Don't Panic! Lighten Up!S


Smiley

Stay away from anonymous stock calls during results season

Indian stock markets (or perhaps just India's investing media) is in the grip of someone called Mr Expector, whose behaviour is now almost as strange as the famous Mr market. Investment homilies often refer to someone called Mr Market, a character which embodies the market.

The originator of Mr Market was the great Benjamin Graham, many of whose investing parables have a person called Mr Market. Invariably, Graham's Mr Market is an unstable, neurotic character who is susceptible every irrational knee-jerk that investors are capable of.

While reading news reports and viewing business news about the stock markets, I have recently detected a similar character whose sole task seems to be go around expecting mutually contradictory things to happen simultaneously. As I am writing this, Mr Expector has excelled himself with some amazing expectations about the quarterly numbers of both Reliance Industries and Bharti Airtel.

In both cases, the pink newspapers as well as the business channels were victims of Mr Expector's conspiracies. He told a certain set of people that both these companies' quarterly numbers will be good and another set of people that the numbers will be bad.

Sheeple

Sports fan dressed as sheep set alight

A 24-year-old football fan dressed as a sheep suffered serious burns to his arms and legs when his suit caught fire on a train in Fife.

Aberdeen fans said the man ran ablaze through the carriage as others threw beer on him to douse the flames.

The Edinburgh to Aberdeen service was stopped at Kirkcaldy at about 1900 GMT on Saturday to allow him to be treated.

British Transport Police said a 23-year-old man had been arrested in connection with the incident.

Mr. Potato

How to get your doctor to sing Happy Birthday while he washes his hands (satire)

I recently saw a poster in a medical building that stopped me cold. It was about influenza, and it said the following: To avoid spreading germs, wash your hands for as long as it takes to sing Happy Birthday to yourself.

I did a double take. Really? Wash your hands while you sing Happy Birthday as a timing mechanism?

Apparently, this is an important bit of advice for teaching the masses how to successfully wash their own hands. I guess they couldn't use Row, Row, Row Your Boat because that song just goes on forever, and people would be stuck at the sink washing their hands like disturbed obsessive-compulsive hand washing addicts.

Family

112-Year-Old Somali Centenarian Weds 17-Year-Old

A man claiming to be 112 married a 17-year-old at a ceremony in central Somalia, his sixth wedding in total but his first in three quarters of a century, he said Thursday.

"My wife is ten times younger than me but we love each other so much and I believe that I can give her the kind of love that not any young man can offer," Ahmed Mohamed Dhore told AFP.

"Married life is about love and passion rather than age and beauty," said the centenarian, whose wedding ceremony in the town of Guriel was attended by hundreds on Wednesday.

"The first time I got married was so long ago I cannot remember and the last time must have been about 75 years ago, I was still a young man," he said.

Smiley

'Dumb' American criminals attempt robbery with 'permanent marker pen disguises'

Image
© UnknownMatthew Allan McNelly and Joey Lee Miller were caught in Iowa with permanent marker pen scrawled over their faces.
Two hapless robbers in America, Matthew McNelly and Joey Miller, have been arrested with the "worst disguises ever" after trying to hide their faces with permanent marker pen.

McNelly, 23, and Miller, 20 were arrested by armed police in Carroll, Iowa, last Friday after witnesses reported seeing two men trying to break into an apartment with fake beards and "masks" scrawled on their faces.

Police responding to a call about the attempted burglary later pulled over a car matching the alleged suspects' vehicle.

When they stopped their 1994 Buick Roadmaster, bewildered police discovered the drunk hapless pair - nicknamed "dumb and dumber" - complete with makeshift disguises.

Play

Anti Terror Keystone Cops in Action!


Family

Alberta Girl, 5, Saves Mother's Life After Horrific Crash

Nikki Butler has always known her five-year-old daughter Mary was special. Now she's calling the little girl her hero.

Mary and Nikki Butler of Lundbreck, a hamlet west of Pincher Creek, were travelling through the Crowsnest Pass when the mother's truck hit a patch of black ice. It slid across the road, hit a guardrail and flipped four times down a steep embankment.

Once the vehicle came to a stop, the girl saw that her mother was bleeding from a gash on her forehead.

She had also lost consciousness.

Mary tried to wake her, but there was no response.

Smiley

Satire, or is it? U.S. Continues Quagmire-Building Effort In Afghanistan

Afghanistan
© The OnionHill by hill, U.S. forces tirelessly work toward the strategic goal of complete immobility.
Kabul, Afghanistan - According to sources at the Pentagon, American quagmire-building efforts continued apace in Afghanistan this week, as the geographically rugged, politically unstable region remained ungovernable, death tolls continued to rise, and the grim military campaign persisted as hopelessly as ever.

In fact, many government officials now believe that the United States and its allies could be as little as six months away from their ultimate goal: the total quagmirification of Afghanistan.
"We've spent a lot of time and money fostering the turmoil and despair necessary to make this a sustaining quagmire, and we're not going to stop now," President Barack Obama said in a national address Monday night. "It won't be easy, but with enough tactical errors on the ground, shortsighted political strategies, and continued ignorance of our vast cultural differences, we could have a horrific, full-fledged quagmire by 2012."

Cowboy Hat

Surprised by Disaster

In re Afghanistan, why, you might ask, is the world's hugest, expensivest, most begadgeted military unable to defeat a few thousand angry tribesmen armed with AKs and RPGs?

Easy: Character. The men running the war are mentally the wrong ones to do it.

Think about this for a moment. Suppose that your boss at the lab or law firm or newsroom demanded that, when he entered the room, you leapt spasmodically to your feet, stood rigidly erect with your feet at a forty-five degree angle like a congenitally deformed duck, and stared straight ahead until he gave you permission to relax. You would think, correctly, that he was crazy as a bedbug. If he then required reporters to stand in a square so he could inspect their belt buckles, you would either figure he was a gay blade or call for a struggle buggy and some big orderlies. This weird posturing is not normal, nor are those it appeals to.

Mr. Potato

Michigan Man Claims He's Cockroach King

A Michigan man says he expects Guinness World Records to award him the world record for fitting the most cockroaches in his mouth.

Sean Murphy of Lansing, whose age was not reported, said it likely will be weeks until he officially learns whether the 16 Madagascar hissing cockroaches he held in his mouth for 10 seconds will be recognized as a world record, the Lansing State Journal reported Sunday.

Murphy apparently broke the record of 11 cockroaches Friday night by holding 12 in his mouth for the mandated 10 seconds. Then he sought to extend his unofficial record to 16.

"I've never gotten it in one try so that was a big surprise," he said of his unusual feat.

Murphy told the State Journal his days of putting cockroaches in his mouth are not yet behind him.