Mark H

"In nutshell, for rape cases afflicted segregation of 4th house is for distorted… self – fidelity… 7th… is for conjugal fidelity disrupted in equality and legality. 8th is seen for conjugal relation in inequality with force or forgery and intrusion,and lastly 12th house is seen for conjugal relationship with illegality and unsocial i.e. bed pleasure is shared with others… Moreover, weak Venus or its affliction in addition to this… prove fatal in female horoscopy for rape and sexual abuse…" - Mark H

"[W]hen we see any house wife or daughter is rape prone we have to see the 4th house at first… 8th house females suffers sex relationship based on inequality and intrusion… male violence to 8th or its lord is very important to signify the rape prone chart…" - Mark H

"You're a black man who wants to comply with police, but sometimes they just refuse to take "Yes, please, yes. It hurts! I give up!" for an answer. Remember: police are human beings, not robots, not for at least five or six more years when, god willing, the Chinese finally put a stop to all this." - Mark H

"Try incorporating yourself. You will need to form a C Corporation to create a distinct legal entity which is impossible to shoot or arrest and actually indemnifies all employees against criminal liability." - Mark H

"I had a good time looking through these audition photos for The Addams Family dated 1964. It’s just plain weird (and fascinating) to see other actors and actresses trying out for these iconic roles because I simply can’t imagine anyone else playing them." - Mark H

Burt Reynolds is auctioning off property which is a little sad although understandable and makes for some great viewing at the things he's collected during his lifetime. - Mark H

"When NASA's Orion spacecraft begins its maiden voyage next week, you may notice something alarming at liftoff: The rocket carrying Orion sort of catches itself on fire. Not to worry, says United Launch Alliance, the rocket's manufacturer. Orion's launch vehicle is a Delta IV Heavy, a mammoth, three-core rocket normally used to heave classified military satellites into space. Just before the Delta IV ignition sequence starts, valves open that control the flow of liquid hydrogen to the engines. Some of that hydrogen seeps out of the engine bells and lingers around the rocket. When the engines roar to life, the excess hydrogen ignites, creating a fireball that chars the booster cores. Occasionally, the insulation on the booster cores smolders as the rocket lifts off." - Mark H

"What causes the charring phenomenon? The start sequence for the RS-68 main engines on the Delta IV booster must ensure that the pump speeds and combustion processes remain within limits. This complex task requires opening the main hydrogen valve at T-5 seconds, approximately two seconds prior to opening the main oxygen valve that begins the ignition process. This “hydrogen lead” start sequence results in unburned hydrogen exiting the engine prior to engine ignition. Since hydrogen is lighter than air, the hydrogen gas rises and drifts with the prevailing breeze. As the powerful RS-68 engines reach full thrust, the high speed engine exhaust flowing into the flame ducts creates a strong suction of surrounding air and hydrogen into the launch duct. As the air mixes with the hydrogen during this liftoff event, the hydrogen burns, creating heat that can also char the insulating materials on the launch vehicle." - Mark H

"The female bar staff here wear the shortest uniforms I’ve ever seen in a restaurant, anywhere. (The male staff wear regular clothing.) One of them stops every few minutes to yank her skirt bottom down, so it more completely covers her. It’s not sexy. It’s degrading. Her face is blank and white. America’s management calls its bottle-service staff “our team of stunning ‘America girls.’” Young, leering men and old leering suits pour into America in the evenings. If you build it, creeps will come." - Mark H

"One evening, a Wednesday last month, we had ordered the $58 lobster Rockefeller and a $37 plate of milk-fed pork, as well as a bunch of appetizers. The appetizers arrived and we started in on them. And then roughly four minutes later the mains arrived, too. One of the servers kept referring to the lobster as “Henry” – as in, “How is Henry?” and, “Are you finished working on Henry?” I guess he thought it was funny. Henry became work as soon as that server gave it a name. My tablemate ordered a bottle of wine, a $160 Savennières, but the server had never heard of it, and so my tablemate had to search the wine list to find it and to physically point it out. They kept the bottle at a waiter’s station, so we couldn’t refill our own wine glasses. Our glasses sat empty while we worked on Henry and the pork; I had to flag somebody down and explain to him what wine we were drinking to get a top-up. None of this should ever happen in a restaurant, let alone a restaurant where the average entrée price is $45." - Mark H

