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Saturday, December 20, 2008
737 Catches Fire On Takeoff At DIA Goes off the Runway. in an Aborted Takeoff.
Updated
DENVER — Firefighters said it was like something out of a movie — passengers emerging from a smoke-filled ravine where the remains of a Boeing 737 lay in flames, its landing gear and left engine shorn off.
Denver Fire Department Division Chief Patrick Hynes called it "surreal." The fire burned the entire right side of the plane, and melted plastic from overhead compartments dripped onto the seats below.
Thirty-eight people suffered injuries including broken bones, and two were in critical condition with fractures after the Saturday evening accident, officials said.
Passenger Mike Wilson of Denver described a chaotic scramble to leave the burning plane on updates he posted on Twitter.com from the airport using his cell phone.
"By the time the plane stopped we were burning pretty well and I think I could feel the heat even through the bulkhead and window," he wrote. "I made for the exit door as quickly as I could, fearing the right wing might explode from the fire. Once out, I scrambled down the wing."
The 107 passengers and five crew members made it out through slides, and firefighters put out blaze quickly, said airport spokesman Jeff Green.
The cause of the accident was not immediately known. The weather in Denver was cold but not snowy when Continental Flight 1404 took off from Denver International Airport for Houston around 6:20 p.m.
The plane veered off course about 2,000 feet from the end of the runway and did not appear to be airborne, Day said. Debris was left scattered on the runway, with the plane about 200 yards away.
Denver International Airport manager of aviation Kim Day said travelers should expect delays Sunday, a busy travel day.
National Transportation Safety Board and Federal Aviation Administration inspectors were on the scene.
AP
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The newest "secret shopping" scam
The check was for $3,985.50. And with it, the promise of a simple part-time job.
"Our company is a 'Secret Shopping' employment service," the cover letter reads.
Conduct a survey of retail stores, fax the results, and pocket at least $680.40 for your work, the letter says.
"Secret Shopping" buyer beware: The job promise is among a series of international scams designed to separate you from your hard-earned cash, U.S. Postal Inspection Service spokesman Al Weissmann said.
"Our company is a 'Secret Shopping' employment service," the cover letter reads.
Conduct a survey of retail stores, fax the results, and pocket at least $680.40 for your work, the letter says.
"Secret Shopping" buyer beware: The job promise is among a series of international scams designed to separate you from your hard-earned cash, U.S. Postal Inspection Service spokesman Al Weissmann said.
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Weather Channel Founder: Sue Al Gore for Fraud
The founder of the Weather Channel wants to sue Al Gore for fraud, hoping a legal debate will settle the global-warming debate once and for all.
John Coleman, who founded the cable network in 1982, suggests suing for fraud proponents of global warming, including Al Gore, and companies that sell carbon credits.
"Is he committing financial fraud? That is the question," Coleman said.
"Since we can't get a debate, I thought perhaps if we had a legal challenge and went into a court of law, where it was our scientists and their scientists, and all the legal proceedings with the discovery and all their documents from both sides and scientific testimony from both sides, we could finally get a good solid debate on the issue," Coleman said. "I'm confident that the advocates of 'no significant effect from carbon dioxide' would win the case."
Coleman says his side of the global-warming debate is being buried in mainstream media circles.
"As you look at the atmosphere over the last 25 years, there's been perhaps a degree of warming, perhaps probably a whole lot less than that, and the last year has been so cold that that's been erased," he said.
"I think if we continue the cooling trend a couple of more years, the general public will at last begin to realize that they've been scammed on this global-warming thing."
Coleman spoke to FOXNews.com after his appearance last week at the 2008 International Conference on Climate Change in New York, where he called global warming a scam and lambasted the cable network he helped create.
"You want to tune to the Weather Channel and have them tell you how to live your life?" Coleman said. "Come on."
He laments the network's decision to focus on traffic and lifestyle reports over the weather.
"It's very clear that they don't realize that weather is the most significant impact in every human being's daily life, and good, solid, up-to-the-minute weather information and meaningful forecasts presented in such a way that people find them understandable and enjoyable can have a significant impact," he said.
"The more you cloud that up with other baloney, the weaker the product," he said.
Coleman has long been a skeptic of global warming, and carbon dioxide is the linchpin to his argument.
"Does carbon dioxide cause a warming of the atmosphere? The proponents of global warming pin their whole piece on that," he said.
The compound carbon dioxide makes up only 38 out of every 100,000 particles in the atmosphere, he said.
