Archives for May 2013

Do you remember the bombing at the Boston Marathon? I do because I knew a couple of people in the race. It took several hours to find out they were safe. Which they were and are. Before we begin I will be the first to admit that there are a couple of unanswered questions; (1) “Why was there a shoot out if the kid didn’t have a gun?” springs to mind and is followed by; (2) “How is it legal to buy that much fireworks without a permit?” Beyond that, not so much. My first running clue that the FBI got it right was the fact that so many callers said “That’s my friend … (pick one or the other)…” when the pictures were first released. If it’s one or two then maybe they’re wrong, but they got hundreds of calls with the same information. You couldn’t get hundreds of random callers to agree on a flavor of cheese. So, they got the right guys. A situation like this is law enforcement’s worst nightmare. When your terrorist cell consists solely of you and an immediate relative the odds are heavily in favor of no one figuring out what you’re up to. At least not until after you do it. And that is a bad time to figure things out.

A friend of mine pointed me towards something that I just found staggering. Not your usual conspiracy nuts or anti-government screeds, but a group of people who seriously, and rabidly, want Dzhokhar Tsarnaev set free and his slate wiped clean.

And the main impetus behind their movement?

He’s too pretty to be a terrorist.

No, I am not making this up.

An online movement calling to free Boston bombings suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is gathering pace – thanks to an army of teenage girls who believe he is “too beautiful to be a terrorist”.

Nicknamed “Jahar”, the 19-year-old, who is currently in custody and has been interrogated by the FBI over the April 15 explosions, has emerged as an unlikely heartthrob in the wake of the attacks, which killed three and maimed hundreds.

Facebook and Tumblr tribute accounts have been set up in support of the teen, and the hashtag #FreeJahar continues to periodically trend on Twitter.

OMG Free Jahar! @FreeJahar97
Yes i like Justin Bieber and i like Jahar but that has nothing to do with why i support him. I know hes innocent, he is far too beautiful.
3:56 PM – 25 Apr 2013

Selam. @baddierauhl
i don’t even care if jahar is a terrorist he’s cute i don’t want him to die.
10:25 AM – 20 Apr 2013

The New York Post spoke to one 18-year-old who insists the evidence against him does not add up and had planned to get words from one of Dzhokhar’s own last tweets inscribed on her permanently.

“Getting one of Jahar’s tweets tattooed on me tomorrow. Guess you could say I’m a #FreeJahar supporter,” @keepitbluntedd tweeted on May 7.

Alisha had earmarked Tsarnaev’s April 7 tweet reading: “If you have the knowledge and the inspiration, all that’s left is to take action” for a spot on her arm.

Since the story went live however, the waitress has had to put her plans on hold for now “out of respect of my family’s wishes. For now. It’s still something I definitely want,” she Tweeted.

#freejahar @laniquathompson
How many RT’s for our boy jahar look at that beautiful face #freejahar pic.twitter.com/K9xKFvv5HT

M. @Lovelessmariee
I’m not gonna lie, the second bombing suspect, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, is hot. #sorrynotsorry

Meanwhile a Facebook group entitled Dzhokhar Tsarnaev Free Jahar Movement has close to 6,500 followers, with many speculating Dzhokhar and his older brotherTamerlan were set up.

Further accounts exist, with “fans” leaving comments such as “I love you, you bomb my heart” and posting photographs of themselves in underwear, holding pieces of paper with Dzhokhar’s name scrawled across them.

An image from a Dzhokar Tsarnaev Facebook ‘fan’ page 

It’s not the first time Dzhokhar’s appearance has been commented on. Earlier this month, Mother Jones spoke to a woman who had a “fleeting fling” with the university student.

Speaking under condition of anonymity, she said: “I met him standing outside a building and honestly, his face was enough to capture my heart. ”

Wired calls the #FreeJahar campaign “a mix of conspiracy theories, sympathy for Tsarnaev and skepticism of the official narrative surrounding his arrest.” The Verge notes that for every message supporting Dzhokhar, “there’s a user expressing vitriolic disgust that Tsarnaev supporters exist.”

