Weird News Thread ....

[Jolie Rouge]

Enron Goes Hip-Hop with Ex-Employee's Rap Record


HOUSTON (Reuters) - Former Enron honchos Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling are about to take the rap for the company's failure.

On a rap record, that is.

A former Enron pipeline engineer going by the name NRun is releasing a rap album, "Corporate America," that chastises his former bosses by name.

NRun, whose real name is David Tonsall, lost his job after Enron's collapse into a record bankruptcy in 2001.


Tonsall said he is angry that the Enron criminal investigation is taking years and has yet to name anyone higher up the corporate ladder than former Chief Financial Officer Andrew Fastow.


Tonsall decided to vent his frustration through the rap album, which has so far cost him $15,000 to make.


"I know you can't go postal. That ends up putting you in jail," said Tonsall, who now runs his own engineering firm, Synergistic Techneering.


He jokes that he went "from pocket protector to hard-core rapper," in a sly reference to the plastic shirt-pocket liners that are the bling-bling of the engineering set.


Neither Lay nor Skilling, both of whom are under investigation by federal prosecutors, has been charged with a crime. Lay, who was Enron's chairman, and Skilling, its ex-CEO, have both denied any wrongdoing.


The title track takes Lay to task, saying Enron's failure under his watch made a mockery of the values of respect, integrity, communication and excellence that he espoused.


NRun turns up the heat on Skilling in another song:


"Skilling, going to find you rain, sleet, or snow. When justice comes around, you're going to get hit."


The record is due out on Dec. 3, the two-year anniversary of the massive layoffs that followed Enron's Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing.



10/27/03 10:09

[Jamie67]

Weird News Thread ....very much so

[Jolie Rouge]

Jamie67 : Weird News Thread ....very much so

We aim to please.

Buh-bye

[Jolie Rouge]

'Irrefutable' Proof of JFK's Assassin


After an exhaustive investigation of the Kennedy assassination, including a computer-generated reconstruction of that tragic day in Dallas in 1963, ABC News has irrefutably confirmed that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone, reports The Associated Press. "It leaves no room for doubt," declared Tom Yellin, executive producer of an ABC News special that will air on November 20, two days before the 40th anniversary of the assassination. He described the study as "enormously powerful. It's irrefutable."

News isn't the first to come to the conclusion that Oswald was the lone shooter. That was exactly the ruling made by the Warren Commission, the official government investigation into the killing. But conspiracy theories have abounded for four decades and even now a significant number of people believe there was more than one assassin.

The computer-generated reconstruction of the shooting that ABC News created was based on maps, blueprints, physical measurements, and more than 500 photographs, films, and autopsy reports. It allows us to view the scene from a variety of perspectives, including what Oswald saw from the sixth floor of the former Texas school book depository. "When you do that, it's chillingly clear what happened," Yellin told AP. "I think it's very hard for people to accept the fact that the most powerful man in the world can be murdered by a disaffected person whose life had been a series of failures up to that point."

[Jolie Rouge]

Need Help Waking Up? Try This -- Naked

The latest product to help you wake up in the morning is...caffeinated soap. It's called Shower Shock, and the manufacturer swears just washing with it in the shower will give you a jolt that's the equivalent of a two cups of coffee--about 200 milligrams of caffeine.

WTOP Radio in Washington, D.C. reports that the caffeine supposedly gets into your skin and gives you a little lift, though no independent testing has proved that. ThinkGeek, the manufacturer, says Shower Shock is a vegetable-based glycerine soap which does not contain any harsh ingredients and is scented with peppermint oil and infused with caffeine anhydrous. "No, we're not kidding, and no you don't eat it. The caffeine is absorbed through the skin," reads an ad on the company's Web site.

Here's another jolt: Each four-ounce bar of soap costs a whopping $6.99 and will reportedly last for about 12 showers. It might be cheaper to move the coffeemaker into the bathroom.

[Jolie Rouge]

School cooks win $95 million in Powerball
Tuesday, October 28, 2003 Posted: 9:32 AM EST

ROSEVILLE, Minnesota (AP) -- They waited until the students got their lunch, then 15 school cooks and one janitor who each put a quarter into a lottery pool came forward Monday night as the holders of a Powerball ticket worth more than $95 million.

The women started their first Monday as millionaires back on the school lunch line where they fed the students in the tiny Holdingford School District before hopping a bus to the state lottery headquarters to claim their prize.

"It was really tough to be concentrating on the meal," said winner Karen Overman. "I know there's a need for news conferences in the morning, but we've got breakfast to put out."

The school workers bought one of two winning tickets for the $190.9 million Powerball jackpot. No one has claimed a second ticket that was sold in a small southwestern Indiana town.

Each paycheck, the Minnesota women would put a quarter toward four Powerball tickets -- a routine they have followed since 1990.

