Search Results for: overlord

Once upon a time, DJ Chucky D. wrote “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” And while he’s written raps that have more popular appeal in our modern times, such as his famous Bah! Humbug!, none seem more salient to me. It’s not that our era is any more dangerous than any other, far from it, it’s just that the lunatics, once relegated to the fringes where it was hoped they they would forget how to procreate, now permeate our headlines. This blog is a standing testament to the idiocy of others. I would rather write about many things, the Sunday science blogs come to mind, but the vast majority of our Hippo readers are fascinated by boobs or our impending robot overlords. Mostly boobs. In fact, I could dedicate a week to the wonderful world of mammaries and receive nary a complaint. Well, maybe I’d get one from that one woman who fervently desires that I write about nothing more interesting than puppies and, preferably, only cute ones at that.

As you may have surmised, she’s not a regular here.

But, today, I thought I’d take a look at some dangerous things. Allan Dowd writes that I stand a good chance of getting laid again since I never smile.

That could be construed as dangerous to some.

Women find happy men less sexually attractive than those with expressions that show pride or hint that they have done wrong and know it, according to Canadian researchers.

The study published online Tuesday in the American Psychological Association journal Emotion showed pictures of the opposite sex to both men and women. Participants were then asked for their initial reactions on sexual attractiveness based the expressions they saw.

“Men who smile were considered fairly unattractive by women,” said Jessica Tracy, a University of British Columbia psychology professor who directed the study.

“So to the extent that men think that smiling is a good thing to do if they want to be found sexually attractive our findings suggest that’s not the case,” Tracy said.

The men’s reaction was just the opposite.

“Women who smile are absolutely very attractive. That was by far the most attractive expression women showed,” Tracy said in an interview.

The researchers admit they are not sure why men and women reacted differently to smiles. In a man, a big smile may make him appear too feminine or more desperate for sex.

The study also adds fuel to the notion that women are attracted to bad boys.

Bad boys, bad boys, whatcha gonna do …. sorry. I can make this one easy for the shrinks, guys who smile all the time are either trying to sell you something or steal something. Usually both. Even women, who are still baffled by how to use a toilet seat after millennia of practice, can figure that out.

They could have just paid me and saved a lot of time.

Nevertheless, there are some things you take for granted that they’re going to be safe. Walking down the street and not being killed at random is one of them. You would be wrong. Especially if you live in – you guessed this one already didn’t you? – Florida. Reuters reports that more people get killed while walking to their corner grocery in Florida than any other state.

And not by drive by shootings or anything obvious like that.

Several major cities in the state — Orlando, Tampa, Jacksonville, Miami-Fort Lauderdale — took the top spots on a list of the most dangerous metropolitan areas for pedestrians published by a U.S. transportation reform group on Tuesday.

The “Dangerous by Design” report, produced by Transportation for America, ranked cities with populations over a million people in terms of the danger to pedestrians relative to the amount of walking in a given area.

Riverside, California, Las Vegas, Memphis, Phoenix, Houston, and Dallas filled out the top ten in that order.

The author of the report emphasized the role of planning in the dangerous cities for pedestrians.

The common factor urban sprawl, low-density areas that are organized around wide, high-speed streets known as arterials.

Most of the over 47,700 pedestrian fatalities during the last decade were on these arterial roads, researcher Michelle Ernst said.

Did you notice that the list also focuses on states with much higher speed limits and crappy roads? Golly, I wonder if that’s a factor as well?

Another thing you might think is inherently safe, going to a party with your friends, also could be fraught with peril. UPI tells us the fun loving tale of a man who crashed a party and pulled a gun when he was asked to leave.

A California jury convicted a party crasher who pulled a gun only to be disarmed by a partygoer trained in mixed martial arts.

Gregory Anthony McFarland Jr., 24, was convicted May 26 of felony assault with a firearm, gun enhancements, being a felon in possession of a firearm and residential burglary, the San Francisco Chronicle reported Monday.

