@chai2,
Well, we know now what to stock in our bombshelter.
Don't know why they labeled it 'disapproving' rabbit. Oh, well. Neat video.
@edgarblythe,
I believe he's the starring bunny of a humor page which depicts all bunnies as a disproving and puritanical lot:
http://www.disapprovingrabbits.com/
Jay Coberly has faced many indignities in his 93 years.
He bounced off the roof of a barn and landed in a pig pen after his plane was shot down over Schweinfurt, Germany, in 1943. He lost 30 pounds during two years as a POW at Stalag Luft III, the camp depicted in the movie The Great Escape. He’s dug through trash for food, eaten barley soup with his hands and slept in ankle-deep cow manure.
So Coberly couldn’t help but laugh this week when a hostess at Wolfgang Puck’s Five Sixty restaurant told him and five other war veterans they didn’t look good enough to visit the high-end downtown Dallas eatery -- a rotating dining room atop Reunion Tower, 560 feet above the city.
She said the men’s unit baseball caps, POW T-shirts and shorts did not meet the restaurant’s “business casual” dress code. “I figure if I spent two years in a POW camp, I could have handled the privilege of sitting in that fancy restaurant a few minutes,” said Coberly, a member of the Second Schweinfurt Memorial Association and a bombardier with the decorated 8th Army Air Force, known as the Mighty 8th.
Coberly chuckled at the woman’s prim-and-proper approach.
“We weren’t dressed like hobos. We were just dressed comfortably,” said Coberly, a graduate of the Wharton School of business and a retired hospital administrator from Maryland.
“We’ve been all over the country, and we’ve never had this kind of problem. Dallas must be a first-class town.”
The six veterans -- most in their late 80s or early 90s -- took the rejection in stride as they shuffled back to their tour bus Tuesday. One cracked, “We’re still troublemakers.” Another said, “Just call us the dirty dozen.”
But the men’s wives and children didn’t take the snub so lightly.
They confronted the hostess, reminding her of the military men’s service and sacrifice.
“Do you realize these veterans fought for your freedom and your way of life and you can’t see your way clear to let them up to get a view of the city?” said Michelle Northrop, Coberly’s daughter. “I mean, we weren’t going to be there longer than 45 minutes.”
Northrop said the woman was polite but firm.
“My honest opinion is she was too young to be able to think on her feet,” said Northrop. “She was doing her job, she was professionally dressed and she was not being obnoxious. She was trained well, but this was not an empowered young woman. I’m not sure it ever occurred to her to say, ‘Let me go talk to my manager.’ “
If she had, the veterans would have been admitted to the restaurant without question, said Stephanie Davis, director of communications for the Wolfgang Puck Fine Dining Group.
Everyone involved agreed the hostess made a mistake. What’s in dispute is whether the men identified themselves as veterans.
“If they had explained who they were and what they were doing, it would not have happened,” she said. “It was a mistake and we’re apologetic.”
The restaurant’s general manager, Marcus Cascio, sent the group two bottles of Scotch, a written apology and an invitation to return to the restaurant.
Even Dallas Mayor Tom Leppert got into the action.
He sent each man a letter that concluded, “Again, welcome to Dallas. I’m sure you will enjoy our Southern hospitality.”
The further into it I got the more hilarious it became.
FRAMINGHAM, Mass. — A Massachusetts man is facing an assault charge for allegedly hitting a town hall custodian on the back of the head with a roll of toilet paper because he was angry the cleaning man was whistling while he worked.
Framingham police say 55-year-old Allen Kerner was in town hall Wednesday using the bathroom. The custodian, who didn't realize anyone was in the restroom, whistled as he replenished toilet paper rolls.
The custodian told police he was in a stall when he was struck. Kerner yelled at him about whistling and fled. The custodian pursued him, and Kerner was apprehended by police outside.
Police tell The MetroWest Daily News that Kerner will be summoned to court to face an assault and battery charge. A phone number for Kerner could not immediately be located
@edgarblythe,
That's my former hometown! I remember such squeezably soft quilted violence in my childhood!
