Don't Panic! Lighten Up!S


Passport

'Most unfortunate names' revealed

Baby Cradle
Imagine growing up as Annette Curtain or Tim Burr
What do you call some of the most unlucky people in Britain?

Justin Case, Barb Dwyer and Stan Still.

It sounds like a bad joke, but a study has revealed that there really are unfortunate people with those names in the UK.

Joining them on the list are Terry Bull, Paige Turner, Mary Christmas and Anna Sasin.

And just imagine having to introduce yourself to a crowd as Doug Hole or Hazel Nutt.

Briefcase

10 Reasons Why We Love Making Lists

list
One of countless 25 Random Things About Me lists on Facebook.
Why is it that everywhere you turn there's a list for this or that?

On Facebook, friends recently began posting 25 Random Things About Me - which bloggers have been doing for years. Now some people are lambasting the listiness while others are shortening it to a more manageable 3 Random Things (3 Places I Have Lived or 3 TV Shows I Watch).

Other Facebook and MySpace lists abound: 6 Great Books. 8 Favorite Songs. 7 Reasons to Hate...whatever.

David Letterman's Top 10 List has become a bona fide art form. And there's a list of Top 5 Musicians on Twitter floating around.

Everyday parlance is littered with lists: laundry, grocery, honey-do. When Dick Cheney was asked by then-presidential candidate George W. Bush to find him a suitable running mate, Cheney did what all pols would do: He drew up a short list. (And then he wound up as the VP pick.)

"Enough organization, enough lists and we think we can control the uncontrollable," observed a character on the TV show House. By now you would think there are enough lists. But still we keep jotting things down in an orderly fashion.

Sherlock

'Superbrain' stuns Britain with genius quiz show run

She's being hailed as Britain's cleverest student, a shy, bespectacled and amazingly quick-minded Latin scholar who has romped away to win Britain's hardest quiz show almost single-handedly.

Gail Trimble, 26, is playing down the excitement surrounding her team's victory in the annual University Challenge on Monday, but the nation is abuzz at her polymath performance on the quiz, a favorite on British TV for nearly 40 years.

Coming from behind, Trimble's four-person team from Corpus Christi college at Oxford University raced away to beat sharp rivals from Manchester by 275-190, with Trimble answering most of the dauntingly difficult questions without hesitation.

It was a typically barnstorming performance from the team captain, who has a tendency to laugh excitedly when she knows the answer, even if she seemed nervous at the start as Manchester moved into the lead and the pressure was on.

Bug

Computer Crashed by Real Earthworm

Yeovil, England - A British man said the worm that caused his computer to crash turned out not to be a form of computer virus but an actual 5-inch earthworm.

Mark Taylor, 45, of Yeovil, England, said repairmen told him that the worm had crawled into his laptop through an air vent and coiled itself around a cooling fan, causing the computer to overheat and break down, The Daily Telegraph reported Tuesday.

Taylor said the worm itself had been "cooked" by the overheated computer.

Smiley

Stranded by Ryanair: the rant that became a book

Ryanair
© UnknownRuinair
The first sign of terminal trouble is the subtle inactivity at the Malaga departure gate.

Our scheduled boarding time passes quite uneventfully. Growing mumblings of discontent and half-truths circulate like gossip. There is an aircraft outside so there's hope, but it has technical problems. The screens show "Retrasado". This is Spanish for "Your aircraft is broken". We wait in a void of customer service.

One brave passenger walks up to the desk and comes back holding up 10 fingers. We will board in 10 minutes? He announces: "Delayed until 10 o'clock tonight." Eight hours late. An engineer is flying out.

Smiley

50 Jobs, 50 States in a Year? Man Gives It a Try

Theresa, Wisconsin - At a time when some people are having trouble finding one job, Daniel Seddiqui is lining up 50 - one in every state. Each job symbolizes the state's most famous industry, and each lasts one week - just long enough for the 26-year-old to appreciate the labor and explore the region.

He's been a park ranger in Wyoming, a corn farmer in Nebraska and a wedding coordinator in Las Vegas.

Last week, in Week 23 of his yearlong saga, he was a cheese-maker in southeast Wisconsin. He mixed ingredients, hoisted slabs of cheddar - and tasted plenty of his work.

Laptop

Florida Man tries to steal laptop to check Facebook

Bradenton - Sheriff's officers said a 19-year-old man snatched a Starbucks customers laptop after being told he could not use it to check his Facebook account. According to officers, the man then grabbed the customer's laptop and ran out of the coffee shop, located in an outlet mall.

Mr. Potato

The slow death of Slow Food UK

There seems to be an inherent contradiction between the local and international aims of the Slow Food movement. What do you think such an organisation ought to be doing?
Carlo Petrini - Slow Food
© Barry Lewis-CorbisCarlo Petrini, founder of the Slow Food movement.

Slow Food UK is in crisis. Slow Food itself is a weird organisation. It has a charismatic founder/leader, Carlo Petrini, who presides over and directs the movement from Italy. It purports to be a grassroots movement, inherently democratic because the only thing you have to do to qualify for membership and join is to pay your sub - the £35 fee goes to Slow Food UK and the new member is assigned to a local convivium.

(The vocabulary of Slow Food is its most peculiar feature - there are convivia, presidia, arks and terra madre - an apparent lexical cross between Stalinism and religion, though in fact, I think it reflects the Italian anarcho-syndicalist origins of the movement.)

Binoculars

Lance Armstrong turns to 'twitterati' in search for stolen bike

Lance Armstrong_01
© Max Whittake/ReutersLance Armstrong: leaving no stone unturned.
Seven-times winner of the Tour de France widens search for stolen time trial bike

What do you do if your bike has just been nicked? If you're the Tory leader, David Cameron, you get laughed at and call for the reintroduction of sharia law for bike theft. If you're the seven-times winner of the Tour de France, Lance Armstrong, you turn to Twitter.

"Someone stole my time trial bike! Wtf?!? APB out to the twitterati," he told his 112,000 followers on the microblogging site after a gruelling stage on the Tour of California.

Black Cat

Satire: Sasha Obama Keeps Seeing Creepy Bush Twins While Riding Tricycle Through White House

Bush Twins
© The OnionThe ghostly former first daughters, shortly after a White House elevator reportedly overflowed with cherry daiquiri.

Washington - A little more than a month after the first family's move to the White House, reports of strange happenings have continued to surface, with Sasha Obama confirming Tuesday that she had once again been visited by the eerie specter of the Bush twins.

Sasha, who was playing in the East Wing of the executive mansion so as not to disturb her busy father, reported seeing the former first twins while riding her Big Wheel tricycle down the Cross Hall corridor. The frightening apparitions, the 7-year-old said, emerged out of thin air and were dressed in identical outfits consisting of spaghetti strap tank tops and denim skirts.