"The second time I ate at America, I tried to check in at the hostess stand when I arrived. The two women working there were having a conversation between themselves, not two feet in front of me. They didn’t look up. It was as if I didn’t exist. This continued for most of a minute. Awkward. I told them the reservation name; they said the rest of my party hadn’t arrived yet. They showed me to the table. I waited 20, then 30 minutes. My friends didn’t show. I couldn’t reach them. I apologized to my server and said, “I don’t know where my friends are.” Finally I ordered dinner for myself. Forty minutes after I’d arrived, my friends found me. They’d got to the restaurant before I had, and checked themselves in. The hostesses had told them they’d send me over when I arrived. They had been there all along, waiting at the bar. It was as if nobody had ever worked in a real restaurant before." - Mark H

"It was only when they got to Ganta, a province hit hard by the Ebola epidemic, that problems arose. The team suited up, broke out their homeopathic treatments and tried to get to work on some patients. At which point the medical staff and administrators at the Ganta Hospital realised what it was they were attempting, before completely banning them from the ETU (Ebola Treatment Unit)." - Mark H

"It turned out that no one in the hospital – or, it seems, the entire Liberian medical administration – had any idea that this team would be using homeopathy. The Liberian government had approved the expedition and issued visas on the basis that all four were medical doctors coming to support local staff. [...] The Ebola virus kills you by essentially dissolving the walls of your veins, making you bleed to death from the inside in a massive internal haemorrhage. It's absolutely fucking horrific. Dr Hiltner says his team went to Liberia carrying 110 potential homeopathic Ebola remedies. Based on the "like cures like" principle they needed other substances that kill you by haemorrhage. Among their brightest hopes were arsenic and rattlesnake venom. So exactly the kind of thing you want to put in your body when you're already laid out in the ETU." - Mark H

"The mission was organised through two organisations: the Liga Medicorum Homeopathica Internationalis, a key institution for homeopathy advocacy, and the German group Freundes Liberias, an organisation dedicated to promoting co-operation between Germany and Liberia. Freundes Liberias raised donations for the trip with this campaign. The page talks about a "team of 20 international doctors", but makes no mention of the fact that they will be operating only as homeopaths. This squares with the fact that the Liberian medical authorities backed the trip when they thought it was a "team of doctors", and were then shocked to learn about the homeopathy. So, did the organisers of the expedition raise money and obtain visas and support in Liberia by telling people they were sending doctors, before actually sending homeopaths? If so, that would be pretty shoddy business." - Mark H

Good grief. - Jenny H.

"We are staying right now in a pretty Airbnb place in Valencia and are kind of sad to leave this place with an incredible view. So I started daydreaming and thinking about in what Airbnb we should stay next. So I did some research and these are the current place I would love to stay at (assuming I could ever afford it)" - Mark H

Sportswomanship. - Eivind

"The last decade of David Livingstone’s life did not go well for the famed Scottish missionary and explorer. In 1862, his long-neglected wife, Mary, came to join him in Mozambique, but she quickly contracted malaria and died. Nevertheless, he continued on his mission to find a navigable route through the River Zambezi. But in 1864, seven years before his famous run-in with Henry Morgan Stanley, Livingstone was forced to give up and return to Britain after most of his men abandoned him or succumbed to disease. He quickly fell from public grace as word got out about his failure to navigate the river. Eager to redeem his reputation, he returned to Africa two years later, this time in search of the source of the Nile River. But yet again, his assistants soon began deserting him, and added insult to injury by taking all of his food and medicine with them. Starving and crippled by pneumonia, cholera and cutaneous leishmaniasis, Livingstone had no other choice but to turn to Arab traders for help. But this posed a moral dilemma for the staunch abolitionist: his saviors were the types of men he had been criticizing throughout his professional career for their involvement in the lucrative slave trade in India and the Arab peninsula." - Mark H

"The diary begins on March 23, 1871. Forced to team up with the Arab slave traders due to his deteriorating health, Livingstone found—to his dismay—that he was actually beginning to like these men. “The Arabs are very kind to me, sending cooked food every day,” he wrote in April. He told them about the Bible, taught them how to make mosquito nets and drank fermented banana juice with them, which he swore off in the next day’s entry." - Mark H

