When medics arrived they found Ms. DeLucci unconscious lying on the floor of her bathroom wearing nothing but her bath robe. Running down her leg, was a stream of brown and green syrup. The medic had to transfer her to a stretcher, so he grabbed her left leg which was bent crossing her other leg, to straighten her out. She was lying there all twisted up. When he lifted her left leg to straighten her body out, he exposed her vagina at which point a creature, no larger than the tip of a finger wormed its way out of her g*nitals and landed on the floor with a wet popping sound. Shocked, the medic stared at the creature that was lying on the tile bathroom floor in a casing of mucous. It was a tiny mud shrimp and it sat there on the cold floor gasping for water while flipping itself back and forth. The horrified medic turned to the toilet as he felt the nausea setting in. When he put his face down into the toilet to puke what he saw was so horrific that to this day he cannot look into a toilet without convulsing. The entire toilet bowl was boiling with baby brown mud shrimp flipping and splashing at a furious pace.
If you think that is bad - wait until you hear how it happened: Ms. DeLucci official death was the result of a combination of shock and severe head trauma. She stood up over the toilet in pain and when she saw what she had done, she went into shock and fell, smashing her head on the toilet and then on the floor. It is believed by medical police that on two nights before the accident she had purchased a live lobster at a fish market. While lying in a tub, she gently inserted the creature's tail into her vagina to derive pleasure. At that point, she held a lighter under the creature's face causing it to flip its tail in a violent snapping motion. The medics found a lesbian XXX video in the VCR and the TV was positioned on a table in front of the tub. The lobster was found in the kitchen garbage can wrapped in a paper bag. Traces of Ms. DeLucci's DNA were found on the lobster along with pubic hairs that had wedged themselves between the lobster tail joints. The lobster's face was lightly burned with the same fuel used in lighters. The lobster's digestive track and colon were found to be full of mud shrimp egg casings. Doctors believe that the lobster had eaten them (they are common in the water at fish markets and are usually harmlessly boiled to death) and the lobster had excreted them into Ms. DeLucci when she was torturing it. Maine mud shrimp only take two days to gestate and Ms. DeLucci was only four days away from getting her period, doctors believe that at that point of her menstrual cycle, her womb was the perfect PH balance to grow these mud shrimp which are a much larger version of the popular "Sea Monkey" pets sold throughout the US. Over night the eggs had hatched and the mud shrimp began doubling in size every ten minutes. You can imagine the pain she was in when she woke up that morning and gave birth to well over 1,000 mud shrimp in her toilet.
Forget 11-man teams. Quickly the Pacific adopted a variation to that rule -- the whole village could form a team. Away games were a substitute for war; entire villages of men, women and children all playing. Wickets were any uprights that could be found and forget the smack of willow on leather. Willow doesnt grow in the Pacific so any wood would do, provided it produced a grunty man-sized weapon. At first balls were a tad bit frail until some one had the bright idea of using fresh rubber latex to make the balls. And lots of them -- because when a hefty Samoan with a mighty bat connects with a tiny bouncy ball something really flies. Lots of local rules came into play as a result -- balls into the lagoon could be acceptable in one village, a disadvantage in another. Kilikiti quickly moved away from cricket. Nothing illustrates it more than traditional crickets Law 42.6 "Incommoding the striker" which says its wrong for the fielding side to distract the striker "by any noise or action". An important -- perhaps crucial -- part of any kilikiti training section is to focus on the on-field chants and dance steps.... And thats real dance. Video-umpiring was a no-go back then, but the Pacific islanders had their committees, and long into the night discussions between elders would occur to determine who won. It was usually a political outcome.
Kilikiti is still played widely in Polynesia -- even in places like Funafuti in Tuvalu which is a tiny atoll barely wider than a cricket pitch, so local rules come into play. Samoa became particularly obsessed by the game, to the utter fury of the up-tight German administrators. They saw it as a tremendous waste of time and banned, without any success, the ceremonies, feasting and dancing that accompanied any inter-village tournament. Some said the New Zealand military administration which took over in 1914 only really got one thing ever right in Samoa -- they played cricket too. Auckland, which claims to be the capital city of Polynesia, has a long tradition of both games during the summer and in recent years the Pacific game has become a major part of school sport.
The game has become more formalised -- the days of entire villages has gone although in the church league entire parishes can have the right to bat -- and a national championship climaxed over the weekend. The Stormers beat Happy Days in the mens final and Lau Laau Farani beat the Gardenias in the womens. Organiser Puluaau Pilitai told the Herald the appearance of the Stormers and the Happy Days at Eden Park was going to be awesome for everybody. "These guys here would have wanted to be All Blacks and dreamed of going to Eden Park, but playing your own game there...," she said. "These people deserve it, they are long overdue."
