Cuppacafe

Well, after reading this story I would have to conclude that the person in question wasn’t actually thinking, so I guess I just answered my own question.

A man who went to casualty with his penis stuck in a steel pipe had to be cut free by firefighters using a metal grinder.

Medics at Southampton General Hospital could not get the man's penis out of the stainless steel pipe because the restricted blood flow had caused it to become aroused.

Now, I could go on, but perhaps I’ll just spare you all, and ask you to make the jump and read the story yourself.

A spokesman for the Hampshire Fire and Rescue Service stated that, at least initially, the rescue crew did not have the proper cutting equipment to free the man.

“It was a very delicate operation that required a very steady hand and the crew was worried about things getting too hot during the cutting.

“It's certainly an unusual call-out and I'm sure the man won't be getting into that situation again.”

By now I’m sure that many of you have already heard about the Christmas Eve attack on the pope. Here is some raw video footage of the attack (it happens almost immediately in the vid, and then repeats halfway through):

The attack, which was captured on video by a witness and rocketed around the Web yesterday, occurred as the 82-year-old pontiff was preparing for Christmas Eve Mass. As he moved toward the altar at St. Peter’s Basilica, a dark-haired woman, wearing a red top and what appeared to be blue jeans, leaped over a barrier.

When papal security guards tackled her immediately, she grabbed the pope’s vestments and dragged him to the ground. The woman, identified by the Vatican as a Swiss-Italian named Susanna Maiolo, 25, was taken to a clinic for mental health treatment.

I guess the world really is full of crazies, eh?

The Perfessor

Will Facebook Destroy Your Marriage? Who knows, but if you were to believe the report from below (from Law.com), then perhaps you had better reevaluate how you (and your spouse) spend your spare time.

Facebook It turns out that one of the most significant impacts that the rapid spread of Facebook is having on society may be ... destroying marriages?

The Telegraph reports that by reconnecting old flames and enabling new ones, Facebook is tempting to people to cheat on their partners. One law firm that specializes in divorce asserts that almost one in five petitions they process cite Facebook as a reason, as spouses are finding evidence of flirting and even affairs on the site.

The 20 percent statistic may be high as it comes from a law firm that handles divorces online, but Mark Keenan, managing director of Divorce-Online, says that after hearing from his staff that Facebook was a recurring issue, he confirmed the 20 percent figure. "The most common reason seemed to be people having inappropriate sexual chats with people they were not supposed to," he says.

The article even mentions one 35-year-old woman who discovered her husband was divorcing her when he updated his Facebook status to read: "Neil Brady has ended his marriage to Emma Brady."

Yeah, this has been done before (I remember a non-slanderous smear speech that I read in Mad Magazine a century or so back), and, well, this vid takes a sideways poke at Tiger and any other public figure that has had to stand in front of a bank of Mics to say “Oops, I f#cked up.” Enjoy, I know that I did.

Now we should all learn from all this, and be able to regurgitate it on command.

The Perfessor

Yep, that’s right I just got word that my latest published work is up online on the web.

The work is a web comic entitles Girl Skout Warz, and it is about, well young girls in uniform, the end of the world as we know it, and brain-eating zombies, so it could very well be the hottest web comic ever.

Here are the first two strips.

I am currently awaiting the lettering to be finished on the next three, after-which they will be posted as well. Now that these two are up, I’m actually going to have to write some more I suppose.

Let me Know what you folks think.

The Perfessor

So, I’m sure that by now you’ve all heard that Alaska’ former First Son-in-Law (Levi Johnston) to be is going to show the world (in the pages of Playgirl) exactly what Bristol Palin saw in him (at one time).

Well, I bring this up, not so much because I actually care, but as a footnote to the fact that Levi is now appearing in commercials for pistachios:

While we’re not entirely sure that we approve of the sly underscoring message, we can’t help but to be entertained by the sheer audacity of the commercial itself. Which just leads us to wonder when the young lad will be doing ads for Levi’s 501 button fly Jeans (I can only guess at the tag line for that spot).

The Perfessor

For those of you who though that you were going to have an ebay Christmas...think again:

Ebay became a victim of its own success at the weekend after a surge in the number of items for sale caused the world’s largest online auction site to crash.

Millions of shoppers were first unable to search for items on the website on Saturday, during the crucial run-up to Christmas, after a computer system failure.

Apparently something similar (though not as massive) occurred 10 years ago.

The number of merchants selling items on the site usually rises in the run-up to Christmas, but this year’s rise has been particularly steep because Ebay has encouraged large retailers to sell through the site, which until recently was the preserve of individuals and smaller retailers. Some existing sellers have criticized the policy for putting a strain on the system.

Not sure what this all means, but I guess all those commercials telling folks to list stuff on the auction site did the job. so many folk l;ogged on that the server couldn't handle the traffic.

The Perfessor

What do you do when the people you rely on to keep you going start bailing out because, well, they are burnt out? Well, this is apparently what is happening to Wikipedia. We all know Wikipedia (it is the fifth-most-popular Web site in the world) it has roughly 325 million visitors every month. However, an unprecedented number (in the millions) of their online volunteers (you know, the folks who write, edit and police the site) are, well, quitting.

As you can expect, This could have significant implications for the brand of democratization that Wikipedia helped to unleash over the Internet — the empowerment of the amateur.