Police said McFarland and some friends crashed a Daly City party March 25, 2009, and refused to leave when asked. Investigators said McFarland, who was “extremely intoxicated,” brandished a .380 semiautomatic handgun and threatened to shoot the revelers.

However, another partygoer, who is a mixed martial artist, “promptly executed a flawless wrist lock, nearly breaking the suspect’s wrist,” San Mateo County District Attorney Steve Wagstaffe said.

McFarland fled without his gun, only to be found by police vomiting in a neighbor’s yard.

He faces as much as 20 years and eight months in prison at his sentencing July 8.

“What’re you in for?”

“Murder. How bout you?”

“Getting my ass kicked in Frisco by some chi-chi personal trainer.”

“Oh, you’re going to love shower time.”

I don’t think I need to add anything more.

Yet, having been raised a Catholic, and even having gone to Catholic school, there is one group of people that I feared but, for all the right reasons, not because I thought they’d pull a 9MM Glok on me.

Nuns gone bad?

UPI has this story as well. Must be a fun day over at UPI, don’tcha think?

The FBI is hunting for two robbers who held up a bank in Palos Heights, Ill., while wearing nun masks and habits and wielding guns, officials said Monday.

The holdup occurred Sunday afternoon at a TCF bank branch, the Chicago Tribune reported.

The robbers, sporting get-ups like those in the 2010 movie “The Town,” displayed handguns when they ordered an employee to give them an undisclosed amount of money, officials said.

They fled in a light-colored sedan.

Nuns on the run? Hasn’t that been done to death?

Listen to Bill McCormick on WBIG AM 1280, every Thursday morning around 9:10!

There are days I rant and rave, while worrying and gnashing my teeth, about the impending take over by our robot overlords and then there are days like this. Days where I figure we’ll probably be better off. The kind of day where it’s painfully obvious that humanity has jumped the rails and is just lying in the ditch waiting for something new to pass by.

Most of us, at one time or another, have had parents. Those people who seemed incredibly dense when you were young yet, somehow, managed to look kind of smart as you matured. Well, the was the common conception. After all, if they’re smart enough to procreate they must be smart enough to be responsible adults as well. Right?

Wrong.

Thanks to websites like Bad Parenting and Bad Breeders, with the former going for laughs and the latter being more insightful, it’s becoming clear that many people should not be allowed to breed. At the very least they should be required to pass some basic test before we untie their tubes and set them free.

Yesterday I wrote about a very good family. Today I’ll note that they’re outnumbered, at least, three-to-one.

We’ll take a look at the losers in chronological order based on the age of each child involved.

Starting with an infant. Isabelle Zehnder tells about grandma’s ‘gone wrong’ moment.

It was a bizarre abduction, to say the least. Before leaving her home in Southern California and coming to Northern California, (ED: the infant’s grandmother) Ericka Gallego told her roommate and friends that she had given birth to a baby girl. When she returned home with the baby her roommate became suspicious.

Jaime Portugal said Ericka is his roommate in El Monte. Ericka told people she was pregnant and had just held a baby shower, he said. Ericka told people the baby was 2 ½ weeks old.

Portugal became suspicious something was wrong when the baby looked too mature to be a newborn. “She wasn’t all there from the get-go,” he said. “She was always a little off her rocker.”

“It’s a good feeling to know the baby’s going back to her mother,” he said.

A contractor and handyman from El Monte, Martin Jimenez, said he also knew Ericka and that he was suspicious about her claims she’d recently given birth. He went to a local Kaiser Permanente Hospital in Baldwin Park and was told they had no records of her giving birth.

He said he’d suggested previously that she should seek psychological help. He was concerned enough to call police.

Police actually had Ericka in custody Sunday night. Captain Steve Warne of the Contra Costa County Sheriff’s Office said, “Ericka was arrested late last night. Our detectives interviewed her and others in the early morning hours (of Monday). We haven’t specifically established a motive. We consider this an act criminal in nature.”

