Jazzbo: Portrait of a sad clown!!!

WILKES-BARRE – - WILKES-BARRE – James Jude McCarthy, 44, of East Northampton Street in Wilkes-Barre, pleaded guilty and was sentenced Monday to six months probation on five counts of driving under the influence.

Luzerne County Court of Common Pleas Judge Joseph Augello also imposed $25 fines on summary offenses of harassment and criminal mischief. Additional charges of burglary and reckless endangerment were dropped. A charge of simple assault was previously thrown out at a preliminary hearing.

Wilkes-Barre police said McCarthy threw his ex-girlfriend, Jennifer Spagnola, out of a moving vehicle and then beat her at her residence May 13. Police said McCarthy, who is known professionally as Jazzbo the Clown, had been drinking and using cocaine before the incident.

Police said cocaine was found in McCarthy’s system and his blood-alcohol level was 0.095 percent. An adult driver in Pennsylvania is considered intoxicated with a level of 0.08.

***Clowns have been getting a bad rap as of late. First Gacy now this?!

I give here an "A" for effort

PHOENIX, Arizona (AP) -- Fetuses do not count as passengers when it comes to determining who may drive in the carpool lane, a judge has ruled.

Candace Dickinson was fined $367 for improper use of a carpool lane.

But Dickinson, pregnant when she received the ticket, contended her unborn child qualified to use the lane.

Motorists who use the lanes normally must carry at least one passenger during weekday rush hours.

Municipal Judge Dennis Freeman rejected Dickinson's argument Tuesday, applying a "common sense" definition in which an individual is someone who occupies a "separate and distinct" space in a vehicle.

***I think she deserves to skate just because of the brilliance of her defense!!

Glowing Pigs

TAIPEI (Reuters) - Taiwan, home to the world's first transgenic glowing fish, has successfully bred fluorescent green pigs that researchers hope will boost the island's stem cell research, a professor said on Thursday.

By injecting fluorescent green protein into embryonic pigs, a research team at the island's leading National Taiwan University managed to breed three male transgenic pigs, said professor Wu Shinn-Chih of the university's Institute and Department of Animal Science and Technology.

"There are partially fluorescent green pigs elsewhere, but ours are the only ones in the world that are green from inside out. Even their hearts and internal organs are green," Wu said on Thursday.

*** Dude sounds like a used pig salesman!!! Our pigs are green from inside out!! And can you imagine this at the local AA meeting" My name is Phillip and I am an alcoholic. I have been sober since I saw the imaginary fluorescent pig. What?!?!! He was real?!?! Holy crap!!! I am outta here!!!

A sad tale of girls and chickens

VAN, Turkey

Sumeyya Mamuk considered the chickens in her backyard to be beloved pets. The 8-year-old girl fed them, petted them and took care of them. When they started to get sick and die, she hugged them and tenderly kissed them goodbye. The next morning, her face and eyes were swollen and she had a high fever. Her father took her to a hospital, and five days later she was confirmed to have the deadly H5N1 strain of bird flu.

"The chickens were sick. One had puffed up and she touched it. We told her not to. She loved chickens a lot," her father, Abdulkerim Mamuk, said of the second youngest of his eight children. "She held them in her arms."

Her oldest brother, Sadun, said Sumeyya loved animals and took care of puppies and kittens in Van's Yalim Erez neighborhood.

When her mother saw Sumeyya holding one of the dying chickens, she yelled at her and hit the girl to get her away.

Sumeyya began to cry. She wiped her tears with the hand she'd been using to comfort the dying chicken.

"She wiped her face," said her father, speaking in broken Turkish and wearing a leather jacket and a typical Kurdish headdress in their bright, clean home. "She started to swell. She had a really high fever."

Following a few tense days when her family worried if she would recover, Summeya's condition has improved due to quick treatment with the antiviral drug Tamiflu, said Dr. Huseyin Avni Sahin, chief physician at the Van 100th Year Hospital.

But at least two other children have died of the same virus in Turkey, and as of Tuesday, 15 people had tested positive for infection in preliminary tests. Many are children.

The disease also appears to be spreading.

In parts of the world where the virus has been deadly _ until now only in East Asia _ children like Summeya have been the worst hit.