The group has attracted as many as 200 people to meetings at the Transmission Theater, a hip nightclub in San Francisco's burgeoning "South of Market" area that is also the meeting site for the more mainstream Association of Internet Professionals. Do not expect to see scantily clad women milling around or tables overflowing with raunchy photos at its meetings. The sessions are aimed at sowing seeds of business relationships and are a place where shoptalk borders on the wonkish as Web masters exchange ways to perfect their technology. "We felt like there was a need for people getting together in a monthly networking group," McPherson said. "Slowly but surely the group has grown." Models meet photographers, venture capitalists search for the next big thing, Web masters learn how to place their sites higher on search engines and business owners discover which accountants do not mind pornography.
"There is really enthusiastic mingling," McPherson said. "At Bay Area Adult Sites people are engaged almost immediately and the atmosphere is very businesslike." At one recent meeting, participants were treated to a panel discussion featuring one of the heavy hitters of the e-porn business, former nude model and stripper Danni Ashe, 32, who has parlayed her site "Danni's Hard Drive" into a mini-empire. Ashe's Web site, covered with her own nude pictures, is credited with helping to establish the standard business model for Internet pornography -- luring customers with a few free pictures and then making them pay to see more. She answered questions at the meeting and dispensed advice to would-be porn moguls on topics ranging from outsourcing employees to the benefits of Internet pop-up advertisements. "It is now much harder to be seen," she told Reuters in an interview, discussing the benefits of new groups like Bay Area Adult Sites. "I think it's important for small Web masters to band together." McPherson, tall, blonde and also a former stripper, runs a far smaller site called Juicy Mango, which gets about 2,000 hits a day. But she said the opportunity to mingle with fellow porn purveyors in the flesh, so to speak, helps facilitate business among group members. It even led to one million-dollar deal involving adult fetish videos with names like "Messy Girls" where nude women frolic while lathered in food. "These people had been going over stuff, missing phone calls and exchanging voicemail," McPherson said. "It was that one-on-one ... 'Let's sit down and shake hands and look each other in the eye' that confirmed the deal."
The stakes are certainly high. Mark Hardie, an expert on the adult entertainment industry, says Americans spend some $1 billion each year on online pornography. But with an estimated 30,000 to 40,000 adult Web sites already floating around cyberspace and more being added by the day, an industry group like Bay Area Adult Sites can be a crucial tool for fledgling firms to share their experiences and strategies for survival. "The industry has always been one where cooperation is the first effort," said Hardie, a former analyst with Forrester Research who left to form Entertainment Technology Corp. "You want to have an approach where, whatever you want to find, we'll find it for you," he said. "It is better to send a visitor somewhere else where they leave satisfied and with what they were looking for. A lot of people involved in Bay Area Adult Sites just want to run a business, just like a pizza shop."
Greg Penhaligon, 33, could be selling pizza, but the clean-cut computer programmer is trying to sell sex. "It's like the biggest thing on the Internet, but it's not talked about," said Penhaligon, who left his job at a telecom company in October 1998 to form Carnal Planet, basically an X-rated version of Web portal companies like Yahoo!. "My mom thinks its great," he added. "She thinks someone should take advantage of it." Carnal Planet started off with $150,000 in venture capital from the president of a "well-known" telecom firm he would rather not name. Now looking for second round funders, Penhaligon said Bay Area Adult sites offered him a way to learn crucial marketing tips from other Web masters, such as how to direct Internet traffic to Carnal Planet. The group has also provided tips on ways operators can keep sites upscale, ranging from dealing quickly with customer complaints to keeping explicit nudity off the site's front page in order not to overplay their hand. "My reason for being involved is the business side," said Penhaligon, who became the associate director of Bay Area Adult Sites. "I see it as a chamber of commerce."
This is the official grounds of Kazakhstan's "Zholbars" Service, Fighting and Shepherd Dog Club, where burly men from Central Asia and the Caucasus gather each Sunday throughout the winter to see the canine display. Around the rusting metal walls of the compound are tied a frightening array of fierce-looking beasts, tugging and gasping at their leads to get at whatever dog is closest. Stocky pitbull and Staffordshire bull terriers line up alongside mastiffs; long-haired and bulky Caucasus sheepdogs eye up the Asian breed -- also large, but with shorter hair and a stump for a tail. Most show the scars of battle. One brown pitbull's head is a patchwork of pink gashes inflicted by his enemies. He is clearly itching to return to the fray.
There is nothing furtive about this weekly event, the equivalent to a day at the races in Europe, as would be the case in countries where the unarguably brutal "sport" is prohibited. Club president Timirbek Katpin said dog fighting is not banned by Kazakh law, explaining that it is part of the Central Asian state's heritage, alongside hunting with falcons and playing ancient sports on horseback. "The West considers this to be illegal, we know," he said outside the gate to the compound, ready to collect the 100 tenge ($0.70) entrance fee. "But in Central Asia this is our ancestry and has been for centuries, along with falcons, camels and horses. In Spain you have bullfighting, in Kazakhstan you have dog fighting." He recounts legends of how Asian sheepdogs, called "tobet" in Kazakh, protected livestock from wolves and snow leopards for nomad owners long before the vast Central Asian region between Russia, China and Iran was settled by the Russians.
