WannaGo

I'm wondering if this shooting has now inspired the guy in Orlando who walked into an office where he was fired two years ago and started shooting people. Looks like one dead, a half-dozen injured.

True, but they also sell cheap crap manufactured in China that falls apart when you try to use it. Wal-Mart itself acknowledged that a few months ago when the company announced it was going to start redesigning stores and improving product quality in an effort to attract a more upscale shopper.

Forcing overweight people to buy 2 seats or business won't do well in the US. The courts would be full of protesters.

I thought they already were doing that...no?

I just couldn't stand to spend time with any of the characters...not even to love hating them.

Gross. I still think the jury went overboard on sentencing 31 years in prison. Many are not sentenced that long on a murder charge.

Depends on his criminal history. Many states have sentencing enhancements for prior convictions, but the story doesn't give any details about that. Doesn't really seem to fit the crime charged, though. According to the original story, his weapon was a rock in a sock.

Let us enumerate the ways..

I would buy a house and build my own home movie theater and library...I would stock the theater with every great movie I've ever seen or wanted to see, and the library with all the books I have read or want to read.

When I was in the military years ago, I took the Defense Language Aptitude Battery to see about going to language school. The Army had languages arranged by simplest to most difficult, and your score determined where on the list you landed...for example, if you had the highest score, you could take any language on the list...if you had a medium score, you could take any of the bottom half of the languages, etc.

Flemish was listed as the easiest language to learn, while Chinese, Russian and Arabic were the most difficult. English was considered the equivalent of the three most difficult for a non-native speaker. I always figured Chinese would be the hardest because there are so many words that are written and and pronounced similarly, but have different meanings depending on the intonation.

By the way lvdkeyes, where'd you find that bit? I like it.

I'll be very curious to see whether the winning bidder actually hands over the cash, or if it was just BS. That's happened before with eBay auctions that get media attention...people bid just as a joke.

Actually, the boy's father said that he had been training all his life, and tagged the boy along to the gym when he was training. That's when the little boy started to lift weight - started with playing with the small dumbells perhaps. But what's crazy is why they allowed him to do so.

The father even said that the boy was always guided and was never allowed to lift weights on his own, and that he was never forced. "After all, he is still a boy. He likes to play and do other things as well."

Whatever.

I'm not buying dad's story...look at the kid...to get ripped like that, he would need to have someone coaching him pretty seriously. That's not "playing around" with equipment at the gym while dad works out.

Hell, I get drunk/tipsy more often than that, you wuss! And as for stupid? It's a daily thing for me...

I had to give up drinking when I developed diabetes...but sometimes, I really miss it.

According to Reporters Without Borders, the three of them just posted news stories after the market fell linking the decline to rumors about the king.

“We call for the charges against these three Internet users to be dismissed,†Reporters Without Borders said. “Such accusations are baseless and violate the right to report an economic event after it has taken place. Explaining that the stock exchange fall was linked to the king’s health harms neither the king nor national security.â€

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This Reuters piece says Thaksin is positioning himself for a return to leadership in Thailand.

ANALYSIS - Thaksin launches new offensive to win back power

BANGKOK (Reuters) - His opponents may dismiss him as a fugitive criminal and a spent political force, but ousted former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra is redoubling his efforts to return to power in Thailand, and the government is stumbling.

His red-shirted supporters have been pushing for a royal pardon of his corruption conviction, which would allow the exiled billionaire to come home. Now Thaksin has raised the stakes with a series of moves likely to add fuel to an intractable crisis in Southeast Asia's second-biggest economy.

His acceptance of an offer to become an adviser to the government of neighbouring Cambodia has caused an ugly diplomatic row, with the prospect of his running a political campaign from across the border angering the powerful opponents who have fought hard to keep him at bay.

"The government is being seen as incompetent and we're slowly moving towards becoming a failed state," political scientist Pitch Pongsawat said. "Thaksin wants to steal the show ... and we're headed for a whole different battle."