At a news conference Monday night, the smiling women said they still had not decided whether to choose the cash option, which would amount to $2.1 million apiece after taxes.

Some in the group said they didn't plan on giving up their school lunch jobs just yet.

"The kids come first," Overman said of the tiny school district outside of St. Cloud, in central Minnesota.

The winning numbers were 6-17-45-47-48 and Powerball 4.

The winners can take $95.45 million worth of annual payments over 30 years or $49.8 million in cash before taxes.

[Jolie Rouge]

The No. 1 Halloween Sweet Treat

Wonder what the neighbors are passing out this Halloween? Chances are, it's chocolate. Hershey Foods Corporation, which admittedly has a huge financial stake in trick-or-treating, commissioned a telephone survey of 1,034 adults to find out everything you ever wondered about the spookiest holiday of the year, including the fact that 73 percent of American households will give chocolate to the little goblins. Rounding out the top five treats are lollipops, hard candy, bubble gum, and gummy candy.


Other fun facts unwrapped by Hershey:

--87 percent will participate in Halloween festivities.
--81 percent of parents will take their kids trick-or-treating in their neighborhoods.
--16 percent will visit a mall for trick-or-treating.
--46 percent of all homes will carve a pumpkin.
--44 percent will decorate their homes.
--25 percent of adults will dress up in a costume.
--21 percent will visit a haunted attraction.
--20 percent will attend a Halloween party.

And here's a good trick!

Fully 75 percent of Americans will buy candy treats for Halloween,

but only 68 percent will actually give them to the kids.

Thinking we've found Halloween's real monsters in that greedy 7 percent!

[Jolie Rouge]

Bombshell: Diana's Butler Faked Quotes

Royal butler Paul Burrell's tell-all book about his boss, Princess Diana, has now come under fire after he admitted making up quotes that supposedly came from several of her personal letters, reports The New York Post. The shocking confession came during a BBC Radio interview on Tuesday when Burrell was asked about a note in "A Royal Duty" in which he quoted from Diana's brother, Earl Spencer, that accused the princess of instability. He admitted to the BBC, "I don't have these letters. I took a mental note or a note in my journal that these things happened." The New York Post says, "Burrell's bombshell confession casts doubt about many of the scandalous claims he makes in the tell-all."

Meanwhile, Burrell insisted he meant the gossipy book to be "a loving tribute" to the princess and not an act of revenge against the royal family. But in interview after interview to promote the book, Burrell has admitted he is still angry at the snubs he received from the royal family, and he wrote the book to give his side of the story, reports Australia's Herald-Sun. "My name has been trashed, my family has been put through hell, and I have been to the brink of suicide," he said.

The most shocking revelation in "A Royal Duty" is a letter written by Diana 10 months before she died in which she predicted her own death in a car crash. According to Burrell, she wrote the secret letter and asked him to keep it for insurance. The letter includes the name of someone Diana thought was plotting her death, but for legal reasons that name is not being revealed. The princess did die in a car crash that was driven by chauffeur Henri Paul. Her lover, Dodi al Fayed, also died.

[Jolie Rouge]

THIS Is What the Big Bang Sounded Like

It wasn't an explosive bang at all.

The Big Bang sounded like a deep hum, according to an analysis of the radiation left over from the cataclysm, reports New Scientist. "The sound is rather like a large jet plane flying 100 feet above your house in the middle of the night," said the man who figured it out, University of Washington physicist John Cramer.

It all started when an 11-year-old boy asked Cramer what sound the Big Bang made. He wanted to know for a school project. That got the physicist thinking, and he set out to recreate the racket that was last heard some 13.7 billion years ago. First, Cramer knew that right after the Big Bang happened, giant sound waves spread through the blazing hot matter that filled the Universe. As it heated and cooled, sound waves left their imprint as temperature variations on the afterglow of the Big Bang fireball, the so-called cosmic microwave background, reports New Scientist.

So Cramer grabbed data from NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe, which has measured the intricate differences in the temperature between various parts of the sky. Using the temperature information, he calculated the frequencies of the sound waves that flooded the Universe in its first 760,000 years. One problem: At that time, they were too low to be audible, so Cramer had to scale the frequencies 100,000 billion billion times to recreate the sound. But he did it! And the result is a 100-second sound file that can be played on a PC that imitates the loudness and pitch of the sound waves in the early Universe. "It becomes more of a bass instrument," says Cramer.


Hear it for yourself!

Click to listen to the 100-second sound file of what Cramer believes the Big Bang sounded like. www.npl.washington.edu/AV/BigBangSound_2.wav

[janelle]

Ok, but I want to know what caused the big bang. Something had to cause it so who or what was here before the big bang to cause the big bang? LOL

[Jolie Rouge]

AHA - Now *THAT* ]b]IS[/b] THE Question .....