Here is why historically, husbands aren’t allowed to help deliver babies, unless it is in a cab.

LOS ANGELES - A California woman is suing a hospital for wrongful death because her husband fainted and suffered a fatal injury after helping delivery room staff give her a pain-killing injection.
In June 2004, Passalaqua’s husband, Steven Passalaqua, was asked by Kaiser staff to hold and steady his wife while an employee inserted an epidural needle into her back, court papers said.
The sight of the needle caused Steven Passalaqua, 33, to faint and he fell backward, striking his head on an aluminum cap molding at the base of the wall.
Jeanette Passalaqua delivered the couple’s second child, a boy, later that day. Steven Passalaqua, however, suffered a brain hemorrhage as a
result of his fall and died two days later, the lawsuit said.

Once again, you can’t argue with tradition. Truly civilized places still have a bar in the bottom floor of the hospital for the men to wait.

We lower our flag to half mast, in deference to our British friends in their fight against the heathen murderers.

Well, for all the folks that wanted a house up in a tree when they were little kids, and did not manage to get one (it is not that easy after all), now you have the chance. In Germany, more precielsy in a island called Einsiedel, they have managed to build 5 cottages at a height btw the 8 and 10 meters.

Every cottage can host up to 6 persons. In order to reach it, of course, you have to climb the wooden stairs along the tree. There is a platform where all guests from different cottages can meet and where the laugagge is stored.

They have an emergency bathroom in case you can’t make it to the one downstairs, a balcony and electricity. It sounds quite nice. The price? Btw 160 and 220 euros a day. I have to say that when I read this, I thought I want to go, but then I saw the picture that you see here, and it does not look like I have imagined. Maybe this pic is not the best one.

Update:  Click here if you can’t see the picture

When I was in high school, I was kind of shy and quiet. The few friends that I did have were (at best) simply good acquaintances… and most others were content to ignore me. That was fine… I had very little patience for them as well. I was content to hang out under the field bleachers with a flask and a book. (Robert Louis Stevenson, H.G. Wells, and Edgar Rice Burroughs were my best friends back then.)

I didn’t find too many people that I cared for the company of in those days… so I just wanted to be left alone. Now, it is needless to say that children can be cruel. My loner demeanor earned me a lot of teasing, a big helping of badgering, and a few physical confrontations. I didn’t invite this kind of abuse… but I endured it.

When I finally graduated high school in the late 80’s, it was like getting out of prison. I went to college… tried on a few hats… and soon found my niche. I found a career… I found friends (most of whom I still would kill for to this day)… and I found I was finally happy. Now… I know it was a bit petty… but I wanted just a taste of vengeance.

My opportunity came back in 1993 when the invitation to my 5-year high school reunion arrived.

Out of nothing more than simple curiosity, I went to my first high school reunion. I wanted to see who would be there… and to see if life had been cruel to them. If not, then perhaps I could extract a pound of flesh for all the hardships I had had to endure.

Upon arriving, I milled about and talked with a few people. I yawned at the pitiful attempts to impress me with mentions of income or luxury vehicles. (I was making more money than most of them at the time anyway.) I showed as little interest as possible in rumors of boats and summer homes. I wasn’t interested in that… I was on a hunt.

I found 3… three people that had tortured me mercilessly throughout my high school career. There was Kurt, Carol, and Alan.

Kurt was the jerk who always went after me in gym class. He’d try to trip me when I would run by, push me when I had the opportunity to fall from a significant height, and constantly aim at my head whenever throwing something in my general direction.

Carol was a self-absorbed slut who always sat directly behind me due to our close alphabetical relation in surnames. When she wasn’t making fun of my wardrobe (as my family was quite poor), then she was either trying to make me blush or stabbing me in the back… literally. Her favorite game was to sneak straight-pins into class and periodically jabbing them into my flesh at quiet class moments. (She finally stopped the stabbing in 11th grade when I got so fed up that I delivered a back-hand to her face. She was knocked over her desk and into an embarrassing heap upon the floor. She is the ONLY female I have ever struck in my life… and I still insist that I have never struck a lady. She was no lady.)

Finally, there was Alan. Alan was the stereo-typical pretty-boy-jock-type. He was the captain of the football team. He was the student body president during our senior year. He even made a point of dating the prom queen. You’d think with all that going on, that he wouldn’t have time to bother with little old me… but he did. He always felt like the big man when he’d knock people (myself included) out of his way in the halls… and on one occasion, he knocked my books to the floor. When I bent to pick them up, he kicked me when I was down. It is for this incident alone that the big oaf had to be one of my targets.

BACK TO THE REUNION…

I let my mind wander into new and inventive ways to get at these people. I had no master plan… I was shooting from the hip.

