Saturday Morning Videos - Racing Is Dangerous

The Macau Grand Prix has has two deaths on it's course in as many days as organizers defended the safety of the street circuit.

On Thursday, Portuguese motorcycle rider Luis Filipe de Sousa Carreira was killed during qualifying...this amateur video was in the exact right place for the crash, which I have to warn the squeamish among you is pretty intense.

And this YouTube video about the death, is, well...clearly from another country.  On Friday, Hong Kong driver Phillip Yau Wing-choi crashed at the Mandarin Bend.

Organizers said Yau was an experienced Macau competitor who had won two races at the track, and Carreira was competing for the seventh time in the bike race.  Motorsport is awesome, but it is not without it's dangers.

Tombstone Rodeo

It was a busy last few days for being dead, and I'm not just talking about the 3rd season premiere of The Walking Dead...

There were many passings this weekend that made news, from old television hosts and older politicos, to aspiring athletes and foolish ones, but two stood out to me.  The first was Jose Melena, an employee of Bumble Bee Foods, who died in the most spectacular of ways via industrial accident.  Cal-OSHA had the pleasure of investigating how Melena ended up cooked in an oven, described by the coroner's documents as a "giant murder boiler" "steamer machine".   But fear not fish feeders, the plant will be back open today, so you'll have no break in production or food shortage.  Just make sure you get the cans where they were packed in spring water.

The other death was not as remarkable, but no less satisfying to me. Police said 19-year-old man tagging a three-story building in the Westlake district here in Los Angeles fell to the ground, and was declared brain dead, though I would argue he was brain dead long before that. The incident occurred around 2:30 am, when only good things happen, when the unidentified victim attempted climbing a tree to reach the building in the intersection of Beverly Boulevard and Union Place.  To think, if he had only put that much effort into getting an education and raising his IQ!  He was taken to a hospital, where he later died, and none too soon.  Why so happy about this?  I hate taggers - they have no value in society.  

Corkscrewed

Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow

Spacediving

You can't call it skydiving if you're beyond the sky...

BASE jumper Felix Baumgartner plans to jump from beyond 23 miles high this summer in the name of science (and energy drinks).  This past March, Baumgartner made a test jump from 71,581 feet above Earth, from a small capsule attached to balloon the size of a 16-story building. The Austrian was in freefall for three and a half minutes and reached a top speed of 364 mph before engaging his chute and gliding to the ground near Roswell, New Mexico.  He'll test 90,000 feet this summer, and finally from more than 120,000 feet.

Baumgartner and his team say the primary aim is to advance the science of survival at extreme altitude, not just to break records or publicize Red Bull (but don't let the sponsors hear that).  At points during his descent, Baumgartner will experience temperatures as low as -148 degrees Fahrenheit, and  clock in at 690 mph, potentially breaking the sound barrier.  A small, