Pink: 2 Days Ago in France

Not only is she a dude. But she's a dude that can't dress himself. Arrrrggghhh!!!

Artist Sends 2,000 Pink Happy Faces Into the Sky

An artist tried to lift the February gloom by releasing more than 2,000 pink smiley faces into the air over London.
The Happy Cloud installation filled the air outside the Tate Modern gallery with the faces, made from helium, soap and vegetable dye.

The artist, 28-year-old Stuart Semple, said he wanted to create something that would cheer people up.

"I've had enough of the doom and gloom in the air and I wanted to show something completely positive floating up in the sky," he said.

"This was the most straightforward way I could think of to literally contribute something happy to the atmosphere.

"I am hoping it might put a smile on a few people's faces as they go through their day."

Though the faces were short-lived - each of them lasting only around 30 minutes before dissipating - Mr Semple was pleased with his efforts.

"I know at times like this it's easy to make creativity a low priority but I want to show on a very human level that an artistic idea might be able to do something important, even for a fleeting moment," he said.

Paula Dean's Pants Fall Down At South Beach Food & Wine Festival

And I think she wears a thong. **Shudder....**

Mythological Dragon on the loose!!! Real or photoshop???

According to legend, the Nabau was a terrifying snake more than 100ft in length and with a dragon's head and seven nostrils.

But now local villagers living along the Baleh river in Borneo believe the mythical creature has returned after this photo of a gigantic snake swimming along the remote waterways has emerged.
The picture, taken by a member of a disaster team monitoring flood regions by helicopter, has sparked a huge debate about whether the photos are genuine or merely the work of photo-editing software.

Katy Perry & Benji Madden An Item??? You Decide.

Newly single Katy Perry went to her blog to deny any romance with Benji Madden when rumors arose that she hung out with the rocker and friends at a Las Vegas nightclub on Valentine's Day.

"It's two pseudo famous people sitting next to each other...doesn't mean we were bumping uglies!" Perry wrote in part. "I was there celebrating a really fun show and a boozy Valentines with all my good friends. We were like a group of 25!"

So what do YOU think??? Are they together? Or are they just casual cigarette buddies? "Hooray we're getting black lung together!!!"

Utah Roads Shut Down Due To Burgers And Beer

Red meat and beer clogged major traffic arteries Tuesday, slowing the morning commute.

Motorists on Interstate 15 were impeded by a piles of hamburgers after a truck spilled a load of the patties, blocking the northbound lanes for four hours.

The driver of a tractor-trailer carrying 40,000 pounds of hamburger patties dozed off around 5 a.m., said Utah Highway Patrol trooper Cameron Roden. The truck driver's rig drifted to the left side of the freeway near 2300 North and crashed into a wall and an overhead sign, which ripped open his trailer, spilling hamburger over the north and southbound lanes of the interstate.

Motorists were detoured off I-15 and onto surface streets to bypass the meat.

UHP quickly cleared southbound lanes, but northbound lanes were not reopened until about 9:30 a.m., Roden said. No one was injured in the incident.

A second truck spill east of Morgan caused minor delays.

Before 7:30 a.m., a truck was heading westbound on Interstate 84 about a half-mile east of Morgan. The driver was traveling too fast for the snowy conditions there and lost control, Roden said.

The truck slipped off to the left, hit a guardrail, and flipped over on its side. The impact split the truck open, spilling Fat Tire Beer being shipped from Colorado, Roden said.

No other vehicles were involved in the accident, and the truck driver was slightly dazed but uninjured. Troopers blocked the left lane and directed traffic around to the right side.

Lindsay Lohan and her chic stolen dress

She went to a fashion show on Sunday wearing this dress. Check the security tag on the bottom. Oops! Someone's a trendy crook...

Rabid Coyote Attacks Girl Waiting for School Bus

When David Miller heard 9-year-old Ashton Crowe cry out for help, he didn't take time to find his shoes. The young man bolted out of his grandparents' house, down a gravel driveway, and kicked Ashton's attacker with his bare foot.

Although David, 16, could not tell exactly what kind of animal was biting Ashton about 6:30 a.m. Friday, he grabbed it by the neck, pinned it against the ground and told Ashton to run for safety. Ashton, who suffered leg wounds and severe damage to her toe from the coyote, sought shelter as David's grandfather, Howard Rochester, came down the driveway with a pistol.

"I was limping and running and went inside," recalled Ashton, who had been waiting for a school bus on Sutton Road, east of Pacolet.

