The Lighter Side of the News

[Geo]

Is there a video of a happy Führer instead of the one where Hitler makes a tantrum about everything?
Could be used to make variants of such advertising tweets.

[gwillybj]

More on the unusual snow and cold up here:
NY Tourism Site That Urged Visitors to Go to Florida Crashes
February 18, 2015

ITHACA, N.Y. (AP) — A New York tourism office's suggestion that potential visitors should go to the Florida Keys instead has ended up crashing its website.

Bruce Stoff of the Ithaca-Tompkins County Convention and Visitors Bureau tells The Associated Press on Wednesday that the office's overwhelmed server crashed Tuesday afternoon, not long after the AP reported on his agency's stunt.

On Sunday, Visitithaca.com posted images of Key West and provided links to Florida Keys websites. The Ithaca site said, "We surrender" and "Winter, you win" and suggested that a visit to Key West was a better option than frozen central New York.

Stoff says his office removed the Florida link because the nearly 150,000 views crashed the website. The upside: Stoff says his office fielded numerous inquiries about tourism in upstate New York.
http://news.yahoo.com/ny-tourism-urged-visitors-florida-crashes-161636275.html

[Geo]

The irony!

[gwillybj]

Nevada Lawmaker Wants Medical Marijuana for Pets
Reuters | March 18, 2015

(Reuters) - A Nevada lawmaker proposed a bill in the state legislature on Tuesday that would grant ailing pets access to medical marijuana.

The measure, put forward by Democrat Tick Segerblom, would let owners obtain the drug for their animals if a veterinarian confirmed it " may mitigate the symptoms or effects" of a chronic or debilitating medical condition.

The proposed bill also includes provisions related to medical marijuana use among humans, including new regulations for dispensaries and dropping penalties for motorists found driving with the drug in their system.

The proposal comes as a growing number of U.S. states have relaxed marijuana laws. Nevada is one of 23 states where medical marijuana is legal, and voters have approved the drug for recreational use in four states and Washington, D.C.

Public opinion has also shifted dramatically toward legalizing marijuana in recent years. Some 46 percent of Americans support full legalization of marijuana, according to Reuters/Ipsos polling.

(Reporting by Curtis Skinner in San Francisco; Editing by Raissa Kasolowsky)
http://news.yahoo.com/nevada-lawmaker-wants-medical-marijuana-pets-102507408.html

[gwillybj]

Cost to Reopen Philadelphia's Ghost Station Could Top $18M
Associated Press
March 16, 2015 5:25 PM

CAMDEN, N.J. (AP) — A closed Philadelphia train stop commonly referred to as Ghost Station could be reopened at a cost exceeding $18 million.

The Delaware River Port Authority is due to receive on Wednesday a report examining the feasibility of reopening the Port Authority Transit Corporation's Franklin Square Station in the Old City section of Philadelphia. The Delaware River Port Authority oversees the PATCO, the commuter rail that shuffles passengers between southern New Jersey and downtown Philadelphia.

The station was abandoned in 1979 and is dimly lit and eerie. The report says it would cost $18.5 million to resurrect it and another $8 million to install escalators and reopen additional entrances.

The station would serve 1,300 passengers each day. But the study says most of those already use another station in downtown Philadelphia.
http://news.yahoo.com/cost-reopen-philadelphias-ghost-station-could-top-18m-211512153.html

[Geo]

Mariuana for pets? Since when do other species react the same way as humans to 'recreational' drugs?

[Unorthodox]

Shhh, you're going to diminish the need for 'vet' visits. 

[gwillybj]

Mariuana for pets? Since when do other species react the same way as humans to 'recreational' drugs?

I'd suspect the catnip growers might object as well.
Is there a hallucinogen for dogs, or are they inherently nuts?

[Geo]

Is there a hallucinogen for dogs, or are they inherently nuts?

I'd say the latter!
Sorry, BUncle.

[Unorthodox]

They've proven dogs and cats can see in the ultraviolet range, so they are pretty much always trippin'. 

Explains why they see things that "aren't there" as well. 

