A black bear cub who became affectionately known as "jarhead" after a plastic container got stuck on its head can eat and drink again after experts removed it.
The clear container was removed from the six-month-old cub's head after it had been wedged on for at least 10 days. The cub poked its head into the jar when digging through rubbish in a central Florida neighbourhood.
Biologists said the animal was days away from death because the jar made it impossible for it to eat or drink.
The team had to tranquillise the mother bear and then grab the cub to remove the container from its head.
The subdued mother was then put in a trap, and the cubs followed. After she awoke and nursed the cubs, the bears were moved to a less populated area nearby.
Hey Ryan, have you heard anything about this? I've heard that image is everything, but it seems like these companies could spend their money in better ways.
Beijing, China (CNN) -- In China, white people can be rented.
For a day, a weekend, a week, up to even a month or two, Chinese companies are willing to pay high prices for fair-faced foreigners to join them as fake employees or business partners.
Some call it "White Guy Window Dressing." To others, it's known as the "White Guy in a Tie" events, "The Token White Guy Gig," or, simply, a "Face Job."
And it is, essentially, all about the age-old Chinese concept of face. To have a few foreigners hanging around means a company has prestige, money and the increasingly crucial connections -- real or not -- to businesses abroad.
"Face, we say in China, is more important than life itself," said Zhang Haihua, author of "Think Like Chinese." "Because Western countries are so developed, people think they are more well off, so people think that if a company can hire foreigners, it must have a lot of money and have very important connections overseas. So when they really want to impress someone, they may roll out a foreigner."
Or rent one.
Last year, Jonathan Zatkin, an American actor who lives in Beijing, posed as the vice president of an Italian jewelry company that had, allegedly, been in a partnership with a Chinese jewelry chain for a decade.
Zatkin was paid 2,000 yuan (about $300) to fly, along with a couple of Russian models, to a small city in the central province of Henan where he delivered a speech for the grand opening ceremony of a jewelry store there.
"I was up on stage with the mayor of the town, and I made a speech about how wonderful it was to work with the company for 10 years and how we were so proud of all of the work they had done for us in China," Zatkin said. "They put up a big bandstand and the whole town was there and some other local muckety-mucks."
The requirements for these jobs are simple. 1. Be white. 2. Do not speak any Chinese, or really speak at all, unless asked. 3. Pretend like you just got off of an airplane yesterday.
Those who go for such gigs tend to be unemployed actors or models, part-time English teachers or other expats looking to earn a few extra bucks. Often they are jobs at a second- or third-tier city, where the presence of pale-faced foreigners is needed to impress local officials, secure a contract or simply to fulfill a claim of being international.
"Occasionally companies want a foreign face to go to meetings and conferences or to go to dinners and lunches and smile at the clients and shake people's hands," read an ad posted by a company called Rent A Laowai (Chinese for "foreigner") on the online classified site thebeijinger.com.
It continued: "There are job opportunities for girls who are pretty and for men who can look good in a suit."
People like Brad Smith. When Smith -- the nom de plume of the Beijing-based American actor -- answered CNN's phone call on a recent morning, he was standing outside a meeting room at a Ramada Inn in Hangzhou, a city about 100 miles outside of Shanghai. Today's job: Pretend to be an architect from New York and give design plans for a new museum to local officials.
"They have not told me what my name is today. I think it is Lawrence or something," said Smith -- unlike some jobs, no fake business cards were given to hand out.
Earlier that morning he went over his script with his Chinese "business partners" at a Kentucky Fried Chicken. "It says, 'Good morning distinguished leaders. It is my privilege to participate in this program'," said Smith, who asked that his real name not be used for fear it could jeopardize future jobs.
If Smith is asked a question, he is told to pretend to answer as his "translator" pretends to understand.
Occasionally, these jobs can go awry. Smith said 18 months ago Beijing police showed up at his apartment after a financial company he worked at for a couple of months in Xi'an, a city in western China, allegedly swindled millions of yuan out of clients.
