Belle de Jour is a daily insight into the world of a hooker in London. Well written.

Hong Kong viewers will get the naked truth on a new TV news show on the Fire/Ice network presented by nude newsreaders, press reports said on Friday.
The first show, to be aired this weekend, features newsreader Chan Long, an 18-year old model who has just graduated from secondary school, who strips through the five-minute bulletin until she is completely naked.

"It's not easy, synchronising news-reading and taking off all your clothes," she says.

Pentagon officials say they do not expect to be able to provide space for representatives of human rights advocacy groups to observe any military tribunals at the naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

In letters last week to Amnesty International, Human Rights First and Human Rights Watch, a senior military official said it was unlikely that they would be allowed to attend any military tribunals at Guantánamo. The official, Brig. Gen. Thomas L. Hemingway, a chief legal adviser in the office of military commissions, wrote that space would be limited if and when tribunals were held at Guantánamo.

"It is expected that limited courtroom seating and other logistical issues will preclude attendance by many who desire to observe military commission proceedings," he wrote.

General Hemingway noted that there would be seats for the news media as well as for representatives of the International Red Cross. There will probably be arrangements for some members of Congress to attend the trials and perhaps for officials of organizations that represent victims of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

Brazilian carnival revelers welcome a passenger from the worlds largest ocean liner, the Queen Mary 2, after its arrival to the Port of Rio de Janeiro

Workers paint a float that represents Adam and Eve making love at the Rio Grande samba school in Rio de Janeiro.

Members of the Estacio de Sa samba school dance as their group competes in the second division parade at the start of the carnival season in Rio de Janeiro

Carnival dancers perform to Samba music in front of hundreds of spectators outside the Brazilian Mercantile and Futures exchange in Sao Paulo's financial heart

A Colombian performs during the first day of carnival in Barranquilla

Two Colombians dance during the first day of carnival in Barranquilla

In the course of a routine raid at the city’s Tunnel nightclub in St Petersburg, Russia, policemen stumbled upon a private party celebrating the birthday of one of the club’s owners. The police were immediately suspicious because of the unusually high number of people on drugs, even for a nightclub.
When asked where they had got the drugs, the party-goers said they had bought them from a Pepsi drinks machine. After several more similar answers the policemen lost their temper and, according to one of the revellers, started beating up some of the patrons.
But even then the same explanation was given, so one of the law enforcers approached the machine and gave it a kick. Much to the amazement of the officers, several ecstasy pills dropped out of the machine. With this, the incident was virtually over. ''At least they stopped beating up the guys,'' one club visitor said. The police arrested 20 people and seized the offending machine. The club was then closed ''for technical reasons''.
Further investigation revealed that drug dealers working in the Tunnel had created a rather clever scheme for trading their wares. When a clubber wanted a “lift”, he paid 350 roubles (about $12) to the dealer and was allowed access to the Pepsi machine, which delivered a pill when he pressed a button. Police experts are working on the machine which has been declared forensic evidence, but say it will be very difficult to prove the dealer’s involvement.

I wonder what was in the Coke vending machine...

You must supply a password to make this connection


Twice now I've had this problem on different peer to peer Windows network trying to access a Windows XP computer. It then asks for a password for \\SERVERNAME\IPC$ for which no password works.


The solution both times has been to


1) Enable Guest account
Start|Settings|Control Panel|User Accounts


2)Change the following setting:

Start|Settings|Control Panel|Administrative Tools|Local Security Policy|
then under Security Settings|Local Policies|User Rights Assignments

look for Deny access to this computer from network
right-mouse-click on this setting and choose properties, highlight Guest, click Remove.



This is as much for my reference as anyone else's. For some reason this setting is not the same between apparently identical setups (I have compared XP Pro SP1 systems). Weird.

Don Brash, leader of the National Party in NZ, has stated that should his party come to power that he will withdrawal funding from universities that run entry schemes for Maori students. He is really on a roll with his race-baiting; odd considering when he was governor of the Reserve Bank he instigated a Maori scholarship scheme.
You will note though that discrimination on favour of rural students is acceptable to him.
From the University of Auckland Medical School website:

... the Faculty offers two special entry quotas:

* Maori and Pacific Admissions Scheme (MAPAS)
* Rural Origin Medical Preferential Entry scheme (ROMPE)

But there's no political mileage to be made with baiting the rural folk.

