Wednesday, 30 November 2011

Banks May Have Illegally Foreclosed On 5,000 Members Of The Military

Ross MacManus RIP

Ross MacManus, who has died aged 84, was a popular singer and trumpet player and in later years became well known as the father of Elvis Costello; his choice of career as a band singer, although it afforded him security and a measure of recognition, precluded him from developing his talent fully, as his son has observed publicly on several occasions.
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Massive WWI Human Sculptures

(Click to enlarge)

It's almost impossible to comprehend the scale of these historic photographs by Englishman Arthur S Mole and his American colleague John D Thomas, who were commissioned by the US government to take the pictures as a way to raise morale among the troops and raise money by selling the shots to the public during WWI.
In the photo above, "there are 18,000 men: 12,000 of them in the torch alone, but just 17 at the base. The men at the top of the picture are actually half a mile away from the men at the bottom," explains Arthur's great nephew Joseph Mole, 70.
Mole and Thomas were the first to use a unique technique to beat the problem of perspective after they devised a clever way of getting so many soldiers in the pictures. Joseph explains: "Arthur was able to get the image by actually drawing an outline on the lens, he then had the troops place flags in certain positions while he looked through the camera. It would take a week to get all the outlines right, but just 30 minutes to move all the men into position to take the shot. It must have been amazing to watch."
What's makes the story even more fascinating is that instead of profiting from the sale of the images produced, the photographers donated the entire income derived to the families of the returning soldiers and to this country’s efforts to re-build their lives as a part of the re-entry process...
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MetPoliceCO11 Metropolitan Police
I only ended up in this job because of my youthful fascination with the music of Sting and a truly terrible misunderstanding.

Defense seeks documents in Army WikiLeaks case indicating leaked material was benign

SLAB - Sloth Returning

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under heavy heavy manners, an instrumental old style, full force....

Brush With Death

Via

Ralph Steadman’s artwork for Alice in Wonderland takes you to Gonzoland

You may also recognise one of the mice in Bernard Stone's 'Inspector Mouse' book !

♪♫ Björk - Crystalline (Later with Jools Holland)

The Horrible Thing That Happened to Enos the Chimp When He Orbited Earth 50 Years Ago

WTF??? Drug-sniffing dog aids family interventions

DJ Smith works with Xanax the dog in a search for drugs at a Santa Monica sober living home on Nov. 18, 2011. (John McCoy/Daily News Staff Photographer)

As DJ Smith watched Xanax, a drug-sniffing dog, search for narcotics around a sober living home, he couldn't help but think how a dog like the eager Belgian Malinois might have changed his own life.
Smith, 23, had become addicted to prescription drugs and alcohol at age 16. His family suspected, but they never knew the extent of his problem. Nor did they find the pills he'd hidden in innocuous over-the-counter medicine bottles or disguised in other ways.
So the Agoura Hills family constantly worried if and when Smith would come home at night, or if he would survive his latest hospitalization.
"Unfortunately, I didn't have a service like this," said Smith of Narc with a Bark, a North Hollywood-based business that uses Xanax the drug detection dog to find drugs in private homes and rehab facilities, and doesn't involve law enforcement.
"A service like this would have intervened a lot quicker," Smith added.
Now nine months sober and training to become Xanax's handler, Smith likes the fact that the service is geared not toward catching people with drugs in order to report them to police, but to offer solid proof of use to those interested in helping them recover.
"It's not to get anyone in trouble," said Smith, who is now working on a counseling degree. "It's not like a bust, it's not to get you expelled from school. It's strictly for gaining more information for a family that is worried and doesn't know what's going on..."

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