If you’re looking for a way to make men go “ewww” at a beautiful women, you can always turn to marketing…

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1. The Photograph That Raised the Photojournalistic Stakes:
“Omaha Beach, Normandy, France”
Robert Capa, 1944

“If your pictures aren’t good enough,” war photographer Robert Capa used to say, “you aren’t close enough.” Words to die by, yes, but the man knew of what he spoke. After all, his most memorable shots were taken on the morning of D-Day, June 6, 1944, when he landed alongside the first waves of infantry at Omaha Beach.

Caught under heavy fire, Capa dove for what little cover he could find, then shot all the film in his camera, and got out – just barely. He escaped with his life, but not much else. Of the four rolls of film Capa took of the horrific D-Day battle, all but 11 exposures were ruined by an overeager lab assistant, who melted the film in his rush to develop it. (He was trying to meet the deadline for the next issue of Life magazine.)

In an ironic twist, however, that same mistake gave the few surviving exposures their famously surreal look (“slightly out of focus,” Life incorrectly explained upon printing them). More than 50 years later, director Steven Spielberg would go to great lengths to reproduce the look of that “error” for his harrowing D-Day landing sequence in “Saving Private Ryan,” even stripping the coating from his camera lenses to echo Capa’s notorious shots.

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President Bush said Wednesday he’ll submit a proposal to balance the budget in five years and exhorted Congress to “end the dead of night process” of quietly tucking expensive pet projects into spending bills.

The budget was balanced before Bush was president. It’s hard to be taken seriously on the economy when you admit your policies set the country back 12 years.

is this 8.7 MPG 1969 Chevy Blazer:

(more pictures at the link)

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Officials in Australia have destroyed copies of a video showing Crocodile Hunter Steve Irwin’s death.

It was feared the film could fetch hundreds of thousands of pounds and placed on the internet.

Irwin, 44, died in September after being stabbed in the chest by a stingray’s poisonous barb while filming a documentary in Queensland.

State Coroner Michael Barnes said police gave the original film to his wife, Terri, last month.

And other copies of the tape, which was shot during the filming of a documentary on the Great Barrier Reef, had been destroyed.

Too bad this trend didn’t start one week earlier…

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What makes this large ceramic chess set unusual is its artistic portrayal of the Middle East conflict. Arrayed against the forces of the West are burkha clad Islamic extremists. Look closely — all those pieces look the same. The challenge playing for or against the Islamic extremist side is to remember which piece is which — like in the real conflict.

Besides the ominous, dark pieces of the Islamic extremist side, the play on art continues to the other side, with the stack of gold coins representing cash-is-king and the Statue of Liberty as queen.

Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men.

Martin Luther King Jr. (1929 – 1968), Strength to Love, 1963

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Welcome to the acronyms and scripts of the Casualty Notification Guide for the Casualty Notification Officer (CNO).
Aren’t you glad that once you have sacrificed your son or daughter the CAC reduces you to a NOK and they strongly urge you NOT to speak to the media about your sacrifice?

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A five-year-old Canadian boy can have two mothers and a father, an Ontario court ruled this week in a landmark case that redefines the meaning of family and examines the rights of parents in same-sex relationships.

In a ruling released on Tuesday, the Ontario Court of Appeal said the female partner of the child’s biological mother could be legally recognised as the boy’s third parent.

The biological father, named on the boy’s birth certificate, is a friend of both women and is taking an active role in the child’s life.

“It is contrary to (the child’s) best interests that he is deprived of the legal recognition of the parentage of one of his mothers,” Justice Marc Rosenberg wrote in the ruling, which did not name the three parents or the child.

“Perhaps one of the greatest fears faced by lesbian mothers is the death of the birth mother… Without a declaration of parentage or some other order, the surviving partner would be unable to make decisions for their minor child.”

The two women, who have been together since 1990, told the court they did not want to adopt the child because it meant the father would lose his status as a parent.

“It’s an important precedent because the legislature has not kept the legislation up to date,” said Peter Jervis, one of the lawyers for the applicant, referred to only as “A.A.”

“The court has basically said that it would step in to recognise this woman as the mother of her child … and would treat her equally,” said Jervis.

He added that the court found the family to be a very loving one and that A.A. had met all the criteria of being a loving mother.

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Rep.-elect Keith Ellison, the first Muslim elected to Congress, will use a Quran once owned by Thomas Jefferson during his ceremonial swearing-in Thursday.

The chief of the Library of Congress’ rare book and special collections division, Mark Dimunation, will walk the Quran across the street to the Capitol and then walk it back after the ceremony.

Ellison, D-Minn., contacted the library about the book last month, Dimunation said.

Some critics have argued that only a Bible should be used for the swearing-in. Last month, Virginia Rep. Virgil Goode, R-Va., warned that unless immigration is tightened, “many more Muslims” will be elected and follow Ellison’s lead. Ellison was born in Detroit and converted to Islam in college.

Ellison spokesman Rick Jauert said the new congressman “wants this to be a special day, and using Thomas Jefferson’s Quran makes it even more special.”

“Jefferson’s Quran dates religious tolerance to the founders of our country,” he added.

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Leshan Buddha’s is 71 meters high and sculpted in a cliff in front of Dadu & Min rivers in Sichuan province of China. It’s the tallest Buddha in the world, and he is sitting down…The buddha was built in the year 713 of this era to spiritually help and save the sailors from sinking and drowning in the crazy waters and maelstroms of the area… It took more than 90 years to finish this huge project, but ironically, science and religion teamed up together…all the debris of rocks that were carved from the mountain fell into the river, and in the same time, patched up the holes and made the waters around the buddha less dangerous. If you go in China, and you are near Leshan, you need to see this.

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A head teacher has spoken of his shock at seeing a video clip posted on a public website of a laughing pupil hurling a rock at a classroom window.

The shaky 15-second footage shows a clearly identifiable boy grinning as he strides up to throw the missile.

Head teacher Gordon Cunningham said it had been the Year 9 pupil’s last day at Easthampstead Park School in Berkshire before he and his family emigrated.

And since the kid emigrated, the teachers pretty much can’t touch him, so they move on to the next target:

She said the union supported a zero tolerance approach in schools to pupils who used technology to abuse and undermine teachers, and called for more rigorous legislative control of internet sites which gave them licence.

Man, kids these days. When I was their age, we had to vandalize stuff the old fashioned way. Remember those days? Rocks were the foremost vandalizing technology, but nobody called for rigorous legislative control on them. Almost everyone had rocks when they were growing up (although the ones who didn’t will swear it made them better people)…

Teachers, this would be a classy response: post a video of yourself giving the kid detention for a month. Your country is already full of cameras anyway, so don’t go complaining that some of them aren’t under your control and are filming things you don’t want filmed.