"It was the same in Asia," said Dr. Guenael Rodier, a scientist with the World Health Organization who has been chasing the virus around the world. "It mainly occurred in family clusters of small size, and mainly in children."

Even if not animal lovers like Sumeyya, children in poor agricultural towns tend to be extremely comfortable with the animals they share their lives with. It has been particularly difficult to convince them that this proximity can now be dangerous.

In Dogubayazit, the Turkish town near the Iranian border where most of the current cases originated, children usually outnumbered workers in trying to round up chickens for culling. Boys and girls led cows and sheep down the main streets. As adult out-of-towners fled from terrifying dogs that snarled from nearly every backyard, little local children giggled.

As the H5N1 bird flu virus spreads, scientists monitoring it for fear it could mutate into a form easily transmissible among humans say education on its dangers is crucial to fighting it. Rodier said his organization was considering implementing a program aimed solely at rural children.

"It's child behavior," he said. "They play with everything."

As for Sumeyya, she is expected to be released from the hospital and join her family and her other pets _ dogs, cats and cows _ in the next few days.

"She's gotten better," Sahin said. "In a few days, she'll be released."

Teabagging in the news....

In a disciplinary move that stunned parents and reduced teenage boys to tears, leaders at Argo Community High School on Monday suspended three coaches and expelled three varsity wrestlers for hazing on a team bus.

The coaches each will miss nine meets and practices and be docked pay for their absence. Their suspensions will be staggered so as to have as little impact on competition as possible. A fourth coach will receive a letter of reprimand, officials said.

The varsity wrestlers will be allowed to finish out the year at an alternative school but are banned from extracurricular activities. The two seniors can receive a diploma from Argo, and the junior can return to his home school next year, officials said.

The punishments were doled out by unanimous vote of the School District 217 board. They were prompted by what some parents characterized as a harmless prank, but what others saw as sexual abuse.

On the ride home from a romping victory over Bremen High School on Dec. 1, upperclassmen wrestlers allegedly "teabagged" five to seven members of the freshmen team.

The older boys pulled the freshmen, one by one, to the back of the bus. While two boys held down a victim, the third shoved his testicles in the victim's face.

Four of the five wrestling coaches were on the bus at the time and did not notice any disturbance, which members of the team attribute to the loud celebration of the 67-0 victory that lasted the entire ride back to Summit.

In the wake of the hazing, school board president Eugene Wroblewski said procedures will be created to guarantee better supervision on all activity buses. A more detailed description of hazing also will be added to the disciplinary code.

"This is not acceptable behavior," he said. "To take no action is to condone it."

The senior boy who exposed himself was turned in to the administration after bragging about the teabagging at school, parents said.

A wrestler who was not victimized told his parents about the incident and word quickly spread to other parents, coaches and school officials.

The tight-knit group of freshmen parents, many of whom know each other from football or junior high honors programs, demanded the upperclassmen be held accountable.

The students were suspended from school and wrestling for 10 days, but at least two victims' parents planned to press criminal charges if the students were not expelled. Summit police have said teabagging would constitute misdemeanor battery.

"If they expel, I'll be happy with that decision," said one victim's mother before the school board meeting.

But neither the freshmen parents nor their kids were prepared for the coaches to be suspended.

Freshmen mother Laura Ashley submitted a letter to the board in the coaches' defense. She said the coaches sit toward the front of the bus to separate the one female wrestler and girl managers from the boys. When the coaches learned of the hazing, they took action to prevent it from happening again.

"Taking these coaches away from the wrestlers and forcing the blame for someone else's actions on these coaches will only hurt the boys who have already been hurt by this incident, and that is the freshman wrestlers," she wrote in the letter.

Many parents and wrestlers admitted they have heard, seen and even participated in similar hazing incidents at Argo or other schools. And they defended initiation as part of athletics from the high school to professional level.

Wrestler Jon Shue was one who said he'd heard stories about hazing at Argo but thought it was no big deal — until he saw the fallout of this incident Monday night.

"I'm a junior, and I'll make sure this never happens again," he said.

*** I guess the victory wasn't the only thing romping!!!

Beware if you are approached by a polar bear for a date!!