[gwillybj]

The New York Times | Science
When Science Is Lost in a Legal Maze
George Johnson | March 23, 2015

In a saner world, where science and the law meshed more precisely, a case like Firstenberg v. Monribot would have been dead on arrival in court. But that is not what happened.

Earlier this month, five years after the lawsuit was filed, the New Mexico Court of Appeals upheld a lower court’s ruling that Arthur Firstenberg, an outspoken opponent of wireless technology, could not seek $1.43 million in damages from his neighbor, Raphaela Monribot, for damaging his health by using her iPhone and a Wi-Fi connection.

The electromagnetic signals that go from cellphone to cellphone and computer to computer lie quietly on the spectrum between radio broadcast waves and the colors of light. From the perspective of science, the likelihood of the rays somehow causing harm is about as strong as the evidence for ESP. But the law proceeds by its own logic, in which concepts like evidence and proof take on meanings of their own. This case in New Mexico shows how two of civilization’s great bodies of thought — the scientific and the legal — can make for an uneasy mix.

Mr. Firstenberg and Ms. Monribot, the record shows, were once on good terms. He had hired her in 2008 to cook for him, and after she left for Europe, he rented and then purchased her small house in a densely populated old neighborhood in Santa Fe, N.M. When she returned to town, she moved into a house adjacent to the one he owned.

It was there, Mr. Firstenberg would claim, that she became the cause of his suffering. Dizziness, nausea, amnesia, insomnia, tremors, heart arrhythmia, acute and chronic pain — all because she insisted on using her cellphone, computers and other ordinary electronic equipment.

Her dimmer switches and compact fluorescent bulbs emitted their own painful rays. The fact that the two houses shared the same electric utility connection, Mr. Firstenberg argued, intensified the effect.

A self-described sufferer of a medically unrecognized condition called electromagnetic hypersensitivity, he was already known in Santa Fe for his unsuccessful effort to block the installation of Wi-Fi in the city library and other public places.

When I heard that Mr. Firstenberg, who lives a couple of miles from me, was filing a tort claim seeking damages for what amounted to electromagnetic trespassing, I assumed the case would be quickly dismissed. Instead, in 2010, it entered the maze of hamster tubes that make up the judicial system.

In an exchange of emails, he declined to be interviewed about the case, saying that reporters should focus instead on what he believes are grave dangers posed by electromagnetic radiation. But except for a few obscure experts who quote one another’s discredited research, the consensus of science is that the health risks are most likely nonexistent.

Unlike X-rays and gamma rays, the radiation emitted and received by wireless devices is far too low in frequency to shake apart the molecules in living cells. Only at extremely intense exposures, like those inside a microwave oven, can the waves cause harm by generating heat.

It is not impossible that low, “subthermal” levels of the waves might disturb cellular chemistry in less obvious ways, but the evidence isn’t there. Double-blind studies of people who consider themselves electrosensitive have found no relationship between the onset of their symptoms and the presence of electromagnetic fields.

Showing skepticism from the start, District Judge Sarah Singleton denied Mr. Firstenberg’s request for a preliminary injunction, ruling that he was “unlikely to prevail on the issue of causation.” If only the locomotive had stopped there.

The judge also denied Ms. Monribot’s motion to dismiss the case entirely, calling instead for an evidentiary hearing to consider “in depth proof and argument on the validity of both sides’ experts.”

The result, in retrospect, was like the comedian John Oliver’s “statistically representative climate change debate” in which three critics of human-caused global warming were pitted against 97 scientists who considered the evidence overwhelming. Any debate over the scientific legitimacy of electrosensitivity would be even more lopsided.

In 2012, after two more years of claims and counterclaims, depositions and cross-examinations, days of hearings and pages of affidavits, the court was persuaded in its circuitous way of what science already knew: Mr. Firstenberg had no case. His expert witnesses, consisting of a holistic doctor and a consulting psychologist on neurotoxicity, were ruled unqualified and his evidence scientifically unreliable. And so came a summary judgment against him.

