">My Big World Of Crap

It is often said that most people who fall victim to snakes get bitten while attempting to kill them. Here’s another case where the snake beat someone trying to hunt it.

A woman was shot dead by her husband in Queensland this week while trying to flush out a brown snake that was hiding in their garage. Leanne Sleba and her husband Geoff had spotted the two-metre Eastern brown snake earlier in the night, but failed to find it. Worried about their children’s safety because they frequented the fridge in the garage, the couple returned later with a shotgun.

After a thorough search, they couldn’t find the snake, and were about to give up, when, according to a family member:

“Leanne started to walk away and she was about three or four metres from him and Geoff heard hissing and he looked down to see the snake on his foot.

“He’s either jumped, slipped….. and his finger hit the trigger and the gun went off.

“It hit Leanne,”

She died at the scene.

Toowoomba District Police Inspector Brett Schafferius said police deemed that the firearm accidentally discharged. Scientific investigations were undertaken and a report was being prepared for the coroner.

Call me suspicious, but how often do things like this eventually turn out to be much more than initially meets the eye?

Ronald Long, of Deepwater in the US decided that using his gun was a good way of making a hole through the wall, which he needed to do in order to instal a satellite TV system at his home. He fired his gun from the inside of his home after several unsuccessful efforts to punch a hole through the exterior wall using other means.

Unfortunately, his wife, Patsy, was outside at the time. She was pronounced dead early on Saturday evening after being shot in the chest with a .22-caliber handgun.

The local sheriff’s department said a person involved in such a case normally would be charged with manslaughter, but that was up to the prosecutor.

“Once we complete a diagram of the incident, we will be submitting everything to the prosecuting attorney and let him decide if he wants to press criminal charges,”

the sheriff’s spokesman said.

Even if he escapes jail for killing his wife, Long is clearly not the sharpest tool in the shed, and should never be trusted with anything remotely dangerous, like power tools, let alone a gun!

An Air Canada flight from Toronto to London had to make an emergency landing in Ireland after a medical emergency … apparently the co-pilot suffered a breakdown, and had to be removed from the cockpit and restrained by other crew members.

According to a passenger:

“He was very, very distraught. He was yelling loudly at times,”

“He was swearing and asking for God and very distressed. He basically said he wanted to talk to God.”

I suppose  for someone wanting to talk to God, he was in the right place - well, 10,000 metres or so closer than if he’d been on the ground.

Seriously though, wouldn’t you shit yourself as a passenger had you seen this happen on your own flight?

Well, the sub-editor who came up with this headline just couldn’t.

Masturbators come together in Copenhagen | NEWS.com.au

Copenhagen is to host a masturbate-a-thon in May which organisers hope will help break lingering taboos about self-love.  This follows previous such events in San Francisco and London.

Tom Cruise’s daughter Suri is not actually his, but was conceived using Scientology founder, L Ron Hubbard’s sperm.   Thats one claim made in a new book by Andrew Morton:  “Tom Cruise: An Unauthorised Biography“.  He also claims that Scientology played a large part in the breakdown of Cruise’s marriage to Nicole Kidman, and that Kidman has not been able to speak out against the pseudo-religion because of threats of blackmail over the release of details of the couple’s sex life and also access to their two adopted children.  The pseudo-church has denied these claims of blackmail.

Another claim in the book is that Cruise has since risen to No. 2 in the church, according to Morton, and his next mission is to recruit David and Victoria Beckham …. a task which I’m sure will take convincing philosophical and intellectual argument to achieve.

Enough of that.  Next, Terri Irwin.  She claims to have had contact with dead husband Steve through American television medium John Edward.  Hours before the psychic performed for 4500 people at the Irwins’ Australia Zoo Crocoseum , Mrs Irwin and Steve’s father, Bob,had private “readings” to contact the late wildlife champion.  Mr Irwin said his daughter-in-law was overjoyed by the outcome. He said both “had contact with Steve”.

“There’s no doubt that Steve was with us,” Mr Irwin said. “It’s not black and white, it’s grey, but there was a definite, unmistakable Steve energy.”

If the rest of the crowd at the public $90-a-head show were hoping to “see” Steve Irwin yesterday, they left disappointed. He did not make his presence felt and Edward did not address any Irwin family member during his two-hour show.