Rochester fired a close-range shot into the coyote's stomach and it released itself from David's grasp, then charged Rochester and bit down on the barrel of Rochester's .22-caliber pistol. He fired and the animal jumped back and ran around a little more as Rochester fired until the trigger went "click."

The coyote then died in a nearby field, where it was taken away by Spartanburg County animal control agents, said Don Arnold, director of environmental enforcement.

Ashton said she originally thought it was a dog named Petey, but then the animal attacked and she screamed and kicked it a couple of times.

"(The coyote) got her toe really good," said Ashton's mother, Brandi Cantrell. "(Miller) took off and got it off her. I'm very thankful."

Rochester and David said they didn't feel like they had done anything heroic for their neighbor and friend Ashton, but Arnold said David's quick response saved Ashton from more severe injuries. She received treatment at Spartanburg Regional Medical Center and then stopped by her school to briefly participate in class activities for Valentine's Day.

Arnold said the male coyote weighed 27 pounds, although adult males usually weigh between 30 and 50 pounds. He said agents sent the coyote's head to the state Department of Health and Environmental Control for tests, which came back positive for rabies.

Ashton and David will require a series of five to seven vaccinations over a 21-day period, and Petey will be impounded for 10 days during her treatment. Ashton and David were set to begin the vaccination process Friday evening.

Britney Spears' Topless Valentine's Day Date

Yup... "topless" as in convertable.
You've been duped. :)
But here's Britney & her new mystery man out on the town in Britney's topless Mini Cooper. Joy.

World's Longest Nails Broken In 4 Car Pile-Up

The Guinness World Record for longest fingernails was broken Wednesday, so to speak.

The fingernails Salt Lake City resident Lee Redmond has been growing since 1979 were broken off in a four-car pileup Wednesday in Holladay, said Salt Lake County sheriff's spokesman Don Hutson.

Redmond was a passenger in one of the cars in the 1:30 p.m. crash. She and at least two others were taken to a hospital with minor injuries, Hutson said. She was ejected from the vehicle, Hutson said.

Redmond's nails were 33 inches long when The Tribune last interviewed her in 2007. She then was 66. In a 1995 article, she said she once turned down $10,000 to trim her nails on Japanese TV.

According to Guinnessworldrecords.com, the nails were measured at a total length of 28 feet 4.5 inches, with a thumbnail reaching 35 inches on Feb. 23, 2008, in Madrid.

India Bottles New Soft Drink Made Of Cow Urine

Does your Pepsi lack pep? Is your Coke not the real thing? India's Hindu nationalist movement apparently has the answer: a new soft drink made from cow urine.

The bovine brew is in the final stages of development by the Cow Protection Department of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), India's biggest and oldest Hindu nationalist group, according to the man who makes it.

Om Prakash, the head of the department, said the drink – called "gau jal", or "cow water" – in Sanskrit was undergoing laboratory tests and would be launched "very soon, maybe by the end of this year".

"Don't worry, it won't smell like urine and will be tasty too," he told The Times from his headquarters in Hardwar, one of four holy cities on the River Ganges. "Its USP will be that it's going to be very healthy. It won't be like carbonated drinks and would be devoid of any toxins."

The drink is the latest attempt by the RSS – which was founded in 1925 and now claims eight million members – to cleanse India of foreign influence and promote its ideology of Hindutva, or Hindu-ness.

Hindus revere cows and slaughtering them is illegal in most of India. Cow dung is traditionally used as a fuel and disinfectant in villages, while cow urine and dung are often consumed in rituals to "purify" those on the bottom rungs of the Hindu caste system.

In 2001, the RSS and its offshoots – which include the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party – began promoting cow urine as a cure for ailments ranging from liver disease to obesity and even cancer.

The movement has often been accused of using more violent methods, such as killing 67 Christians in the eastern state of Orissa last year, and assaulting women in a pub in Mangalore last month. It also has a history of targeting foreign business in India, as in 1994, when it organised a nationwide boycott of multinational consumer goods, including Pepsi and Coca Cola.

The cola brands are popular in India, now one of their biggest markets, but have struggled in recent years to shake off allegations, which they deny, that they contain dangerous levels of pesticide.

Mr Prakash said his drink, by contrast, was made mainly of cow urine, mixed with a few medicinal and ayurvedic herbs. He said it would be "cheap", but declined to give further details about its price or ingredients until it was officially launched.

He insisted, however, that it would be able to compete with the American cola brands, even with their enormous advertising budgets. "We're going to give them good competition as our drink is good for mankind," he said. "We may also think of exporting it."