“Ericka Gallego never had permission to take Ramy from her house. We believe she snuck into the home without the parents’ knowledge. The parents had no idea Erika was in the possession of their baby until we notified them,” Warne said.

First off, a big tip of the Nude Hippo hat, even though the producers are too cheap to actually give us hats, to Martin Jiminez for calling the cops and helping this family get reunited. As to the grandmother, “WTF WAS SHE THINKING?!?!!”

Yeah, that about sums it up.

But not all stories about bad parents involve people who are clearly delusional. Some are just patently evil. For example, Erin Alberty tells us of the nice mommy who wanted to sell her, 13 year old, daughter’s virginity.

A Salt Lake City woman is accused of trying to sell her 13-year-old daughter’s virginity for $10,000.

The woman’s boyfriend reported the alleged plot to police after finding text messages on the woman’s phone detailing negotiations with a man identified only as “Don,” said Salt Lake County prosecutor Sim Gill.

The woman, 32, had promised Don that her daughter would perform oral sex and other sex acts in exchange for $10,000 and later confessed the deal to police, Gill said.

The girl told police she initially consented to the arrangement but later decided she didn’t want to follow through, Gill said.

The mother also admitted to taking the girl to a Victoria’s Secret store, where she opened the dressing room door for Don to watch the girl model bras and thong underwear, Gill said.

The woman is also accused of sending pictures of the girl wearing lingerie to another man in exchange for money.

The negotiations for the pictures and the sex acts are alleged to have occurred from April 1 to May 18, Gill said.

Gill would not discuss details of any investigation of the man known as Don or the other man who received photos of the girl. He would not comment on whether police have identified those men or whether their ages are known.

The woman is charged with two first-degree felony counts of aggravated sexual abuse of a child and two second-degree felony counts of sex exploitation of a minor.

The Salt Lake City Tribune, and all other media outlets, are honoring the police’s request not to name the mother for fear of harming the child, so we here are Nude Hippo will respect that as well.

But, seriously, when did this seem like a good idea? How do you go from “Honey, would you like to wear your school sweatshirt to the dance?” to “Honey, let’s go to Victoria’s Secret so mommy can be a pimp.”

I would have thought the gap between those thoughts was a gaping chasm, not a fine line.

As to the men involved in this venture, I hope there’s a special place in hell for them.

But, for our final story, we turn to Texas where the kids are in their 30’s and share the loving story of their demented dad. Steve Campbell reports on a story that would be funny as heck if it weren’t so sad.

On the other side of the barbed-wire fence, John Joe Gray, a “free-standing man” and fugitive from the law, is locked and loaded for the coming apocalypse or authorities – whichever shows up first.

“It’s coming,” he says. “It’s time this country knows God is coming.”

A rifle is slung across his back and a gun belt around his waist holds a revolver and extra cartridges. A knife is strapped to the other side of his lean torso. A battered felt hat frames a deeply lined face and bushy beard.

Dangling from a nearby tree, a hangman’s noose strangles a weathered sign that sums up his stance: “Solution to tyranny.”
Warily covering Gray’s flanks are two of his six children, sons Jonathan, 39, and Timothy, 33. The dark-bearded, fit and tanned brothers are as well-armed as their 62-year-old father.

Ten feet behind her brothers and father, long-haired Ruth Gray, 31, stands solemn and silent. She, too, is armed to the teeth.

Next to her is teenager Jessica Gray, “who is old enough,” according to her father, Jonathan. She has on a cowboy hat that the wind keeps blowing off, a long denim skirt, a sequined denim vest and cowboy boots. She’s packing a pistol and binoculars.

This is one stubborn side of what has been called America’s longest-running standoff with law enforcement.

But it’s been a single-sided siege. Henderson County authorities have pointedly ignored the would-be war.

For more than 11 years, John Joe Gray and his country clan have been holed up inside their own private prison, a 47-acre strip of Trinity River bottomland about 100 miles southeast of Fort Worth in Henderson County.

