XIAM007 - Making Unique Observations in a Very Cluttered World

Saturday, 10 December 2011

Junk Food-Powered Car Sets New Record - from Diet Coke and Mentos candies -

Junk Food-Powered Car Sets New Record - from Diet Coke and Mentos candies -

The Maine guys known for creating colorful geysers from Diet Coke and Mentos candies say they’ve set a distance record for a vehicle with soda-and-candy-powered propulsion.

Fritz Grobe and Stephen Voltz created a single-seat rocket car powered by 54 bottles of Coke Zero and 324 Mentos. They say the Mark II traveled 239 feet, improving upon last year’s 220 feet with only half the fuel.

Voltz said Thursday they incorporated a simple piston-and-cylinder mechanism to get the vehicle moving. He says it’s powerful enough that people shouldn’t try the experiment at home.

The Buckfield-based entertainers shot to fame five years ago when they wore lab coats and goggles during their online videos demonstrating elaborate geysers set to music.

Read more -
http://connecticut.cbslocal.com/2011/12/09/junkfood-powered-car-sets-new-record/

The Top 10 Viral Videos of 2011 -

The King of All Vegas Real Estate Scams - how homeowners were bilked by those they least suspected: their neighbors -

Before the market crashed and home prices tumbled, before federal investigators showed up and hauled away the community records, before her property managers pled guilty for conspiring to rig neighborhood elections, and before her real estate lawyer allegedly tried to commit suicide by overdosing on drugs and setting fire to her home, Wanda Murray thought that buying a condominium in Las Vegas was a pretty good idea.

At first glance, Murray doesn’t look much like the type of person who would arrive in Las Vegas only to get tangled up in and eventually help unravel a complex criminal conspiracy. At 65, she stares out at the world through thick glasses. She is legally blind. Her eyes never quite seem to focus on any one thing. On a recent Friday morning, she sits at her dining room table wearing a zip-up leopard-print sweatshirt and recounts how she helped to foil a group of lawyers and contractors running amok in Sin City. “They didn’t think there would be four old ladies who wouldn’t put up with their stuff,” says Murray. “They really pissed me off.”

Before moving to Las Vegas, Murray and her husband ran a children’s dance studio in the suburbs of Minneapolis. Every so often, they would travel to Las Vegas on vacation. They loved the warm, dry weather. A poolside condo, far away from the Minnesota winters and a short drive from the Bellagio fountains, seemed like the perfect place to retire.

In 2002 they bought a two-bedroom condo for $105,250 in a new gated community, the Vistana, on the southwest outskirts of the city. The development’s architecture consisted of vaguely Spanish-style stuccoed buildings with ruddy tiled roofs. All told, there were 732 units in the subdivision, hundreds of imported palm trees, three swimming pools, and one cloudless Nevada sky.

Condominium complexes such as the Vistana were springing up across the city. Fueled by low interest rates and feverish demand, there were 32,964 closings on new condominiums and apartment conversions in Las Vegas from 2002 to 2007, according to Restrepo Consulting Group. At the same time, the building boom was creating a growing market for the contractors who fixed the construction problems, such as leaky roofs or faulty electrical outlets, that emerged at the hastily built developments.

In Las Vegas these large-scale repair jobs often involved lawsuits. There were a handful of lawyers in town who specialized in such suits, which pitted the collective owners of a gated community—in the form of nonprofit neighborhood corporations known as homeowner associations—against their developers.

As Las Vegas’s housing supply exploded, so did the competition among lawyers and contractors to represent new homeowner associations in so-called construction-defect lawsuits. It was in this environment, according to plea agreements recently unsealed in an ongoing FBI investigation, that a shadowy outfit cooked up a brazen scheme.

When a new development was nearing completion, the group would buy a couple of units in the community and then transfer partial ownership of the condos to individuals secretly on its payroll, according to court documents. While pretending to be residents of the communities, these “straw buyers” would run for leadership positions on boards of the new homeowner associations. By paying off community managers, hiring private investigators to find dirt on legitimate candidates, and rigging elections, the documents allege, the straw buyers were able to infiltrate boards at several new developments in Las Vegas from 2003 to 2008. Once in control of the boards, the straw buyers would then use their governing positions to steer millions of dollars in construction and legal fees back to their co-conspirators. Targets included the Chateau Nouveau, Chateau Versailles, Park Avenue, Palmilla Townhomes, Jasmine, Pebble Creek, Mission Ridge, Mission Pointe, Horizons at Seven Hills, Sunset Cliffs, and the Vistana.

Read more -
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/the-king-of-all-vegas-real-estate-scams-12082011_page_2.html

America’s Richest Zip Codes 2011 - No. 1 Richest Zip Code: 33480, Palm Beach, Fla. -

It should come as no surprise that rich people like living around other rich people. From Shibuya in Tokyo and the Seventh Arrondissement in Paris to Manhattan’s Upper East Side and the tree-lined avenues of Palm Beach, Fla., wealth gravitates to wealth. As the global income gap between rich and poor widens, the richest neighborhoods keep getting richer—and bigger.

