- How was your Thanksgiving meal? However good or bad it may have been, there is no doubt that it had to be more appetizing than the meal a Pakistani woman is accused of cooking up earlier this week. Zainab Bibi, a resident of the southern city of Karachi, was allegedly facing a difficult situation with her husband. She claims he wanted a physical relationship with their daughter and rather than allow him to commit that incestuous act, she elected to cook herself a little man flesh stew - using her husband as the main ingredient. Bibi is being held on suspicion of killing her husband, cutting him up and trying to cook the pieces, Karachi police said Friday. She was arrested in connection with the murder Ahmad Abbas and her nephew, Zaheer Ahmed, is accused of helping Bibi stab Abbas to death and carve his body into small pieces. The best part of the story is unquestionably the fact that Bibi isn't protesting her innocence of claiming she has been set up or framed. She spoke to Pakistani domestic satellite channel ARY News from the police station where she is being held and in an interview broadcast late Thursday, she claimed to have killed her husband because of his planned incest and was adamant that she did not regret her actions. "I killed my husband before he dared to touch my daughter," she declared. But why not off her husband and bury him in some remote mountain area where he would decompose in isolation, never to be found? Police said she wanted to cook her husband's body parts so she could dispose of them without being caught. The plan might have worked if not for the fact that cooking man flesh stew tends to create a rather pungent odor and neighbors became suspicious when they caught the foul scent wafting through the air. That holiday fruitcake Aunt Irene brought to the family Thanksgiving dinner doesn’t sound so bad now, does it……………
- Chicago Cubs pitcher Carlos Zambrano cannot catch a break. Except in this case, that’s a positive. After another controversial, injury-shortened season full of tantrums, outbursts and ugly incidents in which he won just nine games, Zambrano headed south to his native Venezuela to play for Caribes de Anzoategui in the Venezuelan Winter League. Many major leaguers play winter ball in the Caribbean even though they obviously have some additional injury risk in so doing, so Zambrano isn't doing anything out of the ordinary. But even in playing winter ball, the man known as Big Z can't avoid trouble. He is recovering Saturday after being hit in the face with a line drive during Friday night's start for Caribes de Anzoategui. Zambrano was removed from the game after the liner hit him below the right bottom lip in the fifth inning and received 16 stitches to close the wound at a local hospital. "He's a bull," Caribes general manager Sam Moscatel said. "He's OK. We spoke (Friday) night after he had the surgery, and he said he wants to make his next start on Friday." Despite that wish to make his next start, Zambrano will remain sidelined for now and will not start another game until Dec. 6. He was actually pitching extremely well in the Venezuelan Winter League prior to being dotted by the line drive, compiling a 3.29 ERA and 12/6 K/BB ratio in 13 2/3 innings over his first three winter league outings. Perhaps it is the motivation of meeting with new Cubs president of baseball operations Theo Epstein in Chicago and being informed that he will have to “earn his way back” to staying with the team for the final guaranteed year of a five-year, $91 million contract that has led to Zambrano’s mini-turnaround. Now if he could only stop batters from turning around his pitches and sending them back into his face………….
- Wow……shocking news from the music world. Two of the biggest hacks in all of the business released new albums within the past week and neither Rihanna nor Mary J. Blige are off to a resounding start. Early figures for Rihanna’s new album, Talk That Talk, are down significantly from her equally crappy previous album Loud, which managed to move more than 207,000 copies in its first week. This time around, Rihanna’s digitially enhanced, auto-tuned, synthesized, over-produced musical drivel sold just under 180,000 copies for its first week and although it did land at No. 2 on the (utterly meaningless) Billboard Top 200 charts, the decline from her last album is noteworthy because its lead single “We Found Love” has been popular on lame Top 40 stations that don’t actually give a damn about good music and simply pander to the crappy musical tastes of the general public. The single has also been well-received on iTunes, but it was not enough to keep Rihanna from losing out on the top spot on the Billboard 200 chart to…….the Bick! That’s right, Bickelnack, a.k.a. Nickelhack, a.k.a. Nickelback! The Bick will be taking the top stop on the Billboard Charts with their latest release, Here and Now, which somehow sold over 225,000 copies. That’s a lot of gag gift for white elephant Christmas gift exchanges, to be sure. Coincidentally, Rihanna’s albums and number two fit very well together, if you caught that bathroom-humor pun. Compared to R&B crooner Mary J. Blige, however, Rihanna may as well be double platinum already. Blie, whose last album, Stronger With Each Tear, sold over 332,000 copies in its first week back in December 2009, sold less than 140,000 units in the first week of release for her new album, My Life II…The Journey. Even a slight jolt from Black Friday sales (because who wasn’t in line getting pepper-sprayed, Tased or stomped half to death because the one item they wanted was the newest Rihanna or Mary J. Blige album), neither of these ladies is likely to register as anything other than the disappointments they are in general when it comes to their first-week sales………….