As you can see, the Free Jahar movement is being led by a mix of Justin Bieber fans and losers. Also, based on what I could see from Facebook posts and Twitter feeds, the majority of them are young, female and suburban.

That should send a chill through every parent reading this today.

Just remember that “Not your little girl” is pictured above in her underwear cheering for a terrorist.

How did this happen? Well, you can blame the segments of the media who consistently portray terrorists as turban wearing camel jockeys since stereotypes are easier to convey. Good looking young men like Dzhokhar are not considered to be threats.

Facts and logic both fly in the face of that assumption, but facts and logic have been getting short shrift lately.

That is why thoughts like these get espoused as though they are useful in any way.

The Flaming Lips – You Lust (NSFW) from Delo Creative

Listen to Bill McCormick on WBIG (FOX! Sports) every Friday around 9:10 AM.
Visit us on Rebel Mouse for even more fun!
contact Bill McCormick

As I noted on Facebook the odds are staggeringly in favor of the fact that your loving and nurturing mother has been auditioning finger puppets while reading 50 Shades of Grey. People don’t like to think of their moms like that but if your mom didn’t do the mattress mambo you wouldn’t be here. So while you’re taking her to a champagne brunch and ordering a chocolate croissant for her you might want to invest in a gift certificate from Taboo-Tabou. I mention this since I have been recently dating a mom. It’s okay, she’s divorced and everything. Her kids, both teens, know, intellectually, that we do more than play Canasta and go to church, but they really, REALLY, do not want to consider it. I can’t say I blame them. I wouldn’t want to imagine me naked either. But, since I have made them breakfast on a couple of occasions, the subject has been broached. Oddly enough, completely out of character for me, it was dealt with delicately. Without a single mention of mom’s finger puppets. Those dazzlingly deft digits that ….. umm, never mind.

Anyway, as you may have guessed, today is Mother’s Day. The nice people over at 1011 – no, I have no idea what they do – have put together a compendium of useless trivia about Mother’s Day.

So, allow me to share it with you.

On Mother’s Day

• Anna Jarvis of Philadelphia who started Mother’s Day celebrations also filed a lawsuit in an effort to stop the over- commercialisation of Mother’s Day. She lost her fight. Anna had hoped for a day of reflection and quiet prayer by families, thanking God for all that mothers had done.
• Julia Ward Howe staged an unusual protest for peace in Boston, by celebrating a special day for mothers. She wanted to call attention to the need for peace by pointing out mothers who were left alone in the world without their sons and husbands after the bloody Franco Prussian War.
• Japan’s Imperial family trace their ancestry to Omikami Amaterasu, the Mother of the World.
• Ancient Egyptians believed that ‘Bast’ was the mother of all cats on Earth, and that cats were sacred animals.
• In the Bible, Eve is credited with being the ‘Mother of All the Living.’
• In the vast majority of the world’s languages, the word for “mother” begins with the letter M.

Believe It or Not Records:

Youngest Mother
The youngest mother whose history is authenticated is Lina Medina, who delivered a 6½-pound boy by cesarean section in Lima, Peru in 1939, at an age of 5 years and 7 months. The child was raised as her brother and only discovered that Lina was his mother when he was 10.

Oldest Mother
On April 9, 2003, Satyabhama Mahapatra, a 65-year-old retired schoolteacher in India, became the world’s oldest mother when she gave birth to a baby boy. Satyabhama and her husband had been married 50 years, but this is their first child. The baby was conceived through artificial insemination using eggs from the woman’s 26-year-old niece, Veenarani Mahapatra, and the sperm of Veenarani’s husband.

Most Surviving Children
Bobbie McCaughey is the mother who holds the record for the most surviving children from a single birth. She gave birth to the first set of surviving septuplets – four boys and three girls -on November 19, 1997, at the University Hospital, Iowa, US. Conceived by in vitro fertilization, the babies were delivered after 31 weeks by cesarean in the space of 16 minutes. The babies are named Kenneth, Nathaniel, Brandon, Joel, Kelsey, Natalie and Alexis.

