Happy Halloween everyone! In spirit of the festivities, I present to you:
EXTREMEPUMPKINS.COM

Here is what Rick from near Rochester NY had to say about this masterpiece.

I usually grow a few Atlantic Giant pumpkins every year and carve them up. Some of the giants have a recessive gene for *green* skin; those look particularly striking when carved. While the skin is green, the flesh is still normal orange color. Here’s one 280 pounder that I carved last year… hope you enjoy it!

I think it was pretty damn cool.

Have fun tonight and don’t scare too many little kids!

The Queen of England sent an official Birthday telegram to Flook, the Burmese cat, for his 100th birthday. Few humans ever receive such an honor, and Flook may be the first pet to ever have his birthday officially recognized by her Majesty.

Owner Chris Evans from Windermere, Cumbria, wrote to Buckingham Palace to inform the Queen that his beloved pet was set to celebrate reaching a century in cat years – that’s roughly 23 in human years.

And, in a surprising break with protocol, she received an official congratulatory telegram signed by Her Majesty.

Mr Evans said: “I have watched Flook grow up from a kitten and I am very proud of her. I really just sent the letter tongue in cheek and didn’t expect anything back. But when I got the letter from Buckingham Palace I nearly fell over.”

[Daily Mail UK]

So the super duper, supposed to be fantastic, fix-it-all Internet Explorer 7 was released yesterday (granted it does fix A LOT). Within the last 24 hours there have been reports of crashes and information disclosure vulnerability. Granted this IS a beta release, however… it’s MS IE… what did you expect?

Chuckle, chuckle. Laugh, laugh. Haha.

All things aside, this means a lot of work for me. “Why?” you say? Well let me tell you a little story: The wonderful people at Microsoft decided they wanted to be different… to be special… to NOT follow the W3C (logical) standards of CSS. It was that day that Internet Explorer was born. For every version up until now, massive amounts of display issues would surface once one coded the style (or display) information for a design. So because IE decided they wanted to be “cool” and stand from the crowd, I’ve had to insert a special little “hack” everytime I created a website.

Well now that’s gone – since the people over there finally decided to actually listen to anyone – now I need to go back to EVERY website I’ve created and “fix” that little hack… along with the plethora of other new display problems.

So what does this all mean? Go Firefox. It’s free and doesn’t make you want to pull your hair out. *thumbs up*

Alexander Shopmann, a 55-year-old German retired stockbroker, thought of a bright idea one day to create Smokers International Airline, Smintair for short.

Shopmann claims that in an age of extremely limited freedoms, and cramped/stuffy/terrible airflights, his new airline will offer an experience that a flier won’t be able to find anywhere else. And it’s true:

SMINTAIR reinstates the liberty of smoking in all seats. Non-smokers will find the cabin air more refreshing than on any other flight with any other airline, as SMINTAIR adds fresh outside air to the conditioning system! This is more expensive, as it burns more fuel, but it is seen as an additional service to our guests.

Where do you think those colds you get right after a flight come from? STUFFY AIR!

More interesting “features:” Keep reading this »

Faith Hill dons the issue of Glamour magazine this month. All personal situations concerning Faith Hill aside, shouldn’t we be talking on how to not get divorced…. instead of better ways to do it in “helpful” women’s magazines like this one? I can see the feminazi infiltration now: “Now girls, you’ll want to make sure that when you’re done with your first husband and want to move onto your second make sure you don’t…”

To most, General Tso is recognized only by the fact that his name precedes the word “chicken” in the delictably sugary-spicy, deep fried, garlicky, meet tidbit dish universal to Chinese take-outs across the United States. However, what most people do not know is that General Tso was a ruthless military leader who met the height of his day during China’s greatest civil war, the 14-year-long Taiping Rebellion, which claimed millions of lives…. “Setting their chopsticks aside, patting their stomachs, the satisfied diners spare scarcely a thought for General Tso, except to imagine that he must have been a great connoisseur of hot stir-fried chicken.”

Tso’s compaigns were absolutely ruthless. During the Taiping Rebellion, he managed to smash the rebels in four provinces and put down an unrelated revolt called the Nian Rebellion. He THEN continued to march west and reconquer Chinese Turkestan from Muslim rebels.

Is it possible that, struggling to carve out a new life in America under backbreaking adversities, and having heard of the sword skills of the remorseless General Tso (who had the top leaders of the Nian Rebellion executed with the proverbial “death of 10,000 cuts”), the overseas exiles indulged in some gallows-humor about their old enemy? That the chopped-up chicken dish may have gotten its name from the sliced and diced victims of Tso’s grim reprisals?

How’s that for slice and dice chicken?

[Washington Post]