Gnorb.NET

Last night, Fidel Castro ceded power to his brother, “Flaming Homersexual” Raul Castro. No sooner did the news break than the party started in Hialeah and Little Havana. Since about 9:00pm last night, it’s just about dominated the news. Just about: there’s a little tropical storm called “Chris” in the southern Atlantic that seems to be gunning for South Florida as this year’s first hurricane, and the President was in Miami yesterday. Those items aside, South Florida news outlets have become the United Castro Deathwatch association.

This morning, as I walked in the office, I couldn’t help but notice that not one Cuban was sitting. Every single one of them was standing up and talking about last night’s developments.

“It’s too early to celebrate –”
” — but it’s a step in the right direction.”
“Another chapter in our history.”
“I wonder what’s going to happen now?”
“I was at the gym last night and after hearing the news, I decided to go down to 49th. I got there at 9:10 and the streets were packed, so I joined the party!”

Since about half of the people here are Cuban (and most of the others Latin American), I’m sure you can imagine the level of conversation going on. Frankly, I’m surprised more people didn’t take the day off to party a bit more, but I guess they got that out of their system last night, as the block parties went on well past midnight in some places.

I’ll keep on this story because — well, frankly, I’m surrounded by this. That said, the prospect of a Castro-Free Cuba (and yes, this includes Raul) is a rather good one. History’s proven that in communist countries, generations not directly associated with the original “revolution” usually move towards capitalism and some form of democracy rather quickly. (Russia and China are perfect examples.)

Finally, in honor of this event, I bring you “Castro About to be Stepped On by God”:

“Por favor, noooooooo…”

I just caught this on Fark. Basically, here’s the story:

• Man walks into a car dealership and buys a truck at $8,100, paying cash. The deal is checked by the sales person and sales manager. Papers are signed, and the buyer goes home.
• Man who bought the truck receives a call from the dealership that night telling him that they made a mistake and he needs to pay an extra $10,000. Man refuses on the grounds that he’s already paid and all parties involved have already signed the paperwork.
• Dealership takes the truck back in the middle of the night. (Repo or steal — you decide which word to use.)
• Dealership calls man back the next morning, offers to re-sell the car to him for just $11,000 more. The man says “No way. Give me my truck back.” He goes back to the dealership, only to find another customer and sales person looking at it.

Here’s the company’s statement on the issue (from the article):

After we tried to get their side for days, Bill Heard faxed us a statement just before air time, saying that Kieselhorst “should have known” that the deal he got was too good to be true. The company says:”It is not reasonable or fair to expect for Bill Heard Chevrolet … to be bound by a sale where a clear and material mistake was made, and the customer was aware that it was a mistake.”

Because, as we all know, if the customer had instead paid too much for the truck, he should have been able to go into the Bill Heard Chevrolet dealership and take the money back, right? Right?

Here’s the reason police gave to stay out of this:

As for the police investigation, the DA says this is a civil case, not a criminal case. He says Kieselhorst is free to take the dealer to court…

How this doesn’t constitute grand theft auto, I have no idea.

Apparently, this isn’t the first time this dealership has done something like this:

Kathleen Calligan says the Better Business Bureau has received literally hundreds and hundreds of similar complaints about the Bill Heard dealership — more complaints by far than any other auto dealer in all of Middle Tennessee.

It should be noted that Bill Heard dealerships are all over the country. In fact, they were recently found guilty of price fixing in Arizona.

You can read the entire article here.

Seeing as I’m in the process now of looking for a new car — and highly considering a Chevy Malibu — this kind of information is priceless.

For the first time in what seems like forever, this morning I was finally able to go through and read all my RSS feeds. It seems like today was one of those days when weird news just seemed to come out of nowhere, which means it’s time for another episode of Le Linkage! This one I’ll call the “Just Plain Weird” edition because a good number of the articles here are just plain weird. There are some, however, that make for spectacular reading, and one that will make every anime-lover reading this blog wet his/her pants in joy.

ScienceBlog.com — Drunks Don’t See the Monkey: “It’s pretty difficult to overlook the proverbial 800-pound gorilla, or even an average-size person dressed in a gorilla suit. But a new study indicates that people who were given a simple visual task while mildly intoxicated were twice as likely to have missed seeing the person in a gorilla suit than were people who were not under the influence of alcohol.” Lesson: never try to spot a man in a gorilla suit while tipsy. Because if you can’t spot the gorilla, what good are you?