They’ve scraped out a harsh life here ever since Gray was bailed out of jail in January 2000 after he was charged with assaulting a state trooper on Christmas Eve 1999.

During a traffic stop, Gray and the driver of the car told two Department of Public Safety troopers that they were armed. When ordered to get out, the driver did but Gray wouldn’t budge.

One trooper pushed Gray out, and he then lunged for the other officer’s sidearm. Gray bit the trooper as they struggled for control of the weapon, according to investigators.

An Anderson County grand jury indicted him on two felony counts – assaulting a public servant and taking a peace officer’s weapon.

“We’re here because two highway patrolmen lied about what happened,” Gray said last week. “Land of the free and home of the brave? That’s a bunch of bull.”

He has refused to be taken alive and in a long-ago letter to authorities, the family warned officials to “bring extra body bags,” if they come for him. Authorities kept tabs on the compound for months but haven’t maintained an active presence for years.

“We fear no man,” John Joe Gray maintains. “We believe in an eye for an eye and a bullet for a bullet.”

But nobody’s storming the gate.

Henderson County Sheriff Ray Nutt, who is the fourth lawman in the post since 2000, says, like his predecessors, that he’s not willing to risk a gunbattle just to arrest Gray.

“John Joe Gray is not worth it. Ten of him is not worth going up there and getting one of my young deputies killed,” he said.

The hardscrabble compound has no phone, no refrigeration, no power.

Contact with the outside world is through a handful of “supporters” and via shortwave radio, John Joe Gray said.
Drinking water comes from springs, and Gray and his sons say they subsist by growing beans, potatoes, corn, squash, tomatoes and peppers on fields they plow with donkeys. They can vegetables and dry meat to get through the year, they said.

They also raise goats and chickens and catch catfish, carp and drum from the Trinity and hunt deer on the wooded property. Friends bring them staples they can’t produce themselves. Last year, they harvested their first crop of peaches.
One supporter, who frequently visits the farm, said eight children are inside the compound. The kids are armed at an early age, she said. They are equally adept at reciting the Constitution or Scripture.

“It’s sort of Wild West. It’s what a traditional American family looked like 100 years ago,” said Dolores McCarter of Arlington, who says she once worked for Homeland Security and now operates a small nonprofit called Dee’s House that helps battered women and children.

“John is standing as a free man. He loves his family. They are prepared to live out their lives there,” McCarter said. “Some people pity them and they … pity us.”

No, I feel no pity for this particular fool. For his family, maybe, but not him.

“Why not? You heartless S.O.B.!”

Well, because, the statute of limitations ran out years ago. This paranoid moron is as free to shop at WalMart as you and I. He, and his family, can leave at any time. Even if he did get picked up on the outstanding warrant, a judge would cut him free in a nanosecond. And that would be the end of that.

In other words, he’s ruined the minds and lives of his family for nothing.

Then again, that does seem to be the common denominator in all our stories today, doesn’t it?

Listen to Bill McCormick on WBIG AM 1280, every Thursday morning around 9:10!

We live in a world where people in power make decisions for us. Believe it or not most of them are relatively benign. They move your trash pickup from Tuesday to Wednesday. You can handle it. Or they add timers on crosswalks so folks stop being caught in the middle of the street. You can live with not being run over, so you go along with it. Some are just odd. Like discovering that you are not allowed to feed giraffes on Lake Michigan’s beach. I’m sure that’s a law for a reason. Others are not so well received. For example, in Council Bluffs, Iowa, parking tickets can set you back $835 a pop. Some folks said the fine was too high and folks couldn’t pay it so the death penalty would be more appropriate. Add Council Bluffs, Iowa, to the list of places I never want to live.

But, still, you figure if you’re delivering Mexican food you don’t plan on doing hard time. Yet that’s exactly what happened to a young man in Asheville, N.C. the other night.

