The awful stench coming from a Queens apartment on Monday was so bad that cops thought they would find a body inside.
But when firefighters busted down the the door, they found tenant Ming Li Sung was very much alive - and living with rotting garbage piled floor to ceiling.
"When they started trying to clear away some of the trash to get in, he popped up inside, yelling, 'Get out! Get out!'" said Ray West, who lives across the hall.
Cops first noticed the horrible smell when they were called to the Ravenswood Houses in Long Island City in the early morning for a domestic dispute.
"They thought he was DOA," said West.
The apartment looked like a landfill, with trash jammed top to bottom and pressing up against the flat's front door and rear window.
A broken fan, an old watering can and scores of sodden plastic grocery bags stuffed with wet garbage could be seen among the detritus.
When an FDNY haz-mat team arrived to start excavating the garbage, an army of cockroaches poured out into the second-floor hallway, West said.
"The police were throwing up," West said.
Sung, 69, was taken to Elmhurst Hospital Center for psychiatric evaluation, police said. He does not face any charges.
Sung's next-door neighbors have moved out because of the smell, which had been a problem for years, West said. He and his wife, Robin McNeil, are still on a long waiting list for a transfer.
"We're stuck here," said West, a veteran who returned just over a year ago from 18 months fighting in Afghanistan, only to spend his time fighting city bureaucrats over the rancid stench.
West said he called 311, the city Housing Authority and even the Health Department to complain, but he kept getting bounced from agency to agency.
"Everybody kept saying, 'We don't deal with that' and told me I had to call somebody else," he said.
Social workers would visit, but Sung wouldn't answer the door. A year ago the city took some action, according to West, but to little effect.
"They took him to Bellevue to get evaluated," West said, "but then they sent him back here."
The Housing Authority never made a serious effort to clean out the rotting refuse, said McNeil, who has lived at Ravenswood Houses for six years. Sometimes conditions were so bad that dead flies would accumulate on the hallway floor.
"All Housing would do was come and sweep them up," McNeil said.
McNeil was pregnant with twins - the couple's first children - but she miscarried in May. West thinks the overwhelming stench and the stress may have played a role.
"We have to follow the law and respect the rights of the tenant," Housing Authority spokeswoman Lynn Godfrey said late yesterday. She added: "We have a crew out there now to tackle the situation."
JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) – A South African information technology company on Wednesday proved it was faster for them to transmit data with a carrier pigeon than to send it using Telkom , the country's leading internet service provider.
Internet speed and connectivity in Africa's largest economy are poor because of a bandwidth shortage. It is also expensive.
Local news agency SAPA reported the 11-month-old pigeon, Winston, took one hour and eight minutes to fly the 80 km (50 miles) from Unlimited IT's offices near Pietermaritzburg to the coastal city of Durban with a data card was strapped to his leg.
Including downloading, the transfer took two hours, six minutes and 57 seconds -- the time it took for only four percent of the data to be transferred using a Telkom line.
SAPA said Unlimited IT performed the stunt after becoming frustrated with slow internet transmission times.
The company has 11 call-centers around the country and regularly sends data to its other branches.
Telkom could not immediately be reached for comment.
Internet speed is expected to improve once a new 17,000 km underwater fiber optic cable linking southern and East Africa to other networks becomes operational before South Africa hosts the soccer World Cup next year.
Local service providers are currently negotiating deals for more bandwidth.
That is AWESOME! Obviously we've been going about this all wrong. Instead of sending tiny bits of data though high-speed internet, we just send one large chunk of data via carrier pigeon.
I could fill up a 2TB hard drive, stick it in a little box and ship it across the country in a day. This is clearly much quicker than foolishly trying to send that much data over the internet. This sort of system has been referred to as "sneakernet" in the past. Can we call this "pigeonet"?
Unfortunately, carrier pigeons only travel one way. If they want to send another transmission to this pigeon's home they'll have to drive it back to its source point first, which increases the effective transmission time.
Although, if they used a truckload of carrier pigeons, each carrying one data card, and then brought them all back at once that would likely get the effective average transmission time down again.
JESUS! That article's example is already in the Wiki. As I think about it now, I've made use of this technique many times in the past. Especially in the AOL days.
Protesters who attended Saturday’s Tea Party rally in Washington found a new reason to be upset: Apparently they are unhappy with the level of service provided by the subway system.
