Subject: Daily Dose - 050223 - magic marker, True Stella Awards, TWO OLD LADIES, DDL, Rotten News

Saturday and Sunday are National Day and Liberation Day here in Kuwait. Back at you Monday...

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A Guy and girl meet at the bar and are instantly attracted to each other. They Party all night, and at the end decide to go back to his place to continue. Once there, they get passionate and start to make out. When the time is right, the girl finds the bedroom, gets undressed and gets under the covers, waiting for the guy who is now coming out of the bathroom.

The guy walks in starts to undress and stops with just his shorts on. He reaches into his pants pocket, pulls out a magic marker and hands it to her.

She takes one look at it an says, "What's this for? Are you some kinda pervert?"

He looks at her, drops his shorts and smiles kinda sexy.

She smiles, her eyes now wide open and staring in disbelief at his johnson which hangs more that halfway to his knees.

He breaks her spell by saying, "Your gonna have to draw a line somewhere, baby."

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True Stella Awards...  (frivilous American lawsuits)

END RUN
by Randy Cassingham

Derrick Thomas of the Kansas City Chiefs football team was good. As a linebacker, he helped the team win plenty of games, and was well on his way to smashing various records. In his first year with the Chiefs, for instance, he sacked opposing quarterbacks 10 times. In his second year, he doubled that number. When asked how he did it, he'd simply reply with a smile, "Speed kills."

As a person, he gave a lot back to his community. Chiefs president Carl Peterson remembers how Thomas would collect money each year for food drives for the needy. "He would go around the locker room and demand money from his teammates -- at least $100, usually more," Peterson says. "Then he'd come into my office and say, 'What will the Chiefs do to match this?' We'd negotiate, because he loved to negotiate, and we'd decide on how much the Chiefs were going to give. And then he'd say, 'OK, Father, we know what the Chiefs are going to do. Now, what are you going to do?'"

Peterson calls Thomas "the son I never had."

A quick annual holiday fundraiser wasn't all, of course. Thomas' father had been killed in Viet Nam, so he knew the pain of being fatherless. He spent lots of time with kids, helping them learn how to read so that they, too, could break out of the inner city and get to a better life.

Once, during a game against Denver, Thomas got angry, "blowing up" during the game, and was suspended. Rather than blame others, he held a press conference and addressed "the youth of America who look up to Derrick Thomas" and urged them not to make the same mistake he did. The kind of role model sports stars should be, but often aren't.

In January 2000, Thomas was driving in his car, a large Suburban SUV, on Interstate 435 in a Kansas City snow storm. There were ice patches on the road. Witnesses say he was driving too fast. Thomas lost control and rolled. His friend and assistant, Michael Tellis, was thrown out of the vehicle and killed. Thomas was thrown out, landed in oncoming traffic lanes, and left partly paralyzed. Neither had been wearing a seat belt; a third passenger in the back seat was wearing a seat belt and suffered only minor injuries.

In the hospital, Thomas was making progress toward recovery. Two weeks after the accident, however, a blood clot killed him. He was just 33.

"Damnit, D, you had it all, man," editorialized sportswriter Rick Dean. "If only you'd just slowed down a little!" Or had been wearing a seat belt.

Another good guy cut down in a senseless tragedy, perhaps complicated by risk-taking speeds and the lack of a seat belt. That's how everyone saw it. Everyone, that is, except his mother.

Edith Morgan, Thomas' mother, said her son died because his SUV's roof was not strong enough to take the weight of the massive vehicle when it rolled over. It collapsed 8-10", breaking his neck, she says. Morgan -- on behalf of herself, Thomas' estate, and the five mothers of his seven children -- sued General Motors, the SUV's manufacturer; the Metropolitan Ambulance Services Trust, the non-profit ambulance company that tried to save his life; and Royal Chevrolet of Harrison, Mo., the dealer that sold Thomas the vehicle.

The suit, filed in Jackson County Circuit Court by attorney Gary C. Robb, claimed wrongful death. It said the vehicle's roof was defective and the ambulance workers were negligent. The dealer? Who knows what they did wrong by selling Thomas the vehicle he wanted.

