Well played.
thx Jon Charles Newman !

 
Orwellian tax amnesty commercial as seen in Pennsylvania.

Thank you Stephen M. Foland!

 
“A male cat amazed onlookers with his behaviour to a female cat after she was hit by a car and left dead on the street in Kızılsaray district of Antalya, southern Turkey. Having seen his darling lying on the ground, the male cat started making massage-like movements, to bring the beloved back to life. The scene was likened to a cardiac massage by onlookers. The female cat was taken to a veterinary polyclinic for treatment but died there.”

 
The LAPD are on the hunt for a man who fled down the fire escape from his penthouse in downtown Los Angeles ala ‘Jason Bourne’ leaving weapons, counterfeiting equipment, and passports in various names. From the Los Angeles Times:

It started 11 days ago when a resident at an upscale downtown L.A. high-rise tower smelled fumes coming from neighboring apartment. Firefighters knocked on the neighbor’s door, but he refused to let them in.

They called police, who broke down the door of the penthouse just as the man inside was escaping through a back window and down a fire escape with multiple duffel bags over his shoulder.

“He escaped like Jason Bourne,” LAPD Deputy Chief Mike Downing of the Counter-terrorism Bureau, referring to the movie spy character. What they found next has begun a week-long mystery.

The apartment contained sophisticated counterfeiting equipment as well as a cache of weapons, including an AK-47. They also found stacks of counterfeit $100 bills totaling $15,000 and a camera tripod.

But detectives’ interest was really heightened when they looked outside the window and saw that the penthouse balcony had a spot-on view of the U.S. Federal Reserve building on Grand Avenue. Detectives now are searching for the suspect, who leased the $3,400-a-month penthouse, paying in advance with stacks of cash.

Detectives aren’t sure what Brian Alexik, a 33-year-old New Jersey man, was up to, and what role, if any, the Federal Reserve might have played in his schemes.

The fake $100 dollar bills found in the penthouse are said to be extremely good forgeries by those who had seen them.

“There were many levels of criminality,” Detective Downing said. “He’s funding a criminal enterprise. He’s dabbling in narcotics, he’s manufacturing weapons parts. But what is it? Was there a bigger plan? What was his intent? We have a lot of questions for him when he is arrested.”

A room with a view to one big mystery (Los Angeles Times)

 
This must have been one hell of a funeral! From Auto Blog:

Yesterday and today, callers who stopped to pay their final respects to the late Mr. Colón got a bit of a surprise. Instead of the traditional presentation of the body in a casket, Mr. Colón’s corpse, dressed in casual duds and sunglasses, was instead posed in a very lifelike position atop his Repsol-liveried Honda CBR600 F4. According to Puerto Rico’s Primera Hora newspaper, the motorcycle was given to the victim by his uncle, and upon Mr. Colón’s untimely demise, family members delivered the bike to the funeral home specifically for this unusual wake.

Puerto Rican funeral home presents shooting victim on his motorcycle
 
(via Neatorama)

 
It seems that someone’s had a lil’ change of heart where it comes to social media. Known for his radio and television speeches which can go on and on and on and on, Venezuelan el Presidente Hugo Chavez will be forced to learn a little brevity when he starts Twittering. Can Twitter’s 140 character limit accommodate the loquacious leader?

From the Telegraph:

In January Mr Chavez said that using Twitter, the internet and text messaging to criticism his regime was “terrorism.”

He has now decided to use the social networking tool for his own purposes.

“Comandante Chavez is going to open his Twitter account soon to wage the battle online,” Diosdado Cabello, director of Venezuela’s state-run telecommunications agency, said on Venezuelan television, according to Bloomberg News.

“I’m sure he’ll break records for numbers of followers.”

And he’ll probably prove to be much more interesting than Ashton Kutcher or John Mayer!

 
Seriously? Seriously? From the Herald Sun:

A restaurant in a northwest suburb of Adelaide that refused a blind man entry because it thought his guide dog was “gay” was ordered by the Equal Opportunity Tribunal to pay him $1500.

Ian Jolly, 57, was barred from dining at the Thai Spice restaurant in May 2009 after a staff member mistook his guide dog Nudge for a “gay dog,” a tribunal heard this week.

A statement given by restaurant owners Hong Hoa Thi To and Anh Hoang Le said one of the restaurant’s waiters said that Mr Jolly’s partner Ms Chris Lawrence stated “she wanted to bring a gay dog into the restaurant.”

Mr Jolly and Ms Lawrence were refused entry to the restaurant - which displays a “guide dogs welcome” sign - even after providing staff with a guide dogs fact card.

“The staff genuinely believed that Nudge was an ordinary pet dog which had been desexed to become a gay dog,” a statement from the hearing said.

Gay dogs not welcome, diner in South Australia told
 
(via Arbroath)

 
The picketing hate group known as the Westboro Baptist Church—which is basically just one family, led by patriarch the Rev. Fred Phelps and his daughter Margie—is infamous the world over for its hate speech aimed at Jews, blacks, Catholics and especially homosexuals. The Phelps family made a trip to West Virginia earlier this month to picket things the Phelps family—calling them a “church” is really twisting language—view as sinful. This could be just about anything with the Phelps family, of course, and often is: The WBC once picketed an appliance store that sold a particular brand of Swedish vacuum cleaner.

Why? Because Sweden supports gay rights, of course!

Make sense? Of course it doesn’t. These are the same people who picket the funerals of dead American service members with signs reading “Thank God for Dead Soldiers” and instruct their children to desecrate the American flag as families grieve. Astonishingly, during their stay in West Virginia, as news from the Montcoal Mine disaster became known, the Phelpses targeted the families of the dead miners!

But how do you counter such people when they decide to inflict themselves on your community? First off, you don’t even bother trying to counter them, you siphon off their media thunder. Concerned civic and religious groups in Wheeling and Charleston took the novel approach of using social media sites like Facebook and Twitter to organize Stop the Hate Rallies, Spread the Love flash mobs.

Signs in front yards also spread the message: “West Virginia is No Place for Hate!” with symbols of Judaism, Christianity and a rainbow (representing gay and lesbian residents) by far outnumbering the placards carried by the Phelps family (one read “God Hates WV.” Another said “You Will Eat Your Babies”!). But it was the disco dancing flash mobs doing the electric boogaloo to “Take Me Home Country Roads” that stole the show.

“We want to become the story; to steal the story from the WBC,” said one organizer, Rabbi Jim Cohn of Temple Israel. “We’re annoyed by the idea that they get the publicity through hatred.”

For more information see www.niot.org.
 

 
Cross posting from Brand X

 
Senator Harry Reid’s would-be challenger in this November’s election, casino owner Susan Lowden actually has the nerve to suggest that those without health insurance simply barge their way past reception and offer to barter with the doctor. How fucking retarded is that? What a huge gift to Reid’s re-election campaign.

thx Simon Glickman !