Thursday, July 31, 2008

Houston, I have a problem and I can’t get up!

Scientists working with NASA to help astronauts regain balance after extended flights in zero gravity say they've found a way to use the research to help elderly people avoid dangerous falls. The tough part is getting the elderly to say, “Houston, I have a problem and I can’t get up.”

A Bakersfield, California, woman is facing charges that she counterfeited money and identification cards after her 10-year-old son turned her in to authorities. That’s what happens when a parent focuses on her own needs instead of her child’s request to make him a fake report card.

John McCain is being criticized for a television ad comparing Barack Obama to Britney Spears and Paris Hilton. No one is more upset than Barack, who says now paparazzi are trailing him constantly to see if he wears underwear.

Barack Obama says he’s offended by the lyrics of a song by Ludacris that are offensive to Hillary Clinton, John McCain and President Bush. McCain’s camp says this is further proof that Obama is out of touch with the music patriotic Americans enjoy, like “Bomb-bomb-bomb, bomb-bomb Iran.”

Researchers studying a mechanical brass calculator used by the ancient Greeks to predict solar and lunar eclipses now believe it was also used to set the dates for the first Olympic games. What’s even more exciting, they think the brass cup it was found with was used for the first Olympic drug tests.

European scientists using synchrotron X-rays from a particle accelerator found a portrait of a peasant woman Vincent Van Gogh painted and then covered up with another work called “Patch of Grass.” I used that same technique and found out my painting of dogs playing poker actually covers up a painting of cats playing poker.

A former senator in Germany says a sculpture of a crucified frog on display at an art museum is a public obscenity. It was inspired by an early work of Monty Python called “The Life of Hoppy.”

Members of Our Lady of Refuge Catholic Church in Brooklyn raised money and bought a Big Ass Fan to cool off their church. Parishioners upset with the brand name are petitioning to get a new label that reads: “The Big Ass That Jesus Rode Into Jerusalem Fan.”

Police in Fort Worth, Texas, stopped a man who pretended to be a stranded out-of-gas motorist and was scamming sympathetic drivers into bringing him free gallon cans of gas. Wait a minute! Isn’t that the Republican energy plan?

Exxon Mobil reported second-quarter earnings of $11.68 billion Thursday, the biggest quarterly profit ever by any U.S. corporation. Executives at the company celebrated at a party that featured a woman dressed like President Bush jumping out of a cake.

Marathon Oil is considering splitting its oil and gas production business and its refining and marketing operations into separate entities. Because of their size differences, they’ll be called 10K Oil and 20 Miles Oil.

Scientists in Wales studying marine fossils say they've determined that the Antarctica of 40 million years ago had warmer seas and little or no ice. When he heard the news, President Bush nominated them for the Nobel Prize.

According to the journal Nature, U.S. scientists have created a nanoelectromechanical scale system sensitive enough to measure the mass of a single atom of gold at room temperature. The first customer for the scale is expected to be a restaurant catering to supermodels.

No comments:

Post a Comment