Yes, the nice man did tell the cops it was Mexican food and not kilos of cocaine. The shrimp would have been my first clue, but I’m not a cop in North Carolina.

An enzyme found in cheese triggered false drug test results that led North Carolina deputies to think a man with 91 pounds of tortilla dough was actually carrying that much cocaine, the sheriff said.

Antonio Hernandez spent four days in an Asheville jail this month before tests by a state lab showed he was carrying food, not drugs.

A Buncombe County deputy stopped Hernandez on May 1 and found what turned out to be a mix of cheese, shrimp and tortilla and tamale dough in his truck. A portable kit used by deputies changed colors, indicating the mixture was illegal drugs.

Sheriff Van Duncan told The Asheville Citizen-Times he didn’t know until this case that some foods, like cheese, can give false positives on field drug tests. He plans to have deputies talk to the company that makes the tests.

Have these guys ever seen cocaine before? It’s not chunky, I can promise you that. And if it is, then you’re doing it wrong.

But, what about lying? If we penalize people for telling the truth then we must, WE MUST!! I TELL YOU!, give rewards to those who benefit from lying. And, just to help out our impending robot overlords, a scientist is hitting the trifecta by teaching robots to lie.

Robots can evolve to communicate with each other, to help, and even to deceive each other, according to Dario Floreano of the Laboratory of Intelligent Systems at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology.

Floreano and his colleagues outfitted robots with light sensors, rings of blue light, and wheels and placed them in habitats furnished with glowing “food sources” and patches of “poison” that recharged or drained their batteries. Their neural circuitry was programmed with just 30 “genes,” elements of software code that determined how much they sensed light and how they responded when they did. The robots were initially programmed both to light up randomly and to move randomly when they sensed light.

To create the next generation of robots, Floreano recombined the genes of those that proved fittest—those that had managed to get the biggest charge out of the food source.

The resulting code (with a little mutation added in the form of a random change) was downloaded into the robots to make what were, in essence, offspring. Then they were released into their artificial habitat. “We set up a situation common in nature—foraging with uncertainty,” Floreano says. “You have to find food, but you don’t know what food is; if you eat poison, you die.” Four different types of colonies of robots were allowed to eat, reproduce, and expire.

By the 50th generation, the robots had learned to communicate—lighting up, in three out of four colonies, to alert the others when they’d found food or poison. The fourth colony sometimes evolved “cheater” robots instead, which would light up to tell the others that the poison was food, while they themselves rolled over to the food source and chowed down without emitting so much as a blink.

Some robots, though, were veritable heroes. They signaled danger and died to save other robots. “Sometimes,” Floreano says, “you see that in nature—an animal that emits a cry when it sees a predator; it gets eaten, and the others get away—but I never expected to see this in robots.”

So there you go, the squeaky wheel doesn’t get the grease, it gets replaced.

Seriously, teaching robots to lie is a good thing? What’s next? Your GPS saying, “Ignore that cliff, Bob, and just turn left to get your McNuggets.”

On the other hand, they might help us clear out a lot of stupid people.

Hmmmmm.

Listen to Bill McCormick on WBIG AM 1280, every Thursday morning around 9:10!

Don’t worry, this won’t be one of those treacly monologues about all the bad things we’ve done to the planet. Nor will it be one of those weeping diatribes filled with lots of pseudo-science and Gaia worship. You can also toss the whole idea that this will be one of those preachy pieces that DE-FREAKING-MAND that you agree with the author or be forever branded an idiot. Although, personally, I kind of like those because when you use silly things like facts they either shut up or scream such loud nonsense that it’s funny. Kind of like the people who rant against Michael Crichton’s book State of Fear. They’re mad that their research was taken out of context, but don’t dispute the results. They just don’t like those results, so the results must be wrong. Juts FYI, Crichton never once says global warming is a crock, just that the public is being duped into adding in many concepts that have nothing to do with the problem so that corporations can get rich off the sniveling masses.