Shortest Interval Between Two Children
Jayne Bleackley is the mother who holds the record for the shortest interval between two children born in separate confinements. She gave birth to Joseph Robert on September 3, 1999, and Annie Jessica Joyce on March 30, 2000. The babies were born 208 days apart.

Longest Interval Between Two Children
Elizabeth Ann Buttle is the mother who holds the record for the longest interval between the birth of two children. She gave birth to Belinda on May 19,1956 and Joseph on November 20, 1997. The babies were born 41 years 185 days apart. The mother was 60 years old when her son Joseph was born.

Highest Recorded Number of Children
The highest officially recorded number of children born to one mother is 69, to the first wife of Feodor Vassilyev (1707-1782) of Shuya, Russia. Between 1725 and 1765, in a total of 27 confinements, she gave birth to 16 pairs of twins, seven sets of triplets, and four sets of quadruplets. 67 of them survived infancy.

Highest Number of Children in Modern Times
The modern world record for giving birth is held by Leontina Albina from San Antonio, Chile. Leontina claims to be the mother of 64 children, of which only 55 of them are documented. She is listed in the 1999 Guinness World Records but dropped from later editions.

On Women and Motherhood:

• 24.8 is the median age of women when they give birth for the first time – meaning one-half are above this age and one-half are below. The median age has risen nearly three years since 1970.
• A woman becomes pregnant most easily at the age of eighteen or nineteen, with little real change until the mid twenties. There is then a slow decline to age thirty-five, a sharper decline to age forty-five and a very rapid decline as the women nears menopause.
• The odds of a woman delivering twins is 1 in 33. Her odds of having triplets or other multiple births was approximately 1 in 539.
• When the female embryo is only six weeks old, it makes preparations for her motherhood by developing egg cells for future offspring. (When the baby girl is born, each of her ovaries carries about a million egg cells, all that she will ever have).
• August is the most popular month in which to have a baby, with more than 360,000 births taking place that month in 2001.
• Tuesday is the most popular day of the week in which to have a baby, with an average of more than 12,000 births taking place on Tuesdays during 2001.

Strange But True about Celebrity Moms and Kids

• Katherine Hepburn’s father was a surgeon and her mother was a dedicated suffragette and early crusader for birth control.
• Elvis Presley, was a mama’s boy. He slept in the same bed with his mother, Gladys, until he reached puberty. Up until Elvis entered high school, she walked him back and forth to school every day and made him take along his own silverware so that he wouldn’t catch germs from the other kids. Gladys forbade young Elvis from going swimming or doing anything that might put him in danger. The two of them also conversed in a strange baby talk that only they could understand.
• Many of the sweaters worn by Mr. Rogers on the popular television show, Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood, were actually knitted by his real mother.
• Eric Clapton was born to an unwed mother and to shield him from the shame, Eric grew up believing that his grandparents were his parents and his mother was his sister.

From the Animal Kingdom:

• A female oyster over her lifetime may produce over 100 million young.
• A mother giraffe often gives birth while standing, so the new born’s first experience outside the womb is a 1.8-meter (6-foot) drop.
• Just like people, mother chimpanzees often develop lifelong relationships with their offspring.
• Kittens are born both blind and deaf, but the vibration of their mother’s purring is a physical signal that the kittens can feel – it acts like a homing device, signaling them to nurse.

Source: MothersDayCelebration.com

See? Aren’t you glad you’re not a female oyster?

Anyway, from all of us here at the World News Center to all you muthas who read this stuff, Happy Day!

