Misc. Friday Ramblings

Yadda Yadda Yadda...

• Can't have sex with your wife in Nebraska.
  Well, if she's underage that is.


• So you think what you do in your car is your business?
  NJ, a place where breathing tobacco smoke is safer than breathing the air.


• Granny sues over "AO" rated GTA:SA.
  Because a game with drugs, violence, and cursing isn't as bad as one that has sex in it.


• Football rookies have feelings too.
  Be aware of their sensitivities, please.


• Disney closes hand-drawn animation studio in favor of computer animation studio.
  Skynet offline. John Connor unavailable for comment.


• Behold the new 4-door Porsche.
  So, what was wrong with the 2-door Porsche?


• Your job: Signs you've stayed too long.
  Hmmm, blogging instead of working isn't on there. YAY!


• Oh the humanity!!!
  

Obligatory Friday gun stuff!

• It's so cute!
  I want one!


• Jerry Miculek with his wheelgun.
  Dayum, just dayum.


• More speed shooting.

Protect yourself Wilbur, I'm going in!

A Seattle man died after engaging in anal sex with a horse at a farm suspected of being a gathering place for people seeking to have sex with livestock, police said Friday.

The horse involved in the incident was not harmed, and an autopsy of the unnamed man concluded that “the manner of death was accidental ... due to perforation of the colon,” a police spokesman said.

“The information that we have is that people would find this place via chat rooms on the Web,” said Sgt. John Urquhart of the King County Sheriff’s Department.

Although sex with animals is not illegal in Washington state, Urquhart said that investigators were looking into whether the farm, located in Enumclaw, 40 miles southeast of Seattle, allowed sex with smaller animals that resulted in animal cruelty, which is a crime.

“If you’re talking about sheep or goats, there could be some issues,” Urquhart said.

And here I was thinking that size mattered only to women. What a pain in the ass.

Voltron, Defender of the Universe!

"Voltron: Defender of the Universe" is coming to the big screen.

Producer Mark Gordon ("The Day After Tomorrow") is developing a big-budget feature based on the 1980s giant robot kids TV series and toy sensation.

The "Voltron" animated TV series debuted in 1984, about the same time as Hasbro's Transformers toy line, igniting a morphing robot phenomenon. According to sources, Voltron has generated $750 million in worldwide licensing and nearly $200 million in toys and merchandising since 1984. The show, in its many incarnations, remains syndicated throughout the world.

The story being developed will be based on the series about five maverick explorer-pilots who must travel to the planet Arus to learn how to operate Voltron, a giant mechanical warrior formed by five smaller robots. The gargantuan robot is the last hope against the evil Drule Empire that has subjugated Earth and taken control of the universe.

Two employees at New Line Cinema, Mark Costa and Ford Oelman, secured the rights from "Voltron" owner World Events, and eventually brought the project to Gordon, whose credits also include "Saving Private Ryan" and "Speed." Costa and Oelman will executive produce, along with Pharrell Williams, one-half of the producing duo the Neptunes, who will score the film and produce the soundtrack.

"Voltron" is now the second giant robot picture being developed; "Transformers" is set up at DreamWorks Pictures.

Just goes to show you what kids that grew up in the late 70's/early 80's do when they grow up and get to Hollywood. What's next, Thundercats?

There's a snake in the toilet!

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. -- In one Florida household, a whole family is afraid of the toilet after a poisonous snake used it as a hiding place.

Alicia Bailey was bitten by what appeared to have been a large water moccasin that had been hiding in the bowl in the middle of the night.

The snake bit her thigh after she lifted the lid, sending her to the hospital for three days.

No one knows how the snake got in the toilet, or where it went after that.

So the family is a little jumpy these days.

"We're not looking to take it alive," said the victim's husband, Richard Bailey, as he held a shotgun. "I just want it out of here."

"We're currently very uncomfortable in our home," Alicia Bailey said. "And toilet shy, I would say."

The Bailey's 11-year-old son is now staying with neighbors because doctors said he would die if he were bitten by a snake that size.

Oh, it couldn't be something useful like a crap eating carp or something.

Welcome to Jacksonville...

Don't you just hate it when...

...you are working on your computer and a meteorite comes through your ceiling?

