There was an interesting admission from a leading game developer this week. Eric Tereshinski, main developer of Ant Simulator, announced the cancellation of the game and his resignation after the spending of the available money for development. The reason? Tereshinski said that his business partners spent the money on booze and strippers. His partners in ETeeshi were Tyler Monce and Devon Staley.
Category: Bizarre
Kings College Student Saima Ahmad, 20, has informed Nestle that she is demanding compensation for the “monetary and emotional loss” associated with her recent purchase of KitKat bars. To her continuing horror, she found that eight of the bars contained no wafers inside.
By Darren Smith, Weekend Contributor
KOIN News provided this gem as seen in Oregon before a scheduled Monday demonstration by militia groups.
Continue reading “Making The Case For More Government Education Programs”
By Darren Smith, Weekend Contributor
In November of 2014 we featured an article describing how the Washington State Healthcare Exchange website failed to properly calculate tax credits just hours after its launch. A year earlier, the system crashed under heavy user load. Now, it is once again broken–this time a day before the deadline for new enrollees to begin coverage beginning March first.
Those who do not sign up by tomorrow or otherwise have health care provided from employers or other sources may face heavy fines under the ObamaCare statues. Penalties range from seven hundred dollars levied on individual’s tax filings next year to as much as two thousand for families.
But once again incompetence in the state’s healthcare system puts the onus upon the individual citizen to remedy situations caused by the state.
Continue reading “Washington State Health Care Exchange Website Broken, Again.”
By Darren Smith, Weekend Contributor
It is often that people are concerned with the money diverted to art attached to public works projects sponsored by government. The basis providing art from legislation or policies can mandate one percent of project costs be dedicated to art deemed reflective of various ideals approved by officials.
But one particular project regarding a bridge in the Fremont Neighborhood of Seattle is puzzling as to any long term benefit to be experienced, or of any tangible substance.
The City of Seattle budged ten thousand dollars and placed a call for bids for an artist to write a work of poetry, essay, or oral history of a drawbridge.
Continue reading “Seattle To Pay $10,000.00 For Artist To Write Poems, Etc. Describing Bridge”
A legislative proposal by Sen. Scott Surovell (D–Fairfax) would have seemed a no brainer in any legislative body. Surovell was seeking to decriminalize adultery in Virginia. As I have previously discussed (here and here), Virginia has an anachronistic and facially unconstitutional law that makes adultery a crime. Yet, the Virginia Senate killed the bill this month and reaffirmed its intention to criminalize what the majority deems immoral choices by consenting adults. Adultery will remain a Class 4 misdemeanor despite 13 other states that have repealed similar laws in recent years.
Continue reading “Virginia Senate Kills Measure To Repeal Criminalization of Adultery”
Pennsylvania Democratic Rep. Chaka Fattah faced a rare tongue lashing from U.S. District Judge Harvey Bartle III over the failure to pay his defense counsel in his corruption and racketeering trial. Judge Bartle snapped at Rep. Fattah to get “your priorities” straight.
Boston Police Sergeant Edwin Guzman’s lawyer has a curious defense to Guzman sending a photo of his penis to the sixteen-year-old daughter of a friend: “You can’t tell me someone her age has never seen a picture of a penis on the Internet.” Hmmm, even if it were true, it is hard to see that particular approach resonating with a judge or jury.
There was a very disturbing scene at Rome’s famous Capitoline Museum recently during a joint press conference between Iranian President Hassan Rouhani and Italian Premeir Matteo Renzi. The museum had nude sculptures covered up so not to insult the Islamic sensibilities of Rouhani and his staff. One of the statues was the “Capitoline Venus,” a Roman copy of a legendary fourth century B.C. work by Praxiteles. Ironically, it is piece that symbolized the modesty of Venus in covering up after a bath. Not modest enough, it appears, for the Iranians.
Continue reading “Roman Museum Covers Up Nude Works To Avoid Insulting Iranian President”
An Italian court this month showed just how hard it is to bribe an Italian police officer. The highest Italian court acquitted a defendant of corruption charges because it found that the man offered the police officer only 100 euros during a drunk-driving traffic stop. That, the court concluded, was not nearly enough to bribe a police officer. While the court did not share the going market rate, it appears to be over 100 euros, which most of us would not viewed as a trivial sum.
Continue reading “Top Italian Court Rules 100 Euros Is Not High Enough To Constitute A Bribe”
Police are dealing with a somewhat unique crime in Turlock, California where thieves stolen tanks from a truck. Since they also stole gasoline from the truck, the thieves might not have been aware of what was in the tanks but had succeeded in stealing $50,000 of bull semen.
There is a truly disgraceful story out of Lakewood, New Jersey where homeless man Ronald Leggatt, 65, was offered $5 by a stranger to pour a hot cup of coffee over his own head — twice. Carlos Mejia, 22, of Jackson, posted a video of Leggatt discussing the demeaning act. Mejia witnessed the scene and at first thought the man was going to help Leggatt and was horrified as Leggatt poured the coffee over his own head. The coffee reportedly left burn marks on Leggatt’s face. Mejia confronted the man who paid for the act. Mejia said that the culprit was an Orthodox Jew, who allegedly told Mejia that nothing would happen to him because “we run the town.” (Lakewood has a large Orthodox population). The police located the sadist but decided that there was no crime to charge because the act by Leggatt was voluntary. Others in the Orthodox Jewish community were ashamed by the conduct of the culprit and came forward to help Leggatt.
Stories of this kind leave me baffled. With all of the money and harsh measures imposed on the public by the Transportation Security Administration, the TSA itself seems barely accountable for continual stories of bungling and gross negligence. Recently, it was revealed that an international flight was allowed to simply go directly from the aircraft to the streets without passing through customs. People were horrified. Now it has happened again with American Airlines Flight 1223 from Cancun, Mexico and one passenger even alerted the TSA at the time and was told to just leave with the rest of the passengers from Mexico. The only reassuring thought is that any drug mule or terrorist would have assumed that this was a trick since no one is this dumb.
Continue reading “Kennedy Airport Allows Another International Flight To Skip Customs”
I have long admired Bill Gates for his incredible philanthropy around the world. It is for that reason that I was astonished by the news that Gates had sold the rights to a huge number of photos to the Visual China Group. The sale will now placed images from Tiananmen Square, including the iconic Tank Man photo, in the hands of the Chinese who hope to bury them and any memory of the uprising. The sale of Gates’ Corbis likely made a tidy profit but it is a political bonanza for the censors of the Chinese government.
We have been reporting on the protests occurring on college campuses and the troubling demands sometimes made by the “Black Lives Matter” movement in terms of academic components and programs, including college newspapers. Oberlin College President Marvin Krislov finally had enough after receiving a list of rambling demands from black students — demands declared to be nonnegotiable for the Administration. Krislov correctly refused to concede core control over the academic mission and yield to such demands which included things like the firing of certain employees and enrolling recently released prisoners.
Continue reading “Oberlin President Rejects List of Rambling Demands From Black Students”