Listen to Bill McCormick on WBIG (FOX! Sports) every Friday around 9:10 AM.
Visit us on Rebel Mouse for even more fun!
contact Bill McCormick

Before we begin I’d like to remind everyone that tomorrow is the last day of International Clitoris Week. If you haven’t done so already go and find a clitoris and show it how much you appreciate it. There’s still two weeks left in National Masturbation Month so there’s no need to rush for that one. That’s right, just take it slow and easy. Yeah, just like that, Jake from State Farm. Our female readers are welcome to combine the two holidays. The more creative male readers may make a game attempt as well. I think that it is holidays like this that help bring people together. They cut across all cultural lines. After all, you have everything you need to make someone happy right under your clothes. Unless you’re reading this while naked, in which case you’ve got a head start. Oh sure, the May-Sturbation holiday was started by an adult toy store, but that doesn’t mean you need to bust out one red cent to celebrate. So go, cum and be happy.

Now, on to the news of the day.

Paul Templar, no relation to the Knights, was a tour guide in Africa. for some reason he thought it would be fun to see what the inside of a hippo looked like. He found out. It looks, and smells, like death.

“There was a terrible, sulphurous smell, like rotten eggs, and a tremendous pressure against my chest,” Paul Templer said, recalling the moment he realized he had been swallowed by a hippopotamus.

At the time, Templer was 27, a river guide taking groups of tourists down the Zambezi river near Victoria Falls, along the border of Zambia and Zimbabwe.

His near-death story appeared in The Guardian’s “Experience” series on Friday and has since grabbed headlines around the world.

Templer, now living in Michigan, wrote in The Guardian that he knew the hippo — his attempted murderer — as a “grouchy old two-ton bull” that lurked in the stretch of river the tours traversed.

Hippos are a common sight above the falls, according to PBS. The massive mammals, which can weigh up to 8,000 pounds, can spend the majority of the daylight hours submerged to keep cool, reports National Geographic. Fast sprinters and strong swimmers, they can also hold their breath for several minutes, as Templer found out on that March day in 1996.

“I remember looking up through 10 feet of water at the green and yellow light playing on the surface, and wondering which of us could hold his breath the longest,” he wrote in The Guardian. “Blood rose from my body in clouds, and a sense of resignation overwhelmed me. I’ve no idea how long we stayed under — time passes very slowly when you’re in a hippo’s mouth.”

The hippo’s teeth savaged Templer’s chest and left arm. But he told The Chicago Tribune in an earlier interview that he still counts himself very lucky.

“I went straight down his throat. It smelled like death,” Templer said in the Tribune. And yet, when the hippo “bit into my lungs he missed my heart. He missed my liver and kidneys.”

Although Templer carried a .357-caliber Magnum firearm, he told the Tribune he never got a chance to pull it. After repeated bites, Templer managed to get ashore, but his wounds included a bite so deep it revealed part of his lung.

“Out there in the wild, we were the intruders,” Templer explains in a YouTube video titled “A Bad Day at the Office,” which recounts the harrowing event.

In the immediate aftermath of the attack, his left arm crushed and stripped of flesh, Templer recalls a strange feeling of calm come over him.

“All the pain went away, and I knew that it was my moment of choice,” he says in the video. “I could shut my eyes, I could drift off, I could call it a day, or I could fight my way through this and I could stick around. … The pain was so intense I thought for sure I was going to die. And then when I didn’t, there were moments that I wished that I would, just to escape that excruciating agony.”

Hours of surgery later, Templer survived. He went on to a successful career as a motivational speaker, author and founder of a charitable foundation supporting disabled and terminally ill children in Michigan and southern Africa.

While Templer got away from his attacker, thousands of others have been less fortunate. According to Discovery, hippos are considered the deadliest animal in Africa.

Every year, unfortunate tourists and even beauty queens are reported mauled or killed by hippos. In 2011, a particularly tragic incident involved 40-year-old farmer who was killed in South Africa by a 5-year-old hippo he had rescued and tried to domesticate.

There is a scene at the beginning of the novel River God where an Egyptian prince and his barge go hunting hippos. The scene is almost hyper-violent. That is because even ancient Egyptians knew that hippos were not to be messed with.

At the end of the scene they ate the hippo.