If you wait long enough, a piece of outer space itself will come right to you. As Colby Navarro worked innocently on the computer, a rock from space crashed through the roof, struck the printer, banged off the wall, and came to rest near the filing cabinet. This occurred around midnight on March 26 in Park Forest, Illinois, USA, near Chicago. The meteorite, measuring about 10 cm across, was one of several that fell near Chicago that day as part of a tremendous fireball. Pictured above is the resulting hole in the ceiling, while the inset image shows the wall dent and the meteorite itself. Although the vast majority of meteors is much smaller and burn up in the Earth's atmosphere, the average homeowner should expect to repair direct meteor damage every hundred million years.

What kind of blogger am I?

Thanks the Ken for this little quiz.

Your Blogging Type is Logical and Principled

You like to voice your well thought out opinions on your blog. And if someone doesn't what you write, you really don't care! Serious and blunt, sometimes people take your blog the wrong way. But you're a true and loyal friend to those who truly get you.

What's Your Blogging Personality?

Misc. Friday Ramblings

Fridays! We Are Leaving!

• To the asshats bombing the trains and bus in London...
  


• GTA:San Andreas gets hit with an AO rating.
  Guess that coffee was a little too hot, Stella.


• When rocks roll...
  make sure you have a good mic check.


• If at first you don't succeed in a launch...
  try, try again until that sensor goes away.


• It's Photoshop Phriday!
  Four score and seven snikts ago...superheros in history.


• What's the difference between these guys and Mike Tyson?
  These guys are more fun to watch.

Obligatory Friday gun stuff!
Riot control ray gun worries scientists

The Active Denial System weapon, classified as "less lethal" by the Pentagon, fires a 95GHz microwave beam at rioters to cause heating and intolerable pain in less than five seconds.

The discomfort is designed to prompt people caught in the microwave beam to move away from it, thereby allowing riot-control personnel to break up and manage a crowd.

But New Scientist magazine reported Wednesday that during tests carried out at Kirtland Air Force Base in New Mexico, participants playing the part of rioters were told to remove glasses and contact lenses to protect their eyes.

In another test they were also told to remove metal objects such as coins from their clothing to prevent local hot spots from developing on their skin.

"What happens if someone in a crowd is unable for whatever reason to move away from the beam?" asked Neil Davison, coordinator of the nonlethal weapons research project at Britain's Bradford University.

"How do you ensure that the dose doesn't cross the threshold for permanent damage? Does the weapon cut out to prevent overexposure?"

The magazine said a vehicle-mounted version of the weapon named Sheriff was scheduled for service in Iraq in 2006 and that U.S. Marines and police were both working on portable versions.

Well, if someone can't get away or gets overexposed, I guess THEY SHOULD HAVE LEFT WHEN THEY WERE LEGALLY INSTRUCTED TO. Would you prefer the more-lethal alternative? How about living in North Korea? Didn't think so.

Commander Montgomery Scott......signing off.

'Star Trek' Star James Doohan Dies
James Doohan, the burly chief engineer of the Starship Enterprise in the original "Star Trek" TV series and movies who responded to the command "Beam me up, Scotty," died Wednesday. He was 85.

Doohan died at 5:30 a.m. at his Redmond, Wash., home with his wife of 28 years, Wende, at his side, Los Angeles agent and longtime friend Steve Stevens said. The cause of death was pneumonia and Alzheimer's disease, he said.

He had said farewell to public life in August 2004, a few months after being diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease.

The Canadian-born Doohan was enjoying a busy career as a character actor when he auditioned for a role as an engineer in a new space adventure on NBC in 1966. A master of dialects from his early years in radio, he tried seven different accents.

"The producers asked me which one I preferred," Doohan recalled 30 years later. "I believed the Scot voice was the most commanding. So I told them, 'If this character is going to be an engineer, you'd better make him a Scotsman.'"

The series, which starred William Shatner as Capt. James T. Kirk and Leonard Nimoy as the enigmatic Mr. Spock, attracted an enthusiastic following of science fiction fans, especially among teenagers and children, but not enough ratings power. NBC canceled it after three seasons.

When the series ended in 1969, Doohan found himself typecast as Montgomery Scott, the canny engineer with a burr in his voice. In 1973, he complained to his dentist, who advised him: "Jimmy, you're going to be Scotty long after you're dead. If I were you, I'd go with the flow."

