Don't Panic! Lighten Up!S


Crusader

Religious TV channel on carpet

A religious television channel that has encouraged viewers to liquidate their retirement savings and charge up credit cards to make donations in the name of God may learn on Monday whether it answers to Canada's broadcast regulator as a higher power.

Comment: The 11th Commandment: Thou shalt use all means of coercion, deception and manipulation to fleece your elderly flock out of their life savings, so that like Jesus, they can die penniless and alone.


Bizarro Earth

Angry German tourist drops pants at airport X-ray machine

MANILA, Philippines - A 66-year-old German tourist, annoyed by stringent security at Manila's airport, dropped his pants before walking through an X-ray machine, newspapers said Monday.

Authorities were not amused.

Instead of boarding a flight to Frankfurt on Friday, Hans Jurgen Oskar von Naguschewski was detained after police filed a complaint of lasciviousness against him, the Philippine Daily Inquirer and the Philippine Star newspapers reported.

HAL9000

Talking Urinal Cakes Offer Drinking And Driving Advice

SANTA FE -- New Mexico has taken its fight against drunken driving to men's restrooms around the state.

The state has ordered 500 talking urinal cakes that will deliver a recorded anti-DWI message to bar and restaurant patrons who make one last pit stop before getting behind the wheel.

The top of the devices feature the state DWI slogan -- "You drink, you drive, you lose."

Sheeple

Traveller held after Manila strip

A German man who was so angered by airport security in the Philippines that he took off his trousers has been arrested for lasciviousness.

Hans Jurgen Oskar von Naguschewski, 66, performed the impromptu strip after being asked to go through the X-ray machine twice at Manila airport.

Instead of boarding his flight to Frankfurt, he was detained by police and is due in court on Monday.

Padlock

Jail me, urges chocolate-eating Dutchman

A Dutch journalist asked an Amsterdam court on Friday to convict him for eating chocolate, saying by doing so he was benefiting from child slavery on cocoa farms in Ivory Coast.

Teun van de Keuken, 35, is seeking a jail sentence to raise consumer awareness and force the cocoa and chocolate industry to take tougher measures to stamp out child labour.

"If I am found guilty of this crime, any chocolate consumer can be prosecuted after that. I hope that people would stop buying chocolate and thus hurt the sales of big corporations and make them do something about the problem," van de Keuken said.

Wolf

Deputies find alligator during drug bust

Pierce County sheriff's deputies were startled when they entered a house near here during a drug bust and found- an alligator.

"It's alarming in that it's big enough and its mouth looked big enough, that if it were to bite it would definitely do some serious damage," sheriff's spokesman Ed Troyer said of the 4-foot-long alligator.


Heart

Missing for 25 years after getting on wrong bus

BANGKOK - A 76-year-old Malay Muslim woman from southern Thailand who got on the wrong bus 25 years ago and ended up living at the other end of the country has been reunited with her family, officials and domestic media said on Tuesday.

Unable to speak, read or write Thai, Jaeyaena Beuraheng boarded a bus in Malaysia thinking it was bound for Narathiwat, one of three Muslim-majority provinces in Buddhist Thailand's far south.

Magnify

Beware Pseudo-Skepticism - Randi is a Fraud

On January 29th, 2005, we were talking about the James Randi $1 Million Paranormal Challenge in the chat room. If you don't know what the Challenge is, the short version is that this ex-magician, James Randi, is willing to give a million dollars to anyone who can prove something paranormal. It's common for people to ask us why we don't take the Challenge with all the stuff we talk about on PsiPog. Clearly we qualify for the paranormal, and it would seem like easy money. While talking in the chat room, annie made the observation that the prize was in the form of bonds, and not cash. She tried to explain to me how bonds can be "worth" a million dollars legally, but in reality could be completely worthless.

Wine

Cheddarvision TV

Cheese lovers can now watch cheddar mature 24 hours a day on the internet.

West country farmers set up the Cheddarvision website featuring a 25 kg block of cheddar, reports ITN.

Farmer Tom Calver said: "How many other cheeses do you know of on the internet that have their own webcam and a live feed to the internet? I don't think many."

No Entry

Something is rotten in UK: School bans Mother's Day cards

A school has banned the making of Mother's Day cards because the headteacher does not want to upset children without a mother.

Helen Starkey has ended the tradition in the interests of "sensitivity".

"More than five per cent of children here are separated from their birth mother and have either no contact or no regular contact with their mother," she said.

"This decision was not taken because of any philosophical attitude towards the celebration of Mothering Sunday, but to protect a significant number of children in our school.