During trial, several facts emerged:

- The Suburban's vehicle class exempts it from federal roof crush standards. However, Suburbans exceeded that standard anyway -- its design, defense lawyers say, was thus obviously not "defective".
- Accident reconstruction experts testified that Thomas was thrown out of the vehicle's passenger window before the roof collapsed. He couldn't have been thrown out after it collapsed, they said, since the window opening would then have been too small for the linebacker to go through it.
- There was no blood or other evidence that Thomas' neck was broken inside the vehicle by the collapsed roof. Defense experts say Thomas broke his neck by tumbling along the highway for 50 feet after being thrown from the vehicle.
- A traffic engineer calculated that Thomas had been driving somewhere between 63 and 73 mph when he lost control. The posted speed limit was 70 mph but, again, Thomas was driving in a snow storm on icy roads. (Plaintiff attorney Michael Piuze countered that the expert he had hired said Thomas was going at most 58 mph. As if that was a safe speed.)

Before the trial started, the non-profit ambulance service settled for $100,000 and was dropped from the suit. The Chevy dealer that sold the SUV also settled; the amount it paid was not reported.

In closing arguments, Piuze, the family's trial attorney, pleaded with the jurors to remember Thomas' charity work. He reminded them of his children, asking "What's it like not to have a daddy?" Then, reporters say, "Almost whispering to the jury," he urged them to award at least $75 million, perhaps more than $100 million, in damages, avoiding a top figure because "he did not want to put an upper limit on it."

Piuze is a bit of a specialist in rollover crash cases, having taken four of them to trial, three against GM. He won every one of them.

In response, General Motors' attorney John Hickey urged the jurors to consider personal responsibility. Thomas was going too fast and wasn't wearing a seatbelt. Evidence showed his neck was not broken by the collapsed roof -- the roof that actually exceeded federal standards, even though it was not required to even meet them. "General Motors did absolutely nothing wrong," he said. Rather, Thomas "was driving faster than anyone else on the road and cutting in and out of traffic," even in the face of worsening road conditions.

With that, the jurors started their deliberations.

There's the evidence. So how would you, as a member of the Court of Public Opinion, rule in the case? You can find either side 100 percent at fault, or assign a certain percentage of the blame to General Motors.

After deliberating for five hours over two days, the jury found Thomas was entirely at fault, not even finding GM partially responsible for his injuries and resulting death. The vote was 10-2 against his mother, Edith Morgan. (Missouri's constitution requires a two-thirds majority of the jury to decide civil trials, rather than a unanimous verdict.)

"The quality of the car made the jury open to what happened and maybe helped them put Thomas' celebrity status aside," said GM's attorney, John Hickey.

"I'm disappointed, because I felt so strongly about the rollovers," Morgan said. She said she would continue to press for improved roof strength standards.

Attorney Michael Piuze said pretrial publicity was at least in part to blame for the failed suit, in that many of the articles about Thomas' death noted he was driving too fast and not wearing a seat belt. He said the message of the case is: wear seat belts.

Bull! The message delivered loud and clear by the jury is that people need to be held responsible for their own actions, and they -- or their survivors -- don't deserve nine-figure windfalls when they drive like idiots, even if they are normally very nice people who worked hard to help others. Thomas killed himself accidentally -- and killed his friend. Why should General Motors be responsible for that? The obvious answer: they shouldn't.

Meanwhile, consider the ambulance company, which surely did nothing wrong. It either had to cough up $100,000 plus legal expenses, or its insurance company did. Who can blame them for not wanting to take the risk that a sympathetic jury would sock it to them in a case of a fallen home-town hero? But no matter who paid its gigantic bill to get dropped from the case, the non-profit organization certainly suffered a setback in its efforts to serve the citizens in and around Kansas City.

Thomas' death is a sad waste of his potential, both as a ball player and as a human. And the greedy struggle to hold someone else responsible for his actions was a similar, sad waste.

It took four and a half years after the accident to get the case concluded.

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TWO OLD LADIES

It was a small town and the patrolman was making his evening rounds. As he was checking a used car lot, he came upon two little old ladies sitting in a used car.

He stopped and asked them why they were sitting there in the car. Were they trying to steal it?

"Heavens no, we bought it."

"Then why don't you drive it away."

"We can't drive."

"Then why did you buy it?" he asked.

"We were told that if we bought a car here we'd get screwed ... so we're just waiting."