Actually, in general, that’s a very good way to deal with predatory animals.

Ryan Gougeon agrees with me which is why his restaurant serves lion tacos.

Lion tacos, anyone? You won’t find them at a Florida restaurant, which sold out of the controversial item despite a backlash that included online threats.

Taco Fusion in Tampa, Fla. offered lion as a taco filling alongside its other exotic offerings, which include bison, shark, ostrich, gator, gazelle, rabbit, duck, camel and kangaroo. Iguana, bear and zebra will be on the menu in the future, writes local CBS affiliate WTVY.

Owner Ryan Gougeon told NBC affiliate WFLA that selling the meat is well within his rights. “Just because someone at home doesn’t want it, doesn’t mean a hundred other people don’t,” he said. “And America is still free and we are still allowed to provide services that people want.”

Taco Fusion further defends the serving of lion in an undated blog post on its web site:

Paranoia has set in as some folks have had their reality challenged. They say that we’ve “crossed the line” by serving Lion. But let me ask you this, did you cross the line when you ate Beef, chicken, or Pork this week? … Are you a vegan, who consumed vegetables this week? Were those vegetables sprayed with pesticides, and picked by illegal Mexican migrant labor that is exploited for low wages, long hours, and no benefits?

Activists for big cat preservation have expressed outrage over the menu item. When the controversy first struck, Big Cat Rescue’s Jeff Kremer told WFLA that he hoped Taco Fusion would remove the item from the menu. “[T]hey are still going to exploit other creatures or sell them for a novelty, but you have to draw the line somewhere and the time to speak up is right now.”

In a post that has since been removed, Taco Fusion announced it would no longer serve lion meat. Gougeon allegedly began receiving online threats after the restaurant announced the promotion. But those threats didn’t stop the lion tacos from selling out, nor did the price — a pound of lion meat costs about $220, which breaks down to about $35 a taco.

Despite the controversy, some Taco Fusion patrons were clearly enthused by the offering. The Tampa Tribute spoke with a customer, Frankie Consoli, who described the meat as “a bit tougher than steak” with a strong red-meat flavor and a “gamey” finishing note.

“Man it’s delicious,” he told the paper. “I heard everyone hating on them on Facebook about this place serving lion, so I thought I’d come check it out. Where else are you going to get that chance?”

Relax people, he’s not clubbing baby seals or selling endangered species. There are butchers all over the U.S. that sell lion and other exotic meats. Yes, you can order lion if you click that link.

You can also get Alpaca.

The point is that if people are willing to shell out $35 a pop to eat a taco then he should be allowed to take their money.

Of course, he is in Florida, land of the double standard. If he wanted it to be cool and socially acceptable he’d have served it in a techno club.

Mokai Mondays “Best Little Whore House” from DMG (Donsville Media Group)

Listen to Bill McCormick on WBIG (FOX! Sports) every Friday around 9:10 AM.
Visit us on Rebel Mouse for even more fun!
contact Bill McCormick

Regular readers know that I hold psychics in the same regard as armed robbers. Except they aren’t as ethical. They prey on the weak minded and gullible. They fill their head with specious notions and transient proofs. I have pointed out that such people aren’t just harmless providers of mirth. They are dangerous. When people cite the fact that psychics have a long, and honorable, history they are woefully distorting the facts. Or just ignoring them. Ancient, pre-Christian, monks who made predictions did so for the purposes of planting crops and knowing the weather patterns for the upcoming year. That is why so many ancient buildings could be used as sun dials. Their predictions were as much science as anything else. They looked at facts, based it on known history and issued a prediction. That’s pretty much what a weather person does today. That is not what a modern psychic or spiritualist does.

There is a great documentary called Gawd Bless America that I heartily recommend to everyone. It follows the travels of a man who believes in numerologists, UFO-ologists, psychics and the like as he is forced to realize that each and everyone one of those vocations is designed to strip the unwitting of their cash and their dignity. They serve no other purpose.