Strange that?  Nothing on the big stage but success when there were only 2 others around - all equally voracious publicity whores.  Message to Terri Irwin - shut up, all this crap you are going on with recently is destroying whatever credibility you might have had.  Just run the zoo, will you?

Enough of Terri …but by the way, its rather disturbing that 4,500 people were fool enough to part with $90 to see this garbage.  Mmmm, Queensland …. probably explains why Nigerian email scams have a better than average success rate there.   Hey that reminds me, I have an uncle in Lagos who has just died and left me $5m - but I need help getting it out of the country.  Please contact me if you can help me with this ….I’m sure we can cut a deal.

Britney Spears train wreck I posted about separately the other day, so I won’t repeat it all here.

An American judge has been removed from the bench after jailing an entire courtroom full of people when no-one would admit to owning a mobile phone that was ringing. A commission on judicial conduct said Judge Robert Restaino had acted “without any semblance of a lawful basis” and behaved like a “petty tyrant”.  In its ruling on Tuesday, the New York State Commission on Judicial Conduct recommended the removal of Judge Restaino for what its chairman called “two hours of inexplicable madness” on the morning of 11 March 2005.  It said the 48-year-old judge had been presiding over a series of domestic violence cases when he heard a mobile phone ring and “snapped”.  “Every single person is going to jail in this courtroom unless I get that instrument now,” he told the courtroom’s audience, according to the commission. Security officers then attempted to find the phone but failed.  After a brief recess, Judge Restaino returned to the bench and again asked who had been responsible for the ringing phone.  When no-one came forward, the judge ordered that the entire courtroom audience of 46 people be taken into custody and set bail at $1,500.

The audience and defendants were then taken to  jail, where they were searched and packed into crowded cells. Fourteen people who could not post bail were later shackled and transported to another prison.   They were later released when the story started hitting the local media.

I know mobile phones ringing at the wrong time in the wrong place give me the shits, but perhaps Judge Reistaino over-reacted just a smidgin.

In more local news of phone abuse, we had a guy in court in Canberra today charged with various phone stalking offences.  Dejan Nikolovski, 22, faced multiple stalking and harassment charges in the ACT Magistrates Court today: nine counts of using a carriage service to offend, six of indecency, two of stalking and one of possessing a prohibited substance (that last one may well explain the others).

ACT police said earlier that the victims received a barrage of phone calls, including sexually explicit video calls.

“Some victims allegedly received up to 40-50 calls in a one to two hour period in the middle of the night,” a police spokesman said.

Wonder if Dejan Nikolovski is somehow related to Shane Warne?

Update (29/11/2007):  More phone adventures …. this time a man in Korea who is said to have been killed by an exploding mobile phone.  Further update (30/11/2007):  Turns out that was bullshit.  The guy was murdered and the exploding phone was the killer’s bullshit excuse to cover it up.

… spending $50 on a cup of coffee.  Even if it is a Kopi Luwak, made in Indonesia from coffee beans that have been eaten and excreted (whole) by a possum-like marsupial called a luwak.

Mmmm, boiled possum poo!

Colin Lazarus, from Melbourne, has an extremely interesting fetish.  He bought an 11 year old girl black pointy platform shoes then persuaded her to wear them so she could kick him in the genitals.  On another occasion, he asked the girl to kick him in the genitals and put her shoed foot into his mouth.  He also got her 8 year old brother to join in the kicking.  One time, he told her to stand on his neck while her brother kicked him.  He admitted to police he had a sexual fetish for shoes and people standing on him.

Judge Lance Pilgrim said it was the strangest case he had dealt with in his 49 years in court.

No shit!!!!

Only in New Zealand!

I’ve seen these in the supermarket recently and thought that they are about as useful as tits on a bull.

Frozen jaffles? I mean, who can’t get two slices of bread, put some baked beans, ham and cheese or other filling between them, and then toast them in a jaffle maker/sandwich press. Jaffles are a convenience food, something you make for a quick meal or snack, perhaps a way to use up some leftovers. Some bright spark at Four’n'Twenty has seen a market niche for a convenience food version of a convenience food. Wow!

Don’t know if this is just me, but I’m battling to see the appeal of what looks to be baby spew jaffles on the package. That doesn’t resemble in any way, shape or form what I understand a baked bean jaffle should look like.