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DDL

There was a young fellow of Wick
Who found a red ring round his prick
He got such a shock
That he went to the doc,
Who said it was only lipstick

___________________________

"You know, I really don't think I need buns of steel. I'd be happy with buns of cinnamon."
--Ellen DeGeneres

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"My dad, he's a nuclear physicist, my mom, she's a mathematician, my brother is a chemical engineer--and I like to color."
--Shashi Bhatia

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"The flight attendant will always tell you the name of your pilot. Like anyone goes, 'Oh, he's good. I like his work.'"
--David Spade

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What's the difference between a nice guy and a playboy?

The nice guy likes to give a girl a present, while the playboy would rather give her a past.

***

According to archaeologists, for millions of years Neanderthal man was not fully erect. That's pretty easy to understand considering how ugly Neanderthal woman were.

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Rotten News...  (true)

Thu, Dec 09, 2004

Verona asks Romeos to text their Juliets

By Clara Ferreira-Marques

MILAN (Reuters) - Scribbled love notes cover the walls around the tiny marble balcony where the mythical Juliet is said to have pined for Romeo, but Verona wants amorous visitors to go digital in the interest of preservation.

Authorities in Verona, the northern Italian city home to literature's most famous star-crossed lovers, say thousands of notes, often little more than scrawled notes on candy wrappers stuck with gum, are destroying the 13th century house.

"It is time to clean the building, because people aren't just writing on the walls of entrance arch, they are sticking notes on the walls with gum," said Francesca Tamellini, responsible for tourism at the Verona city council. "It has become really ugly."

Verona plans instead to ask visitors to use their mobile phones, sending text messages to a giant screen.

"It seemed the best solution to us, and it will appeal to young people, who are the first to want to send their messages," Tamellini said, adding the screen could be ready by next summer.

Juliet's house, in reality a former inn, is traditionally held to have been the home of the Capulets, her powerful family. Acquired by the council a century ago, it was officially designated "the house of Juliet" in 1935.

William Shakespeare, whose 16th century play celebrated the two young lovers, probably never visited Verona, but starry-eyed visitors are not discouraged.

Tourists flock by the thousands to see the courtyard, the balcony under which Romeo allegedly proclaimed his love and a languid statue of Juliet, said to bring luck to the lovelorn.

Many of them, keen to leave their mark, scrawl something on scraps of paper or on the wall itself, for posterity.

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Thu, Dec 09, 2004

Parents Go on Strike, Move to Front Yard

By MIKE SCHNEIDER, Associated Press Writer

ENTERPRISE, Fla. - The dishes, garbage and dirty laundry would pile up for days when Cat and Harlan Barnard's teenage children refused to do their chores. So the Barnards went on strike, moving out of their house and into a domed tent set up in their front driveway. The parents refuse to cook, clean or drive for their children — Benjamin, 17, and Kit, 12 — until they shape up.

"We've tried reverse psychology, upside down psychology, spiral psychology and nothing has motivated them for any length of time," said Cat Barnard, 45, as she sat in a lawn chair at an umbrella-covered table.

The strike took Benjamin and Kit by surprise. They came home from school Monday to find their mother outside with handwritten signs that read "Parents on Strike" and "Seeking Cooperation and Respect!"

Cat Barnard, a stay-at-home mom, and her 56-year-old husband, a government social services worker, decided their children needed to learn about empathy and responsibility.

The Barnards unsuccessfully tried smiley-face charts and withholding allowances to get their children to do chores. They even sought help from a psychologist.

The tipping point may have been when Benjamin didn't offer to help his sweating, struggling mother work on the lawn Sunday, even though she should have been recovering from oral surgery.

"I had absolutely no motherly guilt after that," Cat Bernard said.

The Barnards have slept on air mattresses in the tent and have barbecued while their children fended for themselves with frozen TV dinners. The parents only go inside to shower and use the bathroom.

Cat Barnard said she and her husband will keep up the strike until they see some changes.

"If we have to stick it out here until Christmas, then ho, ho, ho, we're out here," she said.

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Emergency operation after school prank

Dave Mark

A 10-year-old boy almost lost a testicle when schoolmates copied a prank they had seen on a cartoon and pulled his trousers up as far as they could go.

Jack Watson had to have an emergency hour-long operation to reattach a testicle to the lining of his scrotum after friends gave him the excruciating "wedgie".

The children involved admitted they copied the move from an episode of The Simpsons.

Now the victim's mother Lisa Watson, 36, said: "We want to highlight this can happen."

Head at Thrunscoe Junior School, Grimsby, Bob Wynn added: "Having seen one of their own come off so badly, I do not think it is not going to be an issue for us anymore."

03 December 2004