The Inane Asylum

This is funny in oh so many ways...

from yahoo.com

Gibson seeks meeting with Jewish leaders

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Mel Gibson on Tuesday apologized for making anti-Semitic remarks after his recent arrest for drunken driving and asked to meet with members of the Jewish community to begin a "path for healing."

"There is no excuse, nor should there be any tolerance, for anyone who thinks or expresses any kind of anti-Semitic remark," Gibson said in a statement.

"I want to apologize specifically to everyone in the Jewish community for the vitriolic and harmful words that I said to a law enforcement officer the night I was arrested," he added.

Gibson, who directed 2004's blockbuster movie "The Passion of The Christ" about the last hours of the life of Jesus, was caught speeding in his car in the early morning last Friday, and he went on a rant in which he is widely reported to have said "The Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world."

The Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department report, parts of which have appeared on celebrity Web site TMZ.com, is laced with anti-Semitic statements and expletives said by the actor.

The report said an opened bottle of tequila was found in the car, and that at one point Gibson tried to evade arrest.

But it has been the anti-Semitic remarks that have raised the biggest outcry from members of the Jewish community in and out of Hollywood because before "Passion," the Oscar-winning director of "Braveheart" and star of the "Lethal Weapon" movies denied he or the movie were anti-Semitic.

His statement on Tuesday sought a meeting with Jewish community leaders in which he could explain his actions.

"I'm not just asking for forgiveness. I would like to take it one step further, and meet with leaders in the Jewish community, with whom I can have a one-on-one discussion to discern the appropriate path for healing," Gibson said.

He said he has begun "an ongoing program of recovery," but admitted "I cannot do it alone."

"I am asking the Jewish community, whom I have personally offended, to help me on my journey through recovery," Gibson said.

from reuters.com

Don't kill Harry Potter, authors urge Rowling

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Two of America's top authors, John Irving and Stephen King, made a plea to J.K. Rowling on Tuesday not to kill the fictional boy wizard Harry Potter in the final book of the series, but Rowling made no promises.

"My fingers are crossed for Harry," Irving said at a joint news conference before a charity reading by the three writers at New York's Radio City Music Hall.

The author of "The World According to Garp" and a string of other bestsellers said he and King felt like "warm-up bands" for Rowling, who is working on the seventh and last book in the Harry Potter series, and who has said two characters will die.

King, who shot to fame in 1974 with "Carrie," said he had confidence that Rowling would be "fair" to her hero.

"I don't want him to go over the Reichenbach Falls," King said in a reference to Arthur Conan Doyle's effort to kill off the character of fictional detective Sherlock Holmes. Pressure from fans eventually led Conan Doyle to resurrect Holmes, who was found in a later story to have survived.

Rowling, a Briton whose books have sold 300 million copies worldwide according to her publishers, said she was well into the process of writing the final book.

"I feel quite liberated," she said.

"I can resolve the story now and it's fun in a way it wasn't before because finally I've reached my resolution, and I think some people will loathe it and some people will love it, but that's how it should be."

I read a lot of blogs. Probably too many for my own good and my employer. That being said, this is one of my favorite blog entries in quite some time now. It has all the elements that make up a great blog posting. Rafi Kam, you are a genius.

baking soda sales and rap music

You really need to see this to believe it.

Below is the Aug 2nd entry on a Yankee desktop calendar. Somebody got a little too happy with the search-n-replace feature.

This reminded me of the old Crayon I had made in honor of an Irish Family I know...

This is pretty ridiculous. Chen, all I have to say is, I'm not surprised you were critizied by one of your students.

from yahoo.com:

Professor wins suit against blog site

SHANGHAI, China - A Chinese journalism professor has won a lawsuit against a blog hosting site that refused to remove remarks criticizing him by one of its users, state media said Friday.

It was believed to be the first time that a person in China has sued a blog host for defamation. Winning shows "personal dignity outweighs freedom of speech," the professor, Chen Tangfa, was quoted as saying by the official Xinhua News Agency.

from yahoo.com:

Madonna's concert crucifixion draws ire

ROME - Madonna's plans to stage a mock crucifixion during a Sunday concert in Rome have drawn fire from religious leaders, who have condemned the stunt as "an act of open hostility" toward the Roman Catholic Church.

The prospect of the scene being repeated at the concert in Rome's Olympic stadium, some 2 miles from the
Vatican, prompted Catholic officials to denounce the act as a publicity stunt in bad taste.

"To crucify yourself in the city of the pope and the martyrs is an act of open hostility," Cardinal Ersilio Tonini was quoted as saying in La Stampa daily on Wednesday. "It's a scandal created on purpose by astute merchants to attract publicity."

Muslim and Jewish leaders also condemned the fake crucifixion.

"It's not the first time Madonna stages such an act. We deplore it, we feel it is an act of bad taste," said Mario Scialoja, the president of the Muslim World League in Italy.

"We express solidarity with the Catholic world," said Riccardo Pacifici, spokesman for Rome's Jewish community. "It's a disrespectful act, and to do it in Rome is even worse."

"Knock off the Christ-bashing," Catholic League president Bill Donohue said in a statement. "It's just pathetic."

Wow, you go Madonna. And Bush thought the way to peace was killing people....hmph....

From the same guys who brought you the Couch Bike, comes the Treadmill Bike!

This is what baseball needs more of...

This is a pretty cool Urban Street Climbing video from Russia...

While I might not have been as fast or as aggressive as this guy, this definately reminds me of when I used to get around NYC on my bike...

This is truely bizarre. In case you are unaware, astronomers are about to decide on a definition of "Planet", which could cause Pluto to be demoted from planet status.

One possible proposal classifies Pluto and the other Pluto-like objects in the outter reaches of our solar system as "Plutons". This is angering geologists since the word pluton is used for a common rock formation that exists in most Geology 101 curricula. How could the astronomers miss this? Well it seems they relied on MS Word and Word Perfect to determine of the word was in common use amoung geologists.

from nature.com:

Owen Gingerich, an astronomer at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and chair of the IAU committee that created the definition, says that they were aware of its usage amongst geologists, but unaware of its importance to the field. "Since the term is not in the MS Word or the WordPerfect spell checkers, we thought it was not that common," Gingerich wrote in an e-mail to news@nature.com.

from slashdot.org

Poker Driving Artificial Intelligence Research

"The Canadian Press has a story about a University of Alberta team that is using Texas Hold-'em to study artificial intelligence. Poker seems to be a much more useful game for this research than chess. From the article: 'Poker has what are currently some of the biggest challenges to (artificial intelligence) systems, and uncertainty is the primary hurdle that we're facing,' said Michael Bowling, adding that the University of Alberta program was able to use its opponents' actions to infer certain things about their hands. 'The same techniques, the same principles that we're developing to build poker systems are the same principles that can be applied to many other problems. The nice thing about chess as a property of the game is what we call perfect information. You look at the board, you know where all the pieces are, you know whose turn it is — you have complete knowledge of the game,' he said. 'But in the real world, knowing everything is just so rare. Everything we do all day long is all about partial information. So poker's much more representative of what the real world's like, and in that sense it becomes a much harder problem.'"

This guy's tricks get better and better as the video goes on. He does some pretty creative ones worth a watch.

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