"On July 15, however, Livingstone was abruptly woken from his stupor. The traders—his friends—went into a busy nearby market and began randomly firing guns into the crowd and burning down surrounding villages, killing at least 300 people, many of them women and children. Livingstone had never witnessed such an atrocity before, and he was “crushed, devastated and spiritually broken,” Wisnicki says. In Livingstone’s own words: “I was so ashamed of the bloody Moslem company in which I found myself that I was unable to look at the Manyema. . . This massacre was the most terrible scene I ever saw.”" - Mark H

"I remember [Green Stamps] all too well. They were immensely popular during the 60s and 70s. In fact, the S&H catalog was the largest publication in the U.S. and produced three times more stamps than the U.S. Post Office! But then, as early as 1980, green stamps were over." - Mark H

I have a glass punch bowl I bought in the 90s, but all the cups are long gone. I only actually served punch in it twice, I use it for serving side dishes and mixing meat loaf now, mostly. - Starmama

"Eccentric billionaires are tough to impress, so their minions must always think big when handed vague assignments. Ross Perot’s staffers did just that in 2006, when their boss declared that he wanted to decorate his Plano, Texas, headquarters with relics from computing history. Aware that a few measly Apple I’s and Altair 880’s wouldn’t be enough to satisfy a former presidential candidate, Perot’s people decided to acquire a more singular prize: a big chunk of ENIAC, the “Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer.” The ENIAC was a 27-ton, 1,800-square-foot bundle of vacuum tubes and diodes that was arguably the world’s first true computer. The hardware that Perot’s team diligently unearthed and lovingly refurbished is now accessible to the general public for the first time, back at the same Army base where it almost rotted into oblivion." - Mark H

"The ENIAC panels went on display at Fort Sill in late October, though some more restoration work remains to be done. The museum is in the process of obtaining a few new vacuum tubes, for example, to give the unit an even more authentic appearance. The panels will never be able to run any bona fide calculations, of course, but that’s probably for the best. Even in its heyday, ENIAC required a whopping 30 milliseconds to figure out the square root of a complicated number. Who has the patience for such long waits nowadays?" - Mark H

h/t http://friendfeed.com/isik5 - Mark H

"Remember the 1984 movie The Last Starfighter? Well, someone has gone and created a modern trailer for the film and it makes me want to 1) Watch the movie on repeat and 2) See a sequel or remake finally get made. Too bad that will probably never happen." - Mark H

Side trivia: The star of The Last Starfighter, Lance Guest, went to the same high school I did. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki... ) - Stephen Mack

"Czeslawa Kwoka, age 14, appears in a prisoner identity photo provided by the Auschwitz Museum, taken by Wilhelm Brasse while working in the photography department at Auschwitz, the Nazi-run death camp where some 1.5 million people, most of them Jewish, died during World War II. Czeslawa was a Polish Catholic girl, from Wolka Zlojecka, Poland, who was sent to Auschwitz with her mother in December of 1942. Within three months, both were dead. Photographer (and fellow prisoner) Brasse recalled photographing Czeslawa in a 2005 documentary: ‘She was so young and so terrified. The girl didn’t understand why she was there and she couldn’t understand what was being said to her. So this woman Kapo (a prisoner overseer) took a stick and beat her about the face. This German woman was just taking out her anger on the girl. Such a beautiful young girl, so innocent. She cried but she could do nothing. Before the photograph was taken, the girl dried her tears and the blood from the cut on her lip. To tell you the truth, I felt as if I was being hit myself but I couldn’t interfere. It would have been fatal for me.’" - Mark H

:( - rønin

:( - loi

"Well, I told you that it might not be my last pre-launch logbook yesterday. I woke up a bit earlier from the planned 5-hour nap and there's no point in trying to go back to sleep, so here I am, sharing a few departing thought. The doctors will show up in about 40 min to start a series of hygiene operations: before going to space I'll be as clean as I'll ever be, outside and inside (if you get the message, I'm not going into any details here)." - Mark H

"Now almost everything is done. My bags are neatly packed and will be taken to their final destination by my family, the backup crew and the ever helpful ESA support personnel. Hopefully, it's all properly organized: part of the luggage will go into my landing bags, one for the nominal landing site and one for the ballistic site. Part will go home to Cologne, part will eventually find its way to Houston for my return. Email is set up with out-ouf-office replies: kind of cool to be able to write "Sorry, I'm off the planet for a while"." - Mark H