Cleaning

(Thanks to TJ for sharing the fun!!)

To the Israeli Ambassador

"Press releases aren't given under oath."
~Jim Hacker

Yes, Prime Minister, Episode Six - A Victory for Democracy

For T

Something we can belive in, finally!

DDO$ and a little culture

Today I give you two items:

1) What to do when you get hit with a $3.75m court judgment? One defendant's strategy is to pay it off pennies at a time (or in their case, Swedish Krona at a time) to drive up the processing costs. Which might just fly under legal tender laws. Since the matter appeared in an internet-related case, the defendant has dubbed the strategy "Distributed Denial of Dollars," or DDO$.

2) Though subject to much dispute, one fan with a good deal of time on their hands has created a compilation of the purportedly 100 best movie lines. Once you watch, of course, you will have absorbed ninety years of culture, and have a great excuse to avoid watching anything for the next few years.

In honor of The Heart and her Arabic studies (and for the benefit of anyone who has seen Denzel Washington's larger than life role as Malcolm X), I present this bit taken from an opinion in a case with a pro se plaintiff who essentially filed the same claims twice.

Though Plaintiff proceeded in the Prior Action under his given name, Tyrone Troy McRae, he concedes that Pharo Naji Akhenaten is the same person as the plaintiff in the Prior Action. (Pl.'s Local R. 56.1 Statement of Material Facts ("Pl.'s Facts") PP 1-3.) Plaintiff explains that while "his biological mother named him 'Tyrone Troy McRae,'" Pharo Naji Akhenaten "is his rightful, national, [**10] indigenous, righteous name from Father Allah, in the Hieroglyphic language preserved in Qur'aanic and Hebrew Text. Plaintiff is a Qariat-ul Qur'aan-il Kaariym fi- lisaan Sidqin-il 'Alliyaa [A reciter of the Confirmations of the Noble Qur'aan, in Classical Arabic] and a descendant of Allah by Blood; a Muslim by Nature, not by religion and he is not a mere juristic person [TYRONE TROY MCRAE] or 'straw man' based upon the Black Code but an indigenous aborigine; a natural person under the Divine Protection of Allah, the God of Horus, Isis, Osiris, Ra; Abraham, Isaac, Jacob et al., The Most Honorable W.D. Fard, The Honorable Elijah Muhammad and The Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan." (Id. P 1) (emphasis in original).

Akhenaten v. Najee, LLC, 544 F.Supp.2d 320, 325 n.6 (S.D.N.Y. 2008)

Accounting Joke

Would it be funny if your outside auditing firm's vendor number in your system was 990?

Do Dogs Go to Heaven?

Two churches in Hartford, KY are finally settling the issue for us all by having it out on their signs.

Click the to see the outcome for Fido!


(While it is all fun and games, the Cumberland Presbyterian Magazine reports that is, in fact, an internet hoax, and can be reproduced here.)

Legal Humor

Stasi files emerge through software

This story is a few months old, but it is really cool, so we thought we would share it with you all.
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The contents of files of the former East German secret police, the Stasi - which were destroyed after the fall of the Berlin Wall - are slowly emerging after being pieced back together through new software developed in Berlin.

The fragments are scanned and then matched up to form a complete image. The researches stress they do not read the files, only reconstruct them.

The E-Puzzler system, developed at the capital's Fraunhofer Institute for Production Systems and Design Technology, works by scanning the fragments of the documents into a computer image file.

Then, by treating each scrap as if part of a jigsaw, the information gathered by the notorious agency is being restored.

"It is the biggest puzzle in the world," Bertram Nicolai, head of the Security and Testing department at the Fraunhofer Institute, told BBC World Service's Digital Planet programme.

"The goal of the pilot project is the automatic, virtual reconstruction of 400 bags. It is very important for German history."

Reconstruction process

Almost as soon as the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 - signalling the end of Communism - Stasi agents set about trying to destroy their files, first with shredders, and then with their hands.

Within weeks, they had filled 16,000 sacks with 600 million fragments.

Two years later, following reunification, German officials started trying to recreate the files by hand - but it became clear it was going to take too long.

Then researchers came up with the E-Puzzler, and managed to get a government grant.

The system analyses shape, colour, texture and thickness of the paper, so that it is eventually possible to rebuild an electronic image of the original document.

"It will be a long job - but that's the interesting part," said the Fraunhofer's Jan Schneider.

"First we have to digitise all the pieces from the bags. This is done by a special high-speed scanning device.

"The next step is to segment the image itself from the raw scan - we need the outline of the pieces, pixel-wise, to perform the reconstruction process after that.

"Then all digitised pieces of paper are stored in the database. After that we reconstruct a lot of the descriptive features of the pieces."