Of course, you’d have to have read the book to know that, and that takes all the fun out of internet criticism.

Anyway, none of that is relevant to my humble blog today. No, today, we’re going to look at something far more prosaic. According to Ian O’neill on his personal website, Astro Genie, science has developed a way to listen to planets scream. And that may open up a lot of exciting possibilities.

In 2009, I wrote about a fascinating idea: in the hunt for “Earth-like” exoplanets, perhaps we could detect the radio emissions from a distant world possessing a magnetosphere. This basically builds on the premise that planets in the solar system, including Earth, generate electromagnetic waves as space plasma interacts with their magnetospheres. In short, with the right equipment, could we “hear” the aurorae on extra-solar planets?

In the research I reviewed, the US Naval Research Laboratory scientist concluded that he believed it was possible, but the radio telescopes we have in operation aren’t sensitive enough to detect the crackle of distant aurorae. According to a new study presented at the RAS National Astronomy Meeting in Llandudno, Wales, on Monday, this feat may soon become a reality, not for “Earth-like” worlds but for “Jupiter-like” worlds.

“This is the first study to predict the radio emissions by exoplanetary systems similar to those we find at Jupiter or Saturn,” said Jonathan Nichols of the University of Leicester. “At both planets, we see radio waves associated with auroras generated by interactions with ionised gas escaping from the volcanic moons, Io and Enceladus. Our study shows that we could detect emissions from radio auroras from Jupiter-like systems orbiting at distances as far out as Pluto.”

Rather than looking for the magnetospheres of Earth-like worlds — thereby finding exoplanets that have a protective magnetosphere that could nurture alien life — Nichols is focusing on larger, Jupiter-like worlds that orbit their host stars from a distance. This is basically another tool in the exoplanet-hunters’ toolbox.

Over 500 exoplanets have been confirmed to exist around other stars, and another 1,200 plus exoplanetary candidates have been cataloged by the Kepler Space Telescope. The majority of the confirmed exoplanets were spotted using the “transit method” (when the exoplanet passes in front of its host star, thereby dimming its light for astronomers to detect) and the “wobble method” (when the exoplanet gravitationally tugs on its parent star, creating a very slight shift in the star’s position for astronomers to detect), but only exoplanets with short orbital periods have been spotted so far.

The more distant the exoplanet from its host star, the longer its orbital period. To get a positive detection, it’s easy to spot an exoplanet with an orbital period of days, weeks, months, or a couple of years, but what of the exoplanets with orbits similar to Jupiter (12 years), Saturn (30 years) or even Pluto (248 years!)? If we are looking for exoplanets with extreme orbits like Pluto’s, it would be several generations-worth of observations before we’d even get a hint that a world lives there.

“Jupiter and Saturn take 12 and 30 years respectively to orbit the Sun, so you would have to be incredibly lucky or look for a very long time to spot them by a transit or a wobble,” said Nichols.

By assessing how the radio emissions for a Jupiter-like exoplanet respond to its rotation rate, the quantity of material falling into the gas giant from an orbiting moon (akin Enceladus’ plumes of water ice and dust being channeled onto the gas giant) and the exoplanet’s orbital distance, Nichols has been able to identify the characteristics of a possible target star. The hypothetical, “aurora-active” exoplanet would be located between 1 to 50 AU from an ultraviolet-bright star and it would need to have a fast spin for the resulting magnetospheric activity to be detectable at a distance of 150 light-years from Earth.

What’s more, the brand new LOw Frequency ARray (LOFAR) radio telescope should be sensitive enough to detect aurorae on Jupiter-like exoplanets, even though the exoplanets themselves are invisible to other detection methods. Nice.

As we’re talking about exoplanets, magnetospheres and listening for radio signals, let’s throw in some alien-hunting for good measure: “In our Solar System, we have a stable system with outer gas giants and inner terrestrial planets, like Earth, where life has been able to evolve. Being able to detect Jupiter-like planets may help us find planetary systems like our own, with other planets that are capable of supporting life,” Nichols added.

