A meteor eh? Try again...

Check this shit out that I found on Discovery News. There is a very good chance that scientists have discovered what actually killed the dinosaurs and most other life back all those years ago. This is friggin amazing if it is the reason, and judging by the content of the article, it appears to be a damn good possibility!

Let me know what you think!

Stanley Cup Champions!!!

Our Detroit Red Wings have brought the Cup back to Hockeytown!!!

Fire at Universal Studios!

Earlier this morning firefighters had to fight a fire on a 400 acre lot at Universal Studios in California. Among things damaged in the fire are the King Kong exhibit, some Back to the Future sets, and 40,000 to 50,000 videos and reels. Luckily there are backups of the videos and reels in another location.

Today in History...

 

The Japan-Korea Annexation Treaty, also referred to in Korea as the Humiliation of the Nation in the Year of the Dog, was signed on August 22, 1910 by the representatives of the Korean and Japanese Imperial Governments. This began the de facto period of Japanese rule in Korea. The treaty had eight articles, number one being: "His Majesty the Emperor of Korea makes the complete and permanent cession to His Majesty the Emperor of Japan of all rights of sovereignty over the whole of Korea."

 

The legality of the Treaty is disputed, and its legitimacy has been rejected in Korea ever since, and later by the Allied forces that occupied Japan at the end of World War II. The Emperor of Korea, Emperor Yung-hui, refused to sign the treaty as required, and the treaty, while affixed with the national seal of the Korean Empire, does not bear his signature as dictated by Korean law. The treaty was instead signed by Prime Minister Lee Wan-Yong of Korea and Resident General Count Terauchi Masatake of Japan. In his last testament in 1926, Emperor Yung-hui affirmed that the treaty was forced through by ministers threatened and bribed by the Japanese. It is believed that the seal was originally hidden by Empress Sunjeong, and that it was physically forced off her by others. The people who signed and agreed to the treaty were Korean ministers who had secretly agreed with the Japanese government prior to the actual signing of the treaty.

 

WhaFuck?

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Choose the right car based on your needs. Check out Yahoo! Autos new Car Finder tool.

Today in Badass Gunslinger History...

John Wesley Hardin (May 26, 1853—August 19, 1895) was an outlaw and gunfighter of the American Old West. He was born in Bonham, Fannin County, Texas.

A rather interesting article about the guy. Here are some of the highlites:

In Abilene, Hardin met Wild Bill Hickok, at the time the cattle town's reigning peace officer. Hickok took an indulgently paternal attitude toward the young killer. He drank with Hardin, whored with him and gave him advice, and at one point, when a gang of Hardin's Texas pals and relatives got into trouble, disarmed them but left Hardin his weapon, presumably to allow him to either protect his friends or to keep them in line.

For his part, Hardin was fascinated by Wild Bill and glowed at being seen on intimate terms with so celebrated gunfighter. But all the while, down deep, he realized that Wild Bill would kill him without qualm if circumstance suggested the need--perhaps not out of ill will, but certainly for self-protection.

The climax for association came with one of Hardin's most callous crimes, so ignoble that even he showed some sign of shame and attempted to pass off as the justifiable shooting of a man who was trying to steal his pants. Actually, he had less excuse than that. At the American House Hotel, where Hardin had put up for the night, he began firing bullets through a bedroom wall simply to stop the snoring of a stranger in the next room. The first bullet merely woke the man; the second killed him. In the silence Hardin realized that he was about to plunge into deep trouble with Wild Bill Hickok. Still in his undershirt, he exited through a window and ran onto the roof of the hotel portico--just in time to see Hickok arriving with four policemen, alerted by other guests. "I believe," Hardin said later, "that if Wild Bill found me in a defenseless condition, he would take no explanation, but would kill me to add to his reputation."

Not waiting to determine Hickok's disposition in the matter, Hardin leaped from the roof into the street and hid in a haystack for the rest of the night. Towards dawn he stole a horse and made his way back to the cow camp outside town. The next day he left for Texas, never to return to Abilene. Years later Hardin made a casual reference to the episode. "They tell lots of lies about me," he complained. "They say I killed six or seven men for snoring. Well, it ain't true, I only killed one man for snoring."