Beer Is the New Fish Food

FORT COLLINS - An unlikely alliance between two former Colorado School of Mines students and the New Belgium Brewery in Fort Collins could someday end up saving fisheries all over the world.


"It was just back-of-an-envelope brainstorming. What we've done is come up with a way to make a high protein fish meal using sludge that comes from breweries," Logan said.
At least that's the vision of a handful of entrepreneurs working in a sludge treatment warehouse about a quarter mile in back of the famous brewery.

Andy Logan, who has a PhD in water treatment, explains that fisheries around the world are in a state of collapse.

Even replacing dying fisheries with commercial aquaculture has a way of backfiring, because lower grade fish have to be harvested from the oceans to feed to artificially grown fish.

"Fish eat other fish," Logan said."The fish meal industry sends ships out to catch non-food grade fish species and those are ground up into fish meal. But this source of fish meal is more and more limited. The production is maxed out."

Logan and fellow PhD, Seth Terry, began doing some brainstorming on how they could use their training at the School of Mines to solve the problem.They created a company called 'Oberon FMR'. The FMR stands for 'fish meal replacement'.

"It was just back-of-an-envelope brainstorming. What we've done is come up with a way to make a high protein fish meal using sludge that comes from breweries," Logan said.

Breweries have long faced a problem in properly disposing of waste materials that come from brewing hops and barley. Much like a sewage plant, breweries have to have large settling ponds to treat the sludge.

"Large brewers spend $200 a ton to dispose of this material. We can get that material for free, and using a new bacterial process, we can process 18,000 tons a year of fish food. Nothing like that has ever been done before," Logan said.

"A large facility, a large brewery for example, might put 40 to 50,000 pounds of waste beer down their drain every day. So we can convert that to 30 to 35,000 pounds of bacterial protein everyday. Regular fish feed has 25 to 50 percent protein. Our ingredient has 65 percent protein."

The two scientists proposed developing a pilot project using a waste stream from New Belgium Brewery.

"They loved the idea. They're very green-minded," Logan said.

The beauty of the idea, according to Logan, is that they don't have to build much new equipment to create large quantities of the new fish food.

They say with the addition of a commercial centrifuge and an oven, they can retrofit existing sludge treatment plants for a small amount of money.

The project has gotten the attention of some venture capital, and a much larger facility will be built this year someplace in the eastern part of the country.

"We have three places we're looking at right now," said Logan. "We can have a large scale operation up and running in six months."

"We are in the testing phase in Hawaii and Peru right now, and the University of Idaho is going to be testing our fish food next year," he said.

If the two scientists ultimately end up solving two major environmental problems, fish, fishermen, fish-eaters, and brewers all over the world should be very happy.

Hamburger Cologne???

600 Fires During Operations Reported Annually

Surgical fires -- in which patients actually catch fire in the operating room -- are rarely talked about, but they do happen, Baltimore television station WBAL reported.

Cathy Reuter Lake became a crusader to make people aware of surgical fires after her mother, Catherine Darahano Reuter, underwent a tracheotomy on New Year's Eve in 2002.

Lake said her mother signed release forms that explained everything that could go wrong during the procedure -- bleeding, a heart attack, infection and death -- but there was one frightening possibility those papers did not include.

"She went into an operating room, trusting that they would make things better for her, and instead she came out burned," Lake told the station.

Lake said her mother was disfigured by the surgical fire.

"My mom had second- and third-degree burns to the right side of her face. Both of her eyes were burned, inside her nose and her mouth and down her back," Lake said.

Reuter, a diabetic heart patient, declined rapidly, according to her daughter.

"She couldn't walk. She couldn't eat. She couldn't talk. Her vision was impaired further. So, I became literally her voice, eyes and ears to help her," Lake said.

Lake had never heard of surgical fires. Sinai Hospital anesthesiologist Dr. James Pepple told the station that most accidents happen when oxygen is flowing and a surgical tool such as a laser creates a spark that ignites the flammable items surrounding a patient, including alcohol-based antiseptics, paper and surgical drapes.

Even a person's hair can catch fire, Pepple said.

"Once that happens, it can go to the mask or the nasal canal, and then it becomes a blowtorch, because you've got this flammable plastic with oxygen flowing through it," Pepple said.

Pepple said he has never seen a fire in his 30-year career but has testified as an expert in a number of lawsuits.

"People joke about anesthesia being 99 percent boredom and 1 percent stark terror. The reality is that there are those moments where we have those awful things happen, and that's got to be one of the worst," he said.

The Emergency Care Research Institute estimated there are about 600 surgical fires in the U.S. annually -- a tiny percentage of the 50 million operations performed every year. The actual number could be considerably higher because many states don't require hospitals to report fires in the operating room, the station reported.

