving and at times very effective- and then a pair of pretty eyes will catch his attention and he’ll be too busy staring at her body and thinking of my admonishment to remember that she is a person and that someone might look at his sister that way- to remember to keep the guy chatting her up away.

And with this I realize now how to spare myself the trouble of paying for the house. I’ll have to sell it to have enough money to pay for the security force, school, clothing and all of the other stuff that comes with children.

Years from now you may see me on the street, I’ll be the homeless guy wearing a beat up tank top and some tired hightops. For a quarter I’ll spin a yarn or two for you, but if you want to hear the whole story it will cost you at least a dollar.

Maybe the best thing I can do is listen to the advice of one of the other players and just suffer a mental lapse about my earlier days and go from there.

Thanks to Blogger’s new capabilities pictures will be added to this blog more frequently.