"That's about twice as what there were in the atmosphere in the time we started burning fossil fuels, so it's gone up, but it's still a tiny compound," Coleman said. "So how can that tiny trace compound have such a significant effect on temperature?
"My position is it can't," he continued. "It doesn't, and the whole case for global warming is based on a fallacy."
FOXNEWS
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YouTube's Plan To Gain The Upper Hand With Music Labels
Record labels like Universal Music Group are using YouTube to rake in millions of dollars from their music videos, and yesterday we raised the question of whether Google was making much money from these deals. Well, sources tell MediaMemo's Peter Kafka that the answer is a big, fat no. In fact, the music clips are costing Google (NSDQ: GOOG) money, even though YouTube is running ads on them.
But that is about to change, Kafka says. Currently, YouTube pays the labels either a per-stream fee or a portion of the ad revenue (if there's an ad on the video) every time a user clicks on one of their music clips; but since YouTube hasn't saturated the site with ads (yet), most of the time it's stuck with the per-stream fee. YouTube is in the midst of negotiating new deals with the labels (UMG, EMI, Sony (NYSE: SNE) and Warner Music Group) on very different terms, and Kafka's sources say the new terms will not add nearly as much cash to the labels' coffers. The current deals expire over the course of 2009.
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Cramer's Solution for $150 Oil
Cramer has a plan to make sure the U.S. never again suffers $4 gasoline. Barack Obama should, as one of his first acts as president, build storage facilities – tankers, tanks, whatever is needed – and buy a vast reserve of oil at these low prices.
Let’s face it, $34 crude just isn’t going to last. So the new president needs to take advantage of oil’s tremendous decline and buy as much of the commodity as the U.S. can hold, Cramer said. Drilling doesn’t make economic sense at these levels. But we can buy oil on the open market right now and store it for later use.
That, of course, is the problem. We don’t have any available space. So Cramer wants Obama to initiative a storage build-out, putting to work companies like Chicago Bridge & Iron [CBI 11.13 
-0.09 (-0.8%) 
], Jacobs Engineering [JEC 45.99 -0.99 (-2.11%) ] and Fluor[FLR 45.26 -2.79 (-5.81%) ]to get us what we need. (While these stocks won’t earn returns based on Obama’s expected stimulus package, Cramer thinks they will if the president-elect follows this plan.)
-0.09 (-0.8%) ], Jacobs Engineering [JEC 45.99 -0.99 (-2.11%) ] and Fluor[FLR 45.26 -2.79 (-5.81%) ]to get us what we need. (While these stocks won’t earn returns based on Obama’s expected stimulus package, Cramer thinks they will if the president-elect follows this plan.)With this massive strategic reserve, Washington would then have the ability to reduce the price of oil at will should the cost per barrel get too high, as it was earlier in 2008, simply by releasing the reserves.
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Priest removes Obama books from school
BLUE SPRINGS, Mo., Dec. 18 (UPI) -- A priest has removed two books about Barack Obama from a Missouri Roman Catholic school's library because of the president-elect's abortion position.
"I am very pro-life," the Rev. Ron Elliott of Blue Springs, Mo., told KMBC-TV, Kansas City, Mo. "Because of his stance on certain issues, I was asked to look into that matter."
Elliott said he pulled the Obama books from St. John LaLande Catholic School, even though he didn't find anything wrong with them when he read them.
He said he would put the books back on the shelf in February or March, "after the dust kind of settles."
The school has an early childhood center and teaches students from kindergarten through eighth grade.
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Web site lets fans sing with the King-Elvis
NASHVILLE, Tenn. – So you fancy yourself a singer, eh ... alone, in your car, with the windows up, when no one's looking.
Well, now you can test your pipes against Martina McBride and Elvis Presley in private, and if you like what you hear, you can share them with your friends via email.
As a promotion for "Elvis Presley Christmas Duets" album, Sony BMG Music Entertainment has created a Web site that allows you to record "Blue Christmas" as a duet with Presley, singing McBride's part from the album.
The site, http://www.singwiththeking.com, provides a phone number and access code so you can belt out your lines over the phone. If you're pleased with the recording, you can send it in a Christmas ecard.
Or, if you discover you sound more like Alvin and the Chipmunks than Presley and McBride, you can send the album version of the song instead.
The whole thing is free.
