South Africa has the highest incidence of reported rape in the world. One in three women questioned in a recent Johannesburg poll said they had been raped in the last year.

In response, a new invention will soon be marketed, a female-used condom-like device with teeth.

Some liberals are outraged.

This is a medieval instrument, based on male-hating notions and fundamentally misunderstands the nature of rape and violence against women in this society,” said Charlene Smith, one of South Africa’s most prominent campaigners against rape.

“It is vengeful, horrible, and disgusting. The woman who invented this needs help.”

Visiting some environmentalist whackjobs in Manhattan, the New York Times’ Penelope Green found:

DINNER was the usual affair on Thursday night in Apartment 9F in an elegant prewar on Lower Fifth Avenue. There was shredded cabbage with fruit-scrap vinegar; mashed parsnips and yellow carrots with local butter and fresh thyme; a terrific frittata; then homemade yogurt with honey and thyme tea, eaten under the greenish flickering light cast by two beeswax candles and a fluorescent bulb.

Michelle Conlin rides her scooter, even in the snow. “Rain is worse,” she said.

A sour odor hovered oh-so-slightly in the air, the faint tang, not wholly unpleasant, that is the mark of the home composter. Isabella Beavan, age 2, staggered around the neo-Modern furniture — the Eames chairs, the brown velvet couch, the Lucite lamps and the steel cafe table upon which dinner was set — her silhouette greatly amplified by her organic cotton diapers in their enormous boiled-wool, snap-front cover.

A visitor avoided the bathroom because she knew she would find no toilet paper there.

The nincompoop has a web site. All this idiocy does, of course, have a motive beyond mere self-righteousness. Both a book and a film are in the works.

The LA Times has a strange and amusing story of guile and voodoo used to repossess a mortgage-defaulted freighter berthed in Haiti.

The Boston Bomb Squad was back in action, blowing up a suspicious object found chained to a lamppost in the Financial district. The object turned out to be a traffic counter.

MyFox

Homeland Stupidity

Previous Cartoon Promotion incident

link

Hat tip to Karen Myers.

The earliest American report seems to have been January 30 at The Manic Mechanic:

So, this man in Portugal buys a farm (as opposed to ‘buying the farm’, as it were). Apparently the property owner died and the farm was put up for sale. Pretty satisfied of his purchase he wanders about the property sizing up what might need attention. An old, unused barn that will probably need cleaning out was part of the deal. Upon making his way inside the barn he finds that, indeed, the place needs more than a little cleaning…

The story was originally linked from this Dutch site, which has since removed the link. The Dutch site led to a Norwegian Mazda owners site (Google-cached version) leading to the conclusion that the lucky buyer was Norwegian.

It is still unconfirmed, and an urban legend/hoax of some kind is suspected, but the story is he found 180 vintage cars.

photos

I first came across the story at Maggie’s Farm.

Wedge-tailed Eagle (Aquila audax)

Reuters:

Britain’s top female paraglider has cheated death after being attacked by a pair of “screeching” wild eagles while competition flying in Australia.

Nicky Moss, 38, watched terrified as two huge birds began tearing into her parachute canopy, one becoming tangled in her lines and clawing at her head 2,500 meters (8,200ft) in the air.

“I heard screeching behind me and a eagle flew down and attacked me, swooping down and bouncing into the side of my wing with its claws,” Moss told Reuters on Friday.

“Then another one appeared and together they launched a sustained attack on my glider, tearing at the wing.”

The encounter happened on Monday while Moss — a member of the British paragliding team — was preparing for world titles this month at Manilla in northern New South Wales state.

One of the giant wedge-tailed eagles became wrapped in the canopy lines and slid down toward Moss, lashing at her face with its talons as her paraglider plummeted toward the ground.

“It swooped in and hit me on the back of the head, then got tangled in the glider which collapsed it. So I had a very, very large bird wrapped up screeching beside me as I screamed back,” Moss said.

She said she thought about dumping her parachute-style canopy and using the reserve.

“But then I would have been descending on my reserve as the birds continued shredding it, which I wasn’t happy about,” she said.

Wedge-tailed eagles are Australia’s largest predatory birds and have a wing-span of more than two meters.

Hat tip to Karen Myers.

Turner Broadcasting’s Cartoon Network hired New York guerilla marketeer Interference, Inc. to promote the film spinoff of a new late night cartoon program Aqua Teen Hunger Force, a cartoon series running since December of 2000 about the adventures of three anthropomorphic fast food items living in New Jersey.

