Is this what we’ve come to? Warning people about everything from hot coffee to putting up signs telling us when a sidewalk ends?
It sure the hell is. Get use to it, if you aren’t already. Americans are getting dumber every generation because of a lack of good education. Now we’re reaping the rewards and forced to put up signs stating the obvious.
In his 18 years at Pinckney Community High School, Jim Darga, the principal, said, the homecoming queen had always been crowned at halftime of the school’s football game. Never before, though, had she had to be summoned from the team’s locker room. And that was just the beginning of Brianna Amat’s big night.
If being named homecoming queen is a lifetime memory for a high school student, so, too, is kicking a winning field goal. For Amat, 18, they happened within an hour of each other. On Friday, with Pinckney leading powerful Michigan rival Grand Blanc, 6-0, at the half, Amat, the first girl to play football for the school’s varsity, was asked to return to the field. When she arrived, she was told that her fellow students had voted her queen. When the tiara was placed on her head, she was wearing not a dress, like the other girls in the homecoming court, but her No. 12 uniform, pads and all.
A short while later, with five minutes to play in the third quarter, Amat was called to the same field to attempt a 31-yard field goal. She split the uprights. The kick proved decisive as Pinckney held on for a 9-7 victory against a Grand Blanc team that had come into the game ranked seventh in the state in its division. It also earned Amat the nickname the Kicking Queen.
Excuse me, sir, can I please arrest you? Police cursing comes under fire
The police officers in one of California’s toughest cities are being asked to fight crime with a little less of a potty mouth.The Bay Citizen reports that several police officers in Oakland, Calif., have been reprimanded for swearing on the job.
The crackdown is apparently part of Oakland Police Chief Anthony Batts’ efforts to focus more on community policing in a city that has been plagued by homicides, poverty and gang problems.
Listing of the Week: Albion castle and its underground caverns
For Sale: $975,000
It's not every day that you find a home for sale with underwater stone caverns, but this isn't just any home. This unique property on the San Francisco real estate market is the Albion Castle, and it has a fascinating story behind it.
According to San Francisco City Guide, London brewer John Burnell immigrated to San Francisco in 1868 and purchased waterfront property in a section of San Francisco now known as Hunter's Point. The parcel featured underwater springs, and he set about starting Albion Porter & Ale Brewery.
Burnell dug out low, arched tunnels to serve as reservoirs and built a three-story, Norman castle-style stone tower in which to store the casked beer in a cool, dry space. Although popular, the brewery was short-lived. Upon the onset of Prohibition in 1920, the brewery was shut down and the property was abandoned.
Skip ahead to 1928 when the property found new life. Leonard Mees, president of the Mountain Springs Water Company, purchased the water rights to the springs and reportedly supplied San Francisco with spring water until 1947.
While Mees was tapping into the spring water, the property was falling into disrepair until 1933 when sculptor Adrien Alexander Voisin purchased the property and built a home and adjacent studio amidst the ruins.
And now, the unusual mix of medieval-style stone work and 1930s home is for sale for $975,000. The Hunter's Point home has bounced on and off the San Francisco real estate market in recent years, first listed in 2009 for $2.95 million with a few price changes before the listing was removed in 2011 and re-listed at $1.1 million, and then $975,000, respectively.
The home last sold at an auction for $2.1 million in 2005. Median San Francisco home values are $679,000. According to a mortgage calculator, at the current price, this home will have a $3,619 monthly payment with a 30-year-fixed rate mortgage and 20 percent down.
Time to walk on down the road…
Coffee fuels millions of human brains every day. Now, spent coffee grounds have set a land-speed record as a fuel for cars. That's right; a coffee-fueled car built by an enterprising team of British engineers recently zipped into the Guinness World Records with a top speed of 77.5 miles per hour and an average of 66.5 miles per hour.
The Coffee Car effort is led by Martin Bacon and a team of Teasedale Conservation Volunteers who were inspired after realizing that coffee shops produce tons of grounds that could be used to get something else going. The Coffee Car set the new record for a car powered by organic waste. The coveted honor was previously held by the Beaver XR7, a wood pellet burning car built by Beaver Energy, which averaged 47 miles per hour.
To fuel the car on coffee, Bacon's team collects spent coffee grounds from shops around town, dries them out and turns them into pellets that are cooked up in a gasifier designed to fit within the body of a heavily modified Rover SD1. (More than 550 pounds of excess weight have been removed to make room for the heavy gasifier.) The gasifer burns wood and the coffee pellets at super high temperatures, which creates a synthetic gas of carbon dioxide, hydrogen, and methane capable of powering an internal combustion engine, CNET explains.
