Bizarre News
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Omega_Destroyer
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ThunderTitan
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Is the net killing the video porn industry?
As with audio CDs, so with porn on DVD. According to The New York Times:
After years of essentially steady increases, sales and rentals of pornographic videos were $3.62 billion in 2006, down from $4.28 billion in 2005, according to estimates by AVN, an industry trade publication. If the situation does not change, the overall $13 billion sex-related entertainment market may shrink this year, said Paul Fishbein, president of AVN Media Network, the magazine's publisher. The industry's online revenue is substantial but is not growing quickly enough to make up for the drop in video income.
Part of the problem is, it seems, oversupply: "The barrier to get into the industry is so low: you need a video camera and a couple of people who will have sex," says Fishbein. The "the new spate of low-budget filmmakers" is helping to increase the number of X-rated DVD releases to more than 1,000 a month.
The NYT doesn't do the maths, but 12,000 movies making $3.62 billion still comes to around $300,000 per movie. On average. Maybe the bulk of that goes to rental stores, but if production costs are minimal, that's probably enough to tempt plenty of people to have a go.
Also, is this stuff vetted or rated? Assuming a porn DVD lasts for two hours, you'd need to have 12 people spend 8 hours a day watching it for five days a week, with no holidays or sick days.
What surprises me is that people still pay 4 porn....
Disclaimer: May contain sarcasm!
I have never faked a sarcasm in my entire life. - ???
"With ABC deleting dynamite gags from cartoons, do you find that your children are using explosives less frequently?" — Mark LoPresti
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I have never faked a sarcasm in my entire life. - ???
"With ABC deleting dynamite gags from cartoons, do you find that your children are using explosives less frequently?" — Mark LoPresti
Alt-0128: €
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ThunderTitan
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MistWeaver
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this country has gone mad..Cheering ban costs five students their H.S. diplomas
GALESBURG, Illinois (AP) -- Caisha Gayles graduated with honors last month, but she is still waiting for her diploma. The reason: the whoops of joy from the audience as she crossed the stage.
Gayles was one of five students denied diplomas from the lone public high school in Galesburg after enthusiastic friends or family members cheered for them during commencement.
About a month before the May 27 ceremony, Galesburg High students and their parents had to sign a contract promising to act in dignified way. Violators were warned they could be denied their diplomas and barred from the after-graduation party.
Many schools across the country ask spectators to hold applause and cheers until the end of graduation. But few of them enforce the policy with what some in Galesburg say are strong-arm tactics.
"It was like one of the worst days of my life," said Gayles, who had a 3.4 grade-point average and officially graduated, but does not have the keepsake diploma to hang on her wall. "You walk across the stage and then you can't get your diploma because of other people cheering for you. It was devastating, actually."
more ..
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MistWeaver
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ThunderTitan
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About a month before the May 27 ceremony, Galesburg High students and their parents had to sign a contract promising to act in dignified way. Violators were warned they could be denied their diplomas and barred from the after-graduation party.
What kind of artards sign something like that?Disclaimer: May contain sarcasm!
I have never faked a sarcasm in my entire life. - ???
"With ABC deleting dynamite gags from cartoons, do you find that your children are using explosives less frequently?" — Mark LoPresti
Alt-0128: €
I have never faked a sarcasm in my entire life. - ???
"With ABC deleting dynamite gags from cartoons, do you find that your children are using explosives less frequently?" — Mark LoPresti
Alt-0128: €
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Omega_Destroyer
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Well, I was replying on TT's comment.MistWeaver wrote:Probably. Because in this age I dont remember anyone kicked out of school because he did a FPS game map of it, or anyone who didnt get diploma because some a***oles were cheering.Veldrynus wrote:It wasn't when you were 15.
Veldryn 15:15 And Vel found a dirty old jawbone of a walrus and put forth his hand, and took it, and in his unholy rage, he slew thirty four thousand men and children therewith.
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MistWeaver
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MistWeaver
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ThunderTitan
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Not really, it was just the only thing there was....Veldrynus wrote:It wasn't when you were 15.
Disclaimer: May contain sarcasm!
I have never faked a sarcasm in my entire life. - ???
"With ABC deleting dynamite gags from cartoons, do you find that your children are using explosives less frequently?" — Mark LoPresti
Alt-0128: €
I have never faked a sarcasm in my entire life. - ???
"With ABC deleting dynamite gags from cartoons, do you find that your children are using explosives less frequently?" — Mark LoPresti
Alt-0128: €
Hirst unveils $119m diamond-studded skull
British artist Damien Hirst, notorious for preserving a shark in formaldehyde, has unveiled his latest work - a $119 million diamond-encrusted cast of a human skull.
The work, entitled For The Love Of God, is a platinum cast of an 18th century skull studded with 8,601 diamonds, which his representatives say were ethically-sourced.
Hirst says he hopes that the work will go on show at the British Museum in London, alongside an Aztec turquoise skull which inspired it.
The skull is on display alongside other works at London's White Cube Mason's Yard amid tight security from June 3 to July 7.
Hirst told reporters as the work was unveiled, "I've stopped worrying about what art is. If it's in an art gallery on the wall or the floor, it's probably art".
Asked what his next work would be, he joked: "Two diamond skeletons shagging".
Death is a central theme in much of Hirst's work.
He once said the September 11, 2001 attacks in the United States were like a work of art, but later apologised.
Human madness is the howl of a child with a shattered heart.
At the risk of re-opening a can of words, I present to you the following must-read article. (pictures by following the link) These people are really, really, really completely wacked.
New museum's biblical view of natural history has many critics among scientists
By Josh Jarman
THE COLUMBUS DISPATCH
The dinosaur's green eyes flash in the midday sun as it growls and slashes the air with 4-inch claws. Its mottled skin is pulled back to reveal rows of razor-sharp teeth as it sniffs out its prey: you.
It wasn't always like this. Humans had nothing to fear from the creatures of Earth, including the dinosaurs they walked alongside in early times. Then Adam ate the apple from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, and God cast man out of the Garden of Eden into a world of sin and death.
Welcome to the world's natural history as presented by a $27 million museum opening Monday near Cincinnati.
The Creation Museum about two hours south of Columbus offers a "historical walk through time" that its creators say is not only historically and scientifically accurate, but comes from the highest authority: the book of Genesis.
The dinosaurs are a hook to draw visitors and show the heart of the debate between evolutionists and creationists. According to the Bible, God made all creatures during the fifth and sixth days of creation, so dinosaurs and men walked the planet at the same time.
Creationists say that also means that dinosaurs could not have existed or become extinct millions of years earlier, as scientists contend.
The 60,000-square-foot facility is the brainchild of Ken Ham, president of Answers in Genesis, a nonprofit organization dedicated to explaining the origin of man in strictly biblical terms.
"This particular place is meant to really make a statement to the world that the Bible's history is true," Ham said.
That statement has led to no end of criticism from much of the scientific community, atheists and others whom Ham dismisses as secular humanists. They argue that Earth is billions of years old and that humans evolved through a process of natural selection.
Heading into the museum, visitors travel down a twisting, rippled stone hallway resembling the water-carved walls of the Grand Canyon.
The rock hall opens into the first history lesson, an archaeological dig depicting two paleontologists, a creationist and a naturalist, sitting in the sand uncovering the fossil of a Utahraptor dinosaur.
"It's an important teaching point about science," said Mark Looy, vice president of outreach for Answers in Genesis. "The creationist and the evolutionist have the same evidence."
The difference, Looy said, is that the creationist looks at the bones and concludes that the creature died in a global flood that destroyed almost all life on Earth about 6,000 years ago. The naturalist looks at the same bones and says this dinosaur drowned about 65 million years ago in a smaller regional flood.
Creationist interpretation of scientific findings through the lens of the Bible is one of the biggest bones of contention for organizations such as the New Jersey-based American Atheists Inc.
David Silverman, the group's national spokesman, called the museum's message an outright lie.
"No matter how hard you stamp your feet and cry out that one plus one is three, it doesn't make it true," Silverman said. "The reality is that the universe is billions of years old, not thousands."
To address such criticism, the museum's next room is devoted to the "starting points" exhibit. Adorning the room's walls are signs presenting the established "evolutionist" take on a subject, contrasted with the creationist view.
To round out the room, the exhibits quickly change focus to address why the creationist point of view matters.
A series of rooms resembling an inner-city subway system depicts the world abandoning the Bible. The experience culminates in a room where a wrecking ball engraved with the words "millions of years" is smashing apart the walls of a church.
"As you know, there is a culture war in America," Ham said. "And the cultural war is really a war between secular humanism and a Christian worldview."
Evolutionists contend the creationist message is not for a "scientific" museum to convey.
"For students to learn misinformation and erroneous views of how science works is a very serious problem for general science literacy in the United States," said Eugenie Scott, director of the National Center for Science in Education, in Oakland, Calif.
The center has organized a Web-based petition against the museum's views to be signed by scientists in the three-state region of Ohio, Indiana and Kentucky.
Ham and Looy defend the museum's historical and scientific credibility.
And they are not alone. For the past 13 years, Answers in Genesis has built a support base during national and international conferences and speaking tours. Three donors contributed $1 million apiece to the museum, and a Michigan family gave organizers the $500,000 needed for the 84-seat planetarium.
A recent Newsweek poll showed that 48 percent of Americans said they believed God made humans in the present form in the past 10,000 years.
Not surprisingly, one of the most-intricate exhibits in the museum is the Garden of Eden.
This forested room is filled with sculptures depicting Adam, lamb under his arm, naming the animals.
Farther down the path, the Tree of Life soars overhead, covering the ceiling of the two-story room, while nearby a nude Adam and Eve recline under birch trees.
With no fossilized evidence to reveal what the fruit of the Tree of Life might have looked like, however, "We just made it up," Looy said.
The floor suddenly falls away, leading to a pool beneath the Tree of Knowledge.
There, Eve holds an apple out to Adam while a serpent whispers from the branches above.
Here the sky is painted a foreboding orange, and menacing cliff walls lean overhead. As visitors pass through the next arch an animatronic Utahraptor springs to life, flexing his 4-inch claws and roaring from a subwoofer in the walls.
This is the dangerous Earth that humanity inherited along with the sin of Adam.
As the museum continues, there are rooms devoted to the building of the Titanic-sized ark, the Tower of Babel and the story of how the great flood carved the continents and deposited the fossils that scientists discover today.
Ham explains doubts about the museum's accuracy simply: Critics are opponents of conservative Christianity.
"Therefore, it doesn't matter how good our scientists are," he said. "It doesn't matter what kind of research we've done -- it must be wrong."
New museum's biblical view of natural history has many critics among scientists
By Josh Jarman
THE COLUMBUS DISPATCH
The dinosaur's green eyes flash in the midday sun as it growls and slashes the air with 4-inch claws. Its mottled skin is pulled back to reveal rows of razor-sharp teeth as it sniffs out its prey: you.
It wasn't always like this. Humans had nothing to fear from the creatures of Earth, including the dinosaurs they walked alongside in early times. Then Adam ate the apple from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, and God cast man out of the Garden of Eden into a world of sin and death.
Welcome to the world's natural history as presented by a $27 million museum opening Monday near Cincinnati.
The Creation Museum about two hours south of Columbus offers a "historical walk through time" that its creators say is not only historically and scientifically accurate, but comes from the highest authority: the book of Genesis.
The dinosaurs are a hook to draw visitors and show the heart of the debate between evolutionists and creationists. According to the Bible, God made all creatures during the fifth and sixth days of creation, so dinosaurs and men walked the planet at the same time.
Creationists say that also means that dinosaurs could not have existed or become extinct millions of years earlier, as scientists contend.
The 60,000-square-foot facility is the brainchild of Ken Ham, president of Answers in Genesis, a nonprofit organization dedicated to explaining the origin of man in strictly biblical terms.
