- Mountainous areas often have “Beware of falling rock”
signs. One might imagine that no place in the world has a “Beware of falling
cows” sign. The village of Caratinga in southeastern Brazil may want to consider such signage
after one of its residents died after a 3000-pound cow crashed through the roof
of his house and crushed him. Joao Maria de Souza was reportedly sleeping with
his wife when the animal dropped right through the corrugated asbestos roof of
his home. How did a cow end up on a man’s roof? That’s simple:
The cow is believed to have escaped from a nearby farm, before it climbed
on top the home, which backs onto a steep hill. Cows are notorious for
disregarding structural safety and integrity, so this cow obviously saw nothing
wrong with putting a man’s life and its own well-being in danger by clamoring
onto a roof not nearly sturdy enough to support its massive girth. The fall
wasn’t a long one, but plunging eight feet onto de Souza's side of the bed after
the roof buckled under its weight was enough to off the homeowner. His wife was
unharmed, but Souza was taken to hospital with a broken leg. His brother,
Carlos Correa de Souza, confirmed that Joao Maria de Souza later died from
internal bleeding. There may not be a manual for dealing with this sort of
situation, but the Civil Police of Caratinga in Vale do Rio Doce have announced
plans to open investigation into the circumstances of death. “I didn't bring my
son up to be killed by a falling cow," Souza’s mother, Maria de Souza,
said in one of the most obvious statements a person has made in a long time. He
nearly died when he was two and got meningitis, but I worked hard to buy
medicines for him and he survived. And now he's lying in his bed and gets
crushed to death by a cow. There's no justice in the world.” No justice, but
more than a few awkward laughs…….
- Kings of Leon have taken time off for one of their members
to go to rehab, returned and invited a drunk fan who naked crowd-surfed to meet
them backstage for a drink and apparently rediscovered their love for making a
sh*t-load of money and being famous – er, being a band and making music. So the
band’s members say of their new album “Mechanical Bull,” which apparently helped them fall
in love with being a band again. Part of the allure for the album may have been
recording in their own studio for the first time, a decision frontman Caleb
Followill said should have been made much sooner. "The pressure was really
off of us on this last one. We were our own bosses. There were no bills because
we bought the studio ourselves, there was no timeframe when it had to be done
by,” Followill explained. "It feels like it's a shame that we waited so
long to do it. We can go in there and rehearse or goof off." Bandmate
Matthrew Followill sounded equally happy with how the recording process went
and with being back in the studio after a prolonged time away from music. “Us
being able to take a break, we kind of got to fall back in love with what we
loved about it in the first place, which was picking up your instruments and
playing and smiling onstage and actually having fun, and not feeling like it's
a job,” Matthew Followill said. Both man suggested that there was enough
leftover material from the project to start work immediately on another album. Oddly,
Caleb Followill seems to believe that the band’s previous album, “Come Around
Sundown,” was actually good and somehow takes pressure off them. Given that it
was actually a hot, poppy mess than had no rock credibility whatsoever, maybe
the opinions of Kings of Leon about their own music shouldn’t be taken as fact.
“Mechanical Bull” drops Sept. 24……..
- There be treasure in them waters….them waters being the
ones off of Florida’s Treasure Coast. Treasure hunter Brent
Brisben can prove it after he and the 1715 Treasure Fleet Queen's Jewels
salvage company found some very valuable needs in an ocean haystack in the form
of 48 gold coins that date back 300 years. The coins, called escudos, were
among the wealth of treasure aboard a fleet of 11 Spanish galleons wrecked by a
hurricane off the Florida coast on July 31, 1715. Most of the gold coins appear
to be in good condition, and still have some legible dates and markings. The
oldest of the lot dates back to 1697, while the newest is amazingly young with
a minting date of 1714. The 48 coins have an estimated value of $200,000 to
$250,000, Brisben said. What makes the find all the more amazing is that the
coins were found just 100 feet from the shoreline, in only six feet of water.