You can read the entire article from the link but the meat of the story is:

There is evidence that compounds similar to polybrominated diphenyls,also known as PBDEs, have contributed to a surprisingly high rate of hermaphroditism in polar bears. About one in 50 female bears on Svalbard has both male and female sex organs, a phenomenon scientists link directly to the effects of pollution.

***Ahhh at last the perfect pet for the folks in Hollywood!!!

The great mouse hoax!!! or Burning down the mouse?!?!

FORT SUMNER, N.M. -- The village fire captain said he's never seen a blaze as unique as this. A Fort Sumner, N.M., man said he caught a mouse inside his house and wanted to get rid of it. He had a pile of leaves burning outside, so he threw the mouse on it. The mouse caught fire and ran back into the house. Luciano Mares, 81, talked about the event Saturday from a motel room. The blaze the mouse started destroyed the home and everything inside it.


BUT WAIT!!! THERE IS A FOLLOW UP!!!!

Rumor Squashed: Flaming Mouse Didn't Start House Fire

FORT SUMNER, N.M. -- A small -town rumor that sparked world -wide interest about a mouse burning down a house has been found to be untrue. After 81-year-old Chano Mares's house burned down Saturday in Fort Sumner, news services picked up the quirky story. "Flaming Mouse Burns Down House" read the headline over an Associated Press story that appeared on WSBTV.com, for example. According to the initial report, Mares threw the critter in a pile of burning leaves near his home, but it ran back to the house on fire. A local firefighter said the mouse ran to just beneath a window and the flames spread up the window and throughout the house. All contents of the home were destroyed, but no one was injured. Interest in fires has been high lately. Unseasonably dry and windy conditions have charred more than 53,000 acres and destroyed 10 homes in southeastern New Mexico in recent weeks. The mouse story, however, has been doused by Mares. "It's really humorous more than anything that a mouse burned down the house," he told KOAT-TV in Albuquerque. The mouse was dead when it hit the burning leaves. Mares said he trapped and killed the critter and tossed it on the fire. The flames, he said, probably reached his house because they were driven by high winds. Capt. Jim Lyssy of the Fort Sumner Fire Department said the rumor probably got started because there was "a little too much excitement" at the time of the fire. Mares lost everything -- and has no insurance -- but the mouse story still makes him smile. "I started laughing, and I'll be laughing from now on," he said. "It's silly."

*** The mouse's lawyers are not laughing however!!!

Is Leatherface the librarian?

PROVIDENCE, R.I. --Brown University's library boasts an unusual anatomy book. Tanned and polished to a smooth golden brown, its cover looks and feels no different from any other fine leather.

But here's its secret: the book is bound in human skin.

A number of prestigious libraries -- including Harvard University's -- have such books in their collections. While the idea of making leather from human skin seems bizarre and cruel today, it was not uncommon in centuries past, said Laura Hartman, a rare book cataloger at the National Library of Medicine in Maryland and author of a paper on the subject.

An article from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch from the late 1800s "suggests that it was common, but it also indicates it wasn't talked about in polite society," Hartman said.

The best libraries then belonged to private collectors. Some were doctors who had access to skin from amputated parts and patients whose bodies were not claimed. They found human leather to be relatively cheap, durable and waterproof, Hartman said.

In other cases, wealthy bibliophiles may have acquired the skin from criminals who were executed, cadavers used in medical schools and people who died in the poor house, said Sam Streit, director of Brown's John Hay Library.

The library has three books bound in human skin -- the anatomy text and two 19th century editions of "The Dance of Death," a medieval morality tale.

One copy of "The Dance of Death" dates to 1816 but was rebound in 1893 by Joseph Zaehnsdorf, a master binder in London. A note to his client reports that he did not have enough skin and had to split it. The front cover, bound in the outer layer of the epidermis, has a slightly bumpy texture, like soft sandpaper. The spine and back cover, made from the inner layer of skin, feels like suede.

Zaehnsdorf probably left the covers plain to showcase the material, Streit said.

Brown's other "Dance of Death" edition, done in 1898, is more elaborately decorated with inlays of black leather and a gold-tooled skull. But a closer examination reveals the pores of the skin's former owner.

The story, Streit said, is about how death prevails over all, rich or poor. As with many of the skin-bound books, "there was some tie in with the content of the book," he said.