About a week ago, after the Court of Appeals upheld the decision, I stopped by the office of Ms. Monribot’s lawyer, Christopher Graeser, with a tape measure. The files for the case sat in boxes on a table. Piled together, the pages would reach more than six feet high.

Court costs, not counting lawyers’ fees, had come to almost $85,000, or more than $1,000 an inch. Because of what the court described as Mr. Firstenberg’s “inability to pay,” the bill went instead to Ms. Monribot’s landlord’s insurance company — as if someone had slipped on an icy sidewalk, or pretended to.

Mr. Graeser and another lawyer, Joseph Romero, represented her pro bono, writing off an estimated $200,000 in legal fees. Lindsay Lovejoy, the lawyer for Mr. Firstenberg, said he wasn’t free to discuss their arrangement.

Mr. Firstenberg represented himself for the appeal. The next stop may be the New Mexico Supreme Court. After all, Mr. Graeser said, the plaintiff had “suffered no real disincentive to doing it again.”

A version of this article appears in print on March 24, 2015, on page D3 of the New York edition with the headline: Science, Lost in a Legal Maze.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/24/science/when-science-is-lost-in-a-legal-maze.html
I suppose, in some extreme instances, a person might have a case. I think, though, that this man is overreaching. Consider people who work in contact or near-contact with such devices: They don't appear to suffer anything like what this man claims.

[gwillybj]

David Copperfield's Rooftop Pool Ruptures, Floods Penthouse
Associated Press
March 22, 2015 3:44 PM

NEW YORK (AP) — Now you see it, now you don't.

The water in magician David Copperfield's rooftop pool vanished — and flooded his penthouse apartment as well as multiple floors of his New York City apartment building on East 57th Street.

Copperfield's attorney Ted Blumberg told the New York Post (http://pge.sx/1C2QxdY ) that a malfunctioning pump was to blame for the March 8 incident. He said the entire pool drained through Copperfield's four-story apartment and others underneath it, soaking walls and floors.

Copperfield was performing in Las Vegas at the time.

Blumberg said the water spared Copperfield's collection of vintage machines from Coney Island.

He said the pool would be refilled after steps are taken to make sure a similar mishap didn't happen again.
___

Information from: New York Post, http://www.nypost.com
http://news.yahoo.com/david-copperfields-rooftop-pool-ruptures-floods-penthouse-194440435.html

[gwillybj]

Roaming 'Disorderly' Goat Corralled After Head-Butting Door
Associated Press | April 5, 2015

PARAMUS, N.J. (AP) — A "disorderly" goat has been corralled in northern New Jersey, and authorities are now trying to determine who owns the wayward animal.

Two Paramus police officers nabbed the small white goat shortly after 5 p.m. Saturday. The department says on its Facebook page they were responding to "calls of a disorderly goat head-butting a door."

Officers captured the goat as it was running in the roadway.

The goat apparently was not injured in the incident. It was being cared for at a local animal facility.

Authorities suspect that the animal likely escaped from a local residence.
http://news.yahoo.com/roaming-disorderly-goat-corralled-head-butting-door-161156029.html

Maybe a troll lived there.

[gwillybj]

Police: Don't Chase Bears While Drunk and Wielding a Hatchet
Associated Press
May 12, 2015

NORTH ADAMS, Mass. (AP) — Police in Massachusetts have some sage advice: Don't go chasing after bears while drunk and armed with nothing more than a dull hatchet.

North Adams police wrote on their Facebook page that someone did just that on Monday. The department noted that the drunken man was taken into protective custody.

No name was released.

Police say anyone who sees a bear should leave it alone and call authorities. They say they don't want to see anyone "going all Davy Crockett."

Bears are not unusual in the largely rural western part of the state.

A dispatcher said Tuesday said no one was available to handle media calls.
http://news.yahoo.com/police-dont-chase-bears-while-drunk-wielding-hatchet-160959216.html
Ah, life in the great northeast.

[Geo]

The other day I saw a video of a bear family more or less 'chasing' tourists at some bridge in Yellowstone Park, with a guy in the background yelling "RUN" over and over.