However, at the former Stasi prison Hohenschonhausen, the main place political prisoners were held and subjected to torture, there are criticisms that the process has already taken too long.

"I think it comes a little bit late," said Hubertus Knabe, director of the memorial at the site, which is also a museum.

"Nearly 20 years after the fall of the Wall we start to reconstruct these Stasi files, which are really important: the most important files were the ones they destroyed.

"I am happy that now it is going forward, but it is late."

Story from BBC NEWS

Not sure if we should be scared or not....

Overall, very intimidating, but those tan lines just make me crack up everytime I see him!!

Laundry Win

The Heart actually thought this was funny. I offer, from Failblog, the man's laundry tag.

The SUV Song

I played this for The Brain the other day, and as a Durango Driver he very much appreciated the song. If you click the title of this post you can listen to the song. If it does not work then google the following: Veggie Tales SUV song.

Larry- I like your car
Girl- I like Yours too
Larry- Is It a Jeep?
Girl- A Subaru
Larry- I like your tires
Girl- You've got nice chrome
Larry- A trailer Hitch ?
Girl- Left Mine at Home
Larry- Oh your suspension it suspends me over heights I've never known
Girl- And your roll bar is to die for by the way I like your chrome
Larry-You already said that
Girl- did I ?
Larry-yeah
Girl- oh
Both: Oh you and me in our sport utility vehicles crusin to 7-11 for a bag of frito laysOh you and me in our sport Utility Vehicles we'll slam into 4 wheel and pick up a dozen eggs and if there ever was a snow
Girl- A really really deep snow
Larry: And if everyone was stuck but us
Girl- We'd be the ones not stuck
Larry: then we could be the heroes
Girl- We could be the heroes
Both- we could be the herooooooos
Girl- We would push them and pull them
Larry: push them and pull them
Both- Push them and pull them right out of the snow

Girl- I like your car
Larry- I like yours too
Girl- Periwinkle?
Larry- its baby blue
Girl- hows it handle?
Larry- Like a dream
Girl- How 'bout coffee
Larry- and then Ice cream!
Both- o you and me in out sport utility vehicles crusin to Dunkin Donuts for a cup of steaming Joe oh you and me in our sport utility vehicles we'll slam into 4-wheel drive for a scoop of rocky road
Girl- and if we ever go campin,.. you know
Larry- haven't been but one day.. I'll go
Girl- And we find a ranger stuck in a ditch
Both- a nice ranger in a deep ditch
Larry- we could be the heroes
Girl- we could be the heroes
Both- we could be the heroes
Girl- we would push him and pull him
Larry- push him and pull him
Both- Push him and pull him right out of that ditch

Larry- I like your car
Girl- I like yours too
Larry- Is it a Jeep?
Both- Its my sport Utility Vehicle

Quote of the Week

"Action movies have car chases, and explosions, and budgets, and, um, what's the word I'm looking for here, ... yeah, FANS."

--Will Smith, on the category that gets ripped off every year (this year included) at the Oscars.

Stimulus plan?

Our new president has been circulating a plan to offer $850 billion dollars as a stimulus for the economy. How much money is that? Well, after a friend offered one version of what could be done with that much money, I decided to check on whether it was accurate. Following please find my rough calculations:

23 karat gold leaf is approximately $35 per square foot.

An interstate highway lane is 12 feet wide, with a ten foot shoulder on the right and four feet on the left, or 38 feet per direction. Averaging in cities where there are more lanes, we'll call it 40 feet per direction, or 80 feet of pavement.

A mile is 5280 feet, so 5280 * 80 = 422,400 square feet per highway mile. At $35 / square foot, this is $14,784,000 to gild a mile of highway in both directions. In order to preserve the number of significant digits we have at the beginning, we need to round this to $15 million.

According to wikipedia, there are 46,837 miles of interstate highways in the United States. At the unrounded rate, this is $692,438,208,000, at an even $15M/mi it comes out to $702.555 billion, but again, because of the significant digits, we need to call it $700 billion. Out of a stimulus package of $850 billion, this leaves $150 billion for labor to gild the entire U.S. Interstate Highway System, shoulder to shoulder on both sides.*

So should we go forward with the stimulus plan? For my two cents worth, a shiny gold highway system would look way cooler from space, making this choice easy. Heck, it would probably create more jobs than the stimulus plan, anyway.


*This equation, of course, leaves out the effect trying to buy up that much gold leaf would have on the market price of said leaf, and accordingly, the increases in price for this project before it can be completed. And probably lots of other stuff that is important to coming up with a realistic scenario. But I'm not putting out a bid on this...