Saturday, January 28, 2012

Riot Watch! Senegal, uber-hot lasers and people marrying buildings

- When Republican presidential candidate Mitt “Dry Toast” Romney declared corporations were people, it was bound to inspire something idiotic because that statement itself was idiotic. One of the ass hats Romney inspired with his words is Seattle resident Babylonia Aivaz, who has carefully pondered the former Massachusetts governor’s words and decided that if corporations are people, so are more tangible inanimate objects. "If corporations can have the rights as people, so can buildings," Aivaz proclaimed. To demonstrate her love of buildings, she’s planning to “marry” a 107-year-old warehouse that sits at 10th and Union in the Capitol Hill neighborhood. Her “wedding” is to take place Sunday and Aivaz describes her union of woman and storage structure as "a gay marriage" that will show how much she cares for it and doesn’t respect the Supreme Court’s opinion that corporations are entitled to same of the same rights as human beings when it comes to political advertising and free speech. . "I'm doing this to show the building how much I love it, how much I love community space and how much I love this neighborhood. And I want to stop it from gentrification,” she said. The warehouse has been scheduled for demolition for some time and was supposed to begin next week. However, demolition crews began their work on Thursday and when Aivaz learned demolition work was under way, she rushed over to the site and changed into her wedding dress on the street. Letting her kook flag fly, she began climbing on the crew’s equipment and trying to get in the way of the demolition. Minutes later she departed, telling a news photographer she had to get to work. She has since extended a Facebook invitation to the public to attend her planned wedding on Sunday. "Yes, I'm in love with a 107 year old building! Yes, ITS A GAY MARRIAGE! How is that possible? Well there must obviously be a deeper story," she wrote on the wedding’s Facebook page. Aivaz has been fighting for the warehouse’s right to exist for weeks now and back in December, she and 16 other "activists" linked arms and occupied the warehouse "for a cause in which we believed strongly. That cause was COMMUNITY SPACE." An apartment building is planned for the site once the warehouse is torn down…………


- Hypocrisy is a word that does not seem to be in the vocabulary of quintessential pageant mom/attention whore Susanna Barrett. Barrett, whose daughter Isabella appears on TLC’s deplorable reality series “Toddlers & Tiaras,” has filed a lawsuit against TMZ, Huffington Post and Daily Mail Online, among other media outlets, for running stories that she alleges “sexualize” her 5-year-old daughter, according to court documents. Susanna Barrett does not appear to have any compunctions about accusing others of sexualizing her kindergarten-age daughter despite being the one who allowed that same little girl to sing LMFAO’s “Sexy and I Know It” at an event. Hey pot, it’s kettle. “After this firestorm, I quickly protected my daughter by having cease and desist orders sent to most media outlets that ran the story,” Barrett fumed. “I intend to clear my daughter’s name.” Words fail on occasions like this, when a person is so directly engaged in an activity and excoriates others for commenting on what he or she is doing, then accuses those other people for being guilty of the original offense. In the video, Isabella is shown singing along to “Sexy and I Know It” at a DJ booth with a microphone in her hand. The controversy ensued when several media outlets reported that the Barrett’s were at a nightclub. Susanna Barrett claimed she and her daughter were actually at “a pet friendly charity event at an American bistro restaurant in New York City at 7:19 p.m. It was a private well-lit event with vendor tables and pets in attendance.” Vendor tables, pets and a mother who clearly doesn’t understand the meaning of sexualizing a child because if she did, she’d see a prime example of it in the mirror……….


- Looking for a chance to throw away millions of dollars while contributing to one of the most unnecessary phenomena in sports? If so, step up and make your offer now to be the next sponsor of the event formerly known as the Insight Bowl. One of college football’s whopping 35 bowl games, the Insight Bowl has been sponsored by Tempe-based Insight Enterprises Inc. since 1997, but the tech company has allowed its sponsorship contract to expire. Bowl officials are now seeking a replacement for this year's game and the search shouldn’t be a long one because who isn't eager to throw down a few million dollars to sponsor a contest between two middling football teams? In this case, those teams are the third-place team from the Big 12 against the third- or fourth-place team from the Big Ten Conference, after BCS selections are made. This past season’s Insight Bowl pitted Oklahoma against Iowa on Dec. 30, with the Sooners defeating the Hawkeyes 31-14. Anyone looking to become the game’s next title sponsor will need fairly deep pockets, as the Insight Bowl increased its payout to participating teams to $6.65 million two years ago. The game was first played in 1989 as the Copper Bowl but if it cannot find a new sponsor, it may soon become the D.O.A. Bowl……….


