Prinny, the swimming cat

The Sun reports on a new iPhone app:

A woman desperate to get her lazy boyfriend to exercise has invented an iPhone app that measures how many calories you burn off having sex.
The 59p download, called the Bedometer, analyses the time and intensity of each romp.

Chuffed Livvy Thompson, 25, said: "The results have been amazing. My boyfriend can't get enough of it."

The gizmo is put on the bed and measures raunchy activity using the iPhone or iPod Touch's motion sensor before adding up the calories.

Do not want.

Lorry push

R.I.P. Alex Chilton

____ Walks Into A Bar

Imagine you are a designer of high-performance automobile engines. You design engines and then sell the designs to automobile manufacturers. You have customers of all sizes: from lone hobbyists and weekend racers to major car companies. You give them the engine design, they give you some cash and that's that - flat fee, regardless of how many engines they actually build and use. As long as they aren't re-selling or giving away your design, and aren't just building and selling completed engines based on your design, everything is cool. In other words, you aren't selling to people who would then use your designs to compete directly with you - you only sell to people who use your engine designs as part of something bigger.

Some of your customers are in the drivetrain business. They design a transmission, drive shaft, axles, wheels and a suspension system to use a modified version of your engine, and then they sell that design to car makers. The car makers build the drivetrain, attach a frame, an interior, headlights, etc.. These drivetrain designers pay you for every unit they sell, and most of your income comes from these companies.

Musical interlude: Gillian Welch, "Everything Is Free":

What a great song! She's a treasure. Now, back to the story.

Imagine one of your drivetrain customers is faced with growing competition from a set of popular free drivetrain designs. As in: you can go to the web and download Bob's Free DriveTrain Design, stuff it into your manufacturing system and out comes a drivetrain (there are also plenty of free engine designs, which have steadily eroded your own share of the engine design market). In response to this, your drivetrain customer is thinking about giving away some of his low-end designs, for free, in hopes of getting some visibility among people who would normally not even think of paying for a drivetrain design, given the abundance of free options. The plan is to give away some low-end designs, and hope they are so pleased with the free stuff that they'll eventually want to upgrade to one of the company's higher-end, non-free, designs. You get no money when someone downloads a free design, but would get your standard payment for an 'upgrade'.

The problem for you: if they were to give away their drivetrain design, they'd also be giving away your engine design (because it's an integral part of their drivetrain design). And that is forbidden by your licensing contract. So, they've offered to buy your entire engine design business, giving them complete ownership of your designs, for roughly two years of what they're currently paying you in royalties. But you declined, because you enjoy designing engines.

The next option seems to be: allow them to give away your design (to whoever wants it, unlimited, "free as in beer"), in exchange for an up-front fee. In effect, you would sell them the right to distribute your designs for free.

What's a reasonable fee ?

Are there any other options ?

NJ Woman Eats Her Way to “World’s Fattest” - News- msnbc.com.

A New Jersey woman has a big fat goal: To eat her way to the title of “World’s Fattest Woman.”

The already 600-pound Donna Simpson of Old Bridge, N.J., has 400 pounds to go and plans to reach the 1,000-pound mark in the next two years, reports the New York Post.

Atta girl! Show the world! Be the fattest woman you can be!

She plans to eat 12,000 calories a day, which is at least 2,000 more calories than Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps consumes during his training. The only difference is he burns 3,000 calories each day during that time.

12,000 calories? OMG.

Could this story possibly get better?

Yes, it can!

But eating that much is expensive -- as much as a $750-a-week budget. So what’s a girl to do? Get men to pay her to eat, of course.

Simpson, 42, who already has a boyfriend (who's only 150 pounds) has found other men that are willing to pay to watch her eat burgers, fries, cakes, chips, and 70-pieces of sushi at a time, on her Web site.

On SupersizedBombshells.com [NSFW], Simpson goes by the name Treasure, and lists some of her hobbies as "eating, going to restaurants, snuggling and being fed."

Oh men. Is there anything we can't fetishize ?

And the thought of eating 70 pieces of sushi at once... gack. I may never eat again.

On the other hand. eating might be safer than jogging on the beach:

The mother of a man hit and killed by a small plane as he jogged on a South Carolina beach says he was on a business trip and looking forward to heading home for his daughter's third birthday.

Authorities in Hilton Head say Robert Gary Jones of Georgia died instantly when the plane hit him as it made an emergency landing. It had lost its propeller and the pilot's vision was blocked by oil on the windshield.

Yipe!

Why audiences hate modern classical music

Would there be time to construct a Noah’s Ark Biosphere in North America if there is an emerging Global War starting in the Middle East? I don’t know ... I only know that I have worked on such a project for many years now. If a Global War emerges and much life and civilization is damaged or destroyed due to the use of massive weapons then there may be a need to construct a survival Ark ... of Biblical proportions .. a Dome City .. a New Jerusalem Ark .. to preserve a remnant of earth-kind and make it possible for the earth to be resettled some 200 or 300 years in the future. The problem is it takes a lot of resources to build a modern day Noah’s Ark ... and lots of planning and development. Yet it seems reasonable to assume this planning should be done if there is only a ten percent chance of Global War even within the next 20 years let alone the next 20 months.

The Bible lays out the basic specifications for the New Jerusalem Biosphere ... not very many people realize how this is fully realized. The concept of a city 1300 miles on a side is ludicrous yet if the 12,000 furlong measure is transformed into an overall measure of length, width and height in combination then this parameter can be consistent with the 4500 by 4500 cubit specification in Ezekiel . Here lies the key .. along with the 12 tower design .. the twelve towers being the twelve foundations. And so if goes ... and these specs lay the foundation for a modern day Noah’s Ark.

Is there time to do the detailed design and development work .. and lay out the materials and foundation and build the structure and infrastructure ... I don’t know ... But if there is going to be a Global War then I believe some sort of Noah’s Ark would have to be build to ride out a period of intense atmospheric damage. Then after the period of “Hibernation” people and materials would emerge to repopulate the Earth.

via Stars and Stripes