Volunteers have been departing the project that bills itself as "the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit" faster than new ones have been joining, and the net losses have accelerated over the past year. In the first three months of 2009, the English-language Wikipedia suffered a net loss of more than 49,000 editors, compared to a net loss of 4,900 during the same period a year earlier, according to Spanish researcher Felipe Ortega, who analyzed Wikipedia's data on the editing histories of its more than three million active contributors in 10 languages.

The article in The Wall Street Journal went on to say:

Wikipedia contributors have been debating widely what is behind the declines in volunteers. One factor is that many topics already have been written about. Another is the plethora of rules Wikipedia has adopted to bring order to its unruly universe -- particularly to reduce infighting among contributors about write-ups of controversial subjects and polarizing figures.

“Wikipedia is becoming a more hostile environment,” contends Mr. Ortega, a project manager at Libresoft, a research group at the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos in Madrid. “Many people are getting burnt out when they have to debate about the contents of certain articles again and again.”

To which I have to say...If Wiki goes, will anyone really notice?

Each year, Wikipedians from around the world gather at a conference they call Wikimania. At this year's meeting in Buenos Aires in August, participants at one session debated the implications of the demographic shifts.

“The number one headline I have been seeing for five years is that Wikipedia is dying,” said Mathias Schindler, a board member of Wikimedia Germany. He argued that Wikipedia needed to focus less on the total number of articles and more on “smarter metrics” such as article quality.

He said he disagreed with dire views about the project's future. “I don’t expect to see Wikipedia follow the rule of any curve or any projection.”

The Perfessor

Sure, sure, you and I spend endless hours of our day on Facebook (and other social networks), playing Farmville and Mafia Wars (well, not me, but you know what I mean), what would the world of Superheroes be like if Facebook existed for them...?

These days, everyone in the world seems to be on Facebook, including our bosses, parents, and the people we hated in high school. So what would it be like if superheroes like Batman, Spider-Man and Superman were updating their statuses, taking quizzes, and commenting on each other's profiles like the rest of us? Chris Sims of the Invincible Super-Blog takes a closer look into the Facebook feeds of our favorite heroes.

Personally, I’m loving the Spider-Man bit.

Oh yeah, as it turns out, the best part of the article is that if you click through to the original post, and then click each of the various character entries, you link to a web page that explains the specific reference.

Classic!

The Perfessor

That’s right, kids there is a new digital tool that will soon be available to clutter up your web screen. According to a blogger that I just read, once a person is signed up (and apparently anyone can — it’s part of the Google toolbar), that person can comment on any page and see comments from others on those pages. Google uses an algorithm to decide which comments go at the top. And Google, not the site owner, decides which content must be taken down because it's inappropriate.

More on this can be read here. Needless to say, this blogger doesn’t think that it is ultimately a good idea, and isn’t recommending it.

Personally, I don’t know much about it, but I’m just betting that our resident nerds can tell you more, in the mean time, read this.

The Perfessor

Love to social network, but MySpace is too busy, Facebook too Farmville, and Twitter too time consuming? well then, perhaps Twitteleh is for you:

No? then perhaps Flutter is the way to go.

Then, of course, there is what our old pal Jon Stewart has to say.

Yeah, we thought so.

The Perfessor

Really, just watch this video as some of the Hollywood Elite come out in support of the Insurance companies CEOs who are only making like $500.000 a year need your money:

And I’m not being sarcastic at all.

The Perfessor

This just in...apparently Facebook has just rolled out an option that will allow Page admins to syndicate the updates to pages for Twitter. Meanwhile, Twitter’s Facebook app now lets you push your tweets to Facebook. Needless to say, at this point there is still no easy way to push status updates to Twitter

MySpace has just beaten Facebook to the punch, and rolled out two-way Twitter sync. According to the company, users can now “sync their status so that any update created on MySpace will appear in your Twitter feed and any Twitter feed update will appear within your MySpace status & mood.”.

Adding insult to injury Further, Twitter is finally starting to grow with teens.

This remains MySpace’s strongest demographic (and they tell us that 55% of US Internet users ages 18-24 are on MySpace, compared to just 14% for Twitter) and the feature could create more activity within this group across both networks. Overall, this is a big feature, and it will be interesting to see if Facebook (Facebook) responds by launching their own sync feature with Profiles.

The Perfessor

I’ve seen this vid a couple of times now (each one has a different subtitle text attached) and is has always been funny. This version is the funniest one so far. I’m now waiting for someone to re-dub it with Hitler getting pissed of that there are people comparing Obama to him, and declaring that he is NOTHING like Obama. and that he is more like Kanye West or some such.

Any takers?

The Perfessor

According to Nielsen, Microsoft's search engine, Bing, is growing eight times faster than Google.

More consumers are Googling with Bing. According to the latest stats from research firm Nielsen, Microsoft’s (MSFT) new search engine is growing faster than its archrival’s.

Which (according to the report) makes Bing the fastest-growing search outfit around. The new search engine has a growth rate more than eight times greater than Google’s. Which is quite an achievement given Google’s de facto monopoly over search coupled with the fact that Bing launched just a few months ago. According to some, this clearly makes Microsoft’s new offering the new hot ticket in town, as it is picking up momentum despite Google’s repeated dismissals of it.

Still, given that Google is all but a monopoly (with “Google it” virtually becoming a short cut to “look it up on the Internet” in much the same way that “Xerox it” is shorthand for “make a photo copy” one could argue that Bing has no place to go but up).

Still, even though this seems pretty impressive, I’m still utilizing Google as my engine of choice.

The Perfessor