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I think I went from tears, to whiplash, to a ruptured spleen.

Metallica Shreds:

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And for those who don’t realize this is a parody, here’s the real thing. Metallica’s 1988 classic, “One”:

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As an aside,

This video, from the sophisticated album “…And Justice For All”, married the song’s dark story with footage from the 1971 film “Johnny Got His Gun”. As the reigning ambassadors of all things against the grain of mainstream garbage, Metallica was my favorite band of the eighties. They were all about doing their own thing, our thing, ignoring the rules of commercialism, and instead were an honest band that actually, um, focused on the music when the industry was dominated by the likes of shiny happy bands like Poison, Winger, and White Lion. With that integrity, Metallica had never done a video before, and it’s one of the facets that made them so special.

The band did a commercial one-eighty after Justice, and I can’t help but wonder where they would’ve taken things musically had they stayed on track. I loved the “One” video at the time, considering it a cool experiment, and thought it’d likely be their first and last nod to pop sensibilities. But, sadly, they got hooked on everything that came with it, and things went downhill from there. It was time for our relationship to end, at least for a while, and I decided to see other people.

Then came Dime

The longest one-syllable word in the English language is “screeched.”

“Dreamt” is the only English word that ends in the letters “mt”.

Almonds are members of the peach family.

The symbol on the “pound” key (#) is called an octothorpe.

The dot over the letter ‘i’ is called a tittle.

Ingrown toenails are hereditary.

The word “set” has more definitions than any other word in the English language.

“Underground” is the only word in the English language that begins and ends with the letters “und.”

There are only four words in the English language which end in”-dous” tremendous, horrendous, stupendous, and hazardous.

The longest word in the English language, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis. The only other word with the same amount of letters is pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconioses, its plural.

The longest place-name still in use is Taumatawhakatangihangakoauauotamateaturipukakapikimaungahoronuku-
pokaiwenuakitanatahu, a New Zealand hill.

Los Angeles’s full name is “El Pueblo de Nuestra Senora la Reina de los Angeles de Porciuncula” and can be abbreviated to 3.63% of its size, “L.A.”

A cat has 32 muscles in each ear.

An ostrich’s eye is bigger than its brain.

Tigers have striped skin, not just striped fur.

In most advertisments, including newspapers, the time displayed on a watch is 10:10.

Alfred Hitchcock didn’t have a belly button. It was eliminated when he was sewn up after surgery.

Telly Savalas and Louis Armstrong died on their birthdays.

Donald Duck’s middle name is Fauntleroy.

Al Capone’s business card said he was a used furniture dealer.

The muzzle of a lion is like a fingerprint – no two lions have the same pattern of whiskers.

Steely Dan got their name from a sexual device depicted in the book ‘The Naked Lunch’.

A pregnant goldfish is called a twit.

The Ramses brand condom is named after the great phaoroh Ramses II who fathered over 160 children.

There is a seven letter word in the English language that contains ten words without rearranging any of its letters, “therein” the, there, he, in, rein, her, here, ere, therein, herein.

Dueling is legal in Paraguay as long as both parties are registered blood donors.

John Larroquette of “Night Court” and “The John Larroquette Show” was the narrator of “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.”

The characters Bert and Ernie on Sesame Street were named after Bert the cop and Ernie the taxi driver in Frank Capra’s “Its A Wonderful Life”

A goldfish has a memory span of three seconds.

It’s impossible to sneeze with your eyes open.

It was discovered on a space mission that a frog can throw up. The frog throws up its stomach first, so the stomach is dangling out of it’s mouth.Then the frog uses its forearms to dig out all of the stomach’s contents and then swallows the stomach back down again.

Cranberries are sorted for ripeness by bouncing them; a fully ripened cranberry can be dribbled like a basketball.

The male gypsy moth can “smell” the virgin female gypsy moth from 1.8 miles away.

The letters KGB stand for Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti.

The name for Oz in the “Wizard of Oz” was thought up when the creator, Frank Baum, looked at his filing cabinet and saw A-N, and O-Z, hence “Oz.”

The microwave was invented after a researcher walked by a radar tube and a chocolate bar melted in his pocket.

‘Stewardesses’ is the longest word that is typed with only the left hand.

To “testify” was based on men in the Roman court swearing to a statement made by swearing on their testicles.

The combination “ough” can be pronounced in nine different ways. The following sentence contains them all: “A rough-coated, dough-faced, thoughtful ploughman strode through the streets of Scarborough; after falling into a slough, he coughed and hiccoughed.”

The only 15 letter word that can be spelled without repeating a letter is uncopyrightable.

Facetious and abstemious contain all the vowels in the correct order, as does arsenious, meaning “containing arsenic.”

Emus and kangaroos cannot walk backwards, and are on the Australian coat of arms for that reason.

Cats have over one hundred vocal sounds, while dogs only have about ten.

The word “Checkmate” in chess comes from the Persian phrase “Shah Mat,” which means “the king is dead”.

The reason firehouses have circular stairways is from the days of lore when the engines were pulled by horses.The horses were stabled on the ground floor and figured out how to walk up straight staircases.

Somehow I find these indie perspectives so much more informative than the mainstream sensationalism you catch on the evening news. Lose the noise. Just tell me what’s going on. This one takes you there, quietly and effectively.

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“I believe that if it were left to artists to choose their own labels, most would choose none.”
–Ben Shahn

When adding -ing and -ed to verbs, we sometimes double the consonant beforehand. People are often confused with ‘travelled/traveled’, ‘benefitted/benefited’, ‘focussed/focused’ and ‘targetted/targeted’. This tip answers some of those queries.

The official requirements are that we ‘double a single consonant letter at the end of any base where the preceding vowel is spelled with a single letter and stressed’.

What does this mean in practice?

Source: FuturePerfect

My surrogate Uncle Jon Lane and his wife Itze have an incredible story from these San Diego fires. They’ve got a spread at the foot of the heavily torched San Miguel Mountain. Firefighters saved their house yesterday, and their story is featured on the Voice of San Diego.

I dare you not to smile.

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nasa photos of fires

NASA satellites have obtained new images of the California wildfires, illustrating the immense scale of the blazes. The National Interagency Fire Center reports that 12 large, uncontained fires have burned over 335,000 acres in Southern California. The fires have continued to spread due to the fierce, dry Santa Ana winds.

These new NASA satellite images of the wildfires show the area between Los Angeles and San Diego, California. Fire activity is denoted with red pixels. Vast plumes of thick smoke can be seen blowing out over the Pacific Ocean.

The first image was captured by NASA’s Terra satellite at 2:25 p.m. EST on October 23, 2007. The second image was acquired by NASA’s Aqua satellite at 5:40 p.m. EST, just over three hours later.

According to the National Weather Service, a red-flag warning for extreme gusty winds is in effect for the Southern California area through 6:00 p.m. EST today. However, by Thursday, October 25th, the Santa Ana winds that have fueled the blazes should die out.

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Source: nasa.gov

sunrise October 24th 2007

There’s that redder-than-ever sun rising up from the ashes, taken from Battery Farley at Fort MacArthur. Looks an awful lot like the poster from Apocalypse Now, doesn’t it? What’s not clear in this shot is the silhouette of Cleveland National Forest’s mountains separating the beach cities from the inland areas of Orange and San Diego counties. Beyond those mountains, it’s estimated that one million people have been displaced from their homes. =view large image=

girl on roof fighting wildfires

horse in Del Mar, fires 2007