"I hear this, 'Oh, they're rare, they rarely happen.' Well, you know, that may be true. But I never in my wildest dreams thought it would be my mother that was set on fire. That's how rare they are -- until it's you," Lake said.

Surgical fires are most common in head and neck surgeries because all three fire elements -- air, heat and fuel -- are in close proximity, according to Pepple.

There are simple ways to cut your risk. The Emergency Care Research Institute recommends that you talk with your doctor about fire prevention, which may include using less oxygen or no oxygen during the procedure. You can also request a non-alcohol-based skin prep such as betadyne.

"The more informed you are, the better off you are. If you can raise the awareness of the physicians and the nurses in the room, that's your best prevention," Pepple said.

"I didn't have the knowledge to ask those questions, and had I asked, maybe somebody in the O.R. would have said, 'Oh, wait. Let's make sure and double check this,'" Lake said.

Reuter died two years after her ordeal began. Her daughter reached a legal settlement with the D.C. hospital involved and launched SurgicalFire.org to raise awareness in memory of her mother.

"This is just something that nobody wanted to talk about. And to me, personally, it's a dirty little secret that people don't want to talk about," Lake said.

The station asked more than a dozen hospitals in the Baltimore area if their surgical consent forms alert patients to the possibility of a fire. The only facility that responded did not include that information. Pepple said it would be too time consuming to detail every potential side effect in the pre-operative paperwork.

Maryland requires hospitals to report serious surgical fires; however, Wendy Kronmiller, director of the Maryland Office of Health Care Quality, told the station she believes they are under reported.

Rihanna Is Gettin' Sued!!!

Rihanna and Michael Jackson are being sued over using a sample without permission…
Director John Landis filed a lawsuit against the king of pop for unpaid royalties recently and now it seems there more trouble ahead.

Rihanna is being sued for using part of Jacko’s 1983 pop hit Wanna Be Startin’ Something. The track features the African chant "Mama-se, mama-sa, mama-coo-sa" which was sampled from 1973 track Soul Makossa.

The track was written and performed by Cameroonian saxophonist and vibraphone player Manu Dibango and now the 75 year old isn’t happy that the track has been used without consent… again.

Dibango reached a settlement with Michael years ago but the new lawsuit alleges that he allowed Rihanna to use part of his hit in her single 'Please Don't Stop the Music' without permission.

Lawyers for The Soul Makossa performer have asked French courts to stop record labels Sony BMG, EMI and Warner from receiving any money from the record until he wins his damages fee.

Fire Rescue Workers Save Pantless Man Stuck In Tree

IT wasn't a mainstream rescue, but a tree lopper plucked from a giant eucalypt with his pants around his ankles certainly appeared grateful.

The lopper's safety harness broke, and he ended up perched high up a tree holding on for dear life.
His pants fell victim to gravity and while he was holding onto the tree he was unable to hoist them back up.

But the Queensland Fire and Rescue service responded and he climbed down a ladder to safety.

See a video of the rescue (safe for work!) HERE:
http://www.news.com.au/couriermail/story/0,23739,25008189-5013016,00.html

Student Kicked Out of College Because Of Smelly Feet; Sues School

A STUDENT barred from lectures because of his smelly feet has won a ten-year legal fight to return.
Professors and fellow students at Erasmus Uni in Rotterdam, Holland, said Teunis Tenbrook’s pong made it impossible to concentrate in class.

But a judge ruled they would “just have to hold their noses and bear it” in future.

The uni says it will now fine students who have the same problem.

Truck Overturns; Creates "Hershey Highway"

CHARLESTON -- An unusual accident involving a box-type tractor-trailer is leading to some traffic problems in Kanawha County.

The big rig overturned around 4:30 a.m. Monday near the 9 mile marker of Interstate 79, outside of Elkview.

The driver received only minor injuries, but a small fire did start near the truck's battery.

Metro 911 says no hazardous materials were involved. In fact, the truck was reportedly carrying 47,000 pounds of cocoa, which has spilled across the roadway.

In addition, light rains are hampering the cleanup effort. An official with the Division of Highways tells 13 News that a prison work-release crew may be brought in to help.

Both southbound lanes of Interstate 79 were closed for most of the day as a result of the accident. As of 2:30 p.m., one southbound lane has reopened. An available alternate route is the Elkview exit onto U.S Route 119. Motorists should take Route 119 south and get back on I-79 at Big Chimney.

Authorities say the clean up could take into the evening.