"This particular place is meant to really make a statement to the world that the Bible's history is true," Ham said.
That statement has led to no end of criticism from much of the scientific community, atheists and others whom Ham dismisses as secular humanists. They argue that Earth is billions of years old and that humans evolved through a process of natural selection.
Heading into the museum, visitors travel down a twisting, rippled stone hallway resembling the water-carved walls of the Grand Canyon.
The rock hall opens into the first history lesson, an archaeological dig depicting two paleontologists, a creationist and a naturalist, sitting in the sand uncovering the fossil of a Utahraptor dinosaur.
"It's an important teaching point about science," said Mark Looy, vice president of outreach for Answers in Genesis. "The creationist and the evolutionist have the same evidence."
The difference, Looy said, is that the creationist looks at the bones and concludes that the creature died in a global flood that destroyed almost all life on Earth about 6,000 years ago. The naturalist looks at the same bones and says this dinosaur drowned about 65 million years ago in a smaller regional flood.
Creationist interpretation of scientific findings through the lens of the Bible is one of the biggest bones of contention for organizations such as the New Jersey-based American Atheists Inc.
David Silverman, the group's national spokesman, called the museum's message an outright lie.
"No matter how hard you stamp your feet and cry out that one plus one is three, it doesn't make it true," Silverman said. "The reality is that the universe is billions of years old, not thousands."
To address such criticism, the museum's next room is devoted to the "starting points" exhibit. Adorning the room's walls are signs presenting the established "evolutionist" take on a subject, contrasted with the creationist view.
To round out the room, the exhibits quickly change focus to address why the creationist point of view matters.
A series of rooms resembling an inner-city subway system depicts the world abandoning the Bible. The experience culminates in a room where a wrecking ball engraved with the words "millions of years" is smashing apart the walls of a church.
"As you know, there is a culture war in America," Ham said. "And the cultural war is really a war between secular humanism and a Christian worldview."
Evolutionists contend the creationist message is not for a "scientific" museum to convey.
"For students to learn misinformation and erroneous views of how science works is a very serious problem for general science literacy in the United States," said Eugenie Scott, director of the National Center for Science in Education, in Oakland, Calif.
The center has organized a Web-based petition against the museum's views to be signed by scientists in the three-state region of Ohio, Indiana and Kentucky.
Ham and Looy defend the museum's historical and scientific credibility.
And they are not alone. For the past 13 years, Answers in Genesis has built a support base during national and international conferences and speaking tours. Three donors contributed $1 million apiece to the museum, and a Michigan family gave organizers the $500,000 needed for the 84-seat planetarium.
A recent Newsweek poll showed that 48 percent of Americans said they believed God made humans in the present form in the past 10,000 years.
Not surprisingly, one of the most-intricate exhibits in the museum is the Garden of Eden.
This forested room is filled with sculptures depicting Adam, lamb under his arm, naming the animals.
Farther down the path, the Tree of Life soars overhead, covering the ceiling of the two-story room, while nearby a nude Adam and Eve recline under birch trees.
With no fossilized evidence to reveal what the fruit of the Tree of Life might have looked like, however, "We just made it up," Looy said.
The floor suddenly falls away, leading to a pool beneath the Tree of Knowledge.
There, Eve holds an apple out to Adam while a serpent whispers from the branches above.
Here the sky is painted a foreboding orange, and menacing cliff walls lean overhead. As visitors pass through the next arch an animatronic Utahraptor springs to life, flexing his 4-inch claws and roaring from a subwoofer in the walls.
This is the dangerous Earth that humanity inherited along with the sin of Adam.
As the museum continues, there are rooms devoted to the building of the Titanic-sized ark, the Tower of Babel and the story of how the great flood carved the continents and deposited the fossils that scientists discover today.
Ham explains doubts about the museum's accuracy simply: Critics are opponents of conservative Christianity.
"Therefore, it doesn't matter how good our scientists are," he said. "It doesn't matter what kind of research we've done -- it must be wrong."
"What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were like a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?" - Richard P. Feynman
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