HAPPY FRIDAY AFTERNOON!

Happy Friday Afternoon! What an unusual day at work today. It looks like it's gonna be a long weekend.....

Here are some things on the old webnet I saw in between the weirdness..

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Sarah McLachlan has announced that she will release her first album in seven years, "The Laws of Illusion," on June 15

A lesbian high school student embroiled in a legal flap over her school's prom policy has received a $30,000 scholarship on "The Ellen DeGeneres Show.

Not satisfied with living in Florida, Jonathon "The Impaler" Sharkey wants to move to Washington, D.C. to become the nation's first vampire president. Sharkey, 45, spent Friday on a Greyhound bus with his new fiancee, Audrianna Foster, a 19-year-old girl from Ohio he met online. She too believes she is a vampire, or vampyre. "I haven't dated a girl older than 19 since 2006," said the Tampa man as his 19-year-old daughter and his 2-year-old grandson met him at the Greyhound station. "It's good to be me." "The Impaler" claims he's a direct descendant of Vlad II the Impaler, better known as Dracula. He was scheduled Monday to announce his plans to file paperwork to run for President of the United States in 2012. He recently switched his party affiliation from Independent to Republican so he can run with the G.O.P. He ran for Governor of Minnesota in 2006 and also had short-lived bids for U.S. Senate in 2000, U.S. President in 2004, and U.S. President in 2008.
Read more at http://www.wltx.com/news/story.aspx?storyid=85106&catid=35

From the AP - A jury has awarded a North Carolina woman $9 million from her husband's lover after ruling the other woman ruined their marriage. The News & Record of Greensboro reports the jury ruled this week in 60-year-old Cynthia Shackelford's alienation of affection case. North Carolina is one of a handful of states that allows jilted spouses to sue over affairs. Shackelford says her husband was a Greensboro attorney when he started an affair with Anne Lundquist before separating from his wife in April 2005. Lundquist didn't respond to a message left by the newspaper. Shackelford's lawyer says she might not get the full $9 million, but Shackelford wanted to send a message that the sanctity of marriage should be respected.

Computer data from a Toyota Prius that crashed in suburban New York City show that at the time of the accident the throttle was open and the driver was not applying the brakes, U.S. safety officials said Thursday. The disclosure prompted an angry response from the police captain investigating the cause of the accident. He said his probe was not over and driver error had not been established. "For any agency to release data and to draw conclusions without consulting with the law enforcement agency that brought this to light could be self-serving," said Capt. Anthony Marraccini of the Harrison, N.Y., force.

ANOTHER shocking study reveals that part of happiness is making more money that the next guy. Study researcher Christopher Boyce in the Department of Psychology at the University of Warwick in England says one key to happiness might be whether you make more than your peers, regardless of whether that income is six figures or just a mediocre take-home, a new study finds.

Two women in Phoenix are in critical condition with hundreds of bee stings after a swarm attacked them while they were out for an evening walk. A witness tells KTVK-TV she heard screaming and saw the women lying in the street covered in bees from head to toe. A man jumped in to help and was also stung. All three were hospitalized, and the two women first attacked are in critical condition. Phoenix firefighters searched for the hive and eventually found it and took it down

A majority of Americans are willing to accept cuts in mail delivery days to preserve the U.S. Postal Service, a USA TODAY/Gallup Poll found. Yet older people, who use the mail most often, are more willing than younger Americans to reduce mail service from six days to five. The Postal Service plans to seek approval from the Postal Regulatory Commission and the Congress to stop mail delivery on Saturdays. Federal law requires the Postal Service to deliver mail six days a week to every U.S. household.

South Carolina Attorney General Henry McMaster says he and Florida Attorney General Bill McCollum are ready to file a federal lawsuit if health care reform legislation passes. The U.S. House plans to vote on the plan Sunday. McMaster said Friday that he expects attorneys general to join the lawsuit. He and other GOP counterparts have denounced the legislation. McMaster says he wants to challenge an exemption that would keep Nebraska from paying for Medicaid costs. He says even if that provision is dropped, he will sue over the requirement for everyone to buy health insurance. McMaster says both provisions violate state sovereignty. Both McMaster and McCollum are running for the Republican gubernatorial nomination in their states.

A federal appeals court says Anna Nicole Smith's estate will receive none of the more than $300 million that she claimed her late billionaire husband had promised her. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals is the latest stop in the 15-year legal battle over the $1.6 billion estate that oil magnate J. Howard Marshall left after his 1995 death at age 90. Smith had married Marshall the previous year.

The Dutch prime minister Friday denounced as "irresponsible" a claim by a retired U.S. general that gay Dutch soldiers were partly to blame for allowing Europe's worst massacre since World War II.

and finally, From the SHOCKING! NO! REALLY?!?!?! File - Being around a pretty woman can make men take more risks, a new study finds. Researchers looked at the risk-taking behaviors of 96 young adult men, with an average age of nearly 22, by asking them to do both easy and difficult tricks on skateboards. First, the young men performed the tricks in front of another man, then in front of a young, attractive female. (The attractiveness of the woman was independently assessed by 20 male raters.) The testosterone levels of the skateboarders were measured after each trick. Testosterone is a male sex hormone that fuels sexual interest, arousal and activity, and is also associated with increased competition and risk-taking. When skateboarders attempt tricks, they make a split-second decision about whether to abort the trick or try to land it, based on a mid-air evaluation of the likelihood of success and on the physical costs that failure might bring - such as falling flat on their face. It was that moment the researchers sought to examine, because it resembles the type of risky decisions that young men make when behind the steering wheel of a car or when in physical confrontations with each other. As a group, young males are at the highest risk of early death of any group in industrialized countries in part because they are the biggest risk-takers. As the researchers expected, the skateboarders took greater risks in the presence of the attractive female, even when they knew there was a greater chance they could crash. Along with this increased risk-taking, the young men had higher testosterone levels when they performed in front of the female than when they did their jumps in front of another guy. "This experiment provides evidence for an effect that has existed in art, mythology, and literature for thousands of years: Beautiful women lead men to throw caution to the wind," wrote the authors of the study, Richard Ronay and William von Hippel, of the University of Queensland in Australia. "These findings suggest that, for men, the adaptive benefits gained by enticing mates and intimidating rivals may have resulted in evolved hormonal and neurological mechanisms that facilitated greater risk-taking in the presence of attractive women," they added.

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have a great weekend! Email me- subscribe- comment
John