(06-23-2010 01:24 PM)jedi123 Wrote:  
Yeltsin: I'm sorry, Gorbachev, your Discover Card has been declined!

Quote:It seems the Empire has fallen on hard times. Presumably to get finishing funds for his latest Death Star, Darth Vader—or a man pretending to be Darth Vader?—was reduced to robbing a bank on Long Island this morning. Impotent Rebel Alliance security forces tell Newsday (paywall) that Vader marched into a Chase bank in Setauket around 11:30 a.m. today. Brandishing a completely unnecessary handgun—as he had the power to choke the oxygen out every teller's throat—the fallen Jedi demanded cash.

Quote:New York Yankees owner George Steinbrenner has died, Steinbrenner's spokesman said.

“It is with profound sadness that the family of George M. Steinbrenner III announces his passing," a statement from his family said. "“He was an incredible and charitable man. First and foremost he was devoted to his entire family – his beloved wife, Joan; his sisters, Susan Norpell and Judy Kamm, his children, Hank, Jennifer, Jessica and Hal; and all of his grandchildren.

“He was a visionary and a giant in the world of sports. He took a great but struggling franchise and turned it into a champion again.”

Quote:Speaking at a campaign rally Thursday for Colorado Senate candidate Ken Buck, former Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-Colo.) called President Barack Obama the greatest threat facing America today.

After recalling the nuclear threat from the former Soviet Union, Tancredo said, "We had that threat and we survived it. Later we found out we had another threat to our way of life, and that was al Qaeda. We found that out on 9/11."

Tancredo continued, "But I firmly believe this — it's not just, you know, sort of a dramatic statement that a person would make to get press or something, or ink. I believe this with all my heart. The greatest threat to the United States today, the greatest threat to our liberty, the greatest threat to the Constitution of the United States, the greatest threat to our way of life, everything we believe in, the greatest threat to the country that was put together by the Founding Fathers is the guy that is in the White House today."

Quote:The Texas Republican Party gives a whole new meaning to the word conservative.

The GOP there has voted on a platform that would ban oral and anal sex. It also would give jail sentences to anyone who issues a marriage license to a same-sex couple (even though such licenses are already invalid in the state).

“We oppose the legalization of sodomy,” the platform says. “We demand that Congress exercise its authority granted by the U.S. Constitution to withhold jurisdiction from the federal courts from cases involving sodomy.”

(04-29-2010 10:44 AM)LukeSkywalker21078 Wrote:  
Abdullah: Hey, ever hear the one about the Ayatollah and the enema hose?
Khamenei (thinking): God, please kill me now.

Quote:If you’ve ever wanted to own a real lightsaber, your dream has come true. But safety officials have warned that the product is no toy and could cause serious injury or worse.

The Spyder III Pro Arctic is sold by Shanghai-based firm Wicked Lasers and costs US$197.97, shipping to 70 countries. It takes the direct blue laser diode used in extremely powerful home theater projectors and turns it into a 1W beam.

That might not sound much, but bear in mind that a standard laser pointer of the type used by idiots to piss off other crowd members at sports and entertainment events has the same power as sunlight on the skin. This device has 1,000 times that level of power.

Quote:Charred remnants remained this morning, June 15, of the large Jesus statue iconic to Interstate 75 that was destroyed following an apparent lightning strike during a thunderstorm late Monday night.

The Lawrence Bishop Music Theater at Solid Rock Church on Union Road endured smoke damage, according to officials. Damages to the King of Kings statue and the theater were estimated to be around $700,000, said Monroe Fire Chief Mark Neu.

No one was injured in the blaze.

Quote:Surveying thousands of stars for telltale twinkles that signal the passage of an orbiting planet, NASA’s Kepler spacecraft has discovered a whopping 706 candidate planets beyond the solar system. If confirmed, that motherlode would boost the number of known extrasolar planets, now estimated at 460, to well over a thousand.

The trove, announced June 15, includes evidence of five stars that have full-fledged planetary systems. These exoplanet systems, if verified, would be the first known in which each planet creates a minieclipse as it transits, or passes in front, of its parent star. The amount of dimming and the duration of a transit offer information about planets, including their size, that cannot be gleaned by less direct methods of detection.

A team including Kepler lead scientist William Borucki of NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., has posted the findings online (at lanl.arxiv.org/abs/1006.2799 and at lanl.arxiv.org/abs/1006.2763) at arXiv.org. The discoveries were made by analyzing Kepler’s first few months of data, recorded in the spring of 2009 when the telescope examined 156,000 stars.