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Shit Box is a lightweight portable cardboard toilet, made specifically for outdoor use. The box pops up from a convenient 14 inch flat pack to a rigid, reusable, comfortable toilet. Each box comes with ten degradable poo bags.
Festivals, camping, building sites, fishing, travelling, kids caught short, etc.
Shit Box is a lightweight portable cardboard toilet, made specifically for outdoor use. The box pops up from a convenient 14 inch flat pack to a rigid, reusable, comfortable toilet. Each box comes with ten degradable poo bags.
Festivals, camping, building sites, fishing, travelling, kids caught short, etc.
Police in Lowell, Mass., say a promotional statue for the movie "The Incredible Hulk" disappeared from its spot in front of a local theater this week.
Police Captain James McPadden said the statue is probably in some kid's bedroom. But he thinks more than one person was involved and that a car or pickup truck was needed to whisk it away.
The statue is missing its feet because it was bolted to a platform and whoever took it snapped it off at the ankles.
Beijing has dispatched 8,000 toilet
maintenance staff, each responsible for a specific public restroom in
the city and trained in hygiene standards and techniques, Olympic
knowledge and practical English expressions, Xinhua said on Friday.
There will be selective inspections every week and the results will be posted on the Web site of the Municipal Utilities Administration Commission, said the news agency.
The city was also struggling with which style of commode would be best, noting Westerners prefer seated toilets, which are more comfortable and convenient for the elderly or infirm.
The squat toilets widely used in Chinese public facilities are considered more hygienic as there is no direct contact with body, it said.
At more than 30 test events held by the Games organizers, the squat versions drew frequent complaints from foreigners, said Xinhua.
"Not all of the toilets will be changed, but those for journalists, athletes, and VIPs will be," Xinhua quoted Yao Hui, the deputy director of venue management, as saying.
 | Inventor Doug Wood demonstrates the solar dish's power by using it to set fire to a board held at the focal point. |
A new type of solar energy collector concentrates the sun into a beam that could melt steel. Researchers say the device could revolutionize global energy production.
The prototype is a 12-foot-wide mirrored dish was made from a lightweight frame of thin, inexpensive aluminum tubing and strips of mirror. It concentrates sunlight by a factor of 1,000 to produce steam.
"This is actually the most efficient solar collector in existence," said Doug Wood, an inventor based in Washington state who patented key parts of the dish's design — the rights to which he has signed over to a team of students at MIT.
To test the prototype this week, MIT mechanical engineering Spencer Ahrens put a plank of wood in the beam and generated an almost instant puff of smoke.
The thing does more than burn wood, of course. At the end of a 12-foot aluminum tube rising from the center of the dish is a black-painted coil of tubing that has water running through it. When the dish is pointing directly at the sun, the water in the coil flashes immediately into steam.
 |
Team leader Spencer Ahrens fastens mirrors in place using wire and plastic washers. |
Ahrens and his teammates have started a company, RawSolar, to hopefully mass produce the dishes. They could be set up in huge arrays to provide steam for industrial processing, or for heating or cooling buildings, as well as to hook up to steam turbines and generate electricity, according to an MIT statement. Once in mass production, such arrays should pay for themselves within two years or so with the energy they produce, the students figure.
Wood, the inventor, said the students built the dish and improved on his design.
"They really have simplified this and made it user-friendly, so anybody can build it," he said.
Wood said small dishes work best because it requires much less support structure and costs less for a given amount of collection area.
"I've looked for years at a variety of solar approaches, and this is the cheapest I've seen," said MIT Sloan School of Management lecturer David Pelly, in whose class the project first took shape last fall. "And the key thing in scaling it globally is that all of the materials are inexpensive and accessible anywhere in the world."
Gov. Christine Gregoire's office on Thursday asked the lottery to pull the game, which features tickets that look like labels for Reese's Peanut Butter Cups, Jolly Rancher and other candies, after investigating a concern that it could be perceived as a game for kids.
Lottery Director Christopher Liu asked the state's 3,900 scratch-ticket retailers to remove the game, but it may take a few weeks for the game to disappear from shelves and vending machines, said Jacque Coe, spokeswoman for the lottery.
"The stores have been pulling the ticket, and they're making good progress," Coe said.
Of the original 1.9 million candy tickets printed, 600,000 were still on the market before the decision to pull them.
The $2 game features Hershey products and prizes from $2 to $20,000. Tickets went on sale in March.
That the candy-themed game might appeal to kids "didn't rise up as a concern at that time," Coe said.