Carol was my first victim. When I approached her, she was showing off pictures of her children. (She had a 2 year old son and a 5 year old daughter…. this was no surprise to me as she was the only member of our graduating class that received her diploma dressed in maternity clothes.) After chatting with her for a few minutes, it was painful obvious to me that she was looking for a new Daddy for her kids. So… I made it obvious that I was single. Her interest peaked instantly… and she did everything short of the Dance of the Seven Veils to hold my attention. After leading her on for a brief period, I told her that I might have been interested if she had only met up with me a couple years previous. She asked what different between the then and now. My response was simply: “Well… these days, I have standards.”

Alan was then next target to wander into my sights. He was playing the host, displaying his beloved Porsche merchandise, and showing off his cute, little trophy wife. Now, if I know one thing about Alan… it’s that his greatest fear is that someone will question his manhood. So… I shifted into “gay mode”, and started flirting with him. He finally freaked when I told him that I needed to find the restroom, gave him a wink, and asked him to “show me the way to the head”. He spent the rest of the night hiding behind his wife. My job was done.

Kurt was the last to suffer my wrath. I popped over to where he was hanging out. He was having a bit of an argument with his girlfriend, Sarah. Sarah was hot… she had a tush you could bounce a quarter off of… but was unfortunately suffering from a terminal case of “Jersey Hair”. Anyway, the argument was centered around the fact that he was refusing to buy Aerosmith tickets… and she really , really, REALLY wanted to go. Eventually, Kurt stormed off in a huff… so I started chatting up on Sarah. I told her that I had Aerosmith tickets and was going… and that I had a couple extra. She was further informed that I wasn’t about to hand out tickets to someone I didn’t know… but if we got to know each other a little bit, then I’d think about taking her with me. We agreed to have dinner together on the upcoming Friday. When Kurt returned, I departed with sly little “See you on Friday, Sarah”. This obviously started a fight between them… but that didn’t stop her from going out on Friday. I won’t go into the details… but let’s just say that that evening always puts me in mind of the lyrics to the Sepultura song entitled “Good Friends and a Bottle of Pills”… and I quote: “I fucked your girlfriend last night. While you snored and drooled, I fucked your love. She called me Daddy and I called her Baby when I smacked her a$$.”

OK. I’m done. I’ve had my bit of vengance, and I’m past it now. I didn’t attend my 10-year reunion… and I won’t be attending my 20-year reunion in 2008. I’m glad I got my little bit of revenge… but I do not wish any future misfortune to any of these people. So… no hard feelings. Heheheheheh…

So I worked before in a certain unnamed nuclear power plant in the early 90’s.
To give you an idea off the security around the place, to get to the secured area, you had to walk through the security building, which was split in two by steel bars. Two openings through the bars were full body turnstiles that you could only get halfway through before they locked. You were faced with a hand scanner. Not a cool looking one that uses light to check your fingerprints. This one had bars sticking up that you put your hand against, and it measured the resistance of your skin between the various points.
Well, that was for us normal people. The Wackenhut security guards were all so huge from donuts, they couldn’t fit through the turnstile, and had to walk through the vehicle gates to get back and forth. And that was just the women security guards!
My story starts one fine winter day. Myself and one other person were the network administrators for the plant. Our office was inside the server room. We had maybe 20-25 servers running OS/2 and LANManager. We even were running Lotus Notes on those servers. The backup software failed on a daily basis. All our data storage was on external full height 1 gig drives. Yes, thats right, full height (3 inches tall and about 10 lbs!) 1 gig drives. It was a long time ago…
Outside, we had almost a foot of snow on the ground. Inside the server room, in the center of the building, on the third floor, the temperature was currently over 100 degrees farenheit. At 9am. And climbing.
It seems that the building’s heater system was on the fritz. And stuck on full blast. Directly feeding the server room. Being the third floor center, there were no windows to open. The room had a small access door but that was it. Even a full size floor fan couldn’t get the heat out fast enough, because there was no place for it to go, the whole building was affected, although not quite as hot as in our room.
No one would make the call to just turn off the damn heater. Pull the breakers or something.
About once every half hour, you would hear the unmistakable whine of a drive somewhere in the room giving up and spinning down, data lost forever.
And no one would let us turn off the servers either.
Phone call with IBM server support:
“Whats the maximum ambient temperature your servers can handle?”
“We recommend a maximum of 85 degrees”
“How bad is 110 degrees?”
“What? Turn them off, quick!”
“We can’t, we’re a nuclear power plant…”
“Oh… well, just pray you don’t lose too many then!”
6 hours later. We’ve lost over a dozen drives. Someone on the roof finally got the heating unit fixed. Still, no one had made the call to shut down the servers. Now, these weren’t running the reactors or anything, they were on the administration side of the plant. And yet top managers were still unwilling to make a decision! Gives you real faith in the beaurocracy, don’t it?

Politicians without a strong military have an easier job than politicians with a strong military.

They only have to worry about the best deal for surrendering.

I have found what may be the ultimate lunchbox. A “Mr. Bento”.
A “bento box” is a Japanese lunchbox.
What is great about this one is that you nuke your hot stuff in the morning, and stack it right in there with the cold stuff.
At lunch, the hot stays hot, and the cold is still, well, cold.
It is a little expensive, but this one looks like it would last for many years.