And:

Johnny Cash wrote and recorded a song about Hardin entitled "Hardin Wouldn't Run". It relates some of the true events of Hardin's life, including his murder at the Acme Saloon

Today in History...

Amendment XIX (the Nineteenth Amendment) allowed women the right to vote under official constitutional protection.

The amendment was the culmination of the work of many activists in favor of women's suffrage. One such group called the Silent Sentinels protested in front of the White House for 18 months starting in 1917 to raise awareness of the issue.

On January 9, 1918, President Woodrow Wilson announced his support of the amendment. The next day, the House of Representatives narrowly passed the amendment but the Senate refused to even debate it until October. When the Senate voted on the amendment in October, it failed by three votes.

In response, the National Woman's Party urged citizens to vote against anti-suffrage senators up for election in the fall of 1918. After the 1918 election, most members of Congress were pro-suffrage. On May 21, 1919, the House of Representatives passed the amendment by a vote of 304 to 89, and 2 weeks later on June 4, the Senate finally followed, where the amendment passed by a vote of 56 to 25.

It was ratified on August 18, 1920, upon its ratification by Tennessee, the thirty-sixth state to do so. Secretary of State Bainbridge Colby certified the ratification on August 26, 1920.

On February 27, 1922, a challenge to the 19th Amendment was rebuffed by the Supreme Court of the United States in Leser v. Garnett.

Section 1. The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.

Section 2. The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

Today in History...

The Lewinsky Scandal

In 1995, Monica Lewinsky, a graduate of Lewis & Clark College, was hired to work as an intern at the White House during Clinton's first term. The two began a sexual relationship.

As Lewinsky's relationship with the President became more distant and after she had left the White House to work at the Pentagon, Lewinsky confided details of her feelings and the President's behavior to her friend and Defense Department co-worker Linda Tripp who secretly recorded their telephone conversations. When Tripp discovered in January 1998 that Lewinsky had signed an affidavit in the Paula Jones case denying a relationship with Clinton, she delivered the tapes to Kenneth Starr, the independent counsel who was investigating the President on various other matters including the Whitewater scandal, Filegate, and Travelgate.

Clinton admitted in taped grand jury testimony on August 17, 1998, that he had had an "improper physical relationship" with Lewinsky. That evening he gave a nationally televised statement admitting his relationship with Lewinsky which was "not appropriate".

Stupid Monica Lewinsky. If you blow the President, keep your mouth shut after you swallow.

Elvis Died Today...

and A LOT of people really care.

I like Elvis and all, but personally:

Thats right, The Fool's Gold Sandwich did it.

In the library.

With the Candlestick.

Today In History

The Social Security Act was drafted by President Roosevelt's committee on economic security and passed by Congress as part of the New Deal on August 14, 1935. It was controversial when originally proposed, with one point of opposition being that it would cause a loss of jobs. However, the program has gone on to be one of the most popular government programs in American history.

The Act is also known as the Old Age Pension Act. The Act provided benefits to retirees and the unemployed, and a lump-sum benefit at death. Payments to current retirees were (and continue to be) financed by a payroll tax on current workers' wages, half directly as a payroll tax and half paid by the employer.

Payroll taxes were first collected in 1937, also the year in which the first benefits were paid, namely the lump-sum death benefit paid to 53,236 beneficiaries.

The original 1935 statute paid retirement benefits only to the primary worker. Many types of people were excluded, mainly farm workers, the self-employed, and anyone employed by an employer of fewer than ten people. These limitations, intended to exclude those from whom it would be difficult to monitor compliance, covered approximately half of the civilian labor force in the United States.

The 1935 Act also contained the first national unemployment-compensation program, aid to the states for various health and welfare programs, and the Aid to Dependent Children program. The initial tax rate was 2.0% of the first $3,000 of the employee's earnings, shared equally between the employee and the employer. The tax rate has been raised several times over the years, beginning in 1950, when it was raised to 3.0%.