"I took his advice," said Doohan, "and since then everything's been just lovely."

"Star Trek" continued in syndication both in the United States and abroad, and its following grew larger and more dedicated. In his later years, Doohan attended 40 "Trekkie" gatherings around the country and lectured at colleges.

The huge success of George Lucas' "Star Wars" in 1977 prompted Paramount Pictures, which had produced "Star Trek" for television, to plan a movie based on the series. The studio brought back the TV cast and hired director Robert Wise. "Star Trek: The Motion Picture" was successful enough to spawn five sequels.

The powerfully built Doohan, a veteran of D-Day in Normandy, spoke frankly in 1998 about his employer and his TV commander.

"I started out in the series at basic minimum_ plus 10 percent for my agent. That was added a little bit in the second year. When we finally got to our third year, Paramount told us we'd get second-year pay! That's how much they loved us."

He accused Shatner of hogging the camera, adding: "I like Captain Kirk, but I sure don't like Bill. He's so insecure that all he can think about is himself."

James Montgomery Doohan was born March 3, 1920, in Vancouver, British Columbia, youngest of four children of William Doohan, a pharmacist, veterinarian and dentist, and his wife Sarah. As he wrote in his autobiography, "Beam Me Up, Scotty," his father was a drunk who made life miserable for his wife and children.

At 19, James escaped the turmoil at home by joining the Canadian army, becoming a lieutenant in artillery. He was among the Canadian forces that landed on Juno Beach on D-Day. "The sea was rough," he recalled. "We were more afraid of drowning than the Germans."

The Canadians crossed a minefield laid for tanks; the soldiers weren't heavy enough to detonate the bombs. At 11:30 that night, he was machine-gunned, taking six hits: one that took off his middle right finger (he managed to hide the missing finger on screen), four in his leg and one in the chest. Fortunately the chest bullet was stopped by his silver cigarette case.

After the war Doohan on a whim enrolled in a drama class in Toronto. He showed promise and won a two-year scholarship to New York's famed Neighborhood Playhouse, where fellow students included Leslie Nielsen, Tony Randall and Richard Boone.

His commanding presence and booming voice brought him work as a character actor in films and television, both in Canada and the United States.

Oddly, his only other TV series besides "Star Trek" was another space adventure, "Space Command," in 1953.

Doohan's first marriage to Judy Doohan produced four children. He had two children by his second marriage to Anita Yagel. Both marriages ended in divorce. In 1974 he married Wende Braunberger, and their children were Eric, Thomas and Sarah, who was born in 2000, when Doohan was 80.

In a 1998 interview, Doohan was asked if he ever got tired of hearing the line "Beam me up, Scotty."

"I'm not tired of it at all," he replied. "Good gracious, it's been said to me for just about 31 years. It's been said to me at 70 miles an hour across four lanes on the freeway. I hear it from just about everybody. It's been fun."

To the veteran and actor, a salute sir.

What's good for business.

Jim Sinegal, the chief executive of Costco Wholesale, the nation's fifth-largest retailer, crows about Costco's private-label pinpoint cotton dress shirts.

Combining high quality with stunningly low prices, the shirts appeal to upscale customers — and epitomize why some retail analysts say Sinegal just might be America's shrewdest merchant since Sam Walton, the founder of Wal-Mart.

But not everyone is happy with Costco's business strategy. Some Wall Street analysts assert that Sinegal is overly generous not only to Costco's customers but to its workers as well.

Costco's average pay, for example, is $17 an hour, 42 percent higher than its fiercest rival, Wal-Mart's Sam's Club. And Costco's health plan makes those at many other retailers look Scroogish. One analyst, Bill Dreher of Deutsche Bank, complained last year that at Costco "it's better to be an employee or a customer than a shareholder."

Sinegal begs to differ. He rejects Wall Street's assumption that to succeed in discount retailing, companies must pay poorly and skimp on benefits, or must ratchet up prices to meet Wall Street's profit demands.

Good wages and benefits are why Costco has extremely low rates of turnover and theft by employees, he said. And Costco's customers, who are more affluent than other warehouse store shoppers, stay loyal because they like the fact that low prices do not come at the workers' expense.

