July 30, 2004
Pacemaker replaces patient's pulse
trials in autumn 2004 in the UK. Its design
is intended to solve the problems of mechanical failure and blood clotting that have bedevilled artificial hearts and pumps since they were invented.
The pump also has a curious side effect: people implanted with the device have no pulse.
What makes the VentrAssist different is that it only has one moving part, a spinning impeller that drives a continuous stream of blood. That means the pulse is replaced by a gentle whirling noise that patients describe as similar to the sound of a washing machine. More importantly, the device prevents blood from stagnating, reducing the risk of clotting.
July 29, 2004
Bush Using Drugs to Control Depression, Erratic Behavior
Bush is taking powerful anti-depressant drugs to control his erratic behavior, depression and paranoia, Capitol Hill Blue has learned.
The prescription drugs, administered by Col. Richard J. Tubb, the White House physician, can impair the President’s mental faculties and decrease both his physical capabilities and his ability to respond to a crisis, administration aides admit privately.
“It’s a double-edged sword,” says one aide. “We can’t have him flying off the handle at the slightest provocation but we also need a President who is alert mentally.”
Tubb prescribed the anti-depressants after a clearly-upset Bush stormed off stage on July 8, refusing to answer reporters' questions about his relationship with indicted Enron executive Kenneth J. Lay.
“Keep those motherfuckers away from me,” he screamed at an aide backstage. “If you can’t, I’ll find someone who can.”
Although GOP loyalists dismissed the reports an anti-Bush propaganda, the reports were later confirmed by prominent George Washington University psychiatrist Dr. Justin Frank in his book Bush on the Couch: Inside the Mind of the President. Dr. Frank diagnosed the President as a “paranoid meglomaniac” and “untreated alcoholic” whose “lifelong streak of sadism, ranging from childhood pranks (using firecrackers to explode frogs) to insulting journalists, gloating over state executions and pumping his hand gleefully before the bombing of Baghdad” showcase Bush’s instabilities.
“I was really very unsettled by him and I started watching everything he did and reading what he wrote and watching him on videotape. I felt he was disturbed,” Dr. Frank said. “He fits the profile of a former drinker whose alcoholism has been arrested but not treated.”
One long-time GOP political consultant who – for obvious reasons – asked not to be identified said he is advising his Republican Congressional candidates to keep their distance from Bush.
“We have to face the very real possibility that the President of the United States is loony tunes,” he says sadly. “That’s not good for my candidates, it’s not good for the party and it’s certainly not good for the country.”
July 15, 2004
Video Tombstone
Inventors usually try to come up with things that will change people's lives. But Robert Barrows is hoping to make an impact after their death. He is patenting video-equipped tombstones to let cemetery visitors watch messages from the dead.
Barrows, of Burlingame, California, has filed a patent application for a hollow headstone fitted with a flat LCD touch screen (US 2004/85337). It also houses a computer with a hard disc or microchip memory that allows the deceased to speak from the grave through a video message.
Arrested for being against bush
You may recall, back on the 4th of July, Bush traveled to Charleston, West Virginia (swing state -- five electoral votes). The president shared a simple, patriotic message that few, in any, could disagree with:
"On this 4th of July, we confirm our love of freedom, the freedom for people to speak their minds, the freedom for people to worship as they so choose. Free thought, free expression, that's what we believe."
At the same event, shortly before Bush uttered these words, police arrested two Bush critics who were on hand for the speech. They hadn't caused a disturbance or even said a word -- they were taken out of the crowd in handcuffs by police because they were wearing anti-Bush t-shirts.
Land of The Dead
Variety reports that George Romero is set to direct "Land of the Dead," a horror film that picks up on the zombie saga he hatched with "Night of the Living Dead" and continued with "Dawn of the Dead" and "Day of the Dead."
Pic, from Romero's own script, is being co-financed by Atmosphere Entertainment and Paris-based Wild Bunch. Production will begin in October in Winnipeg or Pittsburgh. Latter was the site of shooting for Romero's original 1968 zombie trilogy.
In Romero's new pic, the zombies having taken over the world and those left alive are confined to a walled-in city that keeps out the corpse corps. Anarchy rules the streets, with the wealthy insulated and living in fortified skyscrapers. Drama revolves around a group of scavengers who must thwart an attempt to overthrow the city while the dead are evolving from brainless slow-moving creatures into more advanced creatures.
found at bloody-disgusting
July 14, 2004
British LSD Test
British LSD Test
Found at kontraband.com
July 13, 2004
Yale Nude Posture Photos
ONE AFTERNOON IN THE LATE 1970's, deep in the labyrinthine interior of a massive Gothic tower in New Haven, an unsuspecting employee of Yale University opened a long-locked room in the Payne Whitney Gymnasium and stumbled upon something shocking and disturbing.
Shocking, because what he found was an enormous cache of nude photographs, thousands and thousands of photographs of young men in front, side and rear poses. Disturbing, because on closer inspection the photos looked like the record of a bizarre body-piercing ritual: sticking out from the spine of each and every body was a row of sharp metal pins.
The employee who found them was mystified. The athletic director at the time, Frank Ryan, a former Cleveland Browns quarterback new to Yale, was mystified. But after making some discreet inquiries, he found out what they were -- and took swift action to burn them. He called in a professional, a document-disposal expert, who initiated a two-step torching procedure. First, every single one of the many thousands of photographs was fed into a shredder, and then each of the shreds was fed to the flames, thereby insuring that not a single intact or recognizable image of the nude Yale students -- some of whom had gone on to assume positions of importance in government and society -- would survive.
found at metafilter
July 11, 2004
Cat found 3 miles of shore in Gulf
A group of friends on a scalloping trip were cruising in Homosassa Bay more than 3 miles into the Gulf of Mexico when one of them spotted something the color of a plastic Publix shopping bag in the distance.
"There was a 9-inch-long kitten doing the paddle and screaming at the top of his lungs," said Rogers, the director of finances at the Clearwater Marine Aquarium. "We scooped him up and he sat on the boat with me for eight hours."
July 09, 2004
Charlie Bucket and The Chocolate Factory
Ladies, gentlemen, Oompa Loompa's, thank you all for coming today. As many of you may know the esteemed Mr. Wonka has decided to hand sole ownership of his candy production facility over to me. Mr. Wonka believed that because I was a child I would be naïve and continue to do things around here in the whimsical and shockingly inefficient manner he has. I am here to say that things are not going to be the same at all. After speaking with Mr. Wonka's accountant I have come to discover that the factory here is rarely operating in the black. In fact, Mr. Wonka has basically saddled me with years of debt caused by some of the ridiculous expenses involved in producing our candy here.
July 08, 2004
Bush no like questions
US President George W. Bush walks away from a briefing with the media, refusing to answer questions after he was asked about Enron and the reported indictment of former CEO Kenneth Lay, who was a close adviser and fund-raiser for Bush and his father, earning him the presidential nickname of 'Kenny Boy.'(AFP/Paul J. Richards)
July 07, 2004
Lego Spiderman 2
Stop motion animated spiderman 2
link