While human leather may be repulsive to contemporary society, libraries can ethically have the books in their collections if they are used respectfully for academic research and not displayed as objects of curiosity, says Paul Wolpe of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania.

"There is a certain distancing that history gives us from certain kinds of artifacts," Wolpe said, noting that museums often have bones from archaeological sites. "If you had called me and said these are books from Nazi Germany, I would have a very different response."

I hope this doesn't really come to fruition...

AL-QAEDA is recruiting suicide bombers who are infected with the AIDS virus, according to documents revealed to the Sunday Mirror.

Terror chiefs are also targeting fanatics who suffer other lethal blood diseases such as hepatitis and dengue fever in order to increase their "kill rate" from an explosion. The chilling new threat is revealed in papers distributed to British military camps in Iraq and across Europe.

Under the heading "HIV/Hepatitis" the document states: "There is evidence that terrorists might be deliberately recruiting volunteers with diseases that are spread by blood transference."

Experts have found that bones and other blood-spattered fragments from a suicide bomber could penetrate the skin of a victim 50 metres away and infect them.

In the papers (part of which is summarised above) soldiers are warned to wear special protective clothing when on guard duty or if they have to deal with casualties in the event of an attack.

All bases must also have snipers hidden behind blast-proof defences ready to take out would-be suicide bombers. The guidelines were issued following the 7/7 London bombings which left 52 dead and injured hundreds more.

Poor little Puckhead!!!

JOHNSTOWN, Pa. - A mascot at a minor league hockey game was burned when his fake beard and jersey ignited during a botched fire-breathing stunt.

John Robinson of the Johnstown Chiefs sustained minimal face and chest burns Friday, Chiefs general manager Toby O’Brien said. Robinson was taken to Conemaugh Memorial Hospital for overnight observation and released.

“He’s a fan who is very much devoted to the city and the hockey team,” O’Brien said. “I’m sure he’ll be back on the ice.”

Robinson, who has played the role of Puckhead for several years, was entertaining fans before the start of a game against Reading.

According to witnesses, Robinson poured the flammable liquid into his mouth and tried to light it, but it didn’t work. When he tried a second time, Robinson’s fake beard and jersey caught fire. An arena employee rushed to help him pull off his jersey as Robinson tore off the beard.

***YOUCHHHHH!!!!!!

Sex Ed 101?

McKeesport officials have hired a lawyer to investigate whether the school district should fire two fourth-grade teachers who had sex in a classroom several years ago while other teachers stood watch at the door, officials said Thursday.
The district placed Patrick Collins, 54, former teachers union president, and Angela DiBattista, 50, on paid leave Wednesday while attorney Carl Beard of Altoona conducts the investigation.

Collins and DiBattista admitted they had sex inside her Cornell Intermediate School classroom several times and in a school bathroom between 1999 and 2001, according to an arbitrator's report obtained by the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review.

Neither Collins nor DiBattista, both of McKeesport, would discuss the report.

School Solicitor Jack Cambest said officials learned of the classroom liaisons last spring while preparing for a grievance hearing for Collins. The district fired Collins in September 2004 over DiBattista's claims that he had harassed and stalked her.

The teachers' admissions of classroom liaisons stunned officials, Cambest said.

"Normally, you don't have someone admitting to a possible violation of the Public School Code during an arbitration hearing," Cambest said.

In Pennsylvania, the school code states teachers can be fired for "conduct which offends the morals of the Commonwealth and is a bad example to the youth ..."

In August, arbitrator William J. Miller Jr ordered the district to reinstate Collins with back pay, ruling that he had wrongly been singled out for discipline. Miller dismissed allegations Collins had harassed DiBattista.

Pennsylvania State Education Association lawyer Robert Abraham said McKeesport lacks grounds to fire the teachers. The union represented Collins.

"They sat on this for nine months, and now the only reason they are doing anything about it is because of the publicity it will cause," Abraham said. "It was a personal matter between two teachers that had no effect on students, that had no effect on their ability to teach."

John Zoscak, DiBattista's attorney, said school officials had promised his client immunity in exchange for her testimony against Collins.

Collins, a district teacher for 31 years, is paid $73,703 annually. He now teaches at Francis McClure Intermediate School in White Oak. DiBattista, a 12-year veteran, is paid $50,168.