Interference arranged to plant LED images of two Mooninites (secondary character adversaries of the show’s heroes) around Boston, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Atlanta, Seattle, Portland, Austin, San Francisco and Philadelphia to publicize the film.

Other cities shrugged off the Mooninite threat, but Boston officials first took two weeks to notice the signs, then panicked, halting highway, bridge, and river traffic, closing down Boston University, having the bomb squad detonate a sign, and overall spending half a million dollars on this nonsense.

Video: How to Shut Down Boston

Boston is charging the freelance artists who erected the signs with a newly defined crime of placing a hoax device which causes panic. Mark Frauenfelder get it right:

the ones to blame are the Boston city officials, whose astoundingly incompetent response to the report of a suspicious device triggered the panic. The people of Boston should be clamoring for the resignation of the mayor and the head of the department of security for being the only city in the ten-city ad campaign that didn’t notice the signs hanging in plain sight for two full weeks and then misidentifying them in a way that caused widespread panic.

Now these shamefaced bureaucrats are rounding up scapegoats and asking Turner to pay for the damages caused by their own ineptitude. Talk about a hoax.

NYM awards Boston the 2007 Mayor Ray Nagin Prize for municipal incompetence combined with pomposity.

$155 million. Ouch! And I thought we paid too much for our new house.

Appropriately named “The Pinnacle,” it’s yours for $155 million…

So what justifies the “most expensive” asking price?

To begin with, the 10-bedroom, 53,000-square-foot, yes — 53,000-square-foot — home will sit on the most coveted piece of property in the resort. The 160 acres ought to provide ample elbow room for someone who has it all.

The home, which includes four guest cottages, will be built in the center of the ski resort and commands dramatic views in all directions…

Jerry Locati, the Bozeman, Mont., architect who heads up Locati Architects, spent the last year designing the home and gave ABCNEWS.com an exclusive interview about what he calls “an incredibly unique, one-of-a-kind house.”

“It’s an adult, well, actually family-oriented home, a sort of Disneyland scale home for someone who is not afraid to spend money,” he begins as he searches for superlatives. “It will have the usual home theater but will also include a bowling alley, an indoor-outdoor pool and an amazing wine cellar.”

The house, which has a rustic exterior crafted out of stone, hand-hewn beams and ample floor-to-ceiling glass, includes a huge underground garage.

“You’ll be able to park 30 or 40 cars,” Locati says. “Perfect for someone with a car collection and of course the ideal service entrance for caterers.”

Locati says he was encouraged to “think outside the box” by timber and real estate billionaire Tim Blixseth, who is developing the property.

Blixseth is also the developer of the Yellowstone Club resort.

One of those “outside-the-box” ideas is three elevators.

“You enter as you would a lodge. There will be lockers for ski equipment and clothing,” says Locati.

“Every aspect has been incredibly well thought out,” he says. “We’ll have hand-carved fireplace mantles, and we have succeeded in bringing the outdoors indoors while still maintaining a warm feeling.”

Perhaps one of the more unusual features is a private-covered gondola that will whisk skiers from a ski run to the home.

So artist Aron Falk is educating frogs to prepare them for survival.

3:20 video

Interview

The London Times reports a New Zealand sky diver who had both parachutes fail to open fell 15,000 ft (4,000m) into a blackberry bush, and survived.

And a Japanese hiker lost on a remote mountain is said to have survived 23 days without water… by hibernation.

WorldNetDaily publishes things I quote myself. Imagine my embarassment at running into today’s column direct from the fever swamps.

Jim Rutz, who seems to be not only a whackjob, but a snake-oil-selling evangelist and author of a number of The-End-of-the-World-Is-Right-Around-The-Corner books, thinks that soy beans make you queer.

Soy is feminizing, and commonly leads to a decrease in the size of the penis, sexual confusion and homosexuality. That’s why most of the medical (not socio-spiritual) blame for today’s rise in homosexuality must fall upon the rise in soy formula and other soy products. (Most babies are bottle-fed during some part of their infancy, and one-fourth of them are getting soy milk!) Homosexuals often argue that their homosexuality is inborn because “I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t homosexual.” No, homosexuality is always deviant. But now many of them can truthfully say that they can’t remember a time when excess estrogen wasn’t influencing them.

I eat edamame all the time at sushi restaurants myself without observable effect.

WorldNetDaily, please clean up your act, and get rid of these kinds of clowns.