They were there for the taking for virtually any would-be treasure hunter with
a working metal detector in the Sunshine State, but Brisben says his work is
not nearly as thrilling as anything Nicolas Cage does on screen in his
crap-tacular blockbuster movies. "You may expect to see a big galleon on
its side with treasure chests overflowing, but it's not like that at all,"
Brisben said. "With shipwrecks that old, most of the organic material like
the actual wood of the ship is gone, due to deterioration. What's left are
mostly metals and pottery... china, silver buckles, bronze cannons and gold
coins." The gold coins will be put to immediate use,
with the 1715 Treasure Fleet Queen's
Jewels salvage company selling them off to private collectors and using the
money they make to finance further searching of the wreckage site………
- Google is upgrading again. This time, it’s the tech titan’s
Chrome
Web browser for iOS devices, which has been updated to include several enhanced
features, including data compression designed to speed up page loading. Google
has worked to reduce data consumption and improve the speed of Web performance
on mobile devices for months and at the company's I/O developers conference in
May, new file compression formats for images and video were announced for
Android-powered mobile devices. Those changes were based largely on capabilities
already present in Chrome for the desktop. Wednesday’s changes are noteworthy because
they take those same concepts and translate them to devices powered by Apple's
iOS. According to Google, the resulting data cost savings will both reduce data
usage and speed up page load times. Users will even be able to view their data
savings in the app's bandwidth management settings. Eventually, the changes
will apply to all users. The update also builds in interoperability with other
Google apps, giving users the option to open links for YouTube, Maps, Google+
and Google Drive in the app instead of in the browser. Its enhancements will
also provide text-to-speech for all variations of English, Spanish, German and
several other languages, along with allowing users to access their full browser
history to view a list of websites the person has visited while using Chrome in
standard mode. None of the features are exactly revolutionary, but most experts
have pointed to the expansion of the bandwidth management features as the most
important part of the update. Google Chrome has grabbed an increasingly large
share of the browser market in the past couple years and the number of Chrome
users has increased from 450 million per month at the time of last year’s I/O
conference to 750 million by the time this year’s event happened, according to
Google……..
- South Carolina defensive end and Heisman Trophy hopeful
Jadeveon Clowney is right. The man behind The Hit, a playing on which he nearly
decapitated Michigan's Vincent Smith and produced video footage that drew
millions of YouTube views, says Clemson's Tajh Boyd and three SEC quarterbacks are
"scared" to face him and the Gamecocks defensive line. Seeing Clowney
obliterate Smith with a helmet-popping smack, then reach out with one hand to
snare the ball, struck fear into the heart of anyone who saw it – regardless of
whether they would or could ever encounter Clowney on a football field. As
abrasive as it sounds for a player to boast about opponents being afraid of
him, Clowney is right – or at least he should be. "I can tell Tajh Boyd is scared back there," Clowney said.
"He ain't no sitting duck, but you can see in his eyes that he's scared of our D-linemen." When
South Carolina faced Clemson in its regular-season finale last year, Clowney
recorded a career-high 4.5 as the Gamecocks beat the Tigers 27-17 in Death
Valley. Boyd threw two interceptions and was sacked six times in the game and
appeared genuinely rattled for much of the game. "We know that coming into
the game that we have him shook already," Clowney explained. "We get
a couple hits on him and it changes the whole game. He's scared every time we
play them. I know he's probably listening to this right now, but I'm just
telling the truth, man." Whether Boyd is afraid of him or not, Clowney is
on the Lombardi and Bronko Nagurski watch lists and the 6-foot-6, 247-pound
freak of nature believes there are other quarterbacks in his own conference who
are wary of him. He named Georgia quarterback Aaron Murray, former Arkansas quarterback
Tyler Wilson and third, unidentified conference signal caller as those whose
nightmares he haunts. "You can look at a guy and tell that he's
scared," Clowney said. "If he's staring at me before the ball is
snapped and he's staring at me every play before the ball is snapped, oh we got
him. I tell the players that he's shook." Those quarterbacks probably wish
Clowney had been allowed to declare for April’s NFL draft, where he likely
would have been the top pick. Instead, NFL rules mandate that he wait one more
year and in the mean time, he’ll keep lighting suckers up……..
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