In answer to an appeal by Annis Abdullah on his 2 year sentence for receiving a blow job Singapore's 77-year-old chief judge Yong Pung How said that despite growing permissiveness in some countries there were "certain offences that are so repulsive in Asian culture".

"There are countries where you can go and suck away for all you are worth," the judge said. "People in high places do it for all they're worth. I'm not an expert, but you read about it in the papers. But this is Asia."

"Times have changed. Women are freer, they don't just run around the kitchen, as it were," he said.

"But ask any mother or your sisters and you'll get a different answer. No lady or woman would ask what aggravation is needed... The offence itself is an aggravation."

A man from Buri Ram province in Thailand who went on a three-day drinking binge returned to his job in the capital with a terrible pain in his abdomen – which he apparently tried to cure by operating on himself.

The man, identified as a 32-year-old Sanan Jodrum, having three days vacation, did what most low-paid laborers in Bangkok do: he boarded a bus and went back to his hometown to see family and friends.

After saying a brief hello to his wife, he joined a wong lao (literally, a “whisky circle”) with his rural friends, drinking continuously for three days and three nights – without eating.

When he returned to the capital, he suffered from terrible stomach pains. He consulted a doctor who told him it was the result of excessive alcohol intake and lack of food.

The doctor gave him a couple of injections but these did not help. Now that conventional medicine had failed him, K. Sanan became convinced that the cause of his gastrointestinal woes was sorcery.

According to a local superstition, it is possible to curse a person in such a way that an indigestible strip of buffalo hide somehow finds its way into an enemy’s stomach, causing great pain followed by agonizing death.

On the morning of January 7, K. Sanan was found dead. Arriving on the scene, investigators found his lifeless body lying face-up in a pool of blood, a single knife wound, apparently self-inflicted, running from the top of his ribcage to just below his navel.

His intestines had burst though the wound. No buffalo hide was recovered.

A German actress has been taken to hospital after a performance artist tried to cut her bra off - with a chainsaw.

Former porn star Sibylle Rauch said it was the "worst moment of my life" as the blade cut through her breasts.

"I thought, Sibylle, you're going to die," the actress told Bild newspaper.

The chainsaw operator, Marko Koenig, said Rauch was lying down during the rehearsal on Monday and suddenly bent forward just as he was applying the saw to her bra.

"I couldn't pull back the chainsaw quickly enough and cut her breast and stomach. It was terrible," he told Bild.

The hospital in Karlsruhe, south-west Germany, where Rauch was treated, refused to give details of her injuries.

On February 10, Dr Rouse wrote to the BMJ explaining that he and his colleague, Yaser Adi, had spent 100 hours preparing a report, Hutton, Kelly and the Missing Epidemiology. They concluded that "the identified evidence does not support the view that wrist-slash deaths are common (or indeed possible)".

To bleed to death from a transected artery goes against classical medical teaching, which is that a transected artery retracts, narrows, clots and stops bleeding within minutes. Even if a person continues to bleed, the body compensates for the loss of blood through vasoconstriction (closing down of non-essential arteries). This allows a partially exsanguinated individual to live for many hours, even days.

Read more »

The NRL Judiciary had little trouble differentiating between a "wedgie", a "finger up the arse" and the area between the "arse and the nuts" before finding Hopoate guilty.

Read more »

With BartPE (Preinstalled Environment) you can boot Windows from a CD or DVD. This is very useful if your computer gets a virus etc and won't start at all. Simply boot from the disk and try to fix the problem with the either the tools that are created with the disk, or other tools you add of your own when you create the disk.


The program to create this disk is only 2.5MB, although I would recommend getting a few extra programs to go with it, such as McAfee command line virus scanner and AdAware. Disk Commander is a useful utility to include as well (although this may cost you money).


It's a very useful utility to create, especially if you don't have me to come around and fix your PC for you when you bugger things up.

The criminal organisation known as Monsanto has been granted a patent on Nap Hal wheat, used to make chapatis, despite the fact that in fact it is the collective result of generations of farmers in India who spent years crossbreeding for its special properties.
There is little hope of the Indian government intervening to fight the patent - it simply cannot afford the legal fees, having spent hundreds of thousands of dollars fighting a US decision to grant a Texan company a patent on basmati rice in 1997.