"This is not altruistic," he said. "This is good business."

"When I started, Sears, Roebuck was the Costco of the country, but they allowed someone else to come in under them," he said. "We don't want to be one of the casualties."

At Costco, one of Sinegal's cardinal rules is that no branded item can be marked up by more than 14 percent, and no private-label item by more than 15 percent. In contrast, supermarkets generally mark up merchandise by 25 percent, and department stores by 50 percent or more.

But Sinegal warned that if Costco increased markups to 16 percent or 18 percent, the company might slip down a dangerous slope and lose discipline in minimizing costs and prices.

Sinegal, whose father was a coal miner and steelworker, gave a simple explanation.

"On Wall Street, they're in the business of making money between now and next Thursday," he said. "I don't say that with any bitterness, but we can't take that view. We want to build a company that will still be here 50 and 60 years from now."

If shareholders mind Sinegal's philosophy, it is not obvious: Costco's stock price has risen more than 10 percent in the last 12 months, while Wal-Mart's has slipped 5 percent.

Emme Kozloff, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Co., faulted Sinegal as being too generous to employees, noting that when analysts complained that Costco's workers were paying just 4 percent toward their health costs, he raised that percentage only to 8 percent, when the retail average is 25 percent.

"He has been too benevolent," she said. "He's right that a happy employee is a productive long-term employee, but he could force employees to pick up a little more of the burden."

Sinegal says he listens to analysts' advice because it enforces a healthy discipline, but he has largely shunned pressure to be less generous to workers.

"When Jim talks to us about setting wages and benefits, he doesn't want us to be better than everyone else, he wants us to be demonstrably better," said John Matthews, Costco's senior vice president for human resources.

Costco was founded with a single store in Seattle in 1983; it now has 457 stores, including two in the Houston area. Despite Costco's impressive record, Sinegal's salary is just $350,000, although he also received a $200,000 bonus last year. That puts him at less than 10 percent of many other chief executives, though Costco ranks 29th in revenue among American companies.

"I've been very well rewarded," said Sinegal, 69, who is worth more than $150 million thanks to his Costco stock holdings. "I just think that if you're going to try to run an organization that's very cost-conscious, then you can't have those disparities. Having an individual who is making 100 or 200 or 300 times more than the average person working on the floor is wrong."

Take care of the employees and the customers, and the shareholder side will take care of itself. As a former wage slave to Wal-Mart, I think the following chart speaks volumes:

Porn makes audience sit up and notice

Indian police forced around 200 people caught watching pornography to do sit-ups in public to shame them and keep them away from theaters that illegally screen smutty movies.

The Hindustan Times reported Monday that police stopped the screening of a pornographic movie at a cinema in Balasore district in the eastern state of Orissa and made audience members -- some as young as 17 -- do 10 sit-ups each at a public square, watched by onlookers.

The police made the all-male group vow not to watch pornography again. To make matters worse for the embarrassed teenagers who were caught, police called their parents to watch them doing sit-ups.

Police officer Sanjeev Panda said authorities carried out the public shaming after attempts to get theaters in district not to show pornography had failed.

"So we decided to crack down on the audience," Panda was quoted in the newspaper, which also reported that police in Orissa planned to integrate such public punishments into their general campaign against pornography.

Exhibiting pornography is illegal in India, but it is screened in many cinemas. The latest craze is pornographic Multi-Media Messaging (MMS) clips, some of which allegedly show Bollywood actresses engaged in sexual acts.

What's more embarassing: being made to do sit-ups in front of the public for watching porn, or being unable to do such said sit-ups because of your aroused condition from watching porn?

Thomas Slams Reports He Seduced Cruise

Matchbox 20 frontman Rob Thomas has rubbished reports he had sex with Hollywood superstar Tom Cruise - and is even more mortified he's been labeled a fellow Scientologist. The singer is horrified by claims he was caught in bed with the War Of The Worlds star and has finally spoken out to end the rumors. But he's even more offended by reports he's joined Cruise and other followers of L. Ron Hubbard's Church Of Scientology, which has been labeled a "cult" by some critics. He says, "If I were gay, Tom wouldn't be on the top of my list...It would be Brad Pitt. I'm more offended by the rumors saying I'm Scientologist."