- The effects of changing atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) levels on global temperatures: Important topic or totally overblown? If a new study is legit, those effects are substantially less than what science previously believed. Lead author Andreas Schmittner of Oregon State University and his team said people should still expect to see "drastic changes" in climate worldwide, but that the risk was a little less imminent than previously thought. Previous climate models have relied on meteorological measurements from the past 150 years to estimate the climate's sensitivity to rising CO2, but this approach makes it difficult for scientists to narrow their projections down to a single figure with any certainty. Instead, such models typically produce projections of a range of temperatures that scientists expect given a doubling of atmospheric CO2 from pre-industrial levels. Using palaeoclimate data incorporated into existing models, Schmittner and his team then attempted to project future temperatures with more certainty. Schmittner explained that by looking at surface temperatures during the most recent ice age - 21,000 years ago - when humans were having no impact on global temperatures, his team was able to show that this period was not as cold as previous estimates suggest.
"This implies that the effect of CO2 on climate is less than previously thought," he said. By mixing this newly discovered "climate insensitivity" into their models, the international team was also able to reduce uncertainty in its future climate projections. The new models predict that given a doubling in CO2 levels from pre-industrial levels, surface temperatures will increase by 3.1 degrees to 4.7 degrees Fahrenheit. That range is much smaller than the one produced by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's 2007 report, which projected a rise of as much as 5 degrees Fahrenheit. However, the results do not mean threat from human-induced climate change should be treated any less seriously, explained palaeoclimatologist Antoni Rosell-Mele from the Autonomous University of Barcelona, who is a member of the research team. "At least, given that no one is doing very much around the planet [about] mitigating CO2 emissions, we have a bit more time," he pointed out. Climatologists surveyed about the study’s results generally fell on the side of caution in assessing the seriousness with which it should be weighed. Most suggested more research (shocker) to verify its conclusions. To learn more and draw your own conclusions, peruse the latest issue of the journal Science…………..
- Animals are raging back against endurance athletes, but no one has yet explained why. The trend first came to light when an epic YouTube video surfaced of a wild antelope in South Africa absolutely OWNED mountain biker Evan van der Spuy of Team Jeep South Africa at the Time Freight Express MTB race at Albert Falls Dam. The vide quickly went viral and with good reason, as the sight of the antelope coming from the right side of the screen, leaping to decimate van der Spuy and leaving the rider in a crumpled heap on the ground is still just as awesome nearly two months later. The wild beast rage crossed the Atlantic Ocean on Thanksgiving, as two runners in a 5K race in Savannah, Ga. were on the receiving end of a hard collision with a renegade deer. At Savannah Christian Church's Ten Can 5K race, runners showed up ready to compete and also ready to help out the less fortunate with donations of canned food. Nearly 350 runners took part in the race, but only two of them were injured when a deer came running from a wooded area onto the course and knocked them to the ground. Both runners were bruised and suffered a few cuts to their hands and arms, but were able to get back up and finish the race. They crossed the finish line, received their race t-shirts and did their part to support a worthy cause. "I think probably a historic event for races in Savannah. We had two runners who were taken down by some deer. It was very scary. They had some nice bruises and cuts to go with it but I think they are okay but very sad they didn't get to finish the race," said Dan Pavlin, race director. Yeah, it’s fine for you, Dan-O. You’re just the race director and not an endurance athlete who must now live in fear that a deer, antelope or wildebeest will come sprinting from the underbrush looking to truck you on your long run or ride……………
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