And the most comprehensive study yet made of chemical use on genetically modified crops, which Monsanto pushes heavily in conjunction with it's herbicide Roundup, shows that in the long term more herbicides and pesticides are used.
When first introduced most of the GM crops needed up to 25% fewer chemicals for the first three years, but afterwards significantly more. During 2002-2003, an average of 29% more herbicide was applied per acre on GM maize.

If you are like me you avoid Real(tm) software like the plague. It has a very bad habit of re-activating the nags and advertising that you disbable.

The BBC has come to the rescue. As a non commercial organisation they are not allowed to carry advertising, however they use Real(tm) formats for their audio and video. To comply with the BBC's charter Real have provided adware/nagware free versions of their media player to BBC which can be downloaded from here.

Israeli police have come up with plans to place bags of pig lard on buses in a bid to deter Palestinian militants from carrying out suicide attacks, the Maariv daily reported on Thursday.

Rabbinical authorities have given the idea its approval on the grounds that it could be a life-saving measure even though pigs are also considered impure by Jews.

Authorities believe that the move could discourage Palestinians from carrying out attacks as pieces of their exploded body could come into contact with the pig fat, prejudicing their chances of entering into paradise.

The paper said that the rabbinical dispensation could mean that security forces also hang bags of lard in shopping malls and schools.

As an aside, an Israeli once told me that their God told them it was wrong to eat pigs raised on Earth, so kosher pigs were raised on platforms above the ground. Sounds like a good way to have your beliefs and eat bacon too.

If you know where there are any weapons of mass destruction tell the CIA, pretty please.

(Try looking around in USA, I think you'll find plenty there).

Read more »

Microsoft has removed Bhuddist good luck symbols from MS Office 2003. For some reason they also removed a Jewish symbol while they were at it.

A man was bitten by a shark on the New South Wales central coast and then drove himself to seek treatment with the shark still attached to his leg.

Luke Tresoglavic from Lake Macquarie says he was swimming near Caves Beach on Tuesday when a wobbegong shark latched on to his leg.

"I just instantly grabbed hold of it with both hands as hard as I could to stop it shaking," he said.

"I just realised I had to swim in like that, hanging on to it.

"Once I got on to shore, a couple of people tried to help me but I could not remove it, it was stuck there.

"So I got up into my car and then drove to the clubhouse and luckily the guys down there had a clue what to do."

Surf lifesavers removed the 60 centimetre shark by hosing it with fresh water.

Update: Now with a picture:

U.S. Air Force, Capt. Christopher Stricklin ejects from a USAF Thunderbirds F-16 less than a second before it impacted the ground at an air show at Mountain Home Air Force Base.

Update: download the very cool in-cockpit video here [4.5MB]

Former Sex Pistols star John Lydon will not be allowed to return to I'm a Celebrity... Get Me Out of Here! after storming off the jungle contest in the middle of the night, throwing the show into a temporary crisis.

ITV bosses have been forced into emergency action and are working out a damage limitation plan to plug the gap left by Lydon, who was the favourite to win the show.

Lydon, who sparked almost 100 complaints earlier this week after calling the audience "fucking cunts" for not voting him off, walked out after launching another four-letter rant and starting a fire on the edge of the camp in protest at the lack of food.

He told programme-makers he was "bored" and "wanted some chocolate".

He is now holed up in a luxury hotel on the Gold Coast and will be barred from returning to the set.

Scientists have successfully extracted monkey sperm from mice who have monkey balls grafted onto them.

Bush's budget for 2005 is $2,400,000,000,000. This is roughly $20 for every human who has ever lived.

Of this $512,000,000,000 is to be borrowed from the rest of the world. This is roughly the amount as the USA spends on it's military machine. The world is loaning the USA the money with which to terrorise, exploit or bully them with.

Even when adjusted for inflation this is more than the cumulative total the USA government spent between 1787 and 1900.

During the Superbowl half time, ironically during Justin Timberlake's lyric of "I'm gonna get you naked by the end of this song."
A setup? I think so - who would wear this otherwise? What will has-been singers resort to next in an attempt for publicity?

A man in North Carolina is still in prison for stealing a television in 1970 - his first and only conviction.
Junior Allen, 63, says he has applied again to the North Carolina Parole Commission for release following 25 straight rejections.

The internals of deltanine have had a revamp to make editing the code easier, while functionality has remained the same. Major improvements have been made to the category, monthly and individual archives. Hopefully this will improve the "stickabilty" from people jumping into the middle of an archive from Google, and improve overall navigation.