Okay, that is too funny. More offended at Scientology than gay, and on top of that dissing Tom for Brad. Oh how the mighty have fallen.

Misc. Friday Ramblings

I lost on Friday, baby, oooo ooo ooo ooooooo...

• It's Photoshop Phriday.
  Merchandising, merchandising, merchandising!


• When couch racing goes bad.
  I'll stick to couch potatoing.


• Woman becomes a man overnight.
  Must have fallen into the cursed springs.


• Speaking of transformers...
  A live action transformer movie backed by Spielberg. Hmmmm.


• Have some Hot Coffee for GTA:SA.
  Sorry Rockstar, it wasn't a hack, it was a bit twiddle.


• If you have to advertise...
  Go big.


• Another reason to watch Mythbusters.
  Kari Byron.

Obligatory Friday gun stuff!
Mythbusters did a show this week on the effects of water against bullets. They tested using varous caliber weapons, with solid ammo (FMJ, Ball, Slug, etc). From a purely vertical angle, the 9mm and 12ga had massive penetration. However, the deer slug broke their testing apparatus, so they had to change to a swimming pool.

For the swimming pool, then had to angle the firing to about 23 degrees. At this angle, they were shown testing a .50cal black powder rifle, a .223 AR variant, an M1 Garand in 30-06, and a AR-50 in 50BMG. Surprisingly, the rifle ammo (except for the black powder round) broke up and fragmented about 3 feet into the water at that angle. The slower black powder round penetrated further, about five feet.

While I would have liked to see them do the vertical testing with all the weapons, the angular testing does show that bullets can be stopped by as little as three feet of water. Here is an advertisement on bullet traps and fragmentation.

'Cooter' Urges Fans to Skip 'Dukes' Movie

If television's "Crazy Cooter" has his way, fans of the "Dukes of Hazzard" may be speeding away from a new movie version of the cornpone classic faster than the Duke boys running from Sheriff Roscoe P. Coltrane.

Ben Jones, a former Georgia congressman who played the wisecracking mechanic on the popular series from 1979-85, said profanity and sexual content in the film make a mockery of the family friendly show.

"Basically, they trashed our show," said Jones, who now lives in the mountains of Washington, Va. "It's one thing to do whatever movie they want to do, but to take a classic family show and do that is like taking "I Love Lucy" and making her a crackhead or something."

Jones said he read a script of the movie, which is scheduled to be released next month, and that it contained profanity, "constant sexual innuendo and some very clear sexual situations."

On Wednesday, Jones wrote an open letter to fans on his web site, cootersplace.com, urging them to stay away.

First off, Dukes of Hazzard wasn't the model of a family show. It was coupled with Dallas when it was first shown. It glorifies two brothers that don't obey the law and tend to destroy public property. All the producers of the new movie have done is take the basic premise and update it for the current MTV audience. Doesn't that hold true to most of the "classic" shows anyways? If it is brought back, it has been updated to what will be interesting currently?

Knoxville can be serious. Scott doesn't play Stifler except in the American Pie movies. Arguably, the most offensive of the new characters is Simpson, and that is just because of the car wash video. Oh yeh, and Cooter isn't offensive? Come on, who actually think that refers to a turtle.

More quizes!

Marvel Superhero


Batman Character


Movie Monster


Video Game Character


Movie Hero


Purity Test


I see a trend here. Moody, loner, armed to the teeth, likes computers, and likes sex. Yup, I'm from the Northside. :)

Oh yeh, thanks to Matt for the following.


EDIT: Ack, how did I miss this one?

Movie Villian

Welcome to Rivendell, Mr. Anderson!

This just in from the "No Duh!" department...

Guess what? Men don't mind seeing naked women...

Most Italians think nude sunbathing is perfectly natural and don't mind crossing paths with bottomless beach-goers -- even when those bottoms are unsightly, survey results released Sunday said.

Women were more frequently bothered by nude sunbathing than men. Just over 40 percent of women said they did not like seeing other naked females on the beach, while just 5 percent of men shared their opinion about nude women.

When it came to unattractive or "brutto" sunbathers, most of those surveyed in the country that champions physical beauty said they didn't object to seeing them naked either.

