Take a Look at Your Kids Fingers

A new study has parents examining the length of their children's fingers to try to determine their academic potential.

A report in the British Journal of Psychology has concluded after studying 75 children that "boys whose index fingers were short compared with their ring fingers tended to excel at numbers and girls with index and ring fingers of similar length tended to do better on the verbal portion of the test".

They studied 75 children huh?  I'm glad they didn't knock themselves out with this study.  The article hints that some other studies have been done but they didn't really state any serious facts.

Before I go trying to stretch out Walter's ring fingers, or worry that they aren't quite long enough I think I'd really need more scientific evidence than a report based on the study of only 75 children. 

I think this report is basically worthless, but if you'd like to take a look here is the full story.   

Celebrity Brats

So I was over at The Inconvenient Truth and I read a post Leigh has written about how celebrities seem to be treated differently under the law than the rest of us. 

I for one am so tired of these celebrity brats getting away with light punishments.  For instance, have you heard that Paris Hilton's cellmate was hand picked for her?  They want to make sure Paris isn't photographed in prison either so all the prison employees have been told that if anyone dares photograph Paris Hilton while she is in jail they will be fired.  Well, I'd say a picture of Paris Hilton in jail would be worth a lot, a lot more than a prison guard's salary.  I'll be willing to bet that we WILL see a picture of Paris behind bars.  Wouldn't you think that a picture of Paris Hilton in an orange jumpsuit behind bars would bring HUGE money?  If I wee a guard there I'd certainly be smuggling in a camera!  The media will be hungry for a jailhouse portrait of Paris.

Also mentioned in Leigh's post is the fact that after a DUI wreck with cocain found in the vehicle that the driver is usually arrested, fingerprinted, has a mugshot taken and spends the night in jail until bail is set and paid.  Well, that's not what happened to Lindsay Lohan.  She had a wreck after a night of patying, left the scene of the accident and apparently forgot to take her cocaine out of the car.  Did she spend the night in jail?  No.  Did she have a mugshot or fingerprints taken when she got out of the hospital?  Apparently not.  She skipped off to rehab instead.  All sources say that her July 2 birthday bash is still on though, I guess that will be a good way of celebrating her stay at Promises rehab.

Here's a nice little video from TMZ.  It's Lindsay Lohan recording a Public Service Announcement… about the dangers of DRUNK DRIVING!  Apparently Lindsay thought the phrase "Don't drink and drive" was absolutely hilarious and couldn't stop laughing.  You can see that enchanting little piece of tv magic here.

I don't know who is more ridiculous.. Paris Hilton or Lindsay Lohan.  It's hard to tell.

Bloggers Making History With DonorsChoose.org

Teachers Ask, You Choose, Students Learn.  That's what it's all about!

BlogCatalog.com had a brilliant idea for a charity fundraising event to benefit DonorsChoose.org

Bloggers from all over are donating and asking their readers to also consider making a tax-deductible donation to the challenge which will raise money for students and schools in New Orleans and other parts of the country where teachers and kids need the most help.

The need is great and the cause is good.  Now we need your help.  You can choose which project you want to help fund and you can donate a little or a lot to help fulfill the projects in need.  I just donated to help the "Fun Friday" after school project which happens to be local to me.  There are lots of areas that need donations so please have a look and see if you could help out.  

Give a little, or a lot – Every donation brings us closer to the goal.

Click here to view the project

Also, I just have to say, I love Morgan Freeman.  He is a supporter of DonorsChoose.org, so we are in good company!

Gold Bathtub Worth $1 Million Stolen

I had no idea that a bathtub could be worth a million dollars, but apparently at a resort hotel in Japan had one.  It has been recently stolen.

Someone must have been sleeping on the job!  The bathtub weighed 176 pounds and was made of 18-karat gold plus it was on the 10th floor of the hotel.  So it's really not like someone wrapped it in a towel and carried it out or packed it in their luggage.  Right?

Get this, there's no video cameras at the hotel either.  So whoever stole the tub made a clean getaway! (Sorry, I couldn't resist).

