A US judge has hailed as a success a new form of punishment for people who go to court for being too noisy - an hour of listening to Barry Manilow or the theme tune from the children's TV show Barney And Friends.
Judge Paul Sacco said he decided to try something new after noticing that violators brought before his Colorado court for playing their stereos too loudly or disturbing neighbours with band rehearsals kept doing it again.
The usual practice of fining these offenders was not proving to be a deterrent, so he decided to give them a dose of their own medicine and make them listen to his musical selection at high volume for one hour.
"This is a way, when I look back, of teaching manners to people," Mr Sacco, a judge from Fort Lupton Municipal Court in Colorado, told Reuters Television.
He said his methods had cut the number of repeat offenders appearing in his court.
A woman has been arrested in Japan after killing off her virtual reality husband in a computer game.
Police say she is suspected of fraudulently accessing the computer account of a man she had married in the virtual world in order to hack into his personal files.
She is then alleged to have killed his avatar or cyberspace alter ego.
The woman has been quoted as saying she was angry that her cyber partner divorced her without warning.
Bring your own light sabre: Uni launches Jedi course
By Europe correspondent Emma Alberici
The UK's first Jedi course teaching personal development through a Star Wars syllabus will open to students at Queen's University in Belfast from November.
According to its publicity material, the course, Feel the Force: How to Train in the Jedi Way, teaches the real-life psychological techniques behind Jedi mind tricks.
It also claims to examine the wider issues behind the Star Wars universe, like balance, destiny, dualism, fatherhood and fascism.
The university says it hopes to attract young Star Wars fans and introduce them to education through open learning.
No prior qualifications are required and the blurb informs students that light sabres are not provided.
Simply nice photos, Landscape, Seascape, Underwater, The Northern Beaches Sydney.
02 September, 2008
Malaysian man gets nut stuck around penis
Sunday the 31st of Aug 31, 2008
A Malaysian welder had to have a nut removed from around his penis after an attempt to lengthen it before he gets engaged next week went embarrassingly wrong, a news report said.
The nut got stuck on his penis following an erection, the Star newspaper said, forcing him to seek help at a hospital in southern Johor state.
Staff from the Sultanah Aminah hospital had to drain some blood from the penis and cut away a top layer of skin before the object could be removed, the newspaper said.
It said the fire and rescue department were also involved in trying to remove the nut from the unnamed welder, who is in his 20s and hoped the nut would weigh down his penis to make it longer.
"The patient is now recovering and we hope to discharge him today (Sunday)," hospital director Daud Abdul Rahim told the Star.
On August 25, another young man in Kuala Lumpur had tried to increase his sexual prowess by slipping a steel ring around his penis, forcing the fire department to cut off the ring after doctors were unable to remove it, the newspaper said.
Simply nice photos, Landscape, Seascape, Underwater, The Northern Beaches Sydney.
12 July, 2008
Russian town puts breasts on a pedestal
A Russian town plans to unveil a monument that shows a man's hand gripping a nubile female breast, which officials say will bring "family happiness" to men who touch it, Russian media reported.
The monument will be opened to the public Saturday in Bataisk, a town of about 100,000 in the Rostov region of southern Russia, a spokesman for the Bataisk administration told the Interfax news agency.
"A bas-relief of a female silhouette has been made on a metal plate, with a man's hand on the breast. It is believed that if a man touches this bust, he will gain family happiness," the spokesman said.
Sculptor Anatoly Sknarin was inspired by a similar sculpture he saw in the red-light district of Amsterdam, the Moskovsky Komsomolets daily newspaper reported.
Simply nice photos, Landscape, Seascape, Underwater, The Northern Beaches Sydney.
06 July, 2008
Shopkeepers warned of sheep in Queen's clothing.
The 6th of July 2008
New Zealand shopkeepers are being fleeced by fake 100 dollar notes featuring a sheep wearing a tiara in the place where Queen Elizabeth's portrait should be.
Police said the notes, which all bear the same serial number, were crude forgeries but some merchants in Rodney, near Auckland, where they were circulating, were taken in, the Herald on Sunday reported.
The Queen's tiara-wearing portrait features on all New Zealand bank notes.
Standing at 1.5m and weighing 400kg, the $44,000 sculpture was installed in a square in front of the Mashuk-Akva Term spa, with a banner declaring: "Let's beat constipation and sloppiness with enemas".
"There is no kitsch or obscenity, it is a successful work of art," said spa director Alexander Kharchenko.
"An enema is almost a symbol of our region."
The monument was designed with "irony and humour", said sculptor Svetlana Avakina, who modelled the angels on the works of Italian Renaissance painter Alessandro Botticelli.
Ms Avakina hoped to promote the sculpture as a brand and turn it into a franchise with souvenirs and awards for medical doctors.
"This device is eternal, it will never change," she said.
Simply nice photos, Landscape, Seascape, Underwater, The Northern Beaches Sydney.
