Oddities and Humor

I believe aliens likely are out there, somewhere. I just don't see that they visit our planet.

Watch a Cute, Short Animation About Parallel Parking
http://nymag.com/daily/entertainment/2010/09/watch_a_cute_short_animation_a.html?mid=agenda--20100908#comment_list_bottom

Al-l-l-lll righty.

Good evening Sir EB.

Good evening. Here is hoping you are well and all that good bologna.

From Need to Know
on PBS

A Massachusetts-based company claims that government agencies here and abroad have purchased hundreds of its van-mounted X-ray devices that reveal the contents of passing vehicles without authorities relying on a manual search to find human stowaways, secret compartments full of narcotics or bomb ingredients.

An executive of American Science & Engineering told Forbes privacy writer Andy Greenberg late last month that the X-ray scanners are most popular with the Defense Department, a fact borne out by federal contracting data. Troops face insurgent bomb architects in Iraq and Afghanistan capable of stymieing the world’s most powerful armed forces with crude, MacGyver-style explosives, so vehicle X-ray technology in a place like Baghdad makes sense.

But marketing vice president Joe Reiss said they’re also being snapped up by law enforcement officials here, another fact supported by public records, which list at least five major federal agencies including the Department of Homeland Security as purchasers of the equipment, in addition to the Pentagon. “This product is now the largest selling cargo and vehicle inspection system ever,” Reiss boasted to Forbes.

Drilling deeper, the transcript of a February earnings conference call shows that company CEO Anthony Fabiano told investors AS&E had sold its first vehicle X-ray scanner “to a state government for law enforcement applications. That’s a U.S. state.” Additional details are scant.

The same privacy defenders who refer to full-body airport scanners as “virtual strip searches,” like Marc Rotenberg of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, are asking similar questions about whether the common use by law enforcement of so-called Z Backscatter Vans would comply with the Constitution.


Video depicting vehicle X-ray scanners in operation.

Airport scanners see underneath the clothing of travelers, and for that the government needs a warrant, Rotenberg argues. Like other probing surveillance technologies, penetrating vehicles at random regardless of whether the driver and passengers are believed to have done anything wrong turns the legal notion of probable cause on its head. The machines are also able to store images long-term, unlike what the Transportation Security Administration has promised of full-body systems.

A public relations group associated with a group of carrot farmers have instituted a bizarre, sophisticated, and very expensively produced marketing blitz campaign advertising 'baby' carrots to a young crowd.
http://nymag.com/daily/entertainment/2010/09/see_the_awesome_new_commercial.html?mid=agenda--20100909

Their tying tag line... "Baby carrots — eat 'em like junk food."

CINCINNATI — Amanda Parker-Wolery was 8 when, on a family vacation in Washington, D.C., her family stumbled upon a battered briefcase filled with World War II memorabilia near the Lincoln Memorial.

Two decades later, Parker-Wolery still remembers how her stomach knotted at the idea of somebody desperately searching for the love letters, old maps and photos that were stuffed inside. Her family unsuccessfully tried for more than a year to find the owner.

Life shoved the mystery to the back burner.

She grew up. Her mother died of cancer. She got married.

But Parker-Wolery never forgot about the bag.

"I always had a feeling in my stomach that this was somebody's life and it doesn't belong to us," said Parker-Wolery, an art teacher who lives in Cincinnati.

Over Labor Day weekend, while cleaning out a shed at her father's home in Mayville, N.Y., where he moved after his wife's death, Parker-Wolery uncovered the silver-buckled, black, plastic briefcase.

It was musty and falling apart. But, the contents remained unscathed.

"It always stuck with me as something I had to do, find the owner," Parker-Wolery said.

This time — thanks to the Internet — it took less than an hour to find Deborah Dean, a 57-year-old Texan and the daughter of the briefcase's owner, Gerald J. Amirault. He died in 1989.

Parker-Wolery called Dean last Saturday.

Dean said she's still in shock.

"I thought I'd never see it again," said Dean, of Hurst, Texas. "The police told me I probably wouldn't either." But the briefcase is in the mail, sent by Parker-Wolery on Wednesday.

The saga started in 1990.

After Amirault died, Dean and her family trekked across the country to Maine, to visit her aunt. Dean hoped she could shed some light on the woman who wrote the love letters to Dean's father.

On the way there, the family stopped in Washington, D.C., where their car was broken into. The thieves took everything — the family's $2,500 in travelers checks, their clothes and the briefcase.

The family still went to Maine, but without being able to look at the documents or pictures, her father's sister couldn't help.

Over the years, Dean has tried to track her father's history, but the job proved impossible. Everything she knew about her father's past was in that briefcase. He never spoke of the war. All she knew was that he served on the front lines in Europe.

Meanwhile, unable to find the owner, Parker-Wolery's mother tucked the briefcase away. She died of cancer 11 years ago. It was put into a Rubbermaid tub, carted to one house and then another. And then to that house's shed.

Parker-Wolery uncovered it while sorting her mother's belongings. She turned to her dad and vowed to find the owner.

After driving back to Ohio last Saturday, she spread the contents of the briefcase on her living room floor.

There were maps of Europe, yellowed, curling at the edges.