The record-setting car was developed in cooperation with the BBC One show Bang Goes the Theory and will be at Bang Live during the Manchester Science Festival Oct. 22-23.
source – Future of Technology
C’mon in. Don’t be shy. I’ve got a fresh pot of coffee on and a trio of stories to start your day. Who cares if it’s wet outside? Tip a cup with me and read what’s happening on this fine Monday morning.
U.S. company turns gun lovers' ashes into ammunition
There's something to be said for going out with a bang.
Two Alabama game wardens have devised a smoking send-off for avid hunters and gun enthusiasts. For a small fee, they will turn cremated ashes into ammunition that the deceased's loved ones can fire at will. Since it launched in July Holy Smoke LLC has had only two clients, but founders Thad Holmes and Clem Parnell said they have seen an uptick in prearrangements thanks to word-of-mouth and a recent flurry of international press.
Seniors who take aspirin daily are twice as likely to have late stage macular degeneration, an age-related loss of vision, than people who never take the pain reliever, according to a European study.
The data do not show that aspirin causes vision loss. But the findings, published in Opthalmology, are of concern if aspirin somehow exacerbates the eye disorder, given how many seniors take it daily for heart disease.
The high atmosphere over the Arctic lost an unprecedented amount of its protective ozone earlier this year, so much that conditions echoed the infamous ozone hole that forms annually over the opposite side of the planet, the Antarctic, scientists say.
"For the first time, sufficient loss occurred to reasonably be described as an Arctic ozone hole," write researchers in an article released online Sunday by the journal Nature.
Some degree of ozone loss above the Arctic, and the formation of the Antarctic ozone hole, are annual events during the poles' respective winters. They are driven by a combination of cold temperatures and lingering ozone-depleting pollutants. The reactions that convert less reactive chemicals into ozone-destroying ones take place within what is known as the polar vortex, an atmospheric circulation pattern created by the rotation of Earth and by cold temperatures. This past winter and spring saw an unusually strong polar vortex and an unusually long cold period.
Time to walk on down the road…
By Dave Stancliff/For the Times-Standard
Vietnam 1970 - I had been in country one week when my squad leader said, “We don’t need any John Waynes in this squad.” Nearly everyone I met during my tour in Vietnam and Cambodia agreed with that sentiment.
At first, it was hard for me to understand why everyone seemed so down on the Duke.
At nineteen I knew very little about politics. I learned that Wayne used his iconic status to support conservative causes that kept the war going. That included rallying support for the Vietnam War by producing, co-directing, and starring in the critically panned Green Berets in 1968.
That movie was propaganda, pure and simple. After awhile, I understood why his name had come to represent the establishment and the senseless war we were fighting. I found out there were no heros like the ones in the movies. Just survivors. Most of the Vietnamese I met wanted us to go home. We came to realize we were invaders, not saviors.
I never saw anyone cry out, “for God and Country” and charge into enemy bunkers with an M-16 blazing away. That’s not the war I saw. I 
How could my boyhood hero have supported such a massive mistake? Why did he support the government that put us there for no good reason? What made Marion Mitchell Morrison side with the bad guys?
Time has been kind to the Duke’s memory. A Harris Poll released in January 2011 placed him third among America's favorite film stars, the only deceased star on the list and the only one who appeared in the poll every year since it first began in 1994.
To millions, he symbolized and communicated American values and ideals. Nothing will ever change that. I’ll always consider him a great actor despite disagreeing with his politics.
His son, Ethan Wayne, is selling some of his stuff in an auction at the Hyatt Regency Century Plaza Hotel in Los Angeles, and also online, Oct. 3-6. Ethan has such a large collection of his father's movie memorabilia that he decided to open his archives for the auction.
Ethan Wayne said he believes his dad still resonates with fans around the world not only because of his movies "but he was also liked personally. People knew he was the same kind of guy off screen as he was on s
Some hold Wayne in contempt for the paradox between his early actions - he never went into the military - and his rampant patriotism in later decades. His widow suggested he was that way because he felt guilty and not because he was a hypocrite.
You know what? I’ve forgave him a long time ago. I’m beyond those bad old days when the Duke wore a Black hat instead of his customary White one. I have no problem watching a re-run of him in Stage Coach , The Searchers, The High and Mighty, The Flying Tigers, or the Shootist. Wayne played the lead in 142 of his film appearances. I’m pretty sure 
It’s easier now for me to go back to my childhood days when the Duke ruled the cinema. If I could afford it, I would attend the auction and buy a piece of his memorabilia.
