The United States Mint, concerned that rising metal prices could lead to widespread recycling of pennies and nickels, has banned melting or exporting them. The Mint is also testing dozens of cheaper alternative metal compositions in the expectation that Congress will mandate a change when it meets in the new year. According to calculations by the Mint, the metal value of pennies, which are made of copper-coated zinc, is now more than one cent. The metal value of 5-cent coins, made from a copper-nickel blend, is up to 7 cents. Adding in the costs of manufacturing means the Mint now spends 1.73 cents for every penny and 8.74 cents for every nickel it makes
It is considered polite to light a match after passing gas. Not while on a plane. An American Airlines flight was forced to make an emergency landing Monday morning after a passenger lit a match to disguise the scent of flatulence — via Roguesun
Mayid’s call shortly after 4.00am sent four Polk County, Florida, deputies racing to the 2,150-acre lake just outside Lakeland, where they jumped into the water and wrenched Apgar’s arm from the gator’s mouth. The 45-year-old victim, who told authorities he’d passed out nude on the shore after smoking crack cocaine, was rushed to a hospital in critical condition #8212; via Pharyngula
What do remote-control garage door openers have to do with national security? A secretive Air Force facility in Colorado Springs tested a radio frequency this past week that it would use to communicate with first responders in the event of a homeland security threat. But the frequency also controls an estimated 50 million garage door openers, and hundreds of residents in the area found that theirs had suddenly stopped working
Bob Averill, a student at the Art Institute of Portland, claims he was expelled for being an atheist after he challenged a young woman’s belief in the ludicrous. I jokingly asked her if she believed in leprechauns. It turns out, she does. They live on another energy layer,
Averill told the Portland Mercury. In the interest of bringing my own view to the discussion, I began to ask her how she knew these things. Again I know all too well that people can be sensitive about their spiritual beliefs, so I was pretty much walking on glass as I did so.
The other student complained to the teacher, and Averill was eventually expelled — via Portland Mercury
Scientists have taught dolphins to combine both rhythm and vocalisations to produce music, resulting in an extremely high-pitched, short version of the Batman theme song. The findings, outlined in two studies, are the first time that non-human mammals have demonstrated they can recognise rhythms and reproduce them vocally
Tipped off by three plastic pipes mysteriously skimming the ocean’s surface, authorities seized a homemade submarine packed with three tons of cocaine off Costa Rica’s Pacific coast. Four men traveled inside the 50-foot wood and fiberglass craft, breathing through the pipes. The craft sailed along at about 7 mph, just 6 feet beneath the surface
A group of Saitama used car salesmen whose idea of punishing a co-worker allegedly involved using him as a target for air rifle practice and as an ashtray are now being targeted themselves, but by crime fighters. At first, all three allegedly told the cops they tortured the man as a joke. But there wasn’t much funny about the fact that their co-worker had to be rescued by public health authorities and shunted away in a mental hospital for a couple of weeks — via Warren Ellis
Junichiro Mine, 27, an unemployed man of Toyota, Aichi Prefecture, was arrested Wednesday for strangling a woman he had got acquainted with through a suicide web site — via Warren Ellis
A dead man has been blamed for hundreds of speeding offences in Australia in what police believe is a major fraud designed to help motorists avoid traffic fines. Police in Sydney said 240 people were under investigation over the speeding scam, where hundreds of motorists blamed either the same dead man, or a person living in another state, for driving their cars at the time of the speeding offences
Either Lieutenant Colonel John Pine-Coffin has the strangest military career in history or the obituary writers at the Telegraph have been indulging in long lunches. In 1963 he was in Nassau when he was ordered to investigate a party of Cuban exiles that had infiltrated Andros Island, part of the Bahamas. His seaplane landed in thick mud and Pine-Coffin decided that his only chance of reaching dry land was to strip off. On coming ashore, plastered in mud and wearing only a red beret and a pair of flippers, he was confronted by a party of armed Cubans. Mustering as much authority as he could in the circumstances, he informed the group that they were trespassing on British sovereign territory and were surrounded. The following morning, when the Royal Marines arrived to rescue him they were astonished to find him and his radio operator in a clearing standing guard over the Cubans and a pile of surrendered weapons. He was appointed OBE
— via Charlie Stross
Union Products, the original manufacturer of the plastic pink flamingo, will close its doors by 1 Novemebr, according to the company’s president. Production of the flamingos stopped in June, along with the company’s other product lines, and the company is now in the process of liquidation, according to its president, Dennis Plante — via Improbable Research
A UK firm is hoping a mobile phone security system it has developed which sets off a high pitch scream, permanently locks the handset and wipes all data if stolen, will halt the spiraling rise in phone theft. The sound will only stop if the battery runs out or is removed, but it will begin again as soon as the battery is replaced or charged. Even replacing the SIM card will not help
Whether you’re looking to exact revenge on a cheating spouse or to simply quiet that noisy neighbour once and for all, InstantHitman.com can help. Let our team of experienced contract killers make a bold statement on your behalf! If you’re reading this fine print, you’re either a search engine, a lawyer, or just really bored. In any event, this site is obviously a joke. Please, don’t kill anyone, and don’t hire anyone to kill anyone. Got it?
Alton Verm, an unbelievably stupid man from Texas, is fired up because the Conroe Independent School District uses the book Fahrenheit 451
as classroom reading material. He wants to ban a book about book burning because It’s just all kinds of filth
. Not that he’d know, because he hasn’t even read it — via yourhoustonnews.com
A woman in Surrey, England couldn’t figure out why her car wouldn’t start. An Automobile Association patrolman arrived on the scene and the two realised that the woman’s dog had swallowed the car’s immobiliser chip fob. The immobiliser contains an RFID chip that must be within a certain proximity of the steering column for the key to work. The patrolman put the dog in the front seat, turned the key and the car started right up — via Boing Boing
It seems the alien invasion of the Earth has just started! A 50m insect has been spotted roaming the German countryside! Let the I, for one, welcome our new giant insectoid overlords
joke contest begin! A moderator at a Keyhole forum identifies the bug as a thrip, about 1mm long, squished under a glass plate during scanning — via Slashdot
Police have launched a frantic search for three bottles of potentially deadly poison lost after a Shimonoseki Mitsui Chemicals official who had been carrying them went out for a night on the town and got so drunk he can’t remember what he did with them — via Improbable Research
Since the early 1960s, the man who owns and lives inside the £1m Victorian property has been digging. No one knows how far the the network of burrows underneath 75-year-old William Lyttle’s house stretch. But according to the council, which used ultrasound scanners to ascertain the extent of the problem, almost half a century of nibbling dirt with a shovel and homemade pulley has hollowed out a web of tunnels and caverns, some 8m deep, spreading up to 20m in every direction from his house. Their surveyors estimate that the resident known locally as the Mole Man has scooped 100 cubic metres of earth from beneath the roads and houses that surround his 20-room property
After a five month trial and two weeks of deliberation, a jury in Santa Ana has convicted two leaders of the Aryan Brotherhood prison gang of racketeering and murder. Barry The Baron
Mills and Tyler and The Hulk
Bingham were found guilty of ordering attacks on black inmates from maximum security cellblocks, and are now eligible for the death penalty. How did they order hits from within such high-security cells? With 400-year-old crypto, and invisible ink made from urine — via Boing Boing
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