Only about 16 percent said they were vexed by unattractive women nudists and 9.7 percent objected to unsightly men.

Just goes to show you that most men are dogs, and they don't care where they bury their bone (or want to). Funny, this doesn't show up in the 70's, where the women would all be so hairy they'd look like they had Buckwheat in a head-scissor (ie, between their legs).

Misc. Friday Ramblings

It's alive, alive, weird Friday...

• A letter to the terrorists.
  I couldn't have said it better myself. Nods to Rez for the link.


• Why was London attacked? Why Now?
  It wasn't because of the Olympics.


• Top Gear!
  My new favorite show on Discovery.


• Watch the birdy.
  Ah, nature in action.


• It's Photoshop Phriday!
  Rock on, movies!


• A case of wrong identity.
  And if it was my house, a case of dead bounty hunters.


• A true football fan.
  If ya gotta go, at least go in comfort.


• Someone get that girl a sammich!
  Cause the skeletor look belongs to Maria Schriver.


• Be your own wi-fi hotspot.
  As long as you don't get hot flashes in the process.


• What Star Wars character are you?
  

Obligatory Friday gun stuff!

The Springfield XD in .45 GAP.



From a THR thread:

The .45 GAP operates at a higher chamber pressure than the standard pressure .45 ACP. At those higher chamber pressures, the .45 GAP has roughly the same ballistics as the .45 ACP does at standard chamber pressures.

When you increase the .45 ACP to the higher +P chamber pressures, it has a slight ballistic and effectiveness advantage over the .45 GAP. For example, the .45 GAP and standard pressure .45 ACP Ranger T both have a MV of 885 fps (and have identical penetration, expansion and intermediate barrier performance figures). When you up the Ranger to +P, the MV jumps slight over 100 fps to 990 fps, and the penetration, expansion and intermediate barrier figures improve (e.g., 2.5" more penetration against heavy cloth and 1.6" more penetration after auto glass).

Working hard for the money.

"Sack" is the only name I'm given for the person I'm supposed to contact. He lives in the Fujian province of China, but his place of business is online—he plays Lineage II. He's paid about 56 cents an hour to work in a videogame "sweatshop."

Sack is the low man in these operations. "I work from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. on the U.S. Lineage II server," he says. He works long, boring hours for low pay and gets no holidays. Carefully constructed macros do most of the work; Sack is just there to fend off the occasional player itching for a fight or game master who's hunting for these automated farming programs. "Everyone knows where the good places are, and GMs know that your account has been online for a whole month," he says. "[A GM will] message me asking, .Hello, what level are you, please?' I know he isn't asking my level; he just wants to know if [there's actually a person at the computer]."

How does it work? The macros for World of WarCraft, for example, control a high-level hunter and cleric. The hunter kills while the cleric automatically heals. Once they are fully loaded with gold and items, the "farmer" who's monitoring their progress manually controls them out of the dungeon to go sell their goods. These automated agents are then returned to the dungeons to do their thing again. Sack's typical 12-hour sessions can earn his employers as much as $60,000 per month while he walks away with a measly $150.

That is the first step. It isn't too difficult from there to make the leap into creating your own sweatshop. All you need is the ability to write game macros or the money to purchase them. That's right, if you know where to look, they are on the open market. A macro that uses a teleportation exploit in WOW is currently going for $3,000. Then just hire cheap labor to monitor the bots.

For every reseller of gold, there's a wholesaler who supplies it to gamers with real money to burn. And the biggest name in gold resale is IGE, or Internet Gaming Entertainment. "It's not that they pay the best; they are the most well known, and so [stuff] sells fast," says Smooth Criminal. He knows sales are good because resellers can track profits in real time—and because IGE is one of the biggest fish in the secondary gold market. In fact, IGE has been on a buying spree. It is acquiring the competition and creating a virtual monopoly in this market.

But finding and shutting down these farming sweatshops is a hard thing to do. Kiblinger says that IGE's customer service is based in Hong Kong, its employees working for sweatshop wages. IGE's response: "The reason we have customer service in Hong Kong is because it's the gateway to Asia, and our customer service reps earn a fair salary in relation to the profession in that country." This is the same rationale for major companies shipping their customer service desks to India.