- Riot Watch! Riot Watch! Senegal has missed out on the unrest in Africa and the Middle East over the past year, but no more. The country’s opposition vowed Saturday to force President Abdoulaye Wade out of office as massive riots rocked the capital city of Dakar following a decision by the Senegal’s top court that the octogenarian could run for a third term. Riot police patrolled the area around the presidential palace and blocked off streets after opposition groups threatened to march on the palace after a night of what local media described as "fire and blood" in which rioters killed one policeman. It was truly an inspiring scene to see still-smoldering debris littered all over streets in downtown Dakar, reminders of the running battles with police, overturning and burning of cars, torching of tires and general property destruction of the night before. The working class suburb of Colobane saw some of the most violent clashes after a mass opposition gathering turned confrontational. Shops were looted and torched and the entire scene was the result of the Constitutional Council giving Wade, 85, the green light to run in Feb. 26 polls. Opposition groups anticipated the ruling and had their plans to riot locked and loaded once it became official. Predictably, Wade dismissively told his opponents to stop throwing "temper tantrums.” Those weren't temper tantrums, Abdoulaye, those were some epic riots. The chief organizer for the riots was the June 23 Movement of opposition, which called Friday's rally and urged Senegalese to march on the presidential palace in downtown Dakar. Spokesman Abdoul Aziz Diop issued the rallying cry, saying M23 "calls on the Senegalese people to mobilise and march on the Presidential Palace and remove Wade who is squatting there." Characterizing the president as a squatter, that’s solid. Diop reiterated his call Saturday and said opposition leaders deliberated “all night on the best way to organize a response," possibly more riots. Presidential spokesman Serigne Mbacke Ndiaye agitated the opposition further by insisting in a radio interview that Wade’s administration would challenge several opposition candidacies. Overall, the five-judge council approved a list of 14 contenders but rejected the candidacy of music icon Youssou Ndour, depriving the election of some much-needed star power even though he stunned the African music world when he announced this month he was quitting singing for politics. Wade’s candidacy is controversial because when he was elected in 2000 for a seven-year mandate there was no term-limit in the constitution, but one year into his term he revised the laws instituting the two-term limit and reducing the mandate to five years. After securing re-election in 2007, he rewrote the constitution again, reverting to a seven-year mandate, renewable once. However, he argues that the law does not apply retroactively and that he is thus due two seven-year terms from 2012. Sounds like a wonderful reason to riot………..


- Let’s face it, world: We just can't heat things up to quite the extreme temperatures we’d like. Microwaves are nice and ovens are awesome, but what if you want to heat, say, a sheet of aluminum up to temperatures of 3.6 million degrees Fahrenheit — hotter than the sun’s corona? Now you can, thanks to the hard work of scientists at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory at Stanford University. By focusing rapid-fire pulses from the beam on a piece of aluminum foil thinner than spider’s silk, these brilliant scientific minds were able to achieve the extreme temperatures and in turn create a material known as hot dense matter. Their achievement marks the first time researchers have been able to produce such plasmas in a controlled way. Hot dense matter is some of the most extreme material in the universe and is not commonly found on this side of the ozone layer (or what remains of it). It is typically found only in the hearts of stars and giant gas planets. Creating a sample of it should allow the SLAC team to further research the material and gain insights to help them create better models of its behavior. If properly utilized, it could also theoretically allow them to roast an entire pig for their annual luau party in .0000000000000001 seconds, give or take a bit. Read more about their white-hot research in the Jan. 25 edition of the journal Nature………

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