All I can say is... what a dumb ass.

The Associated Press
FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla.
An applicant set to take an exam to join the Florida Highway Patrol was arrested Monday, accused of leading troopers on a racing-speed motorcycle chase in rush-hour traffic.

"We told him, don't bother showing up," FHP spokesman Lt. Julio Pajon said of David Carpenter, 24. "Getting arrested is an automatic disqualifier."

Carpenter was to take his physical for the patrol next week, the South Florida Sun-Sentinel reported.

For weeks, troopers and local police have spotted the same biker, cutting through traffic at speeds of up to 140 mph. He managed to flee at least twice and almost caused wrecks involving troopers, Pajon said.

Monday morning, troopers were waiting for him, using an airplane and stationed strategically along the highway. Soon enough, Carpenter was leading a chase, at one point heading south in the northbound lanes and later smashed the cycle's front rim by hurling over a curb to avoid a tollbooth, police reports said.

Carpenter outran troopers in cars, but the airplane shadowed him to his apartment in south Miami-Dade County. When troopers arrived moments later, they saw Carpenter outside, pretending to wash his car.

The cycle was not in sight and Carpenter denied being the cyclist, Pajon said, but it appears his pooch gave him up.

The dog came up to a window, moved a vertical blind and barked at the troopers outside, a report said. A trooper looked inside and saw the motorcycle.

Also inside: Carpenter's application for the FHP.

Miami biker who led troopers on chases had bid in to join FHP

On Friday, Davenport said the judge had already paid the $10 fine. The offense wasn't serious enough to impact Coats' judgeship beyond the fine, Davenport said.

Judge fines himself for letting cell phone ring

Did she get the finger, or did the finger get her?

SAN FRANCISCO, California (AP) -- The woman who claimed she found a well-manicured finger in her bowl of Wendy's chili last month was arrested Thursday night in Las Vegas, police said.

Anna Ayala was taken into custody at her home, San Jose police spokesman Enrique Garcia said. He said police would not give any details until a news conference Friday afternoon. Las Vegas police also refused to comment.
...
Earlier Thursday, Ohio-based Wendy's International Inc. announced it had ended its internal investigation, saying it could find no credible link between the finger and the restaurant chain.

All the employees at the San Jose store were found to have all their fingers, and no suppliers reported any hand or finger injuries, the company said.

Woman in Wendy's finger case is arrested

Woo Hoo! No staples. I'm having 2nd thoughts about getting a PSP..

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Owners of the new PlayStation Portable handheld video game player can now take adult magazine Playboy on the road with them -- and they don't have to bother with the articles.

The online arm of Playboy Enterprises Inc. (PLA.N: Quote, Profile, Research) on Wednesday said it will offer photo galleries and videos shot and edited specifically for the PSP.

Playboy said it has shot a "sci-fi themed" spread of model Amy Cooper that was formatted for viewing on the PSP's wide-angle screen.

Playboy Pics to Go on Portable PlayStation

When the doctor told the patient to quit smoking.. He wasn't kidding...

SEATTLE (Reuters) - Seattle police launched an investigation on Friday to determine how a patient undergoing emergency heart surgery caught on fire at a local hospital in 2003.

The male patient, who was not identified, went up in flames after alcohol poured on his skin was ignited by a surgical instrument.

The patient died after the surgery but that was due to heart failure and not the fire, said Dr. Robert Caplan, medical quality director of Virginia Mason.

Caplan said fires are known to occur in operating rooms although they were extremely rare.

The two-year-old incident became publicly known after an anonymous letter sent to the media mentioned it as a sign of unsafe health care at the hospital, and said the patient burned to death.

Caplan strongly disputed its contents. "That letter is factually incorrect," he said.

Man Catches Fire During Surgery

I wonder if it was set on vibrate...

Romanian police searching a woman suspected of theft found her hiding a mobile phone in her vagina.

They made the astonishing discovery after dialling the number and hearing a muffled ringing coming from somewhere under the woman's skirt.

A witness said he had alerted police when he saw Ruxandra Gardian steal the phone from a customer in a restaurant.
Police questioned the 34-year-old and were about to let her go when the witness suggested they ring the phone to determine whether she was hiding it.
On dialling the number they heard a sound coming from under Gardian's clothes and took her to police headquarters to be strip-searched.

Police officers conducting the search were shocked to find the phone stashed in the woman's vagina.

However, the owner of the phone has since refused to have it returned to him saying it was damaged beyond repair and he would be filing an insurance claim.

Officer Aurel Popescu commented: "I've seen a lot in my time as a policeman but never anything like this."

Romanian Woman Thief Hid Mobile Phones In Her Vagina

Martha may be the self coronated queen of all media but I can't picture her success in the audio only arena. Glue guns, doilies and potpourri just don't carry well w/o the visual and olfactory input. Of course, she would not have to try very hard to succeed at being better than Opie and Anthony; whom XM now give me for free with their recent subscription increase :-( .

NEW YORK Apr 18, 2005 — Six weeks after being released from federal prison, Martha Stewart has reached a deal with Sirius Satellite Radio Inc. to create a 24-hour channel featuring cooking, gardening and entertaining programming for women.

Martha Stewart Gets Own Channel on Sirius

So the sky "isn't" falling? Hmmmmmm

Add up the published claims about disease prevalence and the average American has at least two ailments at a time.

Who's pushing the high numbers? Skeptical bio-statisticians blame drug companies and reporters for much of the hype. They also blame research institutes and disease foundations seeking more public spending on particular diseases.

''They always take the high-end numbers,'' said Mary Grace Kovar, a senior health statistician at the University of Chicago's National Opinion Research Center in Washington. ''They want the money, power and prestige'' that flow when a disease looks like a major problem.

Former National Institutes of Health Director Dr. Harold Varmus, who's now the president of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, fought hard against using such estimates to justify research spending. He called it ''body-based budgeting'' and argued that NIH's billions should be targeted instead to areas that promise the greatest scientific and therapeutic advances.

Kovar and other biostatisticians fault reporters for trying to make new diseases newsy.

Americans' health not as dire as it sounds

Those kooky royals and their l4m3 c0mput3r skillZ....

LONDON, England -- Britain's Prince Harry, who is scheduled to start his army officer training next month, has been told to brush up on his computer skills after reportedly failing a test at the elite Royal Military Academy Sandhurst.

Col. Roy Parkinson, protocol officer at Sandhurst, said Friday that Harry underwent a series of tests, physical and academic, to measure his strengths and weaknesses ahead of his arrival on May 8.

Harry "had no problem with the physical tests," Parkinson told the UK's Press Association.

Prince Harry 'told to get with IT'

Too Funny... Very Dilbertian.

A bunch of computer-generated gibberish masquerading as an academic paper has been accepted at a scientific conference in a victory for pranksters at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

Jeremy Stribling said that he and two fellow MIT graduate students questioned the standards of some academic conferences, so they wrote a computer program to generate research papers complete with nonsensical text, charts and diagrams.

The trio submitted two of the randomly assembled papers to the World Multiconference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics (WMSCI), scheduled to be held July 10-13 in Orlando, Florida.

To their surprise, one of the papers - "Rooter: A Methodology for the Typical Unification of Access Points and Redundancy" - was accepted for presentation.

The prank recalled a 1996 hoax in which New York University physicist Alan Sokal succeeded in getting an entire paper with a mix of truths, falsehoods, non sequiturs and otherwise meaningless mumbo-jumbo published in the journal Social Text.

Scientific conference falls for gibberish prank