It’s the Guns, Stupid!!

by guest blogger, Joe Hack

Some things happen with an inexorable inevitability, like the changing seasons or the tides of the sea or Britney doing something else weird, but perhaps the most predictable of all is otherwise normal Americans shooting holes in each other. Every year in excess of 30,000 Americans die because of guns and many thousands more are horribly injured. Every single day eight children lose their lives because of guns. Every year, sometimes several times a year, some deranged loony will take his gun down to the local mall or high-school and kill indiscriminately. Since President J F Kennedy was assassinated (with a gun) more Americans have died from guns in the USA than in all of Americas wars in the 20th century put together. Think about it. Osama Bin Laden would need to launch nine successful ‘twin-towers’ terrorist attacks just to equal what Americans do to themselves every single year with guns. Crazy or what ?

If you were a man from mars who’d suddenly landed your little spaceship in the USA and you heard people agonizing over the causes of the recent Virginia Tech shootings you might be forgiven for thinking .. ” Its the Guns Stupid !!” I mean, lets face if, if you don’t have a gun you can’t shoot anyone. Right ? But this is the big elephant squatting in the American living room. The blindingly obvious concept that no American politician dare acknowledge. Get rid of the guns. Why daren’t they touch this ? Because it would be political suicide, that’s why. There is a hugely rich and powerful gun-manufacturing industry ready and willing to pour millions of dollars into countering any tentative moves towards gun control. They see the problem not as being that there’s too many guns. Oh no, if there were *more* guns in private hands then that would be the necessary deterrent. Am I missing something ? The United States has the largest number of guns in private hands of any country in the world, with 60 million people owning a combined arsenal of over 200 million firearms. Read that again slowly. 200 million guns . More than enough for every man, woman, child and baby in the USA to be armed to the teeth. Fer chrissakes , how many more guns do the gun manufacturers think are needed (answer: as many as they can sell)

The arguments put forward, often by those interested in profiting from death and misery, seem facile and self serving, but lets examine them briefly:

- They plug into a fuzzy feeling of patriotism by asserting that the second amendment of the constitution enshrines a citizens right to ‘bear arms’. Well kind of, but even that 200 year-old document, written in a totally different world, said only that .. “A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the People to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed”. Got that ? A ‘well regulated militia’, like .. oh .. lets say the modern day local police forces ? Hmmm ? Certainly not every sad-sack psycho or inadequate who feels like a big man just because he’s got a bunch of killer automatic weapons stashed in his bedroom closet.

- They say that putting guns in the hands of private citizens allows them to defend themselves against the bad-guys. Bullshit! The number of times a gun-toting citizen shoots and kills a criminal who is threatening his life with a gun is *tiny*. Its the exception, rather than the rule. The vast majority of deaths by shooting are accidents or suicides or domestic arguments or drunken Saturday night brawls. The exact situations where people would have probably lived if there’d been no guns.

- They say that its not guns that kill, but people. Well duh ! The blindingly obvious fact is that if those people didn’t have guns their ability to kill would be seriously curtailed. Sure you can beat someone to death with your fists, but how much easier is it to just pull a trigger ? Sure people behave badly all the time. They yell and get drunk and have fist fights. They get cuts and lumps and bruises. But where guns are available, they kill each other.

- They say that gun control would be an ‘infringement of civil liberties’. Hmmm .. yeah right. An infringement on the right to make money from selling guns, more like. Lets be serious. We all live in a society in which we accept certain constraints in exchange for certain benefits. Some people, for example, might think the free trafficking of Heroin is desirable, but society as a whole disagrees. Society says that its so dangerous to us all that its sale must be illegal. Quite right too. The point is that we do, as a society, make decisions like that all the time. So there’s nothing to stop us deciding that guns do more harm than good and make them as illegal as heroin. Right ? And remember, guns kill far more citizens every year than heroin does.

- They say that gun control would leave only the bad guys with guns. Oh Boy. Well firstly, if it did, it wouldn’t be very successful gun control, would it ? Secondly, that’s what we pay the police for isn’t it ?. They’re the ‘well-ordered-militia’ that carries guns on our behalf and protects society. Thirdly, slap a mandatory life sentence on *anyone* (other than an authorized officer of the law) found with a gun, no exceptions, and that would pretty quickly take the gun-owners off the streets. And fourthly, Oh but this is just too dumb .. you really know the arguments for guns are tripe …don’t you ?