"Someone in our digital area came up with the concept," said JJ Rosen, executive vice president of Sony BMG Music Entertainment's Commercial Music Group. "It fits the duets concept of the album so well."
Because the campaign leans heavily on technology, Rosen said it brings Presley and his music to a younger generation. "We're always trying to keep the Elvis brand alive."
The site launched Dec. 5 and has drawn 30,000 people from nine countries. It's scheduled to end sometime in January.
The promotion has been successful enough that Sony plans a similar one for Mariah Carey's upcoming release "The Ballads" for Valentine's Day.
Given Carey's vocal range, it could take some serious chops to keep up.
"Dreamlover" anyone?
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** LIFE IN THE 1500′S *** Where some Interesting Idioms came from.
The next time you are washing your hands and complain because the water temperature isn’t just how you like it, think about how things used to be. Here are some facts about the 1500s:
Most people got married in June because they took their yearly bath in
May, and still smelled pretty good by June. However, they were starting
to smell, so brides carried a bouquet of flowers to hide the body odor.
Hence the custom today of carrying a bouquet when getting married.
Baths consisted of a big tub filled with hot water. The man of the house
had the privilege of the nice clean water, then all the other sons and
men, then the women and finally the children. Last of all the babies. By
then the water was so dirty you could actually lose someone in it. Hence the saying, Don’t throw the baby out with the Bath water..
Houses had thatched roofs-thick straw-piled high, with no wood
underneath. It was the only place for animals to get warm, so all the
cats and other small animals (mice, bugs) lived in the roof. When it
rained it became slippery and sometimes the animals would slip and fall
off the roof. Hence the saying It’s raining cats and dogs.
There was nothing to stop things from falling into the house. This posed
a real problem in the bedroom where bugs and other droppings could mess up your nice clean bed. Hence, a bed with big posts and a sheet hung over the top afforded some protection. That’s how canopy beds came into existence.
The floor was dirt. Only the wealthy had something other than dirt. Hence the saying, Dirt poor. The wealthy had slate floors that would get
slippery in the winter when wet, so they spread thresh (straw) on floor
to help keep their footing. As the winter wore on, they added more thresh until, when you opened the door, it would all start slipping outside. A piece of wood was placed in the entranceway. Hence the saying a thresh hold.
(Getting quite an education, aren’t you?)
In those old days, they cooked in the kitchen with a big kettle that
always hung over the fire. Every day they lit the fire and added things
to the pot. They ate mostly vegetables and did not get much meat. They
would eat the stew for dinner, leaving leftovers in the pot to get cold
overnight and then start over the next day. Sometimes stew had food in it that had been there for quite a while. Hence the rhyme, Peas porridge
hot, peas porridge cold, peas porridge in the pot nine days old..
Sometimes they could obtain pork, which made them feel quite special.
When visitors came over, they would hang up their bacon to show off. It
was a sign of wealth that a man could, bring home the bacon. They would cut off a little to share with guests and would all sit around and chew the fat..
Those with money had plates made of pewter. Food with high acid content caused some of the lead to leach onto the food, causing lead poisoning death. This happened most often with tomatoes, so for the next 400 years or so, tomatoes were considered poisonous.
Bread was divided according to status. Workers got the burnt bottom of
the loaf, the family got the middle, and guests got the top, or the upper
crust.
Lead cups were used to drink ale or whisky. The combination would
sometimes knock a person out for a couple of days. Someone walking along the road would take them for dead and prepare them for burial. They were laid out on the kitchen table for a couple of days and the family would gather around and eat and drink and wait and see if they would wake up. Hence the custom of holding a wake.
England is old and small and the local folks started running out of
places to bury people. So they would dig up coffins and would take the
bones to a bone-house, and reuse the grave. When reopening these coffins, 1 out of 25 coffins were found to have scratch marks on the inside and they realized they had been burying people alive. So they would tie a string on the wrist of the corpse, lead it through the coffin and up through the ground and tie it to a bell. Someone would have to sit out in the graveyard all night (the graveyard shift.) to listen for the bell;
thus, someone could be, saved by the bell or was considered a …dead
ringer..
And that’s the truth. Now, whoever said History was boring ! ! !
Educate someone. Share these facts with a friend.
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Friday, December 19, 2008
What will the Bush's Eat when they leave the White House?