Take, for example, Palo Alto, Calif. Over the last decade, hundreds of wealthy people have relocated to this university town as local Silicon Valley tech businesses boomed. It is home to such companies as Facebook, Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), and VMWare (VMW). Thanks to so much new money, Palo Alto‘s 94304 zip code is one of the fastest-growing pockets of wealth in the U.S. The number of households in this area, where the average household net worth is $1.3 million, more than doubled since 2000, according to data from Little Rock (Ark.)-based Gadberry Group.

While many zip codes in the U.S. have been battered by the economic downturn, neighborhoods around Palo Alto are among a small group of expanding rich areas. In a new OECD report, the top 10 percent of the country’s income earners made nearly 15 times more than the bottom 10 percent in 2008, up from a multiple of 12 in the mid-1990s. As is often the case, the rich are grouping near golf courses, beaches, upscale boutiques, and schools.

So where are these privileged zips? In an exclusive analysis for Businessweek.com, Gadberry Group identified the 100 richest zip codes in the U.S., based on average household income and average household net worth. The survey included only places with more than 100 households. (Of the top 50 locations we profiled from Gadberry’s list, the zip with the least number of households is in Mill Neck, N.Y., and the biggest lies in Potomac, Md. The number of households in the 100 richest zip codes—which have an average household net worth of $1.4 million—grew by 7.4 percent from 2000 to 2011, based on Gadberry’s data. (Click here to see the richest, growing zip codes in the U.S.)

http://images.businessweek.com/cms/2011-12-06/launch2.jpg

Friday, 9 December 2011

FOX News Caught Using Fake Video Of Riots -

"Anchor baby" among roughly 10,000 words -- including "hoodie" and "babydaddy" -- added to the dictionary last month -

A decision by the American Heritage Dictionary to revise its definition of "anchor baby" -- labeling it an offensive and disparaging term -- is an attempt to manipulate the "linguistic landscape" and push a leftist agenda, some opponents of illegal immigration say.
"Anchor baby" was among roughly 10,000 words -- including "hoodie" and "babydaddy" -- added to the dictionary's fifth edition last month. The hot-button term, a noun, was initially defined as: "A child born to a noncitizen mother in a country that grants automatic citizenship to children born on its soil, especially such a child born to parents seeking to secure eventual citizenship for themselves and often other members of their family."

That definition caught the attention of Mary Giovagnoli, director of the Washington-based Immigration Policy Center, who heard American Heritage Dictionary executive editor Steve Kleinedler read it during a radio interview last month. Giovagnoli blasted the definition on the organization's blog last Friday, saying it masked the "poisonous and derogatory" nature of the term.
By Monday, the term had been changed. It is now defined as such: "Offensive Used as a disparaging term for a child born to a noncitizen mother in a country that grants automatic citizenship to children born on its soil, especially when the child's birthplace is thought to have been chosen in order to improve the mother's or other relatives' chances of securing eventual citizenship."
The revision is now a "well-crafted" definition of how the term is used, Giovagnoli said.
But not everyone agrees.
"That's a political statement and it's not even accurate," said Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies. "[An anchor baby] is a child born to an illegal immigrant."
Krikorian said the revised definition makes a political statement and is much more than neutral, "just the facts" reference material.
"It's a sign of real provincialism," he said. "I understand why people don't like the term, but I know lots of people who use it in a non-disparaging fashion. There really isn't a shorthand way of describing people like this, and there does need to be because it an important source of political debate: Should the children born to illegal immigrants get automatic citizenship?"

Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2011/12/09/revised-definition-anchor-baby-part-leftist-agenda-critics-say/

MYSTERY: Florida Crocodile Population Sees Boom -- Outside Nuclear Power Plant... -

Once on the endangered species list, the American crocodile has flourished in a most unlikely place.

In the shadow of a nuclear power plant.

The plant, FPL’s Turkey Point Nuclear Power Plant uses over 150 miles of man made canals to help cool the atomic fueled operation.

But there are no two headed toads or three eyed Ibises in this non radioactive water loop, instead there are plenty of crocodiles.

The canals act as a natural habitat and because the site is on FPL land, rarely sees human activity.

That’s where Bob Bertelson and Mario Aldecoa come in. They work for FPL’s Land Utilization unit monitoring the ground water and wildlife on the sprawling property.

Bertelson says he’s seen a ten fold increase in the number of croc in the last 20 years.

A pleasant surprise for the reptile loving biologist who says, “Do not turn your back on a croc, they are unpredictable.”