"In retrospect, we can see where now it might be misinterpreted, and we want to avoid any confusion, any perception that we might be putting the ticket out there to appeal to anyone who's not an adult."
The candy game brings in less than 1 percent of the lottery's revenue and was selling below average, Coe said.
The Hershey game is one of 33 scratch-ticket varieties, many of which also use popular brands and themes, such as "Deal Or No Deal" and outdoor sports, to appeal to buyers.
Washington's Lottery buys most of its games from MDI Entertainment, a subsidiary of Scientific Games, and makes no direct arrangements with brands that appear on the tickets, Coe said.
"This particular brand may have been misconstrued and won't be repeated. We're very committed to preventing sales to minors," she said, citing the lottery's "Not 18? Not a Chance" campaign.
Gregoire has fought against the marketing of cigarettes and alcohol to minors. In 2006, as the lottery was revamping its business strategy, she warned Liu against promoting gambling to teenagers and young adults.
"I want to ensure that we are not, in any way, marketing lottery products to youth," she wrote in a Feb. 10, 2006, letter to the lottery director.
The candy game may have been at odds with that directive, and Gregoire "hopes that [the lottery] will be mindful of this kind of marketing" in the future, said spokeswoman Laura Lockard.
Actual article from the LA Times, The editor's comments at the end are hilarious:
* * *
"In retrospect, lighting the match was my big mistake. But I was only trying to retrieve the gerbil," Eric Tomaszewski told bemused doctors in the Severe Burns Unit of Salt Lake City Hospital.
Tomaszewski and his homosexual partner Andrew "Kiki" Farnum had been admitted for emergency treatment after a felching session had gone seriously wrong. "I pushed a cardboard tube up his rectum and slipped Raggot, our gerbil, in," he explained. As usual Kiki shouted out, "Armageddon," our signal that he'd had enough.
I tried to retrieve Raggot but he wouldn't come out again, so I peered into the tube and struck a match, to try to see him. I thought the light might attract him and he'd come forward to where I could get him out.
At a hushed press conference a hospital spokesman described what happened next. "The match ignited a pocket of intestinal gas and aflame shot out of the tubing, igniting Mr. Tomaszewski's hair and severely burning his face. It also set fire to the gerbil's fur and whiskers which in turn ignited a larger pocket of gas further up the intestine, propelling the rodent out like a cannonball." "Tomaszewski suffered second degree burns and a broken nose from the impact of the gerbil, while Farnum suffered first and second degree burns to his anus and lower intestinal tract.
* * *
Editor's Notes: Things in this story that scare me...
"I pushed a cardboard tube up his rectum ...."
"So I peered into the tube ... " (I'm sorry, but that's like looking through a telescope into hell. I'd rather use binoculars to stare at the sun.)
That poor gerbil (who obviously suffers from low self esteem) being shot out of the guy's anus like Rocky the Flying Squirrel on the Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoon.
Suffering a broken nose from a gerbil's body being launched out of someone's ass. I'm just guessing, but I seriously doubt that said gerbil was springtime fresh after his journey into Kiki's tunnel of love."
People walking around with these volcanic-like pockets of gas in their intestines.
People who do this kind of thing and then admit what they were doing when taken to a hospital emergency room. Sorry, but I think I would have made up a story about a gang of roving, pyromaniacal, anal sex fiends breaking into my house and sodomizing me with charcoal lighter fluid before admitting this kind of truth. Call me old fashioned if you must, but I just cannot imagine looking at a doctor and saying, "Well, doc, it's like this. You see, we had this gerbil named Raggot, and we took a cardboard tube ... "
"First and second degree burns to the anus ...." Wouldn't this make the burning itch and discomfort of hemorrhoids seem like a welcome relief? How does one ever take a healthy dump after something like this? And the smell of burning anus must be in the top five most horrible smells on the face of God's green earth.
People named "Kiki" which is obviously a Polynesian word for: "Idiotic man who insert rodent up his butt."
What kind of hospital would hold a press conference on this?
New Castle County police have arrested a New Castle man accused of
biting a referee who ejected him from a soccer game. Police say the man
surrendered on Friday morning.
According to police, the referee gave the soccer player a "red card" for unsportsmanlike conduct during the game Thursday evening at Weiss Parkland near Newark. That's when the soccer player allegedly grabbed the official and bit his face just below his lower lip and underneath his chin. Police say the bite caused deep cuts.
The assailant ran off, but police obtained an arrest warrant after using the team roster to identify him. The man was charged with felony assault, abuse of a sports official, terroristic threatening, and harassment.