A faded black-and-white photo of a young man. The photo wasn't dated.

A luggage tag, suggesting he carried that briefcase with him while in Europe.

And then there were the letters — written in French and broken English over the course of 1945 — from Marie Cleuet. They're long, filled with longings to see Amirault, but also of mundane day-to-day activities.

The two perhaps had an affair, though she talks about her husband and being pregnant with a son. She called Amirault, "my love." She fretted when too long went by between letters, fearful he was angry with her. She talked of wanting to meet up with him in France.

On May 31, 1945, she wrote, "It is a very great pleasure to read your letters and know you are for me. I certainly wish very much to see you very soon."

Parker-Wolery feared over time she had romanticized the contents of the briefcase, her little girl sensibilities turning the story into a fairy tale. But, now she knows there was a mystery woman and some sort of love story.

She searched for clues that would lead her to the briefcase's owner.

Inside was a list of Amirault family names, notations from Dean who was trying to sort out her father's history. And the death certificate, which described Amirault as a sheet metal worker who was born in Fort Worth. He died of a heart attack in April 1989.

It was the most recent document and it had a Hurst, Texas, address on it.

Parker-Wolery tried Facebook first, thinking the name was so unusual the search would turn up just a few results.

She got 600.

She then typed that address into the Internet white pages. Up popped Dean, who moved into her father's home after he died.

"I know this is going to sound weird..." Parker-Wolery's message started.

Dean called right back.

She knew just what briefcase Parker-Wolery was referring to.

"I am just ecstatic," Dean said. "I can't wait to get it back."

Wednesday, Parker-Wolery looked through the letters one last time, brown packing paper and a box waiting nearby.

"I almost don't want to let it go because it's become part of my family history," Parker-Wolery said. "But the truth is I have to let it go, it's not ours."

Parker-Wolery slowly bundled the letters in twine, placing them back inside the plastic case.

On top she tucked a letter to Dean.

In it, she apologizes for taking so long to get the contents back to her. And she wrote: "Thank you for sharing your family's memories with me."

___

I don't get it.

Sure, humor is about something different from what is expected, but ham?

The Cowboys made the game winning touchdown the last play of the game last night. But lost the points on a foul. Redskins finally win.

Since the beginning of the Obama presidency, right-wing media -- especially those who work at Fox News -- have been carrying out a campaign of not-so-subtle race-baiting.

Today, Fox News contributor Newt Gingrich took this campaign to new levels, reportedly telling the National Review that Obama has pretended to be "normal" but that Obama actually seems to be engaged in "Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior":

Citing a recent Forbes article by Dinesh D'Souza, former House speaker Newt Gingrich tells National Review Online that President Obama may follow a "Kenyan, anti-colonial" worldview.

Gingrich says that D'Souza has made a "stunning insight" into Obama's behavior -- the "most profound insight I have read in the last six years about Barack Obama."

"What if [Obama] is so outside our comprehension, that only if you understand Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior, can you begin to piece together [his actions]?" Gingrich asks. "That is the most accurate, predictive model for his behavior."

"This is a person who is fundamentally out of touch with how the world works, who happened to have played a wonderful con, as a result of which he is now president," Gingrich tells us.

"I think he worked very hard at being a person who is normal, reasonable, moderate, bipartisan, transparent, accommodating -- none of which was true," Gingrich continues. "In the Alinksy tradition, he was being the person he needed to be in order to achieve the position he needed to achieve . . . He was authentically dishonest."
http://mediamatters.org/blog/201009120001

Here's one particularly inflammatory portion of what Gingrich calls D'Souza's "stunning insight":

Incredibly, the U.S. is being ruled according to the dreams of a Luo tribesman of the 1950s. This philandering, inebriated African socialist, who raged against the world for denying him the realization of his anticolonial ambitions, is now setting the nation's agenda through the reincarnation of his dreams in his son. The son makes it happen, but he candidly admits he is only living out his father's dream. The invisible father provides the inspiration, and the son dutifully gets the job done. America today is governed by a ghost.

A Texas mother is outraged after her son was accused of using marijuana by high school officials.

Their only evidence: The boy's bloodshot eyes, two days after the death of his father.

Kyler Robertson, a junior at Byron Nelson High School, was suspended for three days and transferred to an alternative school until January.

This is fun!

Is that a little sign language bit at the end?

Hand Jive, Macarena style.

Odd. Certainly not humerous. Related to BP oil disaster? No one has investigated to find out. This is a fish kill in Louisiana.

Ernest Withers is known as the official photographer of the Civil Rights movement, but a new investigation by the Memphis Commercial Appeal newspaper reveals he was also a spy for the FBI -- informing on the thoughts and movements of Martin Luther King Jr. and others. Earl Caldwell,who knew Withers, offers his insight. Caldwell is a professor at the Hampton University's Scripps Howard School of Journalism and Communications in Hampton, Va.

Slate’s Pop-Tarts BLT Doesn’t Actually Look So Terrible
http://newyork.grubstreet.com/2010/09/slates_pop-tarts_blt_doesnt_ac.html?e=grubstreet--20100914

It doesn't?

I'm just the messenger! Don't shoot me!