Thursday 22 October 2009

Roller skating babies becomes YouTube sensation

A few weeks ago someone sent me a cute video of a bunch of babies rollerskating around New York City’s Central Park. Now it turns out the dancing babies have become a You Tube sensation after more than 11,5 million people watched the video within the last two months. That is almost 200.000 people a day, 8500 people every hour!

"It's one of the cutest things I've ever seen," one YouTube viewer comments. Reviewer Saul Relative says, "You'll find yourself watching this feel good video commercial again and again."
The international advertisement for the French Evian mineral water, featuring roller-skating babies to a remix of the Sugarhill Gang’s song Rapper’s Delight, is one of the biggest hits in the advertisement industry in recent times.

Euro RSCG, responsible for the campaign, launched the web video advertisement early July and the ad has been aired on television in France, Belgium and Canada. According to Evian’s website there are plans to bring the roller-skating babies to the US and UK television screens later this year.

Curious? Check it out on You Tube

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XQcVllWpwGs

Alleged ghost hunt in Toronto ends in death

A Canadion woman fell to her dead when she was hunting ghosts on the roof of a University of Toronto building.
29-year old Leah Kubik was exploring the university building with a friend around 2 am on September 16. She fell to her death after she tried to jump from one section of the building to the next. She missed and made a three-story fall. Although she was taken to a local hospital, she was pronounced dead upon arrival. According to the Toronto Star, the pair had been drinking heavily and when they were walking home they decided to go ‘ghost hunting’. The building was built in 1874 and used by Know College until the university bought the property 37 years ago.

Saturday 17 October 2009

Latest radio 1 item

My latest radio show in Holland, scroll to 1:23 (1 hour and 23 minutes) for my item
http://player.omroep.nl/?aflID=10193103

Thursday 15 October 2009

Woman in coma gives birth to baby boy

A miracle has happened in Germany. For the first time in living memory a woman who had been in a coma for the last 22 weeks of her pregnancy has given birth to a healthy baby.

The 40-year old woman, who fell pregnant before she suffered a heart attack that left her comatose, gave birth to a boy in a German hospital last year. "Given the mother's age and the completely normal state of the child, this case is extraordinary in the scientific world and very pleasing," Matthias Beckmann from the University Clinic in the southern German city of Erlangen said on Wednesday in the British newspaper Metro. The baby is now 18 months old. Beckmann: "We wanted to keep the spectacular case secret for as long as possible to demonstrate that we're not experimenting on people and that the child is still healthy." Less than 25 cases of women who are brain death or in a coma have been known since the 1970s. All of them ended in miscarriages or deformed babies. It is most likely the boy will grow up without a mother though. Doctors have said they have "almost no hope" for the mother. More bad news came for the child when he was placed in a home, after his father decided he was unable to care for him as he had to travel often for his job.

Tuesday 13 October 2009

Driver fined after following GPS to edge of cliff in England

A driver in the United Kingdom has been fined after he followed the directions given by its satellite navigation system, leading him to the edge of a huge cliff drop in Yorkshire, Northern England.

In March 2009 Robert Jones was driving his BMW as he was trying to get home to Doncaster, in South Yorkshire. Since he did not know the route he followed his GPS system. Despite being directed onto a narrow dirt track which can hardly be called a road he continued following the information by his TomTom. Jones became so distracted by his GPS he struck a fence on the edge of a 30 meter cliff. The battery of his phone had died, so he got out and walked to a village nearby for help.

Yesterday, 43-year old Robert Jones represented himself in Calderdale Magistrates Court. He was prosecuted for driving without due care and attention because ‘he followed his TomTom so much it led him up path which was clearly not designed for the use of cars, although he continued to follow the directions of his GPS.’ Mr Jones was fined £370 and got six points on his licence.

Wednesday 7 October 2009

Today is the 57th anniversary of the first patent on the bar code. Inventors Norman Woodland and Bernard Silver filed the patent in October 1949 in the US, and it was granted on October 7, 1952. The original patent was for a system that would encode data in circles (a bulls eye pattern), so that it could be scanned in any direction.

Woman survives being run over by a train

Shocking CCTV images stunned Israel earlier this year, when a 56-year old woman ended up in hospital after attempting to commit suicide by throwing herself in front of a high-speed passenger train, and miraculously survived.

Security camera’s caught the whole incident. You can see on the video that the woman walks onto the train tracks in the Israeli city of Beit Yehoshua as a bystander and possibly a railroad worker watch her lie down. Seconds later, a train passes by and presumably running her over. Howver, after the train passed, the woman got up, brushed herself off, walked back to her car and drove away.

The woman was tracked down by local authorities and brought to a local hospital for treatment. As a miracle, she only suffered minor injuries to her head. She later said to local media she wanted to end her life after losing her job as a travel agent. Watch the video here yourself:

Monday 5 October 2009

A small town in the world's biggest nation

A Chinese group of small people (‘dwarfs’) got so sick and tired of the bullying and teasing they decided to set up their own village.

To escape discrimination from ‘normal sized’ people, the dwarfs in the Kunming area of Southern China decided to move away from their towns and villages to a place where they will all be treated equally. They found themselves a mountain area and turned it into a tourist attraction by building mushroom houses and living and dressing like fairy tale characters. There are now approximately 120 residents and they have banned anyone who is taller than 4’ft 3’’. They set up their own police and fire service. The only question which remains is why would people move away from society for being cruel to them and then ultimately invite them up to view them as a tourist attraction?