Tourists gaped at six stunning wedding dresses displayed at Ripley's Believe It or Not! in New York's Times Square.
The fashionable white frocks were fashioned entirely of toilet paper.
Six dresses were displayed at the Times Square "odditorium" Thursday and three winning designers squared off for the top prize of $1,000.
The judges from Ripley's Believe it or Not!, Charmin and Cheap-Chic-Weddings.com crowned this year's winner, Katrina Chalifoux of Rockford, Ill. She spent two weeks creating a sheath dress with a raised flower pattern from molded toilet paper.
Terro Glover of Marlin, Texas, was a second prize winner. Ann Lee, of Honolulu, Hawaii, placed third in the annual dress competition, which just celebrated its fourth year.
When
Michael Bay got behind the camera for his most recent film, he
chronicled a lot more than just automobiles transforming into robots
from outer space. Millions of fans also watched then 21-year-old Megan
Fox transform from an obscure actress best remembered for a Lindsay
Lohan movie into one of the most desired hotties on the planet.
Now, the “Transformers” star is back on the set with Michael Bay – and true to the director’s favorite word, she says he’s making an awesome sequel.
“As big as the first movie was, this is 10 times as big, 10 times as many set pieces, explosions, and acrobatic stunts,” she told us about “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. “Shia and I make out a little bit; I don’t know if anyone wants to see that.”
Something tells us that Shia LeBeouf wants to see it.
Regardless, Megan insisted that the blossoming romance between Sam and Mikaela is only one of the many plotlines Bay will be juggling for the June 2009 flick. But according to the actress, some last-minute scrambling has been taking place to make sure their romance can hold its own among all those Autobot vs. Decepticon showdowns.
“You know, we’ve been having script meetings, and we’ve been reworking the script, because they wrote it fast because of the writer’s strike,” she explained. “And, we’ve just been going through and trying to do some character stuff for Shia and myself in the middle of this crazy world that they’re in.”
“I can tell you that we’re on locations in some really exotic places,” she added. “It’s just going to be a badass movie. It’s just going to be a popcorn-visual-spectacle, summer film.”
As for Michael Bay’s main directorial input to his lead actress, Megan had this to say: “His main note to me is just to look hot; so I try my best.”
The authorities arrested a Salem man accused of turning off the main water valves to the Marion County Jail and pulling wires from the building's walls.
The Marion County Sheriff's Office says jail employees spotted the man Wednesday after investigating a sharp drop in water pressure. He later stood atop the building and screamed that he had defused a bomb inside and everything was fine.
The man identified by the sheriff's office as 40-year-old Dereck Benitz complied with orders to come down from the building, and was taken to jail.
He was charged with criminal trespass, criminal mischief,
burglary and disorderly conduct. He had been cited for criminal
mischief and released from the jail about an hour before the incident.
The jail's water pressure was back to normal Thursday.
Dell Inc. will charge customers up to $50 for factory-installed Windows XP on some PCs after Wednesday, according to the company's Web site.
Buyers of the low-priced Vostro line of desktops and notebooks will pay $20 to $50 more for Windows XP Professional installed as a "downgrade" from Windows Vista Business or Vista Ultimate than they would for Vista only.
To meet Microsoft Corp.'s June 30 end-of-availability deadline, Dell will stop pre-installing most versions of the seven-year-old operating system after tomorrow. However, it will still be able to ship PCs with XP by taking advantage of the downgrade rights built into Vista Business and Vista Ultimate. Downgrading lets Dell install Windows XP Professional in lieu of Vista, although the newer operating system is still shipped with the machine so that buyers can, if or when they want, transition from XP to Vista.
Vista Business and Vista Ultimate are the only generally-available editions that allow downgrades, and they can be downgraded only to Windows XP Professional. Under Microsoft's licensing terms, the less-expensive XP Home cannot be installed as a downgrade.
In late April, Dell was the first major computer maker to announce that it would downgrade Vista in order to continue installing XP after June 30. A few days later, Dell's global small and midsize business software manager, Jenni Doane, used a company blog to say that Dell would offer free downgrades on Latitude, OptiPlex and Precision systems but would charge what she termed a "small fee" on Vostro systems.
In fact, Dell has priced Windows XP downgrade options the same as Vista-only selections on its Latitude notebooks, OptiPlex desktops, and Precision desktops and notebooks.
Desktops and notebooks in the low-cost Vostro line, however, carry a downgrade surcharge, an examination of Dell's Web site revealed.