The report states teachers Michael Cherepko, 28, and Nicole Lundberg, 30, guarded the classroom door during the encounters. They said they thought Collins and DiBattista were only embracing. No children witnessed the encounters. The district is also considering disciplinary action against Cherepko and Lundberg.

Cherepko, a McKeesport councilman since 2004, and Lundberg were to whistle or call out to Collins and DiBattista if anyone approached the classroom, according to the report. Neither Cherepko nor Lundberg would comment.

Cambest said the district waited until now to take action because officials had to sort out legal issues. The district last month requested proposals from several high-profile law firms to head up the investigation. Beard will be paid $145 an hour.

*** They were only hugging!!!! BWAHAHAHAHA!!!

THIS IS THE MOST HEATBREAKING PICTURE EVER!!!

There is a very heartbreaking picture and story coming up in this post!!! Please scroll down to the next post immediately!!! If you do not want to see the saddest thing ever!!! YOU WAVE BEEN WARNED!!!














REDMOND, Ore. -- Cy, short for Cyclopes, a kitten born with only one eye and no nose, is shown in this photo provided by its owner in Redmond, Oregon, on Wednesday, Dec. 28, 2005. The kitten, a ragdoll breed, which died after living for one day, was one of two in the litter. Its sibling was born normal and healthy.

Pay no attention to that sign over there baby!

CUERO, Texas -- Some registered sex offenders in Cuero might have to post signs at their home declaring their status under an ordinance that received preliminary approval from the Cuero City Council. Only moderate and high-risk sex offenders who move to the city or register after the ordinance takes effect would be bound by its requirements. Registered sex offenders who already live in Cuero would be exempt.


*** I guess you couldn't ever bring a chick home unless she is WAAAAAYYYYY freaky!!

Gail... Gail .... Gail .....

My friend and co-worker Gail sent out the old 9/11 email again the other day...

Freaky Sept 11th Facts

1) New York City has 11 letters
2) Afghanistan has 11 letters.
3) Ramsin Yuseb (The terrorist who threatened to destroy the Twin Towers in 1993) has 11 letters.
4) George W Bush has 11 letters.
This could be a mere coincidence, but this gets more interesting:
1) New York is the 11th state.
2) The first plane crashing against the Twin Towers was flight number 11.
3) Flight 11 was carrying 92 passengers. 9 + 2 = 11
4) Flight 77 which also hit Twin Towers, was carrying 65 passengers. 6 + 5 = 11
5) The tragedy was on September 11, or 9/11 as it is now known. 9 + 1 + 1 = 11
6) The date is equal to the US emergency services telephone number 911. 9 + 1 + 1 = 11.
Sheer coincidence..?! Read on and make up your own mind:
1) The total number of victims inside all the hi-jacked planes was 254. 2 + 5 + 4 = 11.
2) September 11 is day number 254 of the calendar year. Again 2 + 5 + 4 = 11.
3) The Madrid bombing took place on 3/11/2004. 3 + 1 + 1 + 2 + 4 = 11.
4) The tragedy of Madrid happened 911 days after the Twin Towers incident.
Now this is where things get totally eerie:
The most recognised symbol for the US, after the Stars & Stripes, is the Eagle. The following verse is taken from the Quran, the Islamic holy book:

"For it is written that a son of Arabia would awaken a fearsome Eagle. The wrath of the Eagle would be felt throughout the lands of Allah and lo, while some of the people trembled in despair still more rejoiced: for the wrath of the Eagle cleansed the lands of Allah and there was peace."

That verse is number 9.11 of the Quran.

Still uncovinced about all of this..?! Try this and see how you feel afterwards.

Open Microsoft Word and do the following:
1. Type in capitals Q33 NY. This is the flight number of the first plane to hit one of! the Twi n Towers.
2. Highlight the Q33 NY.
3. Change the font size to 48.
4. Change the actual font to the WINGDINGS
What do you think now?!


*** This has been debunked several times over at ttp://www.snopes.com/rumors/elevens.asp. Just do a search for 9/11 and you will see several of the things that were addressed in the email. OH HECK!!!! MY NAME HAS 11 LETTERS! HOLY MACKEREL!!!