Frankly I don’t care much one way or the other. If a bunch of gullible people have been brainwashed by the propaganda of those who want to make money out of gun sales then I guess I’m not going to be able to dissuade them. If someone has been brought up on a steady diet of Hollywood movies and shoot-outs and cowboy myths then any injection of reality into their over-heated vigilante fantasies isn’t going to be welcome. As long as they stay well away from me and mine, then they can pick up their 200 million guns and blow holes in each other all day long. At least that’s what I feel like saying when faced with such destructive and irrational behavior. But the humanitarian in me (and he’s down in there somewhere, the irritating little bugger) says don’t give up on them just yet..

So hey folks, let me ask you this before I go. When will it be enough, do you think ? When will there be enough guns ? When everyone has two, three, five, a hundred ? When will there be enough gun-deaths ? When it rises to 40,000 a year, 50,000 ? More ? When will the price in human misery become too high to stomach ? When someone you love, your child or father of brother or sister gets killed senselessly by a gun ? When will you demand that your spineless, self-serving political representative finally *do* something to eradicate this modern day plague ? Its going to happen, you know. Its inevitable. A situation as crazy as this one is can’t go on forever. Someday, and lets all hope its soon, our collective disgust is going to blow the cowardly politicians who allow this carnage right out of their cosy feathered nests. And you can tell them Joe Hack said that …

100 Pounds of T-Shirts

Guiness World Record For Most T-Shirts Worn At Once – 155 T-Shirts

This guy is really good at wearing a lot of shirts.. I guess!  There's a Guiness World record for everything, isn't there?

[youtube]r6tlw-oPDBM[/youtube]

Ty Pennington Sentenced For DUI Arrest

That was quick.. seems like ten minutes ago when he got arrested, actually it was May 5. 

Anyway, on Friday Ty Pennington from "Extreme Makeover" pleaded no contest to a DUI charge and says he is happy to bring closure to these proceedings.  He was fined $1,500 and will be on probation for 36 months.  He also will attend a 90-day alcohol education program.

Pleading no contest helped him avoid the possibilty of spending some time in jail, so I would imagine Ty is pretty happy with the outcome, as he has expressed.

here's the full story

My Laptop Has Been Taken Over!

I got a laptop a couple of weeks ago.  It's a beautiful thing, just what I needed.  However, it seems to not be my laptop anymore.  It has been taken over by Walter, who is 2 years old.

He has loved the aquarium screensaver since the day we brought it home.  So of course any time I want to actually use it there is a power struggle.  He wants to watch the fish, I want to check my email.  He wins most of the time and I use the other computer.

So today I was showing him www.lejo.nu and he saw how I clicked to get the videos to play.  He has quickly mastered it and has been moving his finger on the mousepad, expertly clicking to play each video and then clicking the red X to close each one when it's finished.  This child is too smart!

So now I guess I don't really have a laptop anymore, but possibly I can borrow Walter's from time to time.

Lindsay Lohan In Promises Rehab

Big surprise here.  Lindsay Lohan has entered rehab after a Memorial Day weekend DUI hit and run accident in which drugs may have been involved, a trip to the hospital, an arrest and then another night of hard partying until she passed out cold.  Maybe she just wanted to get it out of her system?

Lindsay was taken to Promises Treatment Center by her lawyer.  Well, I guess it worked so well for Britney….  Lilo will stay at Promises for 30 days for the inpatient part of her treatment and outpatient treatment will follow.  This isn't Lindsay's first stint at rehab, let's hope she takes it a bit more seriously this time.

Hey, I can hope can't I?

Reality TV Gone Too Far

Here's a new twist for reality tv… the winner gets to live!

A new Dutch reality tv show has a terminally ill woman on who will select from 3 contestants who gets to have her kidneys once she dies.  Sounds like a barrel of laughs, eh?

Despite criticism and calls for the show to be pulled from the air the broadcasters say they will continue with the program and highlight the difficulties of the search for kidney donors.  They are doing this, they say, as a tribute to their founder who died from kidney disease.  Their statement is that the odds of a contestant receiving a kidney from the show is 33% but in real life the odds of finding a kidney to save your life are much lower.

Here's the full story 

Next Page »