• Back to the kitchen: First lady Laura Bush said Thursday that her husband, President George W. Bush, teases her about her cooking because she hasn't banged pots around for more than a decade. "I haven't cooked in 14 years," she said in an interview with Fox News Channel's On the Record. "He can't even remember what it was like, and neither can I. This will be interesting." She said the president has yet to step foot in their new house in Dallas. "I've been to it. I've looked at it. He hasn't seen it," she said.
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Blagojevich May Resign Despite Statement: Attorney
Gov. Rod Blagojevich could still step down despite his forceful statement to the contrary, one of his lawyers said Friday.
Friday afternoon, in his first substantial comments since being arrested on federal corruption charges, Blagojevich said, "I'm not going to quit a job the people hired me to do because of false accusations and a political lynch mob," and reaffirmed his desire to fight the charges in court.
But taking media questions after the governor's statement, lawyer Sam Adam Jr. said, "He told me if it doesn't work, if it is too hard if the people of Illinois suffer, he will step aside."
Watch Adam's press conference:
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Illinois Governor Blagojevich to make statement
CHICAGO — Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich is going to make a statement to the media at his downtown Chicago office building.
His office says the statement is set for Friday afternoon. It would be the embattled governor's first substantial public comments since his arrest last week on federal corruption charges.
Prosecutors say FBI wiretaps caught Blagojevich scheming to deal President-elect Barack Obama's vacant Senate seat for campaign cash or a plum job.
Blagojevich has told reporters that he was looking forward to talking with them about the allegations.
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Real? Or Photoshop? 'Airbrushing' Run Amok
Out-of-Control Airbrushing Turns Stars From Flesh and Blood to Doll-Like, critics say.
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Atlanta Bridge Collapse at Botanical Garden; One Dead
ATLANTA -- Atlanta Fire Department officials said one person is dead and several people are injured after a bridge collapse Friday morning at the Atlanta Botanical Garden. Rescue workers' initial reports stated that at least 17 construction workers are injured and are being transported to area hospitals. The construction workers were pouring concrete on a canopy area of a pedestrian bridge at the gardens at the time of the accident. Grady Memorial Hospital's Denise Simpson said, of the 15 victims taken to Grady, five victims are in critical condition and eight or nine victims have non-critical injuries. |
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Veteran psychiatrist calls liberals mentally ill in Book.
Publishes extensive study on 'Psychological Causes of Political Madness'
WASHINGTON – Just when liberals thought it was safe to start identifying themselves as such, an acclaimed, veteran psychiatrist is making the case that the ideology motivating them is actually a mental disorder.
"Based on strikingly irrational beliefs and emotions, modern liberals relentlessly undermine the most important principles on which our freedoms were founded," says Dr. Lyle Rossiter, author of the new book, "The Liberal Mind: The Psychological Causes of Political Madness." "Like spoiled, angry children, they rebel against the normal responsibilities of adulthood and demand that a parental government meet their needs from cradle to grave."
While political activists on the other side of the spectrum have made similar observations, Rossiter boasts professional credentials and a life virtually free of activism and links to "the vast right-wing conspiracy."
For more than 35 years he has diagnosed and treated more than 1,500 patients as a board-certified clinical psychiatrist and examined more than 2,700 civil and criminal cases as a board-certified forensic psychiatrist. He received his medical and psychiatric training at the University of Chicago.
Rossiter says the kind of liberalism being displayed by both Barack Obama and his Democratic primary opponent Hillary Clinton can only be understood as a psychological disorder.
"A social scientist who understands human nature will not dismiss the vital roles of free choice, voluntary cooperation and moral integrity – as liberals do," he says. "A political leader who understands human nature will not ignore individual differences in talent, drive, personal appeal and work ethic, and then try to impose economic and social equality on the population – as liberals do. And a legislator who understands human nature will not create an environment of rules which over-regulates and over-taxes the nation's citizens, corrupts their character and reduces them to wards of the state – as liberals do."
Dr. Rossiter says the liberal agenda preys on weakness and feelings of inferiority in the population by:
- creating and reinforcing perceptions of victimization;
- satisfying infantile claims to entitlement, indulgence and compensation;
- augmenting primitive feelings of envy;
- rejecting the sovereignty of the individual, subordinating him to the will of the government.
"The roots of liberalism – and its associated madness – can be clearly identified by understanding how children develop from infancy to adulthood and how distorted development produces the irrational beliefs of the liberal mind," he says. "When the modern liberal mind whines about imaginary victims, rages against imaginary villains and seeks above all else to run the lives of persons competent to run their own lives, the neurosis of the liberal mind becomes painfully obvious."
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