29 June, 2008
Manure thief falls into dung, flees naked
A woman trying to make "manure bombs" using stockings, slipped into a slurry tank and fled the scene naked, German police said.
Two women entered a farm in the northern village of Eberholzen on Wednesday evening and started to fill the stockings with manure.
"One of them slipped into the manure tank, right into the cow muck," said a spokesman for local police. "The other one helped her out. We found their clothes in a field. One seems to have run off completely naked, the other in her underwear."
Police said it was unclear what the women had intended to do with the "manure bombs", but added the incident could be linked to victory celebrations surrounding the Euro 2008 semi-finals on Wednesday evening, when Germany beat Turkey 3-2.
"The women can get their clothes back from the local police station - unwashed," the spokesman added.
Road workers in a small New Zealand town got their wish granted when a woman stripped, saying she was fed up with their wolf-whistles.
The Israeli tourist was about to use an ATM in the main street of Kerikeri, in the far north of the country, when the men whistled, the New Zealand Press Association (NZPA) reported.
She calmly stripped off, used the cash machine, before getting dressed and walking away.
The woman told police she did not take too kindly to the whistling from the men repairing the road.
"She said she had thought 'bugger them, I'll show them what I've got'," police Sergeant Peter Masters told NZPA.
"She gave the explanation that she had been ... pestered by New Zealand men. She's not an unattractive looking lady," Sgt Masters said.
"She was taken back to the police station and spoken to and told that was inappropriate in New Zealand."
Monk caught with 230 porn films in monastery: report
A Benedictine monk has been caught with around 230 pornographic films in his room in a monastery in western Germany, the local Abendzeitung newspaper reported on Thursday.
The discovery was made after the monk was caught trying to steal four gay pornography DVDs from a sex shop in the Bavarian city of Wuerzburg in southern Germany.
After an assistant caught him stealing the films, the 49 year-old fled, throwing his loot in a rubbish bin before being caught by police.
The monk lives at the 900-year-old Maria Laach Abbey in Rhineland-Palatinate.
Cemetery full, French Mayor tells locals not to die
The Mayor of a village in south-west France has threatened residents with severe punishment if they die, because there is no room left in the overcrowded cemetery to bury them.
In an ordinance posted in the council offices, Mayor Gerard Lalanne told the 260 residents of the village of Sarpourenx that "all persons not having a plot in the cemetery and wishing to be buried in Sarpourenx are forbidden from dying in the parish".
It added: "Offenders will be severely punished".
The Mayor said he was forced to take drastic action after an administrative court in the nearby town of Pau ruled in January that the acquisition of adjoining private land to extend the cemetery would not be justified.
Mr Lalanne, who celebrated his 70th birthday on Wednesday and is standing for election to a seventh term in this month's local elections, said he was sorry that there had not been a positive outcome to the dilemma.
"It may be a laughing matter for some, but not for me," he said.
Moses was on psychedelic drugs when he heard God deliver the Ten Commandments on Mount Sinai, an Israeli researcher claimed in a study published this week.
Such mind-altering substances formed an integral part of the religious rites of Israelites in biblical times, Benny Shanon, a professor of cognitive psychology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem wrote in the Time and Mind journal of philosophy.
"As far as Moses on Mount Sinai is concerned, it was either a supernatural cosmic event, which I don't believe, or a legend, which I don't believe either, or finally, and this is very probable, an event that joined Moses and the people of Israel under the effect of narcotics," Dr Shanon told Israeli public radio.
Dr Shanon, who says he himself has dabbled with such substances, says Moses was probably also on drugs when he saw the "burning bush".
"The Bible says people see sounds, and that is a classic phenomenon," he said, citing the example of religious ceremonies in the Amazon in which drugs are used that induce people to "see music."
He mentioned his own experience when he used ayahuasca, a powerful psychotropic plant, during a religious ceremony in Brazil's Amazon forest in 1991.
"I experienced visions that had spiritual-religious connotations," he said.
He said the psychedelic effects of ayahuasca were comparable to those produced by concoctions based on bark of the acacia tree, that is frequently mentioned in the Bible.
A CHEEKY artist who uses his penis as a brush has entered a racy self-portrait for Australia's top art prize.
Australian Tim Patch, who calls himself Pricasso, usually exposes his talents at sex product fairs around the world, but has decided to go upmarket by entering a painting for the Archibald Prize - the nation's top award for portraiture.
In a unique painting style, Patch does not use paint brushes, but his penis to apply paint to the canvas.
"I had to use my bum to paint in the background, because you have to have the occasional break," Patch said to the Sydney Morning Herald newspaper today.
Patch entered a painting of a plastic surgeon in last year's Archibald Prize, but failed to impress the judges.
This year's entry depicts a nude Patch, wearing only a hat, holding a blank canvas to hide his "brush".
The Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney expects up to 700 portraits to be entered for the 2008 Archibald Prize, with the finalists to be announced in March.