David Moye writes today of a tragic example of what can happen when psychics are allowed to comment on the real world.

Celebrity psychic Sylvia Browne is doing damage control over a prediction made nearly 10 years ago claiming Ohio kidnapping victim Amanda Berry was dead, but her actions may represent a watershed moment in how Americans view psychics.

“The [Ariel Castro abduction] is a test case for all psychics,” said Joe Nickell, editor of Skeptical Inquirer, a magazine that encourages science-based analysis of paranormal and fringe-science claims. “Why didn’t one psychic wake up in the middle of the night and know where they were?”

Browne told Louwana Miller, the mother of Amanda Berry, on “The Montel Williams Show” in 2004: “She’s not alive, honey. Your daughter’s not the kind who wouldn’t call,” The Atlantic Wire reported. Berry was kidnapped 10 years ago and was found alive on Monday.

Browne responded with an official statement to The Huffington Post earlier this week that included this line: “Only God is right all the time.”

For more than 50 years as a spiritual psychic and guide, when called upon to either help authorities with missing person cases or to help families with questions about their loved ones, I have been more right than wrong. If ever there was a time to be grateful and relieved for being mistaken, this is that time. Only God is right all the time. My heart goes out to Amanda Berry, her family, the other victims and their families. I wish you a peaceful recovery.

Browne has estimated an 87-to-90 percent success rate with cold cases, but Skeptical Inquirer did a 2010 analysis of 115 predictions she made on “The Montel Williams Show” and put her success rate at zero.

Nickell has also headed projects researching the success rate of psychics working on police investigations, and found no substantial evidence of their effectiveness. However, he concedes that some investigators will accept psychic assistance as a very last resort.

“One detective, a homicide commander, told me, ‘you can be skeptical, but when you have a distraught family and a psychic has convinced them they have clues, it’s hard to refuse,'” Nickell told HuffPost.

Problem is, according to Nickell, many of the so-called “clues” offered by the psychics are too vague to be of use. Once the police find out the answers through legitimate police work, the vague clues might seem to fit after the fact, a process he calls “retrofitting.”

Parapsychology researcher Ben Radford, a deputy editor at Skeptical Inquirer, said that anytime there is a high-profile, missing-person case, psychics and mediums come out of the woodwork.

“We call them ‘grief vampires’,” he told HuffPost. “But every single time, the psychics fail to find the person.”

Browne is also drawing criticism from other psychics like Craig Weiler, who said Browne’s callous prediction to Berry’s now-deceased mom crossed a line, possibly doing “harm to the family.” He advises mediums to use disclaimers.

“They need to say, ‘this is my impression’ or ‘this is my truth,'” Weiler told HuffPost. “Something like ‘this is what I feel’ is OK …”

Weiler runs a blog that attempts to explain scientific studies of parapsychology in layman’s terms, but said off-the-cuff predictions make things harder for people like him who are trying to demonstrate psychic ability is real.

“Failed predictions that are so high-profile are a pain in the ass,” Weiler said. “There’s a public perception that psychics are fake. They’re not, but it hurts.”

Weiler said it’s just as unfair to judge psychics by one big failed prediction as it is to judge them by one successful one. “That’s the problem scientifically,” he said. “In order to tell how good she is, you need both success and failures.”

Browne is attracting comments to her Facebook and Twitter pages like, “What do you have to say for yourself? What a horrible horrible thing to say to a family holding on to nothing but hope and faith” and “Can you admit that you’re a hack now?” according to RawStory.com

D.J. Grothe, president of the James Randi Educational Foundation, an organization that works to stop paranormal and pseudoscientific frauds and has long criticized Browne, said this latest psychic scandal is even more reprehensible than others.

“It’s not just her lack of success that bothers me. It’s that she deigns to give so-called psychic or spiritual advice to people when they’re at their lowest and hurting most,” he told HuffPost by email. “How reprehensible for this TV psychic to disrupt criminal investigations or cause a family to lose hope about their missing loved ones like that.”

