Ghosts, goblins, tricks, treats and pranks galore. Yeah I know, corny as hell, but I gotta fill twenty words so's not to screw up my blog preview, so chill. It's not easy when the photo is pretty self-explanatory...

Tired of sitting at endless red lights? Frustrated by lights that turn from green to red too quickly, trapping you in traffic?

Now anyone can breeze through congested intersections just like the police, thanks to a $300 dashboard device that changes traffic lights from red to green, making nasty commutes a thing of the past and leaving other drivers open-mouthed at your ability to manipulate traffic.

But what if everyone had one?

That's the fear of traffic control officials, who believe chaos would take over the roads. That's also the potential facing communities from Troy to Washington Township as Internet-marketed knockoffs of the device -- originally intended only for police and fire vehicles -- have become available to the public.

The knockoffs have traffic engineers investigating whether lockout measures will work against the copycats and whether hundreds of thousands of dollars in traffic technology investments will become obsolete.

Police are worried about the possibility of intersection chaos if people duel over control for lights. But even more fundamentally, the dashboard device may be impossible to detect even from a police car right next to it, and it may be perfectly legal anyway...

The new $20 bill, redesigned by the Bureau of Engraving and Printing to thwart counterfeiters and put into circulation earlier this month, contains secret messages praising Satan and his followers, sharp-eyed observers have found.

At the top-right corner of the bill are what appear at first glance to be a series of small vertical bars. Under magnification, however, the markings clearly form the words "Satan is your master," printed backward.

On close inspection, numerous other sinister messages and occult icons can be found. When the front of the bill is viewed under a microscope, a horned, pitchfork-wielding devil can be seen peeking out from behind Andrew Jackson's bushy left eyebrow. When exposed to ultraviolet light, the bill displays a faint watermark image of George Washington, Jesus and Martin Luther King being tortured in the fires of hell. And when rubbed rapidly with a moist pencil eraser - a counterfeit detection technique known as the "litmus configuration" - the bill will play the opening bars of Hotel California.

Leave it to the nutjobs at PETA to use the Roy Horn tiger attack as a platform for pressuring colleges to get rid of their live big cat mascots.

PETA sent "urgent letters" yesterday to the chancellors of Louisiana State University and Southern University in Baton Rouge urging them - in the wake of the Roy Horn attack - to immediately retire the cats to sanctuaries "before similar tragic incidents strike at their schools’ campuses."

Of course, the LSU mascot - Mike V - isn't led around Tiger Stadium on a leash. And I doubt Southern uses its jaguar in cheesy lounge acts.

Nonetheless, PETA is pleading with the universities to retire the cats -- which "pose the very real risk of attacking trainers, students, or members of the public with virtually no warning."

Recently a school in Columbus tried to put on the play, To Kill A Mockingbird. The drama teacher at the high school was concerned about the racial epithets used in the play. The play/book is set in the south during the dperession. In it Atticus Finch, a white lawyer, defends a black man who has been accused of raping a white woman. The story portrays much of the backlash from the racist community, which is where the racial epithets come in.

Concerned that the strong language may upset some people in the community, the teacher asked the local chapter of the NAACP what they're opinion of the play was. Surprisingly, the NAACP asked that the world not be used in the play. The word in question is, of course, "nigger." The school, however, could not obtain permission from the publisher of the play to change the word.

The NAACP is not reacting to this in the correct way at all. The person who the teacher contacted was a local president of the NAACP, or something along those lines. She stated that she gave her personal opinion, as opposed to an official statement. That may be true, but her personal sentiments can't be that far from the organization's.

Most people prefer them baked in pies or decoratively carved. But for Bruce Bradford, the preferred method of serving up pumpkin is to have it shot out of an air cannon. That is, after all, how he became the world champion of Punkin Chunkin — a sport where winning is a matter of distance, not taste.


This Halloween, Bradford will defend his title at the Punkin Chunkin World Championship in Delaware's Sussex County. His team triumphed in the air cannon division last year after the pumpkin they shot out of their cannon sailed 4,594 feet...

Chaos isn't just a theory in the Passamaquoddy Bay.

Here in the waters off of Eastport, Maine, lurks the Old Sow, the western hemisphere's biggest whirlpool.

She shows up wherever and whenever the spirit and tides move her, occasionally opening her maw suddenly in the form of a madly spinning, 40-foot-deep hole in the ocean, several hundred feet wide.

Sometimes she's more subdued, creating a funnel-shaped hole roughly 12 feet wide and 12 feet deep.

At a press conference yesterday, White House spokesman Scott McClellan announced that all political and military authority in Iraq would be handed over to the Galactic Empire, starting October 1, 2003.

By ceding power to the Empire, the U.S. can free itself from the arduous and unenviable duty of policing Iraq, without losing face in front of the world. "The move is also beneficial to Iraq," McClellan added: the U.N. has no political authority over the Galactic Empire; as such, the Empire's nation-building efforts will not be "stymied by the relentless navel-gazing of the Earth's U.N. Security Council," Lord Vader, Supreme Commander of the Empire's armed forces, stated in a live-video interview from his lavish suite on the Executor, his Super Star Destroyer-class ship currently in orbit around Jupiter...

No PC for the P.U.