Not everyone agrees. One spectator said that though it may be natural for some breeds of dog to protect livestock from predators, there was nothing natural about setting them against each other in a ring. "The only part dogs had in our heritage was Russian borzois hunting with mounted falconers," said Kurmangazy, driving back to the centre of Kazakhstan's drab commercial capital Almaty. "This is being promoted as a Kazakh tradition, but it is really just a way for young people to make money." Joy Leney, director for Europe and Asia at the World Society for Protection of Animals, said by telephone from London that it was now widely accepted that animals shared similar senses and feelings to humans and therefore sports like dog fighting were barbaric. "We work to try to get legislation in place, as without that framework we stand no chance of convincing people. Activities like dog fighting are barbaric and outdated," she said.
The fight between Pantos, the fine, grey Asian shepherd, and Karagyos, his magnificent white Caucasus cousin, is close. Three-year-old Pantos initially gains the advantage by locking the fatty back of Karagyos' neck in a vice-like grip and forcing him to roll over in apparent submission. But Karagyos wrestles free from the powerful jaws time and time again, and in return sinks his huge teeth into his enemy's ears, hind legs and neck in an increasingly bloody tussle. After 20 minutes of frenzied violence, the two steaming dogs are exhausted. They stand askance and pant for breath, apparently happy to call it a day. Their owners have other ideas. They push the blood-stained animals towards each other and urge them to put the bout beyond doubt, the crowd cheering them on. But the judge declares a tie, and after three encounters there is still little to choose between them.
Mikhail, the 43-year-old owner of the aptly-named Tyson, a fierce and fearless Staffordshire who made short work of his larger opponent, said he was still testing the 18-month-old dog. "There was no money on this fight," Mikhail said. "It is only his second time. In the first contest the other dog's neck was broken and he died almost immediately after the start, so it did not tell me much." Stakes between owners can run from a few dollars to several thousand, although the only bet acknowledged on this particular day was $100. That is well above the average monthly wage in the oil-rich but poverty-stricken former Soviet republic. Several spectators spoke in hushed tones of the legendary fight between Dzhinn, a Caucasus sheepdog and multiple Kazakh champion, and a pitbull from Russia. Dzhinn won, but the visitors were not pleased -- the stake was said to be $75,000.
Several viewers complained to the CBST after the Showcase Television channel broadcast the film, during which one of the female characters is raped. The council said the rape scene was highly unrealistic and was clearly designed as an allegorical struggle between the victim and the rapist. "While there is no denying the despicable and criminal nature of the act, in the context of the 'dueling' individuals, psychologically speaking, the Council considers that (the victim) has had the upper hand," it said. Bubbles Galore won best film at the 1997 Freakzone International Festival of Trash Cinema in France. It was described by one Australian critic as "a tender, trippy, pastel-tinted tribute to X-rated porn flicks and the women who work in them".
News about the exhibit -- which began on December 17 -- surfaced this month in Canada in the midst of a controversy about financial mismanagement of billions of dollars of public grants. The daily Ottawa Citizen newspaper ran a front-page headline "Your Tax Dollars at Work" over a photo of a scantily clad "call girl." "I think every Canadian would agree that this is the wrong priority for our money to be spent," opposition Reform Member of Parliament Diane Ablonczy told reporters. But a spokesman in Axworthy's department, Patrick Riel, enthused: "Mrs. Norman's creation is a huge success. The London Times called the show one of the most successful exhibitions in Paris." The department's website describes the show as "playing on interchange, the unexpected, desire, deception, surprise, availability and the forbidden." The Canada Council for the Arts is an arm's length agency of the Canadian Heritage Department, which has run into criticism over grants to fund porn film Bubbles Galore and to a publisher to print books on communicating with the dead and enjoying an orgasm.
May's second place followed disappointment last year when she won Germany's Eurovision nomination with her song "Hoer den Kindern einfach zu" ("Just Listen to the Children") only to be disqualified after it was revealed that her song had been recorded previously by another artist. Fur-clad Berlin rockers Knorkator also made an impact, but won few votes, on Friday with their number "Ick werd zun Schwein" ("I'm Turning into a Pig") which featured their keyboard player taking an axe to his instrument.