Adding Vista Business to a Vostro 1000 notebook, for example, costs an additional $99 above the price with the default operating system, Vista Home Basic. However, selecting the downgrade option -- Windows XP pre-installed and Vista Business installation media in the box -- costs $149. That's a $50 downgrade surcharge.
Downgrading from Vista Ultimate comes with a smaller add-on charge, although the Vista operating system selection itself is pricier. Adding Vista Ultimate to a Vostro 400 desktop, for instance, costs $149 more than the default Vista Home Basic; choosing to downgrade from Ultimate -- Windows XP pre-installed and the Vista Ultimate installation disc in the box -- costs $169, a surcharge of $20.
On its consumer PC site, Dell doesn't specify whether it is slapping downgrade fees on three systems that can be configured with XP: the 630 and 720 H2C desktops and the M1730 notebook, all of which are part of Dell's XPS high-end line. Dell has said that it will not offer downgrades for any "currently available Inspiron laptops and desktops." Inspiron is Dell's best-selling consumer brand name.
Dell did not respond to a call asking for more information about downgrade charges for its consumer PCs.
Although Microsoft will stop providing new XP licenses to computer makers after June 30 and will stop selling boxed copies of the operating system to retailers on that day as well, it has relaxed its own availability rules twice in the last two months for some hardware categories.
In April, it extended XP's availability until June 2010 for light and inexpensive subnotebooks such as the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) XO and the Asustek Eee PC. Two weeks ago, it did the same thing for a new class of low-cost desktops dubbed "net-tops."
You may have known this all along, but now it has been demonstrated scientifically: bikinis make men stupid.
This month’s issue of the Journal of Consumer Research features a paper titled “Bikinis Instigate Generalized Impatience in Intertemporal Choice,” which is a neuroeconomist’s (definition in a moment) way of saying that men don’t make good decisions while checking out pretty girls in bikinis.
Hence automakers’ penchant for placing leggy models in front of absurdly priced cars at auto shows, and the casting of three scantily clad women on that “Republica Deportiva” show on Univision which I find myself watching though I don’t care whether Chivas defeated Rayados del Monterey.
Virgil wrote of the phenomenon 2,000 years ago when he created the epic poem “The Aeneid.” When Venus convinces Vulcan to make some special armor, she
…threw her snow-white arms around him
As he held back, caressing him here and there,
And suddenly he caught fire — the same old story,
In the “bikini” experiments, Belgian researchers conducted a series of tests on 358 young men. In one test, the men looked at images of women in bikinis or lingerie and at images of landscapes. In another, some men were given T-shirts to handle and assess while others were given bras. Another batch of men was assigned to watch a commercial featuring men running over landscapes while other guys watched a video of “hundreds of young women, dressed in bikinis running across hills, fields and beaches.” (No word on whether they used “Baywatch” slo-mo).
In each test, the researchers offered the men the choice between being paid 15 euros immediately or bargaining for a larger sum that they'd be willing to wait a week or a month for. In all the tests, the men exposed to the sexy imagery or bras cited delayed reward amounts that were lower than the amounts cited by the men who saw sex-neutral imagery. For example, while a man who looked at landscapes might have demanded an extra payment of 10 euros a month later (totaling 25), the bikini-gazer might have been willing to settle for five extra (totaling 20). The sexy imagery did not work on all men all the time, but, as a group, men with sex on their brains settled for a less lucrative bargain, suggesting they were more impulsive and valued immediate gratification more than the controls.
“I observed in my studies that men are more likely to pick a smaller immediate reward over a larger later reward,” Bram van den Bergh, the study’s lead author, tells me. “Hence I do think that men might spend money on something they might otherwise not purchase. Men would become more impulsive in any domain after exposure to sexual cues.”
Sexy ‘tunnel vision’
This
jibes with the findings of a 2006 paper, “Heat of the Moment: The
Effect of Sexual Arousal on Sexual Decision Making.” George Loewenstein
of Carnegie Mellon University and Dan Ariely of MIT, found that
sexually aroused men would do all sorts of things they might not
otherwise do.
To study this effect, they asked men to masturbate while answering a series of questions on a computer. (They helpfully created a system that could be operated with one hand.) For example, 42 percent of non-aroused men thought women’s shoes were erotic. But 65 percent of aroused men thought so. Nineteen percent of non-aroused men said they would agree to sex in a threesome with another man and a woman, while 34 percent of aroused men said so. Less than half, 46 percent, of non-aroused men said they would encourage a date to drink to increase the chance she would have sex with them, but 63 percent of aroused men said so.
