Don't Panic! Lighten Up!S


Laptop

How Babel Fish almost caused a diplomatic incident

Amazing, the internet. You can feed a phrase in one of the major world languages into a translation site like Babel Fish (babelfish.yahoo.com), and out it will come another. Type, for example, "internet translation sites like Babel Fish are more trouble than they're worth", click the "English-to-French" button, and you get "les emplacements de traduction d'internet comme des poissons de Babel sont plus d'ennui que la valeur de they're". Put back into English, that yields "the sites of d'internet translation as of fish of Babel are more d'ennui that the value of they're", which, you will agree, is about as close to the original as to make no meaningful difference.

Magic Hat

Man nearly tosses 4.38-carat diamond

MURFREESBORO, Ark. - Chad Johnson has found about 80 diamonds at Crater of Diamonds State Park since moving to Murfreesboro in February, but the former Iowa resident on Monday nearly threw away his largest find yet. A cube-shaped rock plucked out of his sifters turned out to be a 4.38-carat, tea-colored diamond.

"Every time someone finds a big diamond here at the park, they just get slammed with tourists," said Johnson, 36, a park regular. "This has already been a bad summer for tourists and they were looking forward to winding down and then this happened."

Wine

Danger: Beware of Falling Cows

Manson, Washington - Charles and Linda Everson were driving back to their hotel when their minivan was struck by a falling object - a 600-pound cow.

The Eversons were unhurt but the cow, which had fallen off a cliff, had to be euthanized.

Bulb

He Wasn't Calling to Say His Prayers...

CLARKSTOWN, N.Y. - Isn't the 11th Commandment thou shalt not use the church's telephone to call a sex hot line? A homeless man has been charged with breaking into a Valley Cottage church by picking a lock so he could dial up some sex chat.

Health

Man tortured with hot cookies and bottled urine

Two US university students kidnapped, paddled and tortured a man with freshly baked cookies after a drug deal went wrong, a court has been told.

Gear

US police ploy 'insults' Osbourne

Rocker Ozzy Osbourne has claimed his reputation was tarnished by a police operation in the United States.

A party supposedly involving the star was organised in Fargo, North Dakota - but it was actually a scam by officers to round up missing criminal suspects.

©Unknown

Five hundred people with outstanding arrest warrants were sent invitations, and more than 30 suspects turned up.

Rocket

Cherie Blair to burn at the stake



©BBC
Artist Frank Shepherd was among the people who built the guy

Heart

Why can't the English be more like the French?



©The Times
With the high-speed link to London about to open at last, Hortense de Monplaisir warns her fellow Parisians of the horreurs anglais that await them.

Bizarro Earth

U.S. woman accuses co-worker of over-feeding her pet pig

A woman from Winona in Minnesota is accusing a work colleague, who was pet sitting her pig, of neglect after she allowed the pig to become obese, a local daily newspaper said Wednesday.

Michelle Schmitz, 22, said she left the pot-bellied pig, Alaina Templeton, with a colleague in February while she was recovering from ankle surgery. Within nine months the pig's weight tripled - from 22 kg (50 pounds) to 68 kg (150 pounds). In addition, it had trouble breathing and "stunk real bad."

"That pig is my life," the Winona Daily News quotes the woman, who even has the pet's name tattooed on her body, as saying.

Bizarro Earth

Nearly 3,500 Chinese Named 'Olympics'

The upcoming Beijing Olympics is more than just a point of pride for China - it's such an important part of the national consciousness that nearly 3,500 children have been named for the event, a newspaper reported Sunday.

Most of the 3,491 people with the name "Aoyun," meaning Olympics, were born around the year 2000, as Beijing was bidding to host the 2008 Summer Games, the Beijing Daily reported, citing information from China's national identity card database.

The vast majority of people named Aoyun are male, the newspaper said. Only six live in Beijing. The report didn't say where the others live.