Rep. Kevin Brady asked for an explanation of why the government-run subway system didn’t, in his view, adequately prepare for this past weekend’s rally to protest government spending and government services.
Seriously.
The Texas Republican on Wednesday released a letter he sent to Washington’s Metro system complaining that the taxpayer-funded subway system was unable to properly transport protesters to the rally to protest government spending and expansion.
“These individuals came all the way from Southeast Texas to protest the excessive spending and growing government intrusion by the 111th Congress and the new Obama administration,” Brady wrote. “These participants, whose tax dollars were used to create and maintain this public transit system, were frustrated and disappointed that our nation’s capital did not make a great effort to simply provide a basic level of transit for them.”
A spokesman for Brady says that “there weren’t enough cars and there weren’t enough trains.” Brady tweeted as much from the Saturday march. “METRO did not prepare for Tea Party March! More stories. People couldn’t get on, missed start of march. I will demand answers from Metro,” he wrote on Twitter.
Brady says in his letter to Metro that overcrowding forced an 80-year-old woman and elderly veterans in wheelchairs to pay for cabs. He concludes that it “appears that Metro added no additional capacity to its regular weekend schedule.”
I caught this live when it was on Fox News. It was hilarious It was still early and only 1 or 2 thousand people had shown up, and they were reporting that at least 10,000 were enroute to the protest and they expected 100k+ to show, and then just kept using that number from then on. Then they switched to Obama's speech in wherever (I think Ohio) and the reporter on scene was talking about how the room was about half full and then he actually said, "we'll see if anyone else shows up."
You mean, the government didn't spend enough money for you to conveniently make it to your tea party rally? Really? But... *sigh*
The facepalm really does speak for this one. I'm sorry my state is absolutely retarded when it comes to anything government or political. Or religious. Or... yeah I'll stop there.
Well, it seems to me that this mister has all the right to complain that his tax dollars haven't been put to use EFFICIENTLY to deliver adequate transport. The solution to that problem does not necesarily mean spending more, but spending it better.
That's because our government prefers to spend a couple billion to encourage people to throw away and destroy perfectly good cars and give them a small credit towards going further in debt to purchase a completely new car.
Well, it seems to me that this mister has all the right to complain that his tax dollars haven't been put to use EFFICIENTLY to deliver adequate transport. The solution to that problem does not necesarily mean spending more, but spending it better.
Except that, as I understand it, this rally supports the cessation of government-run services and government influence. So really, shouldn't they all have been taking cabs instead of complaining about taking cabs?
Nearly 3,000 people gathered on the west lawn of the Capitol on Friday for a mass Muslim prayer service that was part religion and part pep rally for the beleaguered U.S. Muslim community.
As faint shouts of "Repent!" from Christian protesters floated across the gathering, dozens of long rows of men in robes and white knit caps and women in head coverings prostrated themselves to God, gave praise and listened to sermons as part of the congregational prayer that occurs about noon Fridays.
"Stop being so scared!" thundered Imam Abdul Malik of New York. "You ain't done nothing wrong. Just do the work of Allah, and believe."
The service comes as the Muslim community has been rocked by verbal attacks from conservative Christians that have grown stronger since the election of President Obama and by the recent arrests in a terrorism investigation involving several Muslim men, including an imam.
"We wanted to bring people out to show you don't need to fear America," said Imam Ali Jaaber of Dar-ul-Islam mosque in Elizabeth N.J., the service's main organizer. At the same time, he said, he wanted to remind non-Muslims that "we are decent Muslims. We work; we pay taxes. We are Muslims who truly love this country."
Across the street from the service, Christian protesters gathered with banners, crosses and anti-Islamic messages. One group, which stood next to a 10-foot-tall wooden cross and two giant wooden tablets depicting the Ten Commandments, was led by the Rev. Flip Benham of Concord, N.C.
"I would suggest you convert to Christ!" Benham shouted over a megaphone. Islam "forces its dogma down your throat." A few Christian protesters gathered at the rear of the Muslim crowd, holding Bibles and praying.
At one point, organizers asked them to tone it down.
"We would never come to a prayer meeting that you have to make a disturbance," Hamad Chebli, imam of the Islamic Society of Central Jersey, said from the lectern. "Please show us some respect. This is a sacred moment. Just as your Sunday is sacred, our Friday is sacred."