In 1939, the 1937 Federal Insurance Contributions Act (FICA) tax was amended in three important ways:

• The widowed, nonworking spouse of a someone entitled to an old-age benefit also became entitled to an old-age benefit.
• Survivors (widows and orphans) became eligible for a benefit.
• Retirees who had never paid any FICA taxes became eligible for old-age benefits. This feature was very popular among the millions of elderly Americans hard hit by the Great Depression, and fatefully decoupled benefits eligibility from work history.

In 1956, the tax rate was raised to 4.0% (2.0% for the employer, 2.0% for the employee) and disability benefits were added. Also in 1956, women were allowed to retire at age 62 with reduced benefits (70%). In 1961, retirement at age 62 was extended to men, and the tax rate was increased to 6.0%.

Medicare was added in 1965 by the Social Security Act of 1965, part of President Lyndon B. Johnson's "Great Society" program. Social Security was changed to withdraw funds from the independent "Trust" and put it into the General fund for additional congressional revenue.

During the Carter administration, immigrants who had never paid into the system became eligible for SSI (Supplemental Security Income) benefits when they reached age 65. SSI is not a Social Security benefit, but a welfare program, because the elderly and disabled poor are entitled to SSI regardless of work history. Likewise, SSI is not an entitlement, because there is no right to SSI payments.

The 1983 amendments to the SSA, resulting from the 1982 report of the Greenspan Commission empaneled to investigate the long-run solvency of Social Security, taxed Social Security benefits for the first time: benefits in excess of a household income threshold, generally $25,000 for singles and $32,000 for couples (the precise formula computes and compares three different measures) became taxable. The amendments also gradually increased the age of eligibility for full old-age benefits, from 65 to 67 for those born after 1959.

In 1940, benefits paid totaled $35 million. These rose to $961 million in 1950, $11.2 billion in 1960, $31.9 billion in 1970, $120.5 billion in 1980, and $247.8 billion in 1990 (all figures in nominal dollars, not adjusted for inflation). In 2004, $492 billion of benefits were paid to 47.5 million beneficiaries.

This is how it was...now look at it...lousy no good...

Today in History...

Enola Gay is the B-29 Superfortress bomber that dropped "Little Boy", the first atomic bomb ever used in war, when the United States Army Air Forces (USAAF) attacked Hiroshima, Japan on August 6, 1945, just before the end of World War II. Because of its roles in the atomic bombings of Japan, its name has been synonymous with the bombings themselves. It was named after Enola Gay Tibbets, the mother of the pilot.

On August 5, 1945, during preparation for the first atomic mission, Tibbets had the plane named after his mother, Enola Gay Tibbets (1893–1983, who had been named for the heroine of a novel). According to Gordon Thomas and Max Morgan-Witts (Enola Gay, Stein & Day Pub, 1977), regularly assigned aircraft commander Robert Lewis was unhappy to be displaced by Tibbets for the important mission, and furious when he arrived at the aircraft on the morning of 6 August to see it painted with the now-famous nose art. Tibbets himself, interviewed on Tinian later that day by war correspondents, confessed that he was a bit embarrassed at having attached his mother's name to such a fateful mission.

The Hiroshima mission has been described as tactically flawless, and Enola Gay returned safely to its base on Tinian to great fanfare on the base.

Today in History...

MTV (Music Television) is an American cable television network based in New York City. Launched on August 1, 1981, the original purpose of the channel was to show music videos. Today, MTV broadcasts a variety of music, pop culture, youth culture, and reality television shows aimed at adolescents and young adults.

On August 1, 1981, at 12:01 a.m., MTV: Music Television launched with the words "Ladies and gentlemen, rock and roll," spoken by original COO John Lack. Those words were accompanied by the original MTV theme song, a crunching guitar riff written by Jonathan Elias and John Petersen, playing over a montage of the Apollo 11 moon landing. MTV producers Alan Goodman and Fred Seibert used this public domain footage as a conceit, associating MTV with the most famous moment in world television history.

Appropriately, the first music video shown on MTV was "Video Killed the Radio Star" by The Buggles. The second video shown was Pat Benatar's "You Better Run". Sporadically, the screen would go black when someone at MTV inserted a tape into a VCR.