Loewenstein, one of the founders of the field of neuroeconomics, which links the workings of our brains to economic and other human interactions, sometimes using machines like functional magnetic resonance imaging to literally watch brain regions light up, says that sex and other strong drives “produce a kind of tunnel vision.”
“Drives are designed to motivate you to focus on specific goals; they have evolved for that purpose, to focus on the goal to the exclusion of other goals or considerations,” he says.
So a man who is aroused literally narrows his view of the world. When we’re thinking about sex, pretty much all we can think about is sex. So a man might do things he would not otherwise do (spending an hour surfing a Jennifer Love Hewitt fan site), or may behave in a seemingly irresponsible manner (skipping the condom).
In fact, studies have shown that sexy ads don’t really make men remember the product. We’re so lasered in on the sexy stuff, we don’t care what brand of beer it is, or how long it takes the car to go from zero to 60.
What about a Beckham effect?
None
of this excuses bad boy behavior, but it may help women understand why
even a choir boy is tough to dissuade once he’s built up a head of
steam.
Whether or not women are as blinded by sex as men remains an open question. Would a picture of David Beckham in briefs influence a woman to pass up a bigger payout? Maybe, but the studies on sexual arousal and decision-making have mostly been done on men, so the verdict is out.
In general, though, all our brains, Loewenstein believes, can be thought of as being of “two minds,” there is the “affective system,” (“Dude! Who cares what it costs! She’s hot!”) which answers to our basic drives, and the deliberative system (“That’s your IRA contribution!”). To think of this another way, picture an angel on one shoulder and the devil on the other. Even in the heat of the moment, there is still that little voice that says "You know you are making a mistake" — the trouble is it gets drowned out by the volume of the affective system.
We are constantly negotiating between these two systems, which is why economists are so interested; it’s how we make purchasing decisions. It may also explain the morning-after walk of shame, the overcharged credit card — and “don’t worry, I’ll pull out in time.”
So bikinis ring our affective bells and those things make a lot of noise. Just remember this when you go to the beach, or the pool, or the lake this summer. She may look amazing in that tiny bikini, but try to listen to that little voice that’s whispering “SPF 30,” no matter how uncool you’ll look slathering it on.
You’ve been warned.
The winner of last week's $57 million Mega Millions lottery jackpot is a registered sex offender who also pleaded guilty to two breaking and entering charges in the 1980s.
Fred Topous Jr., 45, was discharged from Michigan Department of Corrections supervision in October 2006.
The Kent City man traveled to Lansing on Tuesday to claim the prize from Friday's drawing in the multistate game. Topous chose to take the prize as a $34 million lump sum payment, before taxes.
Topous said he planned to buy a house, send
his children to college and have some fun with his winnings. He said he
and his wife work multiple jobs to make ends meet and thought they'd
have to work till they died.
"I want to enjoy a little bit of life," Topous told state lottery officials. "We're plain folks. We've struggled all our lives."
According to the Corrections Department's offender profile, Topous pleaded guilty to assault with intent to commit sexual penetration in 1999 and pleaded guilty to breaking and entering charges in 1984 and 1988.
A monument to the enema, a procedure many people would rather not think about, has been unveiled at a spa in the southern Russian city of Zheleznovodsk.
 | Nurses
posing near a monument to enemas at Mashuk Akva-Term Sanatorium in the
town of Zheleznovodsk, Russian Caucasus Mountains region. The bronze
syringe bulb weighs 800 pounds and is held by three angels. |
The bronze syringe bulb, which weighs 800 pounds and is held by three angels, was unveiled at the Mashuk-Akva Term spa, the spa's director said Thursday.
"There is no kitsch or obscenity, it is a successful work of art," Alexander Kharchenko "An enema is almost a symbol of our region."
The Caucasus Mountains region is known for dozens of spas where enemas with water from mineral springs are routinely administered to treat digestive and other complaints.
Kharchenko, 50, said the monument cost $42,000 and was installed in a square in front of his spa on Wednesday. A banner declaring: "Let's beat constipation and sloppiness with enemas" — an allusion to a line from "The Twelve Chairs," a famous Soviet film comedy — was posted on one of the spa's walls.
Sculptor Svetlana Avakina said she designed
the 5-foot-high monument with "irony and humor" and modeled the angels
on those in works by Italian Renaissance painter Alessandro Botticelli.
"This device is eternal, it will never change," she told the AP. "We could promote this brand, turn it into a franchise with souvenirs and awards for medical doctors."
Dozens of monuments dedicated to characters from tall tales and popular jokes have been erected in post-Soviet Russia.