I once worked as a security guard at a gated community where he and his wife Pilar lived in Newport Beach (1974) and I saw him there regularly.
Those memories serve me well. He was easy to talk with. We had many interesting conversations, him in his non-descript Ford station wagon, and me standing there in a rent-a-cop uniform at the main gate. He treated me with respect when he learned I was a Vietnam veteran. One day, when I told him I was getting married, he gave me a cigar and wished me the best of luck.
As It Stands, I wonder what that cigar would have sold for at the auction?
Websites carrying this column:
#1 All About Movies #2 Cigar Headlines #3 Cambopedia #4 Famous Dead #5 Hip-Hop newswire
#6 PAIRSonnalités # 7 NewsNow/ World News-Asia, Vietnam #8 ACT Cambodia #9 http://www.khmermidi.com/
Wild Horses Monument in Washington Go Here for the rest of the photos and the video.
In the continuing attempt to make this country as soft as possible, there’s now the “Madre Hill” rule.
Meet 11-year-old running back, Demias Jimerson, who plays in Arkansas’ Wilson Intermediate League. Jimerson is so good that the league implemented a little known rule named after Arkansas Razorbacks great, Madre Hill. If a player has already scored three touchdowns and his team has a 14-point lead, then he’s banned from the endzone. This is the first time the rule was trotted out since coming up with it. What a message to the kid; “Don’t be too good now…wouldn’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings.”
My question is if Jimerson gets close to the goal line, is he supposed to fall down and do snow angels or is there some kind of invisible fence that will shock him and prevent him from scoring? I mean c’mon man!
What’s this world coming to?
Some people said Stetson Graves was too young to have a rifle, but the Tri-County Moose Service Center #2613 – who gave him the 17-caliber Marlin rifle - said that was a bunch of crap!
In other related news, the NRA petitioned for a waiver on the age limit for hunting licenses siting examples of early starters like Stetson Graves.
Good Morning Humboldt County!
Step right in, pull up a chair, and have a cup of coffee with me. Have I got a garage sale for you! Plus, two stories about lucky people. Enjoy:
Beachside fixer-upper among offerings in $22 billion federal garage sale
Like Americans trying to raise quick cash by unloading their unwanted goods, the federal government is considering a novel way to reduce the deficit: holding the equivalent of a garage sale.
Among the listings: Plum Island, N.Y.(photo), off the North Fork of Long Island, which the government has already begun marketing as 840 acres of "sandy shoreline, beautiful views and a harbor." As former home to the federal Animal Disease Center, it may need a bit of "biohazard remediation," making it a real fixer-upper.
Six days after cliff plunge, kids find dad
A 67-year-old man found alive days after his car plunged 200 feet off a mountain road built a makeshift camp, ate leaves and drank water from a nearby creek to survive, his daughter said.
After several days of radio silence from their dad, David Lavau's kids reported him missing to police. As rescue workers conducted an official search for the missing man, the Lavaus set out on thier own.
The family members were the ones who located David Lavau at the bottom of a ravine in the Angeles National Forest in California Thursday. Photo - Los Angeles County firefighters in Angeles National Forest, north of Castaic, Calif., after two vehicles plunged 200 feet down the canyon below.
Mike Scholes was training for a freefall parachute jump five years ago when his vision began to fail.
“I went for an eye test at the optician, and on the way to pick up my glasses five days later, I nearly crashed the car,” says the 58-year-old adventure junkie from Lindfield in West Sussex, United Kingdom.
Within days and without warning, he had lost most of the sight in his left eye. “This meant an abrupt change in my life,” Scholes says. “I had a very successful hot air balloon business, and I had to stop flying. I had to sell my cars as I could no longer drive.”
After seven months of screening — including CT and MRI scans, X-rays and a spinal tap — a DNA test detected Leber's hereditary optic neuropathy, an inherited condition that causes people who can see normally to lose sight in one eye. Months later, they lose sight in the other eye — for Scholes, this happened around the time of his diagnosis. At that point, he couldn’t see in an increasingly large area in the center of both eyes. Colors gradually disappeared, until he could only make out hues of blue.
Time to walk on down the road…
The term “Hobo Nickel” describes any small-denomination coin (though, normally soft nickels) that people carve to create miniature reliefs of…well, all sorts of things. It started sometime in the 18th century but continues to this day; There’s even an entire society dedicated to the art of nickel carving. Go here to see more examples of this unusual art form.
Since my father died last August, there's been other deaths in my family and among good friends. During this tough stretch I'v...