This 'gay presentation' was the basis for the banning of a few eager young minds from their school's computers. Harmless satiric fun aimed at the contentious fashion industry waylayed by politcal correctness. Clearly an outright conspiracy against the Comical Genius.

It's OK. We know who you are...

Monkeys have developed cybernetic limbs, the third phase in their four phase plan for global dominance.

“This bodes well for our plans.” signed the enigmatic Koko, leader of the Simian Liberation Front, as she gently stroked her cat's fur. “We again have seduced the humans into expanding our range of abilities. Now that we have achieved space flight, learned sign language, and acquired cybernetic limbs, we have only one remaining hurdle before our natural ascension as the dominant species on Earth can be fulfilled.

Koko indicated that any scientists wishing to test trigger locks on fully automatic weapons should contact the Simian Liberation Army of Volunteer Experiment Subjects.

Courtesy SlashNot

Dear Spammer,
I was laid off six months ago from my programming job. I've been doing some freelance projects to make ends meet, but my savings is running out. I don't have any other marketable skills other than programming. Any suggestions how I could improve my chances of landing a permanent job before I end up living in a box?
-Desperate in Denver

Apple Computer is expected next week to expand its online music service to Windows-based computers.

The Mac maker has scheduled an event for next Thursday at San Francisco's Moscone West convention hall. "The year's biggest music story is about to get even bigger," Apple said in an invitation to journalists.

The company is expected to launch the long-awaited Windows version of the iTunes Music Store at the event, according to Wall Street brokerage Needham. Apple earlier said it would release the Windows service sometime before the end of the year.

For Patterson Hood, the arrival of trucker chic in pop culture is anything but serendipitous. It's scary. From pop star Avril Lavigne sporting a leather chain wallet to Ashton Kutcher donning a John Deere cap, Hood wants no part of the suddenly ubiquitous salutes to the Stuckey's crowd.
"It's pretty funny," says Hood, one of the founding members of the band Drive-By Truckers. "Of course, we're steering away from it. I don't want to be in fashion, because that means next year we'll be out of fashion. I tend to run the other way."

It's hard to imagine anything dumber than wading out into a muddy river, reaching down deep underwater into a dark hole and wiggling your fingers as bait hoping that a giant catfish will clamp down on your hand so you can pull it out of the hole, without getting pulled in yourself. That's a basic description of catfish Noodling, or the sport of fishing for catfish by hand.

It's a dangerous sport that kills a few people every year and injures many more. There is more than cats that lurk in those holes - snapping turtles or snakes can do damage, not to mention that giant catfish that could just as well drag you down into the hole...

Got this in my Inbox (actually Boomer did) and decided to share the wealth. Enjoy !!

15 Things to do at Wal-Mart while your spouse/shopping partner is taking
their sweet time:

1. Get 24 boxes of condoms and randomly put them in peoples carts when they
aren't looking

2. Set all the alarm clocks in Housewares to go off at 5-minute intervals

3. Make a trail of tomato juice on the floor leading to the rest rooms

4. Walk up to an employee and tell him/her in an official tone, 'Code 3' in
housewares......and see what happens

5. Go the Service Desk and ask to put a bag of M&M's on lay away

6. Move a 'CAUTION - WET FLOOR' sign to a carpeted area

7. Set up a tent in the camping department and tell other shoppers you'll
invite them in if they bring pillows from the bedding department

8. When a clerk asks if they can help you, begin to cry and ask 'Why can't
you people just leave me alone?'

9. Look right into the security camera, use it as a mirror and pick your
nose

10. While handling guns in the hunting department, ask the clerk if he knows
where the anti-depressants are

11. Dart around the store suspiciously while loudly humming the theme from
"Mission Impossible"

12. In the auto department, practice your "Madonna look" using different
size funnels

13. Hide in a clothing rack and when people browse through, say "PICK ME!"
"PICK ME!"

14. When an announcement comes over the loud speaker, assume the fetal
position and scream "NO! NO! It's those voices again!!!!"

And last but not least:

15. Go into a fitting room, shut the door and wait a while and then yell
loudly "There is no toilet paper in here"

A good rule of thumb for an identity thief is not to steal the name of someone whose reputation is worse than yours, such as a sex offender.



Police said James Perry stole the name and identity of a neighbor who turned out to be a convicted sex offender.


Perry stole the identity of Robert Kowalski in order to obtain a drivers license, police said. Perry was living in Florida at the time and Kowalski was his neighbor.

Bush’s request of $89 billion to aid the reconstruction of Afghanistan and Iraq has whetted the appetite of many povery-stricken countries.

Washington — Several of the world’s poorest nations have asked the United States to initiate military campaigns in their countries in a desperate attempt to cash-in on lucrative reconstruction monen. At least eight developing nations welcome a US attack with the promise of clean water, electricity, and health care...

A film about an action movie hero who becomes governor of California? Well, it may have sounded like a B-movie a few months ago, but with the election set for Tuesday and Arnold Schwarzenegger holding a lead in the polls even as controversy swirls about him in California's gubernatorial recall race, that hokey premise is looking like it could become political reality.

Of course, in the real life campaign there have been a few Total Recall-style plot twists -- like charges that Schwarzenegger is no gentleman but an inveterate groper of women who as a youth found kind words to say about Hitler...