Willis Group Holdings and pissing territorial markings

Screw history, we bought it, we get to piss our name on the side....

Welcome to the Big Willie.

Joe Plumeri of Willis Towering Corporate Douce Bag

The Sears Tower, one of the world's iconic skyscrapers and the tallest building in the U.S., was renamed the Willis Tower on Thursday in a downtown ceremony, marking a new chapter in the history of the giant edifice that has dominated the Chicago skyline for nearly four decades.

Mayor Richard Daley unveiled the tower's new name on a large black sign in the lobby with the help of Joseph Plumeri, the Chairman and CEO of Willis Group Holdings, the London-based insurance broker that secured the naming rights as part of its agreement to lease 140,000 square feet of space in the building.

Read more here.

Restored Apollo 11 footage

Cave record of Britain's pioneers

The Cheddar Gorge in Somerset was one of the first sites inhabited by humans when they returned to Britain towards the end of the last Ice Age.

New radiocarbon dates on bones from Gough's Cave show people were living there some 14,700 years ago.

The results confirm the site's great antiquity and suggest human hunters re-colonised Britain at a time of rapid climate warming.

Read more here.

Paul McCartney Get Back @ Broadway NYC

Sheesh with the roofs again. Everybody copies The...oh yeah right.

Tim Hortons expands their crap south

At least you can ask for a coffee there without resorting to pretentious fake Italian...

Star Kitsch

Microsoft's Coming, there goes the neighbourhood

Microsoft, always the innovator...soon they'll be claiming it was all their idea and Apple copied them...

Here’s a tale of bad neighbors waiting to unravel: Microsoft is planning to set up shop right next to its worst enemy, Apple.

In a keynote speech at the Worldwide Partner Conference, Microsoft chief operating officer Kevin Turner told partners that the corporation is planning to open the first of its retail stores next to existing Apple stores.

Read more here.

And read 10 Ways Microsoft's Retail Stores Will Differ From Apple Stores here.

3) Instead of a "Genius Bar" (as Apple provides) Microsoft will offer an Excuse Bar. It will be staffed by Microsofties trained in the art of evading questions, directing you to complicated and obscure fixes, and explaining it's a problem with the hardware -- not a software bug.

Mr. B Natural

Hamas accuses Israel of dumping aphrodisiac gum on Gaza

Double your pleasure, double your fun...

Hamas suspects that Israeli intelligence services are supplying its Gaza Strip stronghold with chewing gum that boosts the sex drive in order to "corrupt the young," an official has said.

Read more here.

Nokia loves them some despots

The mobile phone company Nokia is being hit by a growing economic boycott in Iran as consumers sympathetic to the post-election protest movement begin targeting a string of companies deemed to be collaborating with the regime.

Wholesale vendors in the capital report that demand for Nokia handsets has fallen by as much as half in the wake of calls to boycott Nokia Siemens Networks (NSN) for selling communications monitoring systems to Iran.

Read more here.

Israel, advertising and propaganda

Skin crawling.

ABC reports that the commercial closes with a voiceover saying, "We all just want to have fun."

So have fun, just stay behind the fucking wall.

Olympus and the corporate rip off

The original.



Olympus rip...

They only got around to crediting the original after "Some of the comments we have read here suggest that we should mention the creator of "A wolf loves pork", Mr Takeuchi Taijin...We didnt mention his name because we did not want to do so without his prior agreement."

So, stealing his concept, okie dokie, crediting him, not so much.

story via youthoughtwewouldntnotice.com

TweetCraft

You'll never ever have to leave the house again...

Cats 'exploit' humans by purring

Cat owners may have suspected as much, but it seems our feline friends have found a way to manipulate us humans.

Researchers at the University of Sussex have discovered that cats use a "soliciting purr" to overpower their owners and garner attention and food.

Unlike regular purring, this sound incorporates a "cry", with a similar frequency to a human baby's.

The team said cats have "tapped into" a human bias - producing a sound that humans find very difficult to ignore.

Read more here.

The Green Slime

The Border Drive In's finest...

Fucking Hell. Ireland passes blasphemy law

I'm not sure which piece of unpopular Irish news is being buried by which: the announcement of a second referendum on the Lisbon treaty, or the shuffling through of a law creating penalties for blasphemy, an offence that has never properly existed in the Irish state.

Funny how this comes on the heals of a massive abuse scandal involving the Catholic Church there...

Set the clock on the Wayback Machine way way back Sherman, we're off for a ride!

Read more here.

Morons fill movie theatres this weekend

Bruno #1.

Cheese Zone

The Japanese are nuts.

Psychiatrist Mark Goulston: Idiot of the Day

Now the studios are hiring quacks to tell us what is funny and what isn't?