Mental note - Never date a chick from Indiana

Abortion would be illegal for most women in Indiana, including victims of rape and incest, under a bill filed this week in the Indiana House. Indiana's legislators have chipped away at abortion for decades, imposing waiting periods and other restrictions, but the measure proposed by Rep. Troy A. Woodruff, R-Vincennes, is the first direct attempt in years to outlaw most abortions.

The only exception allowed under House Bill 1096 would be for women whose health or life would be permanently impaired if a pregnancy continued. The bill would define life as beginning at conception and make it a felony to perform all other abortions. Anyone convicted would face up to eight years in prison.

Woodruff said he expected the bill to easily pass the House. But Senate President Pro Tempore Robert Garton, R-Columbus, and Gov. Mitch Daniels questioned the prospects of the proposal.

In Indiana, 11,458 abortions were performed in 2003, the most recent year for which the Indiana State Department of Health has data. That's down from 12,109 in 1999.

*** Shhhh... Listen..... You can hear our freedoms slowly slipping away. Scary isn't it?!

Couldn't they just buy a Playstation instead?

The United States government has hired a bunch of poor souls who lost their arms and legs in accidents and has rigged them up with bags of fake blood so they can play wounded civilians in war games down at Fort Polk, La.

Not only that but Cubic, the defence contractor that produces these games, has also hired 250 Arabic-speaking immigrants at $220 a day (all figures U.S.) as "Cultural Role Players" in the war games.

They've also hired hundreds of local Louisianans to play random Arab civilians, plus "dozens of scriptwriters" to come up with realistic scenarios for the war games.

"The best way to describe what we're doing here," says one of the U.S. Army intelligence officers who plan the games, "is that we're producing a very complex movie with a huge number of plotlines and a very high budget.''

How high is the budget?

"The military spends an average of $9 million staging each 3 1/2-week mission rehearsal exercise," writes Wells Tower, author of this jaw-droppingly bizarre article. That works out to about $117 million a year, he writes.

That doesn't include the $49 million spent constructing the state-of-the-art fake city of Suliyah, which contains 29 buildings, each one equipped with remote-controlled, smoke-making machines and an intercom system that pipes in "recordings of screaming women, crying babies, barking dogs and other sound effects throughout the whole city.''

Plus there are 900 video cameras so the brass can watch the games in real time while sitting in high-back, black-leather chairs in Suliyah's control centre.

"We also are fixing to start implementing smells of the battlefield," said Marty Martinson, Suliyah's chief administrator. ``Smells like vomit, burning rubber, burning bodies, those kinds of things ... Soldiers need to understand, there's a smell to the battlefield. There's a smell to death.''


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Basically, the soldiers are playing very sophisticated games of laser tag
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Needless to say, the army doesn't use live ammo in these exercises. Basically, the soldiers are playing very sophisticated games of laser tag.

Each of the 4,000 or so participants wears a harness that chirps when it's hit by a laser "bullet." And when the game is over, referees wander the battlefield with "god guns'' — devices that erase "wounds" from the harnesses and resurrect the ``dead" so they can play again.

One day at the war games, Tower was chatting with some of the amputees who play wounded civilians when suddenly a horn went off, signalling the start of another fake battle.

A Humvee and a convoy of trucks were attacked with a fake rocket-propelled grenade, causing a fake explosion that caused Cole Young, 71, who lost a leg in an oil pipeline accident, to lie on the ground with fake blood spurting from his amputated leg.

A soldier came to give Young some fake first aid. But when he saw that Young's hand was under his poncho, working his blood-spurting machine, the soldier yelled, "He's got a (bleep) wire!" and started firing laser bullets into Young's chest.

That caused the other fake civilians to start screaming, ``Murderers!"

That distracted the soldiers, enabling a bunch of fake insurgents to sneak up and wipe them all out — "mowing down the troops as effortlessly," Tower writes, "as they might a herd of grazing cows.''

Which is, alas, not unusual: Time after time, Tower reports, the fake insurgents massacred the American troops in these games.

Grandma would no doubt say that the silver lining in that news is that the games are just ... well, games.

In the real war in Iraq, America is kicking insurgent butt, says President George W. Bush.

*** That is hillarious yet incredibly sad!!!! Why don't we take the people who play the insurgents and send them over?!?!? They could probably wrap it up!!!