Today in History...

 

James Riddle "Jimmy" Hoffa (February 14, 1913, disappeared July 30, 1975, date of death unknown) was an American labor leader, and criminal convict. As the president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s, Hoffa wielded considerable influence. After his conviction, he served nearly a decade in prison. He is also well-known in popular culture for the mysterious circumstances surrounding his unexplained disappearance and presumed death. His son James P. Hoffa is the current president of the Teamsters.

 

In 1964, Hoffa was convicted of attempted bribery of a grand juror and jailed for 15 years. On December 23, 1971,[1], however, he was released when Republican President Richard Nixon commuted his sentence to time served on the condition he not participate in union activities for 10 years. Hoffa was planning to sue to invalidate that restriction in order to reassert his power over the Teamsters when he disappeared at 2:30 pm on July 30, 1975, from the parking lot of the Machus Red Fox Restaurant in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, a suburb of Detroit. He had been due to meet two Mafia leaders, Anthony "Tony Jack" Giacalone from Detroit and Anthony "Tony Pro" Provenzano from Union City, New Jersey and New York City.

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Pinpoint customers who are looking for what you sell.

Today in History...

"I am deeply hurt by your calling me a wemon(Woman) hater. I am not. But I am a monster. I am the "Son of Sam." I am a little brat. When father Sam gets drunk he gets mean. He beats his family. Sometimes he ties me up to the back of the house. Other times he locks me in the garage. Sam loves to drink blood. "Go out and kill," commands father Sam. Behind our house some rest. Mostly young -- raped and slaughtered -- their blood drained -- just bones now. Papa Sam keeps me locked in the attic too. I can't get out but I look out the attic window and watch the world go by. I feel like an outsider. I am on a different wavelength then everybody else -- programmed too kill. However, to stop me you must kill me. Attention all police: Shoot me first -- shoot to kill or else keep out of my way or you will die! Papa Sam is old now. He needs some blood to preserve his youth. He has had too many heart attacks. "Ugh, me hoot, it hurts, sonny boy." I miss my pretty princess most of all. She's resting in our ladies house. But I'll see her soon. I am the "Monster" -- "Beelzebub" -- the chubby behemouth. I love to hunt. Prowling the streets looking for fair game -- tasty meat. The wemon of Queens are prettyist of all. It must be the water they drink. I live for the hunt -- my life. Blood for papa. Mr. Borrelli, sir, I don't want to kill anymore. No sur, no more but I must, 'honour thy father.' I want to make love to the world. I love people. I don't belong on earth. Return me to yahoos. To the people of Queens, I love you. And I want to wish all of you a happy Easter. May God bless you in this life and in the next. And for now I say goodbye and goodnight. Police: Let me haunt you with these words: I'll be back! I'll be back! To be interpreted as - bang bang bang, bank, bang - ugh!!

Yours in murder,
Mr. Monster"

In the evening of July 29, 1976, Donna Lauria, 18, and Jody Valenti, 19, were both shot as they sat inside a car parked on the street outside Lauria's apartment in the Bronx.

The Summer of Sam had begun.

A little more in support of Dakota

I once had a conversation with my mother, who was born basically right smack dab in the middle of the baby boom, or more relevantly, during the time that produced the majority of parents of young people with the ability to vote today. I complained once to her about George W. Bush, and she mentioned the fact that as much as we wish it were not the case, JFK was the only president in her lifetime to have been worth anything (presidentially that is) and that he was not given long enough in office to demonstrate his full potential.

So now it's time for me to expand off of that (trust me Dakota, I'm not much of a politician myself, but I'm backing you up on this one). Since the baby boomer era, we have all been a part of the media age - beginning to some small degree with the rapid printing press, expanded far more by the growing popularity of radios, even more with that of television, again in the nineties with the PC era, and now at its highest iteration with the widespread popularity of the cellular phone. We live in an age where generally, less than twenty-four hours will elapse between something occurring, and our ability to hear about it (and that is very generous - most of the time information is available within minutes). I would even venture as far as to say, the American public knows too much about its government, and prospective leaders, and that knowledge causes us to have unnecessarily high expectations of our presidents - not to say that they should not be able to deliver, but that they are promising more than they can, in order to please the public.