On the other end of the spectrum are those viewers who don’t like Bruno, who typically feel victimized by the world and who take themselves very seriously. Their core identity is that of a victim, Goulston says.

"Show me someone who’s really offended by Bruno and I’ll show you a highly self-righteous person," he says. "These people feel that the world already treats them the way Bruno treats people.”

The movie tends to bring out the adolescent rebel in us, Goulston says.

The "adolescent" part, he's dead on....

Read more here.

Mystery of the Queen's stolen silver

This democracy thing's just not working out.

There was a time when an invitation to a Buckingham Palace garden party was the imprimatur of respectability. But not any more.

Proof of this? The Queen's sadness - and dismay - at the disappearance of irreplaceable pieces of her personal crockery and cutlery from her private tent which, I can reveal, followed the deluge that washed out Tuesday's tea party.

Read more here.

Dennis Kucinich sets record straight on Canadian Health Care

Canada! Fuck Yeah!

Big Money, Bad Photos

More lemon for Beckham darlings! His face isn't scrunched enough!

Brüno, the World's Most Accurate Village Idiot Detector opens today

"Brüno is funny" - village idiot

"Brüno is an embarrassing piece of crap" - normal sane human being.

Cretaceous and Cambrian news

The great explosion in flowering plants during the Cretaceous period is one of the great enigmas of evolution.

Charles Darwin had no explanation, calling it an 'abominable mystery'.

But now scientists think they've solved the riddle of how flowers came to dominate the conifers and ferns that preceded them.

Read more here.

Earth's 4.5-billion-year history is filled with several turning points when temperatures changed dramatically, asteroids bombarded the planet and life forms came and disappeared. But one of the biggest moments in Earth's lifetime is the Cambrian explosion of life, roughly 540 million years ago, when complex, multi-cellular life burst out all over the planet.

Read more here.

Copernicus Had Blue Eyes

Nicolaus Copernicus, the father of modern astronomy, gazed at the sky through bright blue eyes, according to genetic research that has identified the scientist's remains.

Published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the research -- announced last November -- details the identification of the remains, while also suggesting that Copernicus most likely had blue eyes, fair skin and light hair color.

Read more here.

Buckingham Palace not Twittering, they're PRing

Buckingham Palace has revealed that the Royal Family has now joined the Twitter micro-blogging revolution.

The Twitter account @BritishMonarchy has just gone live, following several weeks of testing...

...But the spokeswoman said neither the Queen nor other members of the Royal Family would be tweeting personally.

"The intention," she explained, "is that it is a news service rather than a personal voice."

The "tweets" provided by the PR Machine 2000™

Read more here.

Brian Kilmeade of Fox News: The Stupid, it burns it burns!

The Valley Swim Club: Throwbacks of the Day

More than 60 campers from Northeast Philadelphia were turned away from a private swim club and left to wonder if their race was the reason.

"I heard this lady, she was like, 'Uh, what are all these black kids doing here?' She's like, 'I'm scared they might do something to my child,'" said camper Dymire Baylor.

The Creative Steps Day Camp paid more than $1900 to The Valley Swim Club. The Valley Swim Club is a private club that advertises open membership. But the campers' first visit to the pool suggested otherwise.

"When the minority children got in the pool all of the Caucasian children immediately exited the pool," Horace Gibson, parent of a day camp child, wrote in an email. "The pool attendants came and told the black children that they did not allow minorities in the club and needed the children to leave immediately."

The reason given you might ask...

"There was concern that a lot of kids would change the complexion … and the atmosphere of the club," John Duesler, President of The Valley Swim Club said in a statement.

Welcome to 2009.

Read more here.

Neanderthals killed off by H1N1

Yet another theory.

Scientists seeking to uncover the mystery of what happened to the Neanderthals should look to the modus operandi of another great die-off 30,000 years later, argues a Danish expert in an article submitted to the Journal of Archaeological Science.

In the article, professor emeritus Bent Sørensen of the University of Roskilde wrote that disease carried by Homo sapiens migrating out of Africa was responsible for the gradual extinction of our prehistoric cousins in the same way that European illnesses ravaged Native American populations in the sixteenth century.

‘Modern humans brought illnesses they could survive themselves, but for Neanderthals they were deadly,’ Sørensen said.

Read more here.

Is the Harper Government Homophobic? (shock horror!!)

Small minded, petty, anti science mean spirited bigots yes...those are a given.

A Conservative MP says federal funding for Toronto's Gay Pride parade may be responsible for junior cabinet minister Diane Ablonczy losing a key part of her portfolio.

Brad Trost, the MP for Saskatoon-Humboldt, said Ablonczy's decision to use $400,000 for the popular parade that celebrates homosexual, bisexual, and transgendered culture was not supported by most of the Tory caucus.

Read more here.