Who needs your male chauvinistic website. We womenz got our own

Girls Transworld Snowboarding

This is taking it a little to far

Woman denies kids of Obama supporters candy

When Larry Levine helped prepare divorce papers for a client a few years ago, he got paid in mackerel. Once the case ended, he says, "I had a stack of macks."
Mr. Levine and his client were prisoners in California's Lompoc Federal Correctional Complex. Like other federal inmates around the country, they found a can of mackerel -- the "mack" in prison lingo -- was the standard currency.

"It's the coin of the realm," says Mark Bailey, who paid Mr. Levine in fish. Mr. Bailey was serving a two-year tax-fraud sentence in connection with a chain of strip clubs he owned. Mr. Levine was serving a nine-year term for drug dealing. Mr. Levine says he used his macks to get his beard trimmed, his clothes pressed and his shoes shined by other prisoners. "A haircut is two macks," he says, as an expected tip for inmates who work in the prison barber shop.

There's been a mackerel economy in federal prisons since about 2004, former inmates and some prison consultants say. That's when federal prisons prohibited smoking and, by default, the cigarette pack, which was the earlier gold standard.

Prisoners need a proxy for the dollar because they're not allowed to possess cash. Money they get from prison jobs (which pay a maximum of 40 cents an hour, according to the Federal Bureau of Prisons) or family members goes into commissary accounts that let them buy things such as food and toiletries. After the smokes disappeared, inmates turned to other items on the commissary menu to use as currency.

Books of stamps were one easy alternative. "It was like half a book for a piece of fruit," says Tony Serra, a well-known San Francisco criminal-defense attorney who last year finished nine months in Lompoc on tax charges. Elsewhere in the West, prisoners use PowerBars or cans of tuna, says Ed Bales, a consultant who advises people who are headed to prison. But in much of the federal prison system, he says, mackerel has become the currency of choice.

Mackerel Economics in Prison Leads to Appreciation for Oily Fillets

A former Army commander who underwent a sex change operation was discriminated against by the U.S. government, a federal judge ruled Friday in an important victory for transgenders claiming bias in the workplace.
Diane Schroer won her federal lawsuit against the Library of Congress after officials backed out of a 2005 job offer when told of her intention to become a transsexual. At the time of the job interview for a position as a senior terrorism research analyst, David Schroer was a male. He had been a onetime Army Special Forces commander.
U.S. District Court Judge James Robinson said Schroer's civil rights were violated.
"The evidence established that the Library was enthusiastic about hiring David Schroer -- until she disclosed her transsexuality," Robinson wrote. "The Library revoked the offer when it learned that a man named David intended to become, legally, culturally and physically, a woman named Diane. This was discrimination 'because of ... sex.' "

Good for them! It is nice to see them do something right. :)

Transsexual wins lawsuit against Library of Congress

One little girl had the looks. The other had the voice.
So in a last-minute move demanded by one of China’s highest officials, the two were put together for the Olympic opening ceremony, with one lip-synching “Ode to the Motherland” over the other’s singing.
The real singer, 7-year-old Yang Peiyi, with her chubby face and crooked baby teeth, wasn’t good looking enough for the ceremony, its chief music director told state-owned Beijing Radio.

So the pigtailed Lin Miaoke, a veteran of television ads, mouthed the words with a pixie smile for a stadium of 91,000 and a worldwide TV audience. “I felt so beautiful in my red dress,” the tiny 9-year-old told the China Daily newspaper.

Peiyi later told China Central Television that just having her voice used was an honor. It was the latest example of the lengths the image-obsessed China is taking to create a perfect Summer Games.

Crazy

Olympic opening uses girl's voice, not face

A man in Australia who was selling his "life" over the Internet -- including his home, job and the chance to meet his friends -- said Sunday he had sold the lot for 399,000 dollars (383,230 US).British-born Ian Usher, 44, decided to sell his house in the western city of Perth along with his car, motorbike, jet ski and all his other goods as a way of moving on after breaking up with his wife.

The "life package" included not only his tangible assets such as his clothes and DVD collection but the opportunity to take on his former job as a carpet salesman and the chance to meet some of his friends.

"It's not the usual week that I would have had."

Man in Australia sells 'life' for 383,000 US dollars

A Canadian court ruled last week that the father of a 12-year-old girl had no right to ground his daughter for disobeying orders to stay off the Internet.

The girl had taken her father to Quebec Superior Court after he refused to allow her to go on a school trip for chatting on websites he tried to block, and then posting "inappropriate" pictures of herself online using a friend's computer.

I have a hunch that most people (and parents, especially) would disagree with the court's ruling in this case, given how ingrained in legal precedent is the idea that adults are responsible for the welfare of their children (parents have actually been arrested for leaving sleeping children alone in a car within sight for mere minutes). And at minimum, it's generally understood by most folks that if two people bring a child into the world, it's their responsibility to care for it. Just as there are different political philosophies, there is any number of child-rearing philosophies available to parents. Some work, some don't; but one would be hard-pressed to allege reasonably that parents should not have the right to instill within their own children values of their choosing so long as they cause no harm in the process.

I think things have gone a bit to far if this is true.

Child sues father for grounding her

MIT professor and Web star Walter Lewin swings from pendulums and faces down wrecking balls to show students the zany beauty of science.

Walter Lewin is not merely dangling at the bottom of a 15-foot pendulum. He is swinging high and wide, his rapt audience of 300 counting off each cycle.
At 71, he's likely missed his window for a shot at Cirque du Soleil, but the Netherlands-born MIT physics professor seems happy with his own high wire act -- revealing to students, in the most unorthodox ways, the beauty of science.

MIT professor Walter Lewin's elaborate physics demonstrations are a hit in the classroom and online.His pendulum ride comes at the end of a lecture on Hooke's Law, in which he proves the pendulum's period, or time that it takes to complete one cycle, is not affected by the mass at the bottom -- in this case, his own body.
He will also, on other occasions, suck helium and continue his lecture sounding like a Dutch Daffy Duck to highlight the differences in the speed of sound in certain gases. He'll shoot across the classroom stage astride a bicycle mounted with fire extinguishers to demonstrate a rocket's change in momentum.
"It took me a decade to come to the realization," says Lewin at his MIT office, "that really what counts is not what you cover, but what counts

High Wire Act

Funny shit!!

Overheard in New York

Martin Luther King, Jr., a Baptist minister, was a driving force in the push for racial equality in the 1950's and the 1960's. In 1963, King and his staff focused on Birmingham, Alabama. They marched and protested non-violently, raising the ire of local officials who sicced water cannon and police dogs on the marchers, whose ranks included teenagers and children. The bad publicity and break-down of business forced the white leaders of Birmingham to concede to some anti-segregation demands.

Thrust into the national spotlight in Birmingham, where he was arrested and jailed, King organized a massive march on Washington, DC, on August 28, 1963. On the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, he evoked the name of Lincoln in his "I Have a Dream" speech, which is credited with mobilizing supporters of desegregation and prompted the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

This is a speech that is very important to this country but I never heard or read the whole speech until I was a freshman in college. I am a day late but I submit here the full text of the speech by Martin Luther King Jr.

The I Have a Dream Speech