Grothe said he wouldn’t have as many problems with psychic performers if they would tell people their predictions are “for entertainment purposes only” and if they refused to offer spiritual guidance or psychic advice in any form.

One personality who does that is the Amazing Kreskin who has done hundreds of performance art shows similar to magic for more than 40 years.

Kreskin said he has helped the police with 84 crime cases, but acknowledges that he was only helpful one-third of the time. “I can help potential witnesses uncover information they didn’t realize they had,” Kreskin said.

However, Kreskin said that any mentalist, psychic or medium who suggests someone is dead without physical evidence is on shaky ethical ground. “It’s the height of irresponsibility and it indirectly aids the criminal because the people who believe the psychic may have less of a reason to continue to search for the victim,” he said.

Sherry Cole, Amanda Berry’s cousin, told HuffPost that the family “in no way blames Sylvia,” but Weiler still believes anyone claiming to be psychic needs to be responsible about how they use their abilities.

“They need to be truthful,” he said. “They’re not 100 percent. They should say, ‘this is what I feel is happening,’ but that’s it.”

“Grief vampires.” I like that term.

Benjamin Radford at Discovery News did a great piece on how psychics work. I’m going to share a little of it here but I strongly suggest you take a moment and go read it.

The problem isn’t that psychics get it wrong on rare occasions; instead it’s that psychics get it right on rare occasions. Sylvia Browne been a psychic for half a century, yet she and others have consistently failed to predict important world events and tragedies that might have been prevented, from the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks to the Boston marathon bombings. They have consistently failed to find missing and abducted persons as well as wanted criminals and terrorists such as Osama bin Laden.

How could hundreds of psychics giving information over the course of nearly 10 years about three different missing children have failed to know they were alive and being held captive in a Cleveland home? How could psychics miss Jaycee Dugard, a California girl abducted when she was 11 and held captive for nearly 20 years by a couple in a suburban home?

In any other career, such a track record of failure would be fatal: if police detectives solved only a tiny minority of the crimes they investigated, or doctors correctly diagnosed and treated patients at a rate no higher than random chance, they’d soon be fired. But being a psychic is a unique career in which routine failure is simply denied or glossed over. Psychics can try to explain away their mistakes and use psychological tricks to convince the public of their validity, but their failures offer no answers or comfort to grieving families.

If all you’re tossing out is random and vague crap – It will be near water … 90% of the freaking planet is water asshat! – some of it is bound to stick. That doesn’t make someone a psychic.

And, just in case you’re curious, the $1,000,000 offered by James Randi to anyone who could prove they were or are a psychic remains unclaimed. As it has since the 1960’s.

As it will forever. And that’s a prediction you can count on.

Crocodiles – Sunday (Psychic Conversation #9) from Souterrain Transmissions on Vimeo.

Listen to Bill McCormick on WBIG (FOX! Sports) every Friday around 9:10 AM.
Visit us on Rebel Mouse for even more fun!
contact Bill McCormick

A lesson in perspective; If you are standing on flat, uninterrupted, ground the farthest you can see is about 3 miles. You may discern the tops of mountains or skyscrapers farther out since they rise above the curve of the earth but you are otherwise limited in what you can see. Also, if you are top of the aforementioned mountains and skyscrapers, you can see much further than normal because you are above the curve of the Earth. This is why, no matter how clear the weather may be, or how powerful your binoculars are, you can’t see from Chicago to Tokyo. Or even Duluth. Heck, you can’t even see Des Plaines from the Loop. I bring this up since I met a nice young lady yesterday who was very confused by the concept of time zones. My attempt to explain that the world is round and that the sun doesn’t shine everywhere at once ended badly. She simply could not conceive of anything that stretched beyond her horizons. And those were some narrow horizons. By the end of our train ride I felt the need for a shower for fear a palpable layer of her stupid had gotten on me.

She was not a person open to new ideas. I know I don’t have to be worried about her reading this today and being offended since, at one point, she noted that “the Internet is fading, people are going back to real life.” No, I had no idea what the hell she was talking about either so let’s move on.