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A little melodramatic, but an interesting story in the New York Times about the drug trade between Myanmar and Thailand. One thing I'm not clear on is the relationship between the Wa army and the ruling junta. Is the dope being used to finance a rebellion, or do the Wa actually support the junta?

FANG, Thailand — The heroin and methamphetamine traffickers carry assault weapons and walk briskly through the night, crossing the border in small groups and traveling down a spider’s web of footpaths and dirt roads.

So says Ja Saw, a wiry man in his 20s who should know: Two years ago, he was one of them.

Mr. Ja Saw spent a year in a Thai prison for trafficking. Now he works as an undercover agent for the Thai military. In his native Myanmar, where he travels periodically to glean intelligence, he is known by another name.

“They would kill me immediately if they knew I was a spy,†Mr. Ja Saw, who is from the Wa ethnic group, said in an interview at a remote location several kilometers from the Myanmar border.

Thailand’s northern borderland region is ground zero in the country’s efforts to interdict the tons of illicit drugs manufactured in the freewheeling northern reaches of Myanmar. Thailand is also the main international gateway for heroin bound for the streets of Tokyo, Hong Kong, Sydney and other major cities in the region, counternarcotics officials said.

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Right now, with slightly more than a year before I turn 40, that one year is very, very important to me!

The now-alive (formerly thought-to-be-dead guy) and his girlfriend, Rosalita, are also having their troubles now - since, when Rosalita saw him at the funeral, she blurted: "Shit, does this mean I have to give back the insurance money!"

Hope the poor guy didn't catch his best friend "comforting" her.

Not much the authorities can do to Filipinos living abroad.

The woman who owns and runs this whole thing lives in the States.

I don't have the details but it seems a stretch to me to hold the school administrators responsible for outrageous fees the teachers willingly paid to a third party.

Did you read the entire story? The school districts were the ones who were supposed to be making the visa arrangements, not this third-party contractor...and there was that interesting little nugget about the junket to the Philippines for some of the school officials, courtesy of the contractor.

That's too bad...I'm not crazy about most sitcoms, but I love this one. I'm with you on Seinfeld, though. Hated that show and never understood why so many people watched it. There wasn't one character on the show that didn't annoy me.

Once he's in the US, he most certainly won't be given bail until his proceedings are concluded (judges don't give bail to bail jumpers, period).

I don't think that's a concrete rule. I can think of a case in which a guy jumped bail on a drug trafficking charge, then got bail again when he was re-arrested. It was just a much, much higher bail, and he had a lot of restrictions, like an ankle bracelet and daily check-ins.

Forgive me for the ignorance. What's wrong with Walmart?

Wal-Mart has a history of being a corporate bully, treating employees poorly and selling low-quality products. And you really have to go wading in the shallow end of the gene pool when you shop there, especially in the South. However, the prices also are much lower than anywhere else, so you almost have to shop there if you are trying to save money. It's a love-hate thing for me.

As a kid, we used to have these playing cards with X Men characters on them along with power stats like stregnth, agility, mental power etc. I wonder if you've had those playing cards as kids as well.

I don't remember cards, but when I was in the 5th and 6th grade in the early 80s, there were about a dozen of us guys who passed around all the new X-Men comics we could get our hands on.

Yes men most of the time cannot control their arousal and want it as quickly as possible. Girls would like it if men would linger... Are there any tips for them to do that?

Think about baseball.

I think I might have ended up on trial next if he'd rubbed or thrown shit on me.

You believe in what some call the “Barney Frank Rule,†where outing is acceptable when a person uses their power to hurt gay people.

Yep, that about sums up how I feel. Except that I think this can be applied to any inherent (and undisclosed) conflict of interest.

This whole debate reminds me of the gun-nuts...

Not sure I see the parallel here. I don't think anyone's taken a radical position on this. I just said it makes me uncomfortable when the government moves out of the role of helping us to get the information we need and into the role of protecting us from ourselves. Wino pointed out that, in doing so, government can go too far, as government is wont to do. That's a pretty far cry from rejecting any rules.

Krispy Kreme - heart attack in the palm of your hand. But oh man, tastes so good.