For all the so-called virtual sweatshops discovered, a lot of these young men and boys don't mind their jobs, and they aren't exactly working in sweatshop conditions. There's a world of difference between making sneakers and watching bots fight all day. However, they are underpaid, or as Smooth Criminal puts it, "They get paid dirt. But dirt is good where they live."

I'm not sure what the focus of the article is. Is it to expose the fact that people farm stuff in MMOs? Hell, players have been doing that in games for a lot longer that MMOs have been around. There is little harm to farming unless by farming the farmer is denying you the opportunity to obtain the same things.

Is it that they are "underpaid"? Underpaid for who's standards? Look at the last quoted sentence. Farming wouldn't work in the US for the same reason you don't see white collar workers out tending crops all day. People who are used to a certain lifestyle won't step down from it. For others, such a lifestyle is an upgrade.

MMOs, for many people, end up being a competition. Except for a scant few MMOs, you have to play around your character's level. If your friends or your guild outlevels you, you feel left behind. You want to play catch up. It becomes a competition if anything to just stay even. If you can't devote the game time to it, but you have the income, you can buy your character loot and/or levels. It's all about having more money than time.

EDIT:
Heartfelt condolences go out to the victims of the Terrorist attack in London today.

Feel better, work better.

McDonald's wants its employees to get a new look.

The fast-food chain is seeking a high-profile designer to make its 300,000 workers look stylish and trendy.

Tommy Hilfiger and Sean "P-Diddy" Combs are said to be among the top choices to design the uniforms. Other possible designers include Russell Simmons' "Phat Farm" label, Ralph Lauren, Giorgio Armani and American Eagle.

A company spokesman said the change is about "taking the contemporary look and feel of our restaurants."

Currently, McDonald's uniforms vary among its franchises nationwide. But recent styles include a white "business style" collared shirt with small breast pocket, dark polyester pants and a belt.

Da da da da da, I'm loving it. Actually, I bet if they would spend all that R&D money adding a few more dollars into the paychecks, then you might see a change in how the workers feel.

Darwin doesn't take the 4th off.

GOOSE CREEK, S.C. - A 30-year-old man has been killed after a piece of shrapnel from a bomb he made struck him in the chest, police say.

The man died less than an hour after setting off the pipe bomb around 7:30 p.m. Monday, Berkeley County Deputy Coroner Bill Salisbury said. His name has not been released.

The man filled a pipe with gunpowder and set up a battery charger to ignite the bomb as part of his Independence Day celebration, Goose Creek Police Cpl. J.S. Crafton said.

A woman standing several hundred yards away was struck in the wrist by a piece of shrapnel and taken to the hospital, Crafton said. No one else was injured.

It is illegal in South Carolina to make a homemade explosive or fireworks and others that were with the man before he set off the bomb could be charged if investigators find they helped him build the device, Crafton said.

If you are gonna do something to get a Darwin award, please keep it to yourself.

Fireworks, in outer space.

Boom!

Misc. Friday Ramblings

It's only Friday when it rains...

• It's Photoshop Phriday!
  Movies that rock.


• Don't look a horse's gift in the face.
  You might not like the end it comes out of.


• Debris on the raceway...
  sometimes takes care of itself.


• New Taipei restaurant to serve food out of toilets.
  Just don't ask for the soft-serve chocolate ice cream.


• 650lb Catfish caught.
  That's one whale of a fish story right there.


• Tom Cruise isn't a scientologist...
  He's a Sith!


• Remember what I wanted for Christmas?
  I want one of these too. LOL.


• I may complain about the weather...
  but at least we don't have tornados forming over our house.


• Fun with a water hose. (NSFW)

Obligatory Friday gun stuff!
The 4th of July is coming up. Let us all remember to have a safe and fun holiday. Many people like fireworks, both watching and participating. If you participate, be very careful. Last thing we need is fires breaking out in dry areas (won't happen here though).

Also, DO NOT SHOOT A WEAPON UP INTO THE AIR!!! Remember, what goes up must eventually come down. People can be killed.

"Victims fell because of these practices that reflect weak religious, national and political commitment and a retarded mentality in dealing with special occasions, whether of joy or sadness," Fadlallah said in a statement.

Finally, don't be an idiot with fireworks either. The can and will hurt you.