The house, built especially for the project, is surrounded by a wall, but passersby can easily peer over it. Metal barricades have been set up along the street to keep pedestrians from interrupting the flow of traffic. "I feel a little bit like I am in a glass zoo. I do not think people are ready for this. In this country, people need to learn to see the beauty in daily life," Tobar told radio Cooperativa. About a hundred people -- most of them men -- stood on the sidewalk under the tiring sun on Wednesday afternoon waiting for Tobar to reappear. An occasional "here comes the chick" raised and immediately dashed the crowd's hopes when found to be a false alarm. Another person in the crowd shouted, "I bet Frei is watching," referring to the proximity to President Eduardo Frei's headquarters. "I came here out of curiosity," Sergio Subiabre, a 46-year-old agricultural worker who came from Talagante, 24 miles (38 km) southwest of Santiago just to see Tobar, told Reuters. "This is a way to show feminine beauty," he said, adding that he had been waiting four hours just to see her, but she still had not returned. Tobar appears to have won a secret admirer. A red rose tied with a ribbon lay atop a white envelope in the dirt inside her patio, waiting for her arrival.
That quip set off conservative activist Gary Bauer who accused Keyes of condoning the "anti-family, anti-cop and pro-terrorist" sentiments of the band playing at the time. "It's the kind of music that the killers at Columbine High school were immersed in ... . I was a little surprised to see you fall into a mosh pit while a band called 'The Machine Rages On' or 'Rage Against the Machine' played," he said. "Rage Against the Machine" is a politically strident rock band known for its lyrics about societal ills and controversies such as the imprisonment of Mumia Abu-Jamal, the former Black Panther and radio journalist condemned for killing a policeman 18 years ago. Bauer's comment set off Keyes, who responded with a long monologue on the merits and morality of mosh pitting. "Until you told me this fact I had no idea what that music was. I had nothing to do with that music." "Admittedly, I was willing to fall into the mosh pit, but I'll tell you something. You know why I did that? Because I think that exemplifies the kind of trust in people that is the heart and soul of the Keyes campaign ... . And when you trust them, they will in fact hold you up."
Still not satisfied, Bauer declared it incompatible with the dignity of politics for presidential candidates to act like guests on "The Jerry Springer Show." "Well, I would leave that to the judgment of the American people. I do know that when I got down, one of the folks who was there looked at me and said, 'You know, you're the only person I've ever seen dive into a mosh pit and come out with his tie straight,'" Keyes said. Afterward, Republican Sen. Judd Gregg of New Hampshire, who has been escorting Bush around the state this week, shook his head in amazement. "I thought it was surreal," he said.
Around one in 100 people claim to have seen ball lightning, but scientists have never been able to come up with a satisfactory explanation for it. It is typically described as having a diameter somewhere between a golf ball and a beach ball and lasting for around 15 seconds, floating in the air not far from the ground. Ball lightning can be any colour, but is normally white or yellowish, with an intensity roughly equivalent to a 100 watt light bulb. In their article in Nature magazine, Abrahamson and Dinniss suggest that the extreme heat generated at the point where lightning strikes can sometimes turn the silica-carbon mixture contained in soil into silicon and silicon compounds with oxygen and carbon. The process is similar to the techniques used in industry to extract pure silicon from sand. The silicon forms tiny "nanoparticles" which link together into chains which are lifted above the ground by air currents, Abrahamson and Dinniss wrote. The particles then burn slowly, giving off heat and light. The scientists have not yet been able prove their theory by recreating ball lightning in the laboratory, but believe it explains all the commonly observed features of the phenomenon.
Unlike the National Football League -- which McMahon called the No Fun League -- which does not own its teams but offers franchises, the eight teams that start play next year will all be owned by WWF. "We don't play well with others," McMahon said. The new league is looking for a television contract. WWF's wresting programming runs on the USA Network and Viacom's UPN. Each team will have a salary cap, players will have a base salary based on their position and determined by the television contract. They will also be paid incentives for winning, scoring, and playing time. The 40-player teams will play 10-game schedules culminating in a championship game at a neutral site in late April. The season is timed to take advantage of football fans who want something different than basketball, hockey and figure skating in February. "Personally, I think that figure skating sucks," McMahon said. The X in XFL stands for nothing in particular, but the new league's officials on Thursday suggested Xciting, Xplosive, Xtreme and Gen-X. McMahon said it can stand for whatever anyone wants.
The proposal, an amendment attached to an omnibus liquor bill (House Bill 2360), is a companion bill to Rep. Marilyn Jarrett's push to regulate dancing in all-nude cabarets that don't serve alcohol (HB 2297). The bills would keep customers and dancers from touching and would restrict tipping to a chaste hand-to-hand transaction. No putting bills in dancers' G-strings would be allowed. Both bills have passed out of the Government Reform Committee and will likely be heard on the House floor this week. Backers of the bills said the three-feet separation between dancer and customer is designed to prevent drug use and prostitution and disease. "Oh, I see how that will solve the problem," said Rep. Sue Gerard, R-Phoenix, sarcastically.
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