Let's examine not only the places where some of our more recent presidents had shortcomings, but where those shortcomings have been complicated by what took place in reality. A perfect example - Georgey Sr. is famous for his speech at the Republican National Convention. After a long period of heavy recession from Carter and Reagan, Bush Sr. stated "Read my lips: no new taxes." Sounds pretty good to me! Peggy Noonan (Bush's speechwriter) definitely knew what she was doing, and what the American Public needed to hear in order to get him the vote. Unfortunately, two years later, under pressure from democrats and many more moderate republicans, he was forced to raise taxes anyway. Clinton's oval office rendezvous gave birth to Bush Jr's "down-home, American values." And this isn't the first time that suspected immorality gave way to a friendly, deep south Christian - many say that Carter won over Ford more because he was not involved with the previous presidencies (i.e. Watergate) and he offered a kind of retribution from the events of the previous few years.

In the upcoming election, Democrats clearly have the advantage - we've had eight years with a president who has not been in the public's support for at least four years, thanks to an extremely unpopular war. Democrats tend to be more on the pro peace platform, and that's what Americans want. In my opinion, however, we're in deeper than we want to admit. I think that we are still far away from peace between the middle east and the u.s. simply because nothing has truly been resolved (there is a lot to be said for the opinion that we can't exactly figure out what needs to be resolved, but that will make this rant go on for way longer than it already has). The American government has set themselves up with a lose-lose situation. Withdrawing from the Middle East will likely still not do much in the way of helping the economy. And at the end of the war, things will just start over again if we are attacked or bombed again. God forbid, but it is a real concern that we should have. I'm going to set aside the next thought for staying power.

The president cannot control what will happen during their presidency, only those things that they want to prevent from happening.

A president does not usually foresee an economic slump, or being attacked by a foreign power, or saying something incredibly stupid in a speech. Presidents are just people like anyone else, but people with the ability to say yes or no when it comes to new laws (remember our three branches people? President gets to say when we go to war, and besides that, he only okays what others have already decided in other branches of government).

So let me tie this into Dakota's post a little better now that I've offered these disjointed thoughts on government for approximately the last hour of my life. Americans do not vote as often as they should not only because there hasn't been a good president, but because even when we've tried to pick a good one, they have failed at what we really wanted them to accomplish, because their platform is more about image than implementation. Even looking at hot button issues, what would you do if you were president? Take gay marriage for example: alright I would just go ahead and okay that one, fuck you Conservative Christians :). Seriously though, gay marriage. If your paycheck and popularity as the SINGLE MOST RECOGNIZABLE CELEBRITY IN THE ENTIRE COUNTRY depended largely on making people like you no matter what, I would take the moderate route a good deal as well. We offer our citizens the freedom to believe what they'd like to, but human nature is to remain divided about 50/50 on any issue in the world. We are better at complaining than praising. Even small steps forward are seen as "not far enough" to the side that supports and "way beyond the line" to those that are opposed. It is simply impossible to please a nation that wants the economy to improve, gas prices to go down, the war to end, and everyone of its opinions to be eventually on the level with the nation's goals.

So where do we go from here? People will not start voting regularly unless they feel that what they do in a vote matters - and after the hanging chad fiasco a few years back, it will likely be years until that trust is restored. Some progress has been made though. We are in the midst of a social and cultural revolution. In our generation, we're simply expected to be more well-versed in just about everything - because even someone who never leaves the house can be an expert in pretty much any field they want to at the click of a button. Already, at least the younger population is already leaning to more moderate stances, because we can read both sides of the argument, instead of only hearing what we want. As much of a pain in the ass as it was, I'm glad my high school does a three day long formal debate every junior year - at least it's nice to know that whether or not people like it, they at least hear what both sides have to say.

So I kinda went all over the place on that one, and mixed in some stuff that really wasn't on the topic of where I started, but I'm not getting graded on this, so deal with it!