The noise from protesters faded somewhat during the final portion of the service, which lasted nearly two hours.
Organizers said this month that they hoped to draw about 50,000 people from mosques across the country for the gathering, billed as a day of unity for the nation's Muslims. But it failed to attract the support of national Islamic organizations and drew only a fraction of that number. Some people were frightened off by the conservative Christian attacks, said Hassen Abdellah, president of Dar-ul-Islam.
Nonetheless, organizers said they were happy with the turnout.
Abdellah had become the focus of criticism in recent days because he was part of the legal team that represented one of the men convicted in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.
Kia Campbell, a homemaker from Durham, N.C., who came with several members of her family, said they were concerned about their safety.
"It wasn't going to keep us from coming," she said. "But it wasn't that we didn't feel cautious."
Takoma Park engineer Mohammed-Amin AbaBiya said he was happy to be at a "historical" event.
"This shows that America is one, that religion is one," he said, beaming, after the gathering ended and people began to stream off the lawn. "It shows solidarity and brotherhood. In the future, we are going to come more often, I hope."
I especially liked this one gem: " 'I would suggest you convert to Christ!' Benham shouted over a megaphone. Islam 'forces its dogma down your throat.' A few Christian protesters gathered at the rear of the Muslim crowd, holding Bibles and praying."
Even the best movies ever made leave unanswered questions in their wake. Some refer to these as “plot holes,” but why not give the filmmakers the benefit of the doubt? Maybe they had a perfectly reasonable explanation in mind, and simply… forgot to include it in the movie.
Some movies’ unanswered questions are integral to their plots, as with Citizen Kane’s famous issue that nobody was around to hear Charles Foster Kane say “Rosebud” as he died. Most of the time the questions are less important than that, but still can affect your enjoyment of the film, for better or worse — yes, some movies are improved, because without unanswered questions to argue about, there would be little to really discuss about the movie. The Transformers movies are prime examples.
So, then, here is GeekDad’s list of the ten best unanswered questions from geeky movies. What do we mean by “best?” Well, these are ones that are fun to talk about, but that aren’t so significant as to seriously detract from the movie’s quality.
10. Independence Day: The computer virus - This movie has so many unanswered questions that one is forced to conclude that most, if not all, really are just plot holes after all. But then there’s the computer virus that Jeff Goldblum uploads into the alien mothership, that is ultimately what allows the humans to defeat the invaders. Ask any software developer, and they will tell you that it is ridiculously hard to write a virus on a PC that works on a Mac, or vice-versa, and those are two computer systems that were designed and built by human beings. The likelihood of being able to successfully write a virus on a human-built computer of any sort that would affect a computer built by telepathic aliens is infinitesimal. Of course, this is an alien species that has managed to travel in huge ships across vast distances but has never invented a clock (hence the countdown timer they use before initiating their attack), so who knows what sort of vulnerabilities their computers might have?
9. Raiders of the Lost Ark: Indy on the U-boat- The Nazis stop the cargo ship and take the Ark and Marion to their submarine. The crewman tells the captain he can’t find Indy, but then notices that Indy has, of course, swum over to the sub and is climbing onto it. There’s stirring music, Indy waves at the crewmen, he climbs up onto the conning tower, he looks around for a second, and then… the movie cuts to the interior of the sub, where it gets underway, and then we see the red line moving across the map. So how, exactly, does Indy survive this journey? He has no special equipment, can’t get into the sub (the hatches have already been closed, since they’re about to get underway), and it’s about to, y’know, go under the water, in that way subs do. Now, I remember reading once that they scripted (and possibly even filmed) a scene where Indy ties himself to the periscope with his whip. This is, of course, patently ridiculous, since it requires that the sub go no lower than periscope depth on the whole trip and, even if that happened, he’d still probably die. But Indy does tons of things that should get him killed, so we’d have believed that if they’d shown it. But they didn’t.
8. Back to the Future: Marty’s parents’ bad memory - Even though Marty is only in 1955 for a week, he plays a pretty pivotal role in his future parents’ lives. It stands to reason, then, that they would remember him pretty well, don’t you think? Now, I’m not George McFly, but most men would probably have a few questions if one of their children grew up to look exactly like a friend from high school that their wife dated briefly.
7. Star Trek (the 2009 movie): Old Spock biding his time - Kirk gets marooned on the ice planet by Young Spock, and Old Spock saves his life. Then Old Spock tells Kirk that there’s a Starfleet outpost nearby, and they trudge through the snow to get there. Now, Old Spock was marooned there a while before by Nero, and he knew that Nero was going to try to destroy Vulcan. So why didn’t he seek out this Starfleet outpost he knew about until after Kirk arrived? Don’t you think that maybe it would’ve been a smart idea to warn Starfleet that someone was about to try to destroy Vulcan, and, oh, by the way, he’s from the future?
6. Spider-Man 2: Doctor Octavius’s arms - OK, so Octavius had to invent these heat- and magnet-proof metal arms, controlled by sophisticated AI, that attach directly to a human body and interface directly with the brain. So why, exactly, does he need Harry Osborn to finance his big fusion experiment? Is there any doubt that the technology behind these arms would be worth millions, if not billions, of dollars? He could buy and sell Harry.
5. Star Trek IV: The ease of time warp - So, all you have to do to go back in time is slingshot around the sun on a carefully-calculated route, right? It’s the same thing they did in the TOS episode Tomorrow Is Yesterday. If it’s really that easy, then any warp-enabled ship can do it any time, so surely someone in the Klingon or Romulan empires must have figured this out. The Klingons might be too honorable, but why haven’t the Romulans taken advantage of this, and used it for all sorts of nefarious purposes?
4. Star Wars: The Death Star’s slow attack - So the Death Star follows the tracking device on the Millennium Falcon to the rebel base. They jump out of light speed, and, for no clear reason, emerge on the far side of the planet Yavin from the moon where the base is. This light-speed jump takes a split-second, but now they have to wait minutes so they can clear the planet. Not only that, but the Death Star is capable of blowing up entire planets, not just moons, so why don’t they just blow up the entire planet of Yavin? Surely that would effectively destroy anything on its moons as well.
3. Gremlins: Feeding after midnight - Don’t get them wet; OK, fine. Don’t expose them to sunlight; sure, why not? Don’t feed them after midnight; um, how’s that again? If you can’t feed them “after midnight,” at what point during the day does it cease to be “after midnight” so you can feed them again? For that matter, how does the mogwai know what time zone it’s in? Suppose I get my mogwai in New York and then take a vacation to San Francisco — should I not feed my mogwai after midnight Eastern Time or Pacific Time? And what about Daylight Saving Time? Considering the consequences, these details seem pretty important.
2. The Empire Strikes Back: Time dilation - Luke and R2D2 leave Hoth to go to Dagobah at the same time Han, Leia, Chewbacca, and C3PO leave to go… well, they never really say what their initial destination is. Anyway, on Dagobah, Luke embarks on an intensive Jedi training course with Yoda — it’s never stated, but it’s heavily implied that this takes a long time; and besides, you would think a full course of Jedi training would take at least months, right? (We know it’s a full course, because when Luke comes back in Jedi, Yoda tells him he doesn’t need more training.) So, at the same time that Luke finishes this months-long training and runs off to Cloud City, his friends have clearly just gotten there a short time before. Yet all they did on the way was flee from a Star Destroyer and fly down the gullet of a giant space worm. That must have taken hours, not months. So was the Millennium Falcon flying at close to the speed of light (but not at light speed) for a while and thus experiencing time dilation? Yeah, that’s the ticket.
1. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: Was all that really necessary? - It would really have been useful if Henry Jones Sr. had found out, or, if he knew, mentioned the bit about the Great Seal. You know, the Great Seal that the Grail Knight tells them the Grail can’t pass, and which sets off a highly localized earthquake when Elsa tries to pass with the Grail. Because, as it turns out, the whole race against the Nazis to get to the temple and giving a fake grail to Donovan so he could die gruesomely wasn’t necessary at all. The Nazis could never have removed the Grail from the temple anyway! I mean, leave aside the point that Donovan clearly had no idea how to get past the booby traps, and Elsa wasn’t much help to him, so without Indy and his dad there they probably wouldn’t have gotten to the Grail anyway. Once Henry Sr. had been rescued, they could’ve just gone home.
#10: He wrote the virus after he had access to the computer in the ship in Area 51, plus (and I know it's lame, but it's their reason) he had been studying the countdown data and understood their programming methods.
#9: The nazis never submerged, they chose haste over caution and stayed on the surface the whole trip.