Read more -
http://miami.cbslocal.com/2011/12/08/croc-boom-at-turkey-point-boosts-species/

IKEA Shanghai: Love in the MDF coffee table aisle - Eligible seniors descend, en masse, for weekly 'romance sessions.' -

Whether it’s the good, the bad, or the downright ugly, breakfast hotspot and green-minded retailer of not-always-green home furnishings, IKEA, is forever a popular topic on this here blog. But today, here’s something, via The Wall Street Journal, that I didn’t see coming: Apparently, IKEA stores in China, particularly the Shanghai location, are notorious for attracting elderly singles on the hunt for a little romance … and free coffee. I guess you could call the stores (Swedish) meat(ball) markets for the 65-and-over-set.

I live just down the street from the IKEA Brooklyn store and I’ve noticed it can be a tad cruise-y on occasion (but not nearly as bad as Whole Foods outposts in Manhattan) and I totally admit that I actually went on a date, yes, date, at the store when it first opened. Because really, there’s nothing quite as romantic as throwaway wine glasses, dirt cheap bath towels, and check-out lines that rival security at LAX during the holidays.

Anyways, the amorous goings-on at my local IKEA pale in comparison to the retailer's location in Shanghai’s Xuhui shopping district where hoards — we’re talking 70 to 700 people here — of eligible senior citizens descend on a weekly basis to scope out the new arrivals. And I’m not referring to the newest edition of the Billy bookcase.

Take for example Tang Yingzhuo, a 62-year-old widow who prefers the IKEA cafeteria to bars, clubs, and Karaoke establishments. A regular attendee of “romance sessions” for the aged at the Shanghai IKEA, Tang confesses that she’s not all about prowling for potential mates while at the store: “I make more senior citizen friends when I come here. There's more to offer than meeting a boyfriend at IKEA." And then there’s Qian Weizhong, a retired gentleman of a certain age that recently scored the digits of a “nice lady” while attending an informal meet-up in the store’s cafeteria.

However adorably weird, the Shanghai IKEA store’s reputation as a meeting place for throngs of passion-seeking pensioners has proven to be an issue with management and those shopping for furniture and home accessories, not a mate. The store has brought in extra security to man the cafeteria on days when the elderly converge to drink free coffee (scored with an IKEA Family membership card) and chat up Mr. or Mrs. Right. The crowd can get rowdy at times; a store security guard tells the WSJ that he once had hot coffee splashed on him for trying to shush a group of unruly geriatrics.

The store has even erected signage to discourage the assemblage of coffee-guzzling grey-hairs from forming and scaring away paying customers. A sign at the entrance to the cafeteria reads: “IKEA would hereby like to inform this group and its organizers: Your behavior is affecting the normal operations of the IKEA cafeteria. Frequent fights and arguments do serious harm to the image both of Shanghai residents and IKEA. Bringing in outside food and tea violates the cafeteria's regulations…If you are a member of this group, we feel we have warned you, do not use the resources of IKEA to organize events of this kind."

Read more -
http://www.mnn.com/your-home/at-home/blogs/ikea-shanghai-love-in-the-mdf-coffee-table-aisle?hpt=hp_bn12

Squirrel Caught On CCTV Pulling Fire Alarm - one mischievous squirrel -

Administrators at an Ellenton, Florida elementary school tried to find out who pulled a fire alarm last year.

Security camera footage helped identify the culprit. It turned out to be one mischievous squirrel.

The video shows the squirrel enter a restroom, scale the wall, then hang from the fire alarm lever.

The squirrel remains a legend in the Manatee County School District.

The troublemaker's actions were brought up at a school board budget meeting this week to justify a contingency fund for the district maintenance department.

Thursday, 8 December 2011

Did Twitter steal Ontario’s slogan? - “Yours to discover” is now the social media site’s new catchphrase -

Twitter users in Ontario may experience a twinge of recognition when logging onto the social media site.

That’s because the site’s much vaunted redesign, nicknamed “Fly,” appears to have taken a page from the province of Ontario by using the same slogan.

That’s right — the ubiquitous “Yours to discover” slogan on every licence plate in the province is now the social media site’s new catchphrase.

The slogan accompanies the Twitter logo on a website promoting the fly.twitter.com redesign, which the company boasts will make the social media application easier to use, faster and more personalized.

As part of the redesigned site, photos, videos and conversations will be included inside tweets themselves so that users can “see the whole story at a glance,” according to the San Francisco-based company.

The new version of Twitter, nicknamed “Fly,” was unveiled Thursday and will be rolled out by the end of the year.

The Star’s efforts to contact Twitter to find out where the company got its inspiration for the new slogan have so far been unsuccessful.

But Premier Dalton McGuinty noticed the campaign and weighedin, tweeting from his account late Thursday: “Twitter launches ‘Yours to Discover’ campaign. I like it — where have I seen that before…”