Pool hustler

This is Richie, 27, from Chichester, UK. He was trying for a big break but got a nasty kick on the red.



Here's his YouTube profile:

I am just me! I love fast cars and would love to drive a fast car on a program like top gear, so if anybody can get me on then i'll love you forever! I am also a singer/songwriter and would love to perform in a massive venue! I have no arms and have cycled accross the usa twice for charity, also trecked through africa with the bbc, and saved a man from drowning when i was 15! I live alone and currently drive a mitsubishi pajero turbo but want something faster! I recently owned a nissan skyline gts turbo which was a fab car but i needed a car to tow with! hopefully i will get to show you how i drive with my feet soon! but i need to find a cameraman/woman!! haha

Hear Your Music for the First Time

Subband Technologies  OSS3D

OSS 3D greatly improves audio quality in movies and music throughout all of the OS X applications. It provides non-destructive spatial expansions similar to Spatializer or QSound, with additional functionality of Speaker Resonance Correction, Virtual Subwoofer, Automatic Gain Control, Brainwave synthesis, High Frequency Restoration, Center channel control, and more. Also included a studio quality N-band equalizer with built-in peak limiter.

I've used SRS WOW! for some time now on Mac and Windows iTunes but this sound enhancement application blows WOW! out of the water. It works across the board on all your apps, enhancing any sound output. Rather than trying to convince you I'll just say this, give it a try for 30 days, free. If you have the same experience I had you'll do what I did and cough up the 30 bucks (£14-95) within minutes. Wow indeed!

What about a link?

Disney has final word on Randy's Last Lecture

It was billed as a "Last Lecture", a chance for a world expert in computer science who had just learnt he had only months to live to share his lessons on life with 400 students and colleagues.
But Randy Pausch's inspiring, upbeat and often humorous talk rapidly became an internet sensation. Video clips of his hour-long tour de force - punctuated by laughter, applause and ovations from the audience - have been viewed by more than six million people worldwide.

Randy Pausch with his family, Disney has final word on Randy's Last Lecture Randy Pausch makes his final lecture upbeat Now it turns out that the lecture will not be the final public words of the 47-year old academic, who is dying of pancreatic cancer. Hyperion, Walt Disney's publishing wing, is understood to have agreed a $6.75 million (£3.3 million) deal to publish "The Last Lecture" by Prof Pausch and Jeff Zaslow, the Wall Street Journal reporter who first brought the September address at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh to public attention.

The Telegraph links to a 3 minute video it has made of the story. It has links so that you can email or print this story. It has links so you can send the story to Digg, Reddit, Newsvine and other sites. But what doesn't it have?

A link to the publicly available video of the speech itself. No doubt because some lawyer for the paper with his head up his arse decided there might be a slight chance of legal repercussions somewhere down the line so just to be on the safe side...

Idiots!

Here's the video. Enjoy:

First the Yanks stole from them, now they steal from each other

Nonstop Theft and Bribery Are Staggering Iraq

Jobless men pay $500 bribes to join the police. Families build houses illegally on government land, carwashes steal water from public pipes and nearly everything the government buys or sells can now be found on the black market.

Painkillers for cancer (from the Ministry of Health) cost $80 for a few capsules; electricity meters (from the Ministry of Electricity) go for $200 each and even third-grade textbooks (stolen from the Ministry of Education) must be bought at bookstores for three times what schools once charged. “Everyone is stealing from the state,” said Adel Adel al-Subihawi, a prominent Shiite tribal leader in Sadr City, throwing up his hands in disgust. “It’s a very large meal, and everyone wants to eat.”

No internet connection at Aberdeen nick

There's not much to do when you're banged up in a small cell with nothing but a plastic-coated mattress.

It's been a few years since I last had the pleasure of the old bill's hospitality and it's at least as shitty now as it was then. The only thing to do is kip, although for many people sleeping is the last thing they can manage under those circumstances. The secret is to take a sock off and use it as an eyeshade to block out the constant bright light. No pillows and they take away any coats you have so you need to get as comfortable as you can lying flat on your back.

I'm too tired to explain it all now. Suffice to say Mr P, wily old timer that he is, walked free without a stain on his character (apart from the ones that were already there, of course).
Me, threaten five scumbag drunks outside my house, with a gun? The very thought!

PaperRound 1 - 2/12/2007

The Weekend PaperRound is up. My pick of the news and views.

Midnight Music

The great Gil Scott Heron (eventually): Is That Jazz?

Hellzapoppin' Friday

"Probably the best swing dance scene ever captured on film"

Give him the clap he so richly deserves...

Via b3ta

Any bets on how many of these morons get killed eventually?

Protesters demand execution of 'blasphemy' teacher

Thousands of protesters wielding clubs and knives have gathered outside the Sudanese presidential palace calling for execution by firing squad of the British teacher who let her students name a teddy bear Muhammad. The protests began in Khartoum after the end of Friday prayers. Pick-up trucks carrying Sudanese demonstrators drove around the capital blaring out messages to Gillian Gibbons. Protesters shouted: "No tolerance: Execution" and "Kill her, kill her by firing squad". Hundreds of riot police were deployed to the protests in Martyr's Square, but they did not try to stop the rally.Some of the protesters, who an Associated Press reporter at the scene said numbered as many as 10,000, carried clubs, knives and axes.

Oh for the days when you could go all year without seeing the words Muslim or Muhammad in a newspaper or hear them on the radio.

Lord Wank of Tosspot Manor

nourishing obscurity: [vulnerability] where's the pleasure in that

I've always thought this guy was a fucking creep and this post does nothing to alter that opinion.

SLAPP-ed down

Neuwirth Loses Libel Case Against Tikun Olam

Rachel Neuwirth sued Richard Silverstein, the blogger at Tikun Olam, for calling her a "Kahanist swine". So confident were her lawyers of victory they told Silverstein that her case was a 'slam dunk' . Wrong!

The case was thrown out by LA Superior Court Judge John Reid who is no bleeding heart liberal but a law and order conservative who just happens to understand the importance of free speech in blogs.

We won the case with an anti-SLAPP (Strategic Litigation Against Public Participation) motion under which the defendant must prove that his speech was made in a public arena and furthered a public good and that the plaintiff was a public figure. Rachel's key argument was that she is a private figure (she argued that she was merely a real estate agent) and the my blog was a private forum (because I "controlled" it), all of which are patently false since she herself calls herself an "internationally respected journalist" in her online bio. That my blog is a public forum is also patently obvious as 250,000 unique visitors each year indicate. And I no more 'control' the 6,000 comments published on my blog than I control the entire web.

One of the beauties of the SLAPP motion is that the losing plaintiff must pay defendant's reasonable court costs. This system was purposely designed to inhibit well-heeled individuals from bringing frivolous lawsuits against whistle blowers and other do-gooders. As the judge's ruling states:

These lawsuits are generally brought to chill the valid exercise of constitutional rights. A SLAPP suit lacks merit and will achieve its objective if it depletes the defendant’s resources or energy because the aim is not to win but to detract the defendant from his or her objective. [An anti-SLAPP motion] is a procedural remedy to dispose of such suits expeditiously and thereby protect defendants’ free exercise of First Amendment rights on matters of public interest

This is an interesting case, especially in the context of some recent attempts in this country to silence blogs. Read the whole thing. (Via JSF)