Nothing stinks like a pile of unpublished writing.

KIDS' LETTERS TO PRESIDENT OBAMA.

Dear President Obama,

Animals all over the country are homeless, injured, or put to sleep because their owners can't afford the surgery or the medicine.

I watch Animal Planet almost every day. I see that Michigan has lots of problems with animals there. There are even lots of dogfights there, too.

My suggestion is that each animal, animal hospital, pound, and animal shelter should get money to raise the animals there, and not put them to sleep. Some pets are put to sleep because they're aggressive. Can you think of a way to help them and find them a permanent home?

Thank you for your attention.

Sincerely,

Giselle Perez, age 12
San Francisco

P.S. I like your dog. But you should've gotten more than one.

- - - -

via_mcsweeneys

Istituti anomali nel mondo.

Agenzia Preoccupazioni e Affini.

Nata con la specifica funzione di preoccuparsi per gli affari e le disgrazie degli altri. Come esiste, in certi paesi, il mestiere delle lamentatrici, pagate per piangere e disperarsi su un lutto altrui, così esiste il mestiere di impensierirsi per le faccende e le sventure degli altri.

Il funzionamento dell'AGPA procede così:

Chi ha una preoccupazione e, potendo spendere, non vuole sopportarne il peso, si rivolge all'Agenzia, espone chiaramente le cause della sua preoccupazione, paga una quota, che varia secondo la gravità della preoccupazione stessa, e se ne va: ormai è tranquillo; non deve più preoccuparsi. C'è chi si preoccupa per lui.
Difatti, l'Agenzia affida il caso a qualcuno dei suoi impiegati, tenendo conto, naturalmente, delle attitudini personali, e questo s'incarica di preoccuparsene per il periodo di tempo desiderato dal cliente.

via_paoloalbani.it

Complete guide to funeral service management.

Ogni anno vengono assegnati dieci premi a ricerche scientifiche di dubbia costruttività. Questi i premiati dell'IG Nobel 2010.

Ingegneria: Karina Acevedo-Whitehouse, Agnes Rocha-Gosselin (Zoological Society of London, Regno Unito), Diane Gendron (Instituto Politecnico Nacional, Baja California Sur, Messico), per aver perfezionato un metodo per raccogliere il muco delle balene usando elicotteriradiocomandati.

Medicina: Simon Rietveld (Università di Amsterdam, Paesi Bassi), Ilja van Beest (Università di Tilburg, Paesi Bassi), per aver dimostrato che i sintomi dell'asma possono essere curati con le montagne russe.

Ingegneria dei trasporti: Toshiyuki Nakagaki, Atsushi Tero, Seiji Takagi, Tetsu Saigusa, Kentaro Ito, Kenji Yumiki, Ryo Kobayashi (Giappone), Dan Bebber, Mark Fricker (Regno Unito), per aver usato organismi simili ai funghi per determinare la migliore tratta ferroviariapossibile.

Fisica: Lianne Parkin, Sheila Williams, Patricia Priest (University of Otago, Nuova Zelanda), per aver dimostrato che in inverno, sui percorsi ghiacciati, le persone scivolano e cadono meno spesso se indossano calzini sopra gli scarponi.

Pace: Richard Stephens, John Atkins, Andrew Kingston (Università di Keele, Regno Unito), per aver confermato l'opinione diffusa che imprecare[3] allevi il dolore e le sofferenze.

Salute pubblica: Manuel Barbeito, Charles Mathews, Larry Taylor (Industrial Health and Safety Office, Fort Detrick, Maryland, USA), per aver condotto esperimenti atti a dimostrare che i microbi si "aggrappano" alla barba degli scienziati.

Economia: gli amministratori e direttori di Goldman Sachs, AIG, Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch, e Magnetar, per aver creato e promosso nuovi modi per investire — modi che massimizzano gli introiti finanziari minimizzando il rischio finanziario per l'economiamondiale, almeno in parte.

Chimica: Eric Adams (MIT), Scott Socolofsky (Texas A&M University, Texas, USA), Stephen Masutani (University of Hawaii, Hawaii,USA), e British Petroleum, per aver provato la falsità dell'antica convinzione che acqua e petrolio non si possono mescolare.

Economia aziendale: Alessandro Pluchino, Andrea Rapisarda, Cesare Garofalo (Università di Catania, Italia), per aver dimostrato matematicamente che le aziende diventerebbero più produttive se promuovessero persone a caso anziché seguendo criteri meritocratici.

Biologia: Libiao Zhang, Min Tan, Guangjian Zhu, Jianping Ye, Tiyu Hong, Shanyi Zhou, Shuyi Zhang (Cina), Gareth Jones (Università di Bristol, Regno Unito), per aver documentato scientificamente la pratica della fellatio nei pipistrelli della frutta.

via_wiki

Big Daddy, eight musicians prisoner for 24 years in Laos.

It was August 1959, and the Los Angeles-based musical group known as Big Daddy had finally wangled a recording contract. Their manager, wanting to give the waxing as much of a push as possible, got the band booked on a USO tour of Southeast Asia, hoping for some positive publicity. Unfortunately, the United States had no military involvement in Southeast Asia in 1959, or so the official story said, and therefore the publicity value of the tour would have turned out to be nil - had the band come back at all, which it hadn't. Given up for dead after their vehicle was found mired in quicksand, the band spent the next twenty-four years in the custody of Laotian revolutionaries. Rock and roll musicians being at least as unpopular with the U.S. government and its official radio service as were the Communists, the Laotians more or less adopted Big Daddy as Fellow Travelers. The war, of course, went on, and during the Sixties and Seventies, returning US troops told tales of an American band being held captive. Special Forces were eventually able to piece together the story, and after the usual interminable delays, a rescue attempt was mounted in 1983, under the guise of a British motion-picture production. Finally back in the States, Big Daddy agonized about that first recording session they had missed. Of course, during the intervening years, their record company, like so many little diskeries, had folded, and worried that the band might become a burden to the taxpayers, government officials brought in some sheet music and arranged a recording session at Camp David. The sessions were startling; although the band still had its chops, having been allowed to play by their captors all those years, the cultural isolation of northern Laos meant that Big Daddy had heard virtually none of the last two decades' worth of popular music, which meant that their recordings of Seventies and Eighties material, all that could be found in the nearest sheet-music store, were perforce arranged for Fifties performance styles. The record, of course, was unreleasable, so naturally it fell to Rhino Records to release it.

An attempt to communicate with spirits. Famous mediums of the 19th century.

Cora L. V. Scott

She was born on April 21, 1840 near Cuba, New York. Her parents, though initially Presbyterian, became interested in the Universalist religion, and in early 1851 joined theHopedale Community, an intentional community in Hopedale, Massachusetts. Led by Adin Ballou, the community was committed to abolitionism, temperance, socialism, andnonviolence. Finding Hopedale too crowded, the Scott family moved to Waterloo, Wisconsin later that year to found a similar intentional community, with the blessings of Adin Ballou. It was there, in early 1852, that Cora first exhibited her ability to fall into a trance and write messages and speak in ways very unlike herself. Her parents soon began to exhibit her to the surrounding country, and in this way she became a part of the network of trance lecturers that characterized the Spiritualist movement.