Engadget — Korea to test 1,000 remote-controlled domestic robots: “The Ministry of Information and Communication … will begin placing 1,000 wheeled, cell-phone controlled automatons — dubbed URCs, or ubiquitous robotic companions — into households and kindergartens this fall as a trial run for new robot technologies. The URCs will do the usual handling of domestic tasks as we might expect (and some … like cleaning rooms and reading books to children), as well the usual hanging out, taking care of pets, [and more] … The only thing at all disconcerting about any of this is the fact that unlike normal household droids, these URCs will be operated wirelessly from a central computing center ala I, Robot.” Having just watched that movie agan, the thought of a remote controled robot companion isn’t one I’m at all too comfortable with.

Akihabara News — The Wonderbra powered USB keyboard: Ok, uhm… hmm. How do I… err… geez, oh man… heh… I mean… Hmm. So, like, anyways, I uhmm… hmm… How do I put this? Uhm… What?

USB powered keyboard bra with USB powered camera tail that can be switched out with other USB powered items, such a lights and memory sticks. You have to see this for yourself [Angelkitty.jp]. I guess what I’m wondering is where exactly that thing is supposed to be plugged.

KurzweilAI — Frozen Brains Awaiting Resurrection Day in Storage: (From St. Petersburg, Russia) “Kriorus, the world’s first cryonics company outside the United States, located in Alabushevo village in Russia, has two brains in cryonics storage so far. The price: $9,000.” Just what we need, Russian discount cryonics. “You want better brain? Lie down. We do operation, take out brain now. Give you new brain next week. We freeze brain now so if you want back later, you have. ”

My Heart’s in Accra — Book review: “Globalization and its Enemies”: “This is the basic question development economists try to answer. It’s a question with profound practical implications - if we could suggest strategies that consistently helped nations grow wealth, we could address a huge range of problems in education, public health and state stability. It’s also a question that both development economists and political commentators are surprisingly bad at answering.” A very thorough book review and critique by Ethan Zuckerman. Good reading for anyone involved in economics or business.

The New Yorker — How can someone live with only half a brain?: This week’s New Yorker features a particularly interesting article about the hemispherectomy operation. In this procedure, an entire side of the brain is removed as a treatment because of cancer or chronic seizures. The incredible thing is that if the hemispherectomy is done when a patient is very young, the remaining hemisphere does double duty and the child often develops normally. (This one also came by way of My Heart’s in Accra.)

Index of 1,000 Full Length Anime On YouTube: (via Digg) “There are no ads or garbage clips to weed through, just 1000 anime episodes and movies. This index includes The Animatrix, Cowboy Bebop, Ghost in the Shell, Samurai Champloo, Serial Experiments Lain, Ultimate Avengers, and more.” Not weird and not news, but I’ll be damned if I don’t put this link up.

I just got this and thought it important enough to put here. Normally, I delete forwarded mails as soon as they hit my inbox (lest they be work- or business-related), however this one seemed a bit too important to pass up.

Subject: Cell Phone Do Not Call List

Effective in 18 days, telemarketers will be able to get access to your cell phone number and they will be allowed to call you. This can cause a lot of wastage of minutes. And for people using their cell phones regularly for business, this can be a HUGE distraction.

If you would like your phone number added to the DO NOT CALL registry, simply call 1 888 382 1222 from your cell phone. It will take about 1 minute and 15 seconds, but it will give you peace of mind. Then, you only have to do this once every 5 years.

Be sure to forward this message to as many people as you can.

There. Now, if I have your email, I won’t have to swamp your inbox with FWD’s. You can thank me later, by commenting on this message or buying me dinner.

Trillion: The numeral trillion refers to one of two number values, depending on the context of where and how it is being used. It is the largest numerical value in everyday non-scientific use in the English language. It comes between a billion and a quadrillion. Examples of usage:

1. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will cost the U.S. over $1-trillion dollars.
2. The reason George Bush settled on $2.2-trillion for the budget is because someone told him “ten-bajillion” wasn’t a real number.
3. The US deficit is at $9-trillion. Suddenly my student loan payment doesn’t seem quite as bad.

Remember: If you vote anything other than Republican in this midterm election then the Republicans won’t have two more years to fix this mess. They’ve spent the past six years fixing all of Clinton’s mistakes. Also, you eat human fetuses after you happily abort them, then throw a baby-eating abortion party.