Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin has been selected as winner of the 2009 Sitting Duck Award, the National Society of Newspaper Columnists announced Friday.
The award is given annually to the person who provides the best material for columnists facing deadlines. Palin, who became a national political figure overnight last year when Sen. John McCain selected her as his running mate, beat out former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich.
"Being a prominent jerk or cretin is often a thankless job," said the society's current president, Samantha Bennett of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. "This is our way of saying thanks for the low-hanging fruit."
Ben Leach The Telegraph Fri, 03 Jul 2009 01:45 UTC
Staff at a design and marketing company in Newcastle spent a day working together naked after being told it would improve their morale.
David Taylor, a business psychologist, told workers at design and marketing onebestway, in Newcastle upon Tyne, that a Naked Friday idea would boost their team spirit.
He was called in to help the firm after six staff members were forced into taking redundancies at the start of the credit crunch.
Mr Taylor told them that, by stripping off their clothes, staff could also strip away inhibitions and talk to each other more openly and honestly.
Ten days ago, on Friday, June 13th, 2008, I had the extraordinary privilege of talking to George Carlin. As far as I know it was the last in-depth interview he gave before he passed away yesterday at age 71. Originally it was slated to run as a 350-word Q&A on the back page of Psychology Today. But I was so excited to talk to him - and he was so generous with his time - that I just kept on going. By the end I had over 14,000 words.
On stage, George Carlin came across as a grouch, often vulgar and sometimes misanthropic. But with me he was patient and warm, happy to talk through the minutiae of his creative process and eager to share stories about his childhood, his evolution as a comic, and his influence. What struck me most was the joy in his voice as he talked about the wonderful feeling he got in his gut while writing. I was also moved by the gratitude he expressed for his mother, who he said "saved" him and his brother - leaving her bullying, alcoholic husband when George was just two months old, getting a job during the worst years of the Depression, and raising two boys on her own.
Mark Stevenson Associated Press Fri, 26 Jun 2009 20:44 UTC
Mexico City - Mexico vowed to keep looking for a mysterious island that could extend its offshore oil claims after university researchers said they couldn't find it.
"The island doesn't exist" in the area where it was shown on maps, a National Autonomous University of Mexico study concluded after conducting studies with underwater sensing devices and aerial reconnaissance in the area.
"Isla Bermeja" appeared on maps from the 1700s as a speck of land off the northwest coast of the Yucatan peninsula. A group of Mexican legislators hoped the island would help their decade-long effort to fend off what they describe as U.S. encroachment on their nation's oil claims in the Gulf of Mexico.
Australian wallabies are eating opium poppies and creating crop circles as they hop around "as high as a kite", a government official has said.
Wallabies have been observed acting strangely in poppy fields.
Lara Giddings, the attorney general for the island state of Tasmania, said the kangaroo-like marsupials were getting into poppy fields grown for medicine.
She was reporting to a parliamentary hearing on security for poppy crops.
Australia supplies about 50% of the world's legally-grown opium used to make morphine and other painkillers.
Columbia, Missouri - Columbia police have captured an inmate who allegedly escaped from the Howard County jail using a cardboard toilet paper holder. Curtis Jones of New Franklin was captured Wednesday afternoon.
Columbia police officers, who were responding to a tip, went to where Jones was believed to be located, but he had fled on foot. Jones was spotted a short time later and taken into custody.
Bloomfield, N.Y. - She paints with enthusiasm, her whole body thrown into the creative process, particularly her head, which jerks from side to side, then up and down and around, mane bouncing all the while.
She's moody when it comes to colors, refusing to paint with blue for months at a time, then changing her mind and insisting she only paint with blue for a stretch.
Sometimes she refuses to paint altogether. She's a bit of a diva.
A leading researcher, writer, and psychotherapist in Pathological Love Relationships is investigating the effects of psychopathy and narcissism on children. If you are the parent/guardian of a child who has had exposure to these conditions in adults, please contact us to take our research survey. In 2009 we will be writing about pathological parenting and its long term effects on children. SafeRelationships.com
"Out of this modern civilization economic royalists carved new dynasties. New kingdoms were built upon concentration of control over material things. Through new uses of corporations, banks and securities, new machinery of industry and agriculture, of labor and capital - all undreamed of by the Fathers - the whole structure of modern life was impressed into this royal service." Franklin Delano Roosevelt speech in Philadelphia on June 27, 1936
"Sarah, if the American people had ever known the truth about what we Bushes have done to this nation, we would be chased down in the streets and lynched." George Bush Senior speaking in an interview with Sarah McClendon in December 1992
"These are the men who, without virtue, labour, or hazard, are growing rich, as their country is impoverished; they rejoice, when obstinacy or ambition adds another year to slaughter and devastation; and laugh, from their desks, at bravery and science, while they are adding figure to figure, and cipher to cipher, hoping for a new contract from a new armament, and computing the profits of a siege or tempest." Samuel Johnson
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