#8: They had no pictures of their old friend, as Marty grew to look more and more like him, they would naturally associate that image with their son, whom they see every day, than with a distant memory. It took years for Marty to grow up enough to look like himself as he was when he traveled back in time and any recalled resemblance would be chalked up to bad memory (having forgotten Calvin's face and substituted their son's in place).
#7:Never saw it
#6: He was a responsible scientist and knew that the technology for his arms must remain propriety lest the technology be misused.
#5: Any unknown alterations to the timeline would remain unknown. History was changed. nobody knows anything but the new history.
#4: Waste of resources. They still have to conquer the rest of the galaxy. It was obviously a common method for the empire to plan more and use brute force less.
#3: One of the office workers in Gremlin's 2 asks what happens if they're crossing a timezone on a plane while feeding the mogwai. It is obviously just a guideline. The reason is unknown, given more time, the scientists probably could have figured it out. Maybe daytime radiation suppresses the transformation and 3 or more hours after the sun has set, he can turn into a gremlin.
#2: It was obviously just 1-2 days of intense training. Maybe it was a very small planet where time moved faster, too.
#1: It also would have been useful if he knew the location without the needing to see the tablet or the shield. But he didn't know, he found out later, just as he found out about the seal at the end of the movie.
#5: Spock had to do the "computations for time warp" in his head, which were mostly of his own invention and from memory at the time. He gave no guarantee of the success of their endeavor, and they were contingent on multiple factors that might prove difficult for an individual of lesser intellect to discern. Besides, time travel is easy in Star Trek. There hasn't been a series that didn't involve copious amounts of time travel.
#5: Spock had to do the "computations for time warp" in his head, which were mostly of his own invention and from memory at the time. He gave no guarantee of the success of their endeavor, and they were contingent on multiple factors that might prove difficult for an individual of lesser intellect to discern. Besides, time travel is easy in Star Trek. There hasn't been a series that didn't involve copious amounts of time travel.
And the ship they were using was previously captained by Doctor Emmett Brown.
Comments
Although, if they used a truckload of carrier pigeons, each carrying one data card, and then brought them all back at once that would likely get the effective average transmission time down again.
Originally conceived by B. Waitzman
You mean, the government didn't spend enough money for you to conveniently make it to your tea party rally? Really? But... *sigh*
The facepalm really does speak for this one. I'm sorry my state is absolutely retarded when it comes to anything government or political. Or religious. Or... yeah I'll stop there.
I love Austin though
Except that, as I understand it, this rally supports the cessation of government-run services and government influence. So really, shouldn't they all have been taking cabs instead of complaining about taking cabs?
At Capitol, a Day of Muslim Prayer and Unity
I especially liked this one gem: " 'I would suggest you convert to Christ!' Benham shouted over a megaphone. Islam 'forces its dogma down your throat.' A few Christian protesters gathered at the rear of the Muslim crowd, holding Bibles and praying."
The hypocrisy is just delicious.
The irony, it's delicious.
#9: The nazis never submerged, they chose haste over caution and stayed on the surface the whole trip.
#8: They had no pictures of their old friend, as Marty grew to look more and more like him, they would naturally associate that image with their son, whom they see every day, than with a distant memory. It took years for Marty to grow up enough to look like himself as he was when he traveled back in time and any recalled resemblance would be chalked up to bad memory (having forgotten Calvin's face and substituted their son's in place).
#7:Never saw it
#6: He was a responsible scientist and knew that the technology for his arms must remain propriety lest the technology be misused.
#5: Any unknown alterations to the timeline would remain unknown. History was changed. nobody knows anything but the new history.
#4: Waste of resources. They still have to conquer the rest of the galaxy. It was obviously a common method for the empire to plan more and use brute force less.
#3: One of the office workers in Gremlin's 2 asks what happens if they're crossing a timezone on a plane while feeding the mogwai. It is obviously just a guideline. The reason is unknown, given more time, the scientists probably could have figured it out. Maybe daytime radiation suppresses the transformation and 3 or more hours after the sun has set, he can turn into a gremlin.
#2: It was obviously just 1-2 days of intense training. Maybe it was a very small planet where time moved faster, too.
#1: It also would have been useful if he knew the location without the needing to see the tablet or the shield. But he didn't know, he found out later, just as he found out about the seal at the end of the movie.