Although Nichols isn’t talking about directly detecting habitable alien worlds (just that the detection of Jupiter-like exoplanets could reveal Solar System-like star systems), I think back to the 2009 research that discusses the direct detection of habitable worlds using this method: Aliens, if you’re out there, you can be as quiet as you like (to avoid predators), but the screaming radio emissions from your habitable planet’s magnetosphere will give away your location…

In other words, it doesn’t matter if aliens can watch I Dream of Genie or not, they’ll know we’re here anyway. So, don’t panic. You can listen to my podcasts without being responsible for our alien overlords corralling you and your family into slavery.

If you have a few minutes, you can actually listen to the planets in our solar system. Earth is kind of creepy. Anyway, I guess you’d scream too if you were a planet with us on it.

Listen to Bill McCormick on WBIG AM 1280, every Thursday morning around 9:10!

As more and more people read this blog I find myself getting asked “Hey, what happened to such and such?” Or so and so, as the case may be. Since I understand that Google can be tricky for some, I’ve decided to be helpful and catch people up on the topics that seem to interest them the most. For those who’re concerned about the bump in the universe, I’m afraid you’re going to have to wait for a few years to get a definitive answer. The discovery’s too recent. Unlike on TV, real time has to pass while scientists working at colliders the world over check their research to see if they can find similar or matching results. When I posted the article possible answers ranged from it being a statistical anomaly to a message from God. As of today, that’s still where things stand.

Others wanted to know about Paul Arason’s penis. They’ll be pleased to know that Paul kicked the bucket at the ripe old age of 95 and donated his pickled member to the Icelandic Penis Museum. Paul is the first human represented in the museum but will probably not be the last. It seems there are several wills already written which include a request to have the owner’s personal parts so honored as well. Icelandic men seem to be very proud of their penises and want to make sure they get the posthumous posterity they deserve.

Still others wanted to know more about Mrs. God. Some were very angry about the article. They attacked the researcher who made the discovery, theologian Francesca Stavrakopoulou, for being an atheist and a woman. They also attacked me for giving her pub, like she needed me for that after being on The Discovery Channel and so on. But the rest were just curious. They wanted to know if the story had any validity. The answer to that is a simple yes. It seems pretty clear now that, up until the Moses led patriarchy came to dominate Judaism and thus influence Christianity and Islam, the devout worshiped both Yahweh and Ashera. Moses’ scribes and hard liners like Leviticus had no place in their realms for a nurturing being and simply edited her out of any existing scriptures. More discoveries are being made which support Ms. Stavrakopoulou’s original thesis. I’m not sure how this will all play out in the real world, but it should be interesting to follow.

Many more have written to find out more about the food that will not die. That story’s taken on a life of its own. As you know, hamburgers and fries purchased from McDonald’s will not decay. Even if left in the open for hundreds of days, they still look like they just came out of the microwave. The experiment is easy to duplicate. Just buy a Happy Meal (TM), take off the lettuce and stuff and then photograph it every day until it decomposes or you run out of patience. So far, after about a year, people are beginning to see that patience will lose out first. McDonald’s freely admits that each Chicken McNugget is only 50% chicken and the rest is those ubiquitous “fillers and preservatives” and that they treat their meat before freeze drying it and shipping it to their restaurants. Simply put, if food does not decay in the open air then it’s probably not decaying in you either. You might want to give that some serious thought before you slap down your hard earned money for lunch.

For those who are worried about our impending robot overlords, I will be dealing with them in a few days, so stick around. Also, tomorrow, I’m going to take a long look at the recently released FBI documents that ABSOLUTELY PROVE the existence of UFOs. First off, there’s no need to type in all caps. It’s annoying. Second of all, no they don’t. Tune in tomorrow to find out why.

Listen to Bill McCormick on WBIG AM 1280, every Thursday morning around 9:10!