@tsarstepan,
Toilet paper - The New Weapon of Choice
@edgarblythe,
How the innocent were wounded in the driveby TPing!
@Ceili,
At least you spared us the one in which he is a zombie.
@edgarblythe,
I just saw that one after Ceili's video ended.
I had to turn it off. Acting and production values so bad it would make the people who give out the Razzies cry in shame.
Email doing the rounds.
The first owner of the Marlboro Company died of lung cancer.
So did the first 'Marlboro Man'.
A duck's quack doesn't echo,
and no one knows why.
Venus is the only planet that rotates clockwise.
(Since Venus is normally associated with women, what does this tell you
Try to buy some concert tickets or create a new e-mail account, and you're usually confronted with a puzzle of sorts.
A box appears with a distorted word — that sometimes isn't even a word — and you have to re-type it. If you tilt your head or squint your eyes, you can usually just make it out.
That's the point, of course. The puzzles are called CAPTCHAs, and a human can decipher them but a computer can't. It's a way to thwart bad guys from, say, creating hundreds of fake e-mail addresses to spam you from. Or buying up all the tickets to that concert you want to see. But the spammers have found a low-cost, low-tech way around the device — human beings.
Spammers and mass-ticket purchasers have outsourced CAPTCHA solving to teams of low-wage workers in places like Russia and Southeast Asia. Many of them don't even speak English. They don't have to, according to Stefan Savage.
"The beauty of most modern CAPTCHAs is that they simply take Latin characters — so they don't actually need to understand what the words mean — they simply need to be able to look at the symbols and type the appropriate ones on their keyboard," he says.
Savage is a professor in the department of computer science and engineering at the University of California San Diego. He recently co-wrote a paper on the economics of this underground CAPTCHA trade.
Savage tells NPR's Liane Hansen that these CAPTCHA-solving teams are "effectively sweatshop labor, where people will just sit and be given these images to solve and will type them in all day."
Despite a lack of English-language skills, the workers are fast. "Generally speaking, [they] can turn around a CAPTCHA in between 10 and 20 seconds. They're probably a little better at it than we are, because they do it all day," Savage says.
The faster they are, the better — because the going rate is about 75 cents per 1,000 CAPTCHAs solved. "It's about $2 or $3 a day," Savage says.
"It's really in line with some of the lowest paid textile work around," he says, "although probably the quality of life is slightly better than being in a textile mill."
It's unclear if any laws are being broken by these CAPTCHA sweatshops. Savage says that there's nothing illegal about solving a CAPTCHA, even if what the solvers are doing supports fraudulent activity.
It does make you wonder why sites still bother with the cryptic fragments. Savage says even though CAPTCHAs don't ultimately prevent abuse, they still serve a purpose.
"On the one hand, CAPTCHAs do not keep the bad guys out, but at the same time, they actually are effective at keeping the problem in control," he says.
"So even at that very low cost," he says, "they have to be able to make enough money, send enough spam from each one of those accounts that it ends up being worthwhile. So even that very low drag turns out to be enough to weed out a huge number of the people who would play this game."
@tsarstepan,
If that guy's opponent wins, I will at least cry.
@dadpad,
Venus is the only planet that rotates clockwise.
This planet's rotation is part of the reason Velikovsky insisted that Venus originally was a comet, one that got caught in its present orbit after colliding with Earth. Not pushing Velikovsky, just commenting.
In the last hour, I came around the house to find Punky, trying to catch something in a hollow where at its base a tree branches its roots. It was a coral snake. I shooed the dog away. What to kill it with? A wind chime made up of a series of pipes had fallen within arm's reach of the very spot. It was no trick to trap it with one pipe and to repeatedly strike its head with another. I tossed it over the gate to keep it out of Punky's reach and went to the computer to verify, ala Google Images, that it was indeed poisonous. Yep. Red touching only yellow. I gathered the body in a plastic bag, wanting to show my neighbor that I had caught it. Hopefully, it is one and the same as the snake she described from a sighting, last week.
I am not proud to have killed the snake. I would prefer to have trapped it and let it go in the pine forest. But, it would have eluded me if I had approached it differently.