You, however, are a person who lives in the real world. You are automatically better looking and smarter than your neighbors just because you’re here.

You are also someone who not only thinks outside the box, you often never even look at the box. You are the kind of person who would happily join me at a roadkill museum. Peter Jeary, Senior Foreign Desk Editor at NBC News, say’s that’s good to hear since there is such a place.

It also has rocks.

Very few people can talk about rocks and heavy machinery with the enthusiasm and care of a proud father. But for 79-year-old Juozas Stepankevičius, director and curator of perhaps the oddest museum in the world, road-making is an enduring passion.

Over a convivial glass of local moonshine, Stepankevičius described the transformation he had witnessed in highway construction in his homeland of Lithuania. “When I started out, we didn’t work with asphalt and heavy machinery — we used rocks and horses in those days,” he grinned.

Appropriately enough, his labor of love, the Lithuanian Road Museum, sits just off the main highway linking the country’s two largest cities, Vilnius and Kaunas. The museum opened in 1995 to mark the 25th anniversary of the road’s completion. Today, it attracts upwards of 6,000 visitors each year, many of them school kids and construction-industry students.

The museum’s exhibits – an eclectic potpourri of models, rock samples, documents, heavy machinery and road signs – chart the history of an industry that survived and occasionally thrived despite war, invasion, occupation and liberation. Huge wheels and pressed steel jostle for space in two large warehouses, and smaller displays are arranged in tidy gallery rooms on an upper floor.

Stepankevičius went through each specimen in detail. “This one has a Russian tank engine,” he said, pointing to monster dating from the 1950s. “In fact, it pretty much is a tank – just with a bulldozer blade on the front. The Russians were good at tanks.”

Clambering onto another huge earth-mover, he said that “the walls of the workshops rattled so much it caused all the engineers to run outside” when they first started it up.

A scale model of a Lithuanian highway intersection on display in an upstairs room had been used for a conference during the Soviet era as a design for other road engineers to follow, he said. “Then in the mid-1990s it was discovered languishing in a Moscow storeroom. It was Russian President Boris Yeltsin who said it should be allowed to come home.”

Stepankevičius began building roads after graduating high school – he saw a poster offering a stipend for students learning road construction and chose it over a course in plumbing, which didn’t offer as much money.

Gradually his career took him away from the back-breaking work of construction into administration and management, and slowly he began accumulating road paraphernalia.

“Of the five of us from my high school who took the construction course, four of us are still alive,” he said, draining his glass. “Managers live longer than laborers in the road business.”
The eccentric collection came together not by design, but due to his reluctance to throw things away: “The more things I saved, the more I wanted, so the more I saved,” he said. Eventually he found himself scavenging and scrounging for pieces to add to his collection.

Perhaps the most bizarre gallery combines Stepankevičius’ love of roads with another of his passions – hunting. Stuffed birds, beavers, foxes and other assorted mammals adorn display cabinets alongside hunting memorabilia. “Not all of them are roadkill,” he said, with a sideways glance at the beaver.

Despite the museum amassing 6,000 exhibits, Stepankevičius still sees his obsession as a work in progress. “It’s not like writing a book, where, when you have no more to say, you simply write ‘The End’,” he explained. “Here, there will always be things to collect. I am building for the future.”

When was the last time you could say the phrase “Over a convivial glass of local moonshine”? Yeah, it’s been a while for me too. But if we’re going to go there then I see no reason we shouldn’t hop a plane to the Toilet Park in South Korea or Australia’s Museum of Art Made from Poo.

On the other hand, maybe it’s a good thing that the world is round and we can’t see these things.

HITCHHIKER GIRLS IN HEAT (Claude Bernard-Aubert, 1979) (NSFW) from Spectacle Theater on Vimeo.

Listen to Bill McCormick on WBIG (FOX! Sports) every Friday around 9:10 AM.
Visit us on Rebel Mouse for even more fun!
contact Bill McCormick