Today in History...

 

Air France Flight 4590 was a Concorde flight from Charles de Gaulle International Airport near Paris, France to John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York City, New York, and operated by Air France. On July 25, 2000 it crashed in Gonesse, France. All 100 passengers and nine crew on board the flight, as well as four people on the ground, were killed.

 

As the CVR transcript recorded it, the last intelligible words of the crew were (in English):

Co-pilot: "Le Bourget, Le Bourget, Le Bourget."

Pilot: "Too late (unclear)."

Control tower: "Fire service leader, correction, the Concorde is returning to runway zero niner in the opposite direction."

Pilot: "No time, no (unclear)."

Co-pilot: "Negative, we're trying Le Bourget" (four switching sounds).

Co-pilot: "No (unclear)."

 

The crew was trying to divert to nearby Le Bourget Airport, but accident investigators say that a safe landing with the flight path the aircraft was on would have been highly unlikely.

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Moody friends. Drama queens. Your life? Nope! - their life, your story.
Play Sims Stories at Yahoo! Games.

Today in history...

Sorry Kiznox, I'm stealing this from you today

June 25th, 1953 - The premiere of Duck Dodgers in the Twenty-Fourth and a Halfth Century
starring: Daffy Duck, Porky Pig and Marvin the Martian
Voted #4 in the top 50 cartoons of all time
Released during the Red Scare, it has a lot of references to the futility of the Cold War and Arms Race - and now over 50 years later, I bet you'd still be hard-pressed to find someone who has never seen this :)

Today in History...

Amelia Mary Earhart (24 July 1897 missing 2 July 1937, declared deceased 5 January 1939) was a noted American aviation pioneer and women's rights advocate. Earhart was the first woman to receive the Distinguished Flying Cross, which she was awarded as the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic. She set many other records, wrote best-selling books about her flying experiences and was instrumental in the formation of The Ninety-Nines, a women's pilots' organization.

Earhart disappeared over the central Pacific Ocean during an attempt to make a circumnavigational flight in 1937. Intense public fascination with her life, career and disappearance continues to this day.

I bet she was a whore.

Today in History...

The 12th Street Riot in Detroit began in the early morning hours of Sunday, July 23rd, 1967. Vice squad officers executed a raid at a blind pig on the corner of 12th Street and Clairmount on the city's near westside. The confrontation with the patrons there evolved into one of the deadliest and most destructive riots in modern US history, lasting five days and far surpassing the 1943 riot the city endured. Before the end, the state and federal governments, under order of then President Lyndon B. Johnson, sent in National Guard and US Army troops and the result was forty-three dead, 467 injured, over 7,200 arrests and more than 2,000 buildings burned down. The scope of the riot was eclipsed in scale only by the 1992 LA riots. Detroit has never fully recovered from the after-effects of the riot and the negative domestic and international media coverage. The riot was prominently featured in the news media, with live television coverage, extensive newspaper reporting, and an extensive cover stories in Time magazine and Life on August 4, 1967. The Detroit Free Press won a Pulitzer Prize for its coverage.

I would definitely click the blind pig link. I had no idea what the hell that meant, and it turned out to be rather interesting.

Today in History...

John Dillinger (June 22, 1903-July 22, 1934) was an American bank robber, considered by some to be a dangerous criminal, while others idealized him as a latter-day Robin Hood. He gained this reputation (and the nickname "Jackrabbit") for his graceful movements during bank heists, such as leaping over the counter (a movement he supposedly copied from the movies) and narrow getaways from police. His exploits, along with those of other criminals of the 1930s Depression era, such as Bonnie and Clyde and Ma Barker, dominated the attentions of the American press and its readers during what is sometimes referred to as the public enemy era, between 1931 and 1935, a period which led to the further development of the modern and more sophisticated FBI.

Today in History...

You know what? Harry Potter came out. Thats it. Thats all you get for today.

You know why? Because nothing happened on July 21st, that I could find, was interesting in the slightest to me. So there. Today sucked, throughout history. Period.

Emma Watson is hot.