"That company said I was the guy in charge," he said. "I didn't even remember the company's name. After that, I decided I was never going to use my passport again with these fake companies. The small gigs are much less dangerous." Sometimes companies will hire Caucasians simply to sit in the office a few hours a day near the window where clients and customers can see them.
White women are also a hot commodity, sometimes to pose as phony foreign girlfriends, or, in the case of Vicky Mohieddeen, to pretend to be an oil tycoon.
Mohieddeen, who is Scottish, took a job in 2008 to attend what she describes as some sort of "oil drilling conference" in Shandong province for 300 yuan ($44). Several busloads of foreigners, with nationalities ranging from Pakistani to Nigerian, were trucked to the event, she said. They were greeted by brass bands and feted with a sumptuous dinner.
"I was like, 'Yeah, we have a lot of oil in Scotland.' I didn't know what to say. It was a bit nerve-racking. We were guests of honor of the vice mayor. We were put in a nice hotel. It was quite fancy."
For Mohieddeen, who had just arrived in Beijing at the time, the experience, albeit bizarre, was an introduction to a side of China most foreigners will never see.
"It is part of what China is all about, you know," Mohieddeen said. "There is quite an elaborate fantasy world going on here where if everyone buys into it, it does not matter if it is the truth. Those kinds of experiences give me a fuller understanding of the way the culture works."
I heard about this story a while back. And yes, it's completely true. Companies vying for foreign clients try their best to look powerful and international, and the best way to do so is to have some foreigners on board. I'm hired full time, so I'm not just a quick rental like in the article, but I wholly believe the idea of some companies hiring white people just to stand around being white for a week or something while media or local government officials are visiting.
Seriously, every time my company gets local media to come, someone will make a beeline for my desk to shake hands with me and talk for a few minutes. I don't really mind, I am exceptionally sexy after all.
(Sept. 12) -- More than 400 students from Norwin High School in western Pennsylvania got an unexpected eyeful Friday, when a big screen presentation on the importance of donating blood suddenly turned into an X-rated slideshow.
The hardcore images -- described by students as gay pornography, according to the Pittsburgh Post Gazette -- were stored on a portable flash drive owned by a Central Blood Bank employee. That USB stick also contained the safe-for-all-ages PowerPoint presentation. But unfortunately, the Gazette noted, when Assistant Principal Tim Kotch plugged the drive into a computer, he unwittingly clicked on the wrong file, causing several explicit photos to appear on the school's giant TV screen.
"It took a few seconds for people to process what was up there," senior Chelsey Fix told the newspaper. "People were laughing, but the main thing was people were like, 'I can't believe this happened.'" Student Ethan Dobranski told Channel 4 Action News that the images included "frontal male nudity, and there was one with, like, two people in there, but it was, like, from the back."
"That's what popped up, but I don't think [the Central Blood Bank employee] realized that was on there at the time, and he was truly embarrassed for what happened," student Dan Jones told the TV news show. "He was just shocked. He, like, put his hand on the stage and covered his head. He was so ashamed of himself for having that."
A second presentation planned for the school's junior class later that day was canceled.
Those hardcore images may have caused snickers among the students, but they look certain to result in the Central Blood Bank being hit with a seriously hefty lawsuit. "They tell me it lasted about 30 seconds, which is a long time," attorney Peter J. Payne, who has been hired by parents of several students who attended the presentation, told Channel 4. "Every parent that I've talked to is very concerned. We're still talking about the senior class, but these kids are 17, 18 years old at the most."
The school district offered its "sincerest apologies" to parents in a letter, and said local police and the district attorney's office had been notified. "We find this incident inexcusable and are taking every measure we can to ensure that the investigation is carried out with the utmost fidelity," the letter read.
The Central Blood Bank also sent out a letter apologizing for the "inappropriate material" shown to students. The unnamed employee has been suspended pending an investigation. "Per organizational policy, employees are not allowed to use flash drives and are required to review their presentations in advance with their supervisor; in this situation, the employee ignored these policies," the letter said.
However, the photo scandal has at least succeeded in raising awareness of the blood bank with local teens. Senior Ethan Dobranski, 17, told The Associated Press that the photos were the No. 1 topic of conversation on Friday. "No one's ever going to forget this," he said.
Mannn, I feel so bad for that guy who had the porn on his flash drive. Probably shouldn't have been carrying porn on his work flash drive though... I always try to envision worst case scenarios for consequences to small actions I do, just to avoid moments like that.
Porn on your flash drive? Not smart, but eh, not unheard of I guess.
Porn on your flash drive pulled up in front of a high school auditorium while doing a presentation for your job? You're fucked. Royally.
He deserves it though. I am in the same business, I make presentations for work. Sometimes I use my own computer in front of larger groups. And you know what? I keep my porn way the fuck away from anything remotely related to work.
NARITA, Chiba Pref. — American model and actress Paris Hilton dropped her entry request and left Japan on a chartered flight Wednesday after being stopped and questioned at Narita International Airport the previous day about her conviction for cocaine possession, sources familiar with the matter said.
The 29-year-old star of "The Simple Life" was stopped by immigration upon arrival Tuesday, just a day after pleading guilty to a drug charge in Las Vegas, according to an e-mailed statement by Hilton's representative, Dawn Miller.
Hilton spent the night at an airport hotel after being questioned by officials. She was scheduled to promote her fashion and fragrance lines at a news conference in Tokyo on Wednesday, but the appearance was canceled.
"We met her this morning. The process of determining whether she can enter Japan or not is still ongoing," Kazuo Kashihara, an immigration official at Narita, said earlier in the day.
Under Japanese law, immigration authorities are empowered to deny entry to anyone convicted of drug-related offenses.
Tokyo was the first stop on Hilton's Asia tour, which was to take her to Kuala Lumpur and Jakarta, where she intends to open a new store.
Both countries have strict drug laws, though an official in Indonesia, which does not bar foreigners convicted of crimes in other countries, said she was unlikely to be denied entry.
Miller's statement said Hilton was disappointed with all the scrutiny in Japan.
"Paris was contractually bound to her business trip and didn't want to let down her brands and many Asian fans," the statement said. "She intended on fulfilling her contract and is trying hard to do the responsible thing, but this is beyond her control. She is very disappointed by tonight's events."
The Asia trip had been planned before Hilton's arrest last month in Las Vegas, when an officer found a small amount of cocaine in her purse. She pleaded guilty Monday to possessing drugs and obstructing an officer and was placed on informal probation for one year.
Bill Pintas was vacationing in Las Vegas when he decided to stay at the swank new Vdara hotel, a curvy 57-story tower owned by MGM Resorts. He was sitting at the pool when he encountered something alarming. He recalls, "I'm sitting there in the chair and all of the sudden my hair and the top of my head are burning. I'm rubbing my head and it felt like a chemical burn. I couldn't imagine what it could be."
Like an ant under a magnifying glass, he remembers running to an umbrella, but being unable to escape the hot light. He recalls, "I used to live in Miami and I've sat in the sun in Las Vegas 100 times. I know what a hot sun feels like and this was not it. My first inclination was thinking: Jesus we've destroyed the ozone layer because I am burning."
Speaking with employees, he was alarmed to find out that the hotel staff was aware of the situation. He recalls, "They're kind of giggling and say: 'Yeah, we know. We call it the death ray."
The "death ray" appears to be created by the glass surface of the hotel itself -- acting as a concentrating parabolic dish -- similar to those used to heat water to a boil in solar power systems. The dish concentrates light on a 10-foot by 15-foot hot zone moving across the pool. Temperatures in this area spike 20 degrees Fahrenheit -- or more.
Bill Pintas saw his plastic newspaper bag literally begin to melt. The bag -- composed of polyethylene -- is designed to withstand temperatures of up to 120 to 130 degrees Fahrenheit. And the employees recall seeing plastic cups -- which have a melting point of 160 degrees Fahrenheit – actually melting.
Other guests, including newspaper reviewers, have also observed the burning beam.
The hotel management doesn't call it a "death ray", they prefer the more friendly distinction "solar convergence phenomenon". Gordon Absher, a spokesman for MGM Mirage says the hotel is addressing the problem, and comments, "Because of the curved, concave shape of that hotel, they sometimes get isolated pockets of high temperatures."
The hotel is baffled by how to solve the problem of the "death ray", though. When initially constructing the building, they anticipated the issue and put a coating over the glass that absorbs 70 percent of the daytime sunlight. However, that was not enough to reduce its painful effects. And the ray sweeps across a wide area, making it hard to protect a specific region.
Comments Mr. Absher, "This is quite literally an astronomical challenge," Absher said. "We are dealing with a moving target."
The mishap in architecture isn't as glaring as some of history's most notable mistakes -- such as the 1940 Tacoma Narrows Bridge, but it is pretty extraordinary. It serves as a reminder that while many take the science and engineering of designing massive skyscrapers for granted these days, it remains a tricky business.
It looks like the Vrada may have exposed the wrong guest to the death ray, though -- Mr. Pintas is a Chicago-based lawyer.
America's nastiest rappers in shocking revelation – they've been evangelical Christians all along
ICP have been going for 20 years, always wearing clown make-up, which looks slightly lumpy because it's painted over their goatees. They've been banned from performing in various cities where juggalos have been implicated in murders and gang violence. ICP have a fearsome reputation, fostered by news reports showing teenagers in juggalo T-shirts arrested for stabbing strangers and lyrics like "Barrels in your mouth/bullets to your head/The back of your neck's all over the shed/Boomshacka boom chop chop bang."
All of which makes Violent J's recent announcement really quite astonishing: Insane Clown Posse have this entire time secretly been evangelical Christians. They've only been pretending to be brutal and sadistic to trick their fans into believing in God. They released a song, Thy Unveiling, that spelt out the revelation beyond all doubt:
Fuck it, we got to tell.
All secrets will now be told
No more hidden messages …Truth is we follow GOD!!!
We've always been behind him
The carnival is GOD
And may all juggalos find him
We're not sorry if we tricked you.
The news shook the juggalo community to its core. While some fans claimed they'd actually had an inkling, having deciphered some of the hidden messages in several songs, others said they felt deeply betrayed and outraged: they'd been innocently enjoying all those songs about chopping people up and shooting women, and it was Christian rock?
Violent J explained himself unapologetically to a New Jersey newspaper: "You have to speak their language. You have to interest them, gain their trust, talk to them and show you're one of them. You're a person from the street and you speak of your experiences. Then at the end you can tell them: God has helped me."
Of course, one might argue that 20 years was, under the circumstances, an incredibly long time for them to have pretended to be unholy, and that, from a Christian perspective, the harm they did while feigning unholiness may even have outweighed the greater good.
I've come to Milwaukee because ICP have just released their most audacious Christian song to date: Miracles. In it, they list God's wonders that delight them each day:
Hot lava, snow, rain and fog,
Long neck giraffes, and pet cats and dogs
Fuckin' rainbows after it rains
There's enough miracles here to
blow your brains.
The song climaxes with them railing against the very concept of science:
Fuckin' magnets, how do they work?
And I don't wanna talk to a scientist
Y'all motherfuckers lying and
getting me pissed.
10pm. Upstairs, thousands of juggalos are getting drunk in readiness for the show. The atmosphere is riotous and exciting. ICP have a gimmick of throwing gallons of cheap fizzy soda into the crowd, and many juggalos are crushed into the barrier in the expectation of getting soaked and sticky. Backstage, ICP arrive to meet me. They're wearing their full clown make-up – they refuse to meet journalists without it – and are immediately delightful. They smoke, but considerately blow the smoke away from my face. "Oh, I'm sorry, let me put that out. That's some bullshit on my part," says Shaggy 2 Dope when he sees me flinch slightly away from it.
But they also seem melancholy and preoccupied with the negative critical response to Miracles. Saturday Night Live just parodied it ("Fuckin' blankets, how do they work?") and the internet is filled with amused and sometimes outraged science bloggers dissecting the lyrics. Violent J and Shaggy have been watching them, they tell me, feeling increasingly saddened and irate.
"A college professor took two days out of her fucking life to specifically attack us," says Violent J. "Oh yeah, she had it all figured out."
One of the ICP road crew locates the video on his iPhone, and it is indeed withering: "The [Miracles] video is not only dumb, but enthusiastically dumb, endorsing a ferocious breed of ignorance that can only be described as militant. The entire song is practically a tribute to not knowing things."
"Fuck you, man," says Violent J. "Shut the fuck up."
"Did you anticipate this kind of reaction?" I ask them.
"No," sighs Violent J. "I figured most people would say, 'Wow, I didn't know Insane Clown Posse could be deep like that.' But instead it's, 'ICP said a giraffe is a miracle. Ha ha ha! What a bunch of idiots.'" He pauses, then adds defiantly, "A giraffe is a fucking miracle. It has a dinosaur-like neck. It's yellow. Yeah, technically an elephant is not a miracle. Technically. They've been here for hundreds of years…"
"Thousands," murmurs Shaggy.
"Have you ever stood next to an elephant, my friend?" asks Violent J. "A fucking elephant is a miracle. If people can't see a fucking miracle in a fucking elephant, then life must suck for them, because an elephant is a fucking miracle. So is a giraffe."
We watch the video for another few seconds: "It becomes apparent that Shaggy and J consider any understanding of the actual workings of these 'miracles' to be corrosive. To them, knowledge is seen as a threat… For ICP a true understanding of 'fucking rainbows' would reduce them to, as Keats put it, 'the dull catalogue of common things'."
Violent J shakes his head sorrowfully. "Who looks at the stars at night and says, 'Oh, those are gaseous forms of plutonium'?" he says. "No! You look at the stars and you think, 'Those are beautiful.'"
Suddenly he glances at me. The woman in the video is bespectacled and nerdy. I am bespectacled and nerdy. Might I have a similar motive?
"I don't know how magnets work," I say, to put him at his ease.
"Nobody does, man!" he replies, relieved. "Magnetic force, man. What else is similar to that on this Earth? Nothing! Magnetic force is fascinating to us. It's right there, in your fucking face. You can feel them pulling. You can't see it. You can't smell it. You can't touch it. But there's a fucking force there. That's cool!"
Shaggy says the idea for the lyrics came when one of the ICP road crew brought some magnets into the recording studio one day and they spent ages playing with them in wonderment.
"Gravity's cool," Violent J says, "but not as cool as magnets."
"I did think," I admit, "that fog constitutes quite a low threshold for miracles."
"Fog?" Violent J says, surprised.
"Well," I clarify, "I've lived around fog my whole life, so maybe I'm blasé."
"Fog, to me, is awesome," he replies. "Do you know why? Because I look at my five-year-old son and I'm explaining to him what fog is and he thinks it's incredible."
"Ah!" I gesticulate. "If you're explaining to your five-year-old son what fog is, then why do you not want to meet scientists? Because they're just like you, explaining things to people…"
"Well," Violent J says, "science is… we don't really… that's like…" He pauses. Then he waves his hands as if to say, "OK, an analogy": "If you're trying to fuck a girl, but her mom's home, fuck her mom! You understand? You want to fuck the girl, but her mom's home? Fuck the mom. See?"
I look blankly at him. "You mean…"
"Now, you don't really feel that way," Violent J says. "You don't really hate her mom. But for this moment when you're trying to fuck this girl, fuck her! And that's what we mean when we say fuck scientists. Sometimes they kill all the cool mysteries away. When I was a kid, they couldn't tell you how pyramids were made…"
"Like Stonehenge and Easter Island," says Shaggy. "Nobody knows how that shit got there."
"But since then, scientists go, 'I've got an explanation for that.' It's like, fuck you! I like to believe it was something out of this world."
--
"So all those unpleasant characters in the songs," I ask, "like the narrator in I Stuck Her With My Wang, they're examples of people you shouldn't be?"
"Huh?" Violent J says.
"Well, it's very unpleasant," I say. "'I stuck her with my wang. She hit me in the balls. I grabbed her by her neck. And I bounced her off the walls. She said it was an accident and then apologised. But I still took my elbow and blackened both her eyes.' That's clearly a song about domestic violence. So your Christian message is... don't be like that man?"
"Huh?" Violent J repeats, mystified.
There's a silence.
"I Stuck Her With My Wang is funny," Violent J says. "Jokes. Jokes, man. Jokes. Jokes. Jokes. It's just a ridiculous scenario. Silly stories, man. Silly stories. What's she doing kicking him in the balls? We find it funny. But we're saying, while we're close, while we're hanging, hey, man, do you ever ask yourself what's in your riddle box? If you had to turn the crank today?"
--
It's just a terrible twist of fate for Insane Clown Posse that theirs is a form of creative expression that millions of people find ridiculous. But then suddenly, palpably, Violent J pulls himself out of his introspection. They're about to go on stage and he doesn't want to be maudlin. He wants to be on the offensive. He shoots me a defiant look and says, "You know Miracles? Let me tell you, if Alanis Morissette had done that fucking song everyone would have called it fucking genius."
I think it's real. The whole article is pretty long and in depth. Click the link and read the whole thing if you have the time. It's really interesting.
A tattoo artist in Australia faces criminal charges for giving his friend a 16-inch penis tattoo on his back. The client had asked for a yin-yang tattoo.
According to Australia World News, a third man was present at the scene, and convinced the client that the yin-yang tattoo was turning out great.
Ipswich Detective Constable Paul Malcolm said:
“The bloke started doing the tattoo and there was another bloke standing there watching saying, `Mate, it’s looking really good.’”
The two men told the victim to go home, keep the tattoo out of sunlight, and not to show anyone for a few weeks. When the victim got home, however, he showed his girlfriend, who informed him that there was a giant penis tattoo on his back.
To add insult to injury, below the penis tattoo was an unspecified phrase calling the client gay. According to Australia World News, the phrase was misspelled.
The victim returned to the tattoo artists house, where the two got into an altercation.
The tattoo artist has now been charged with two counts of assault. One for causing bodily harm and one count relating to the public safety act. The tattoo artist could also face public safety charges because he is not a licensed tattoo artist.
The best part about Australian news is that violent physical assualts are referred to as 'bashings' on even the most professional of news programmes. Also people get 'King hit' a lot.
Comments
Rescuers save 'jarhead' bear cub from starvation
Chinese companies 'rent' white foreigners
Seriously, every time my company gets local media to come, someone will make a beeline for my desk to shake hands with me and talk for a few minutes. I don't really mind, I am exceptionally sexy after all.
Porn on your flash drive? Not smart, but eh, not unheard of I guess.
Porn on your flash drive pulled up in front of a high school auditorium while doing a presentation for your job? You're fucked. Royally.
Rather, that's what I WOULD do it I had porn.
*cough*
Actually, the people on the flash drive are fucked.
"We can fetishise fucked up shit as well!"
I trimmed the article quite a bit. If you're interested, click the link to get the full story.
Wasn't actually a professor. Or a woman.
Man Asks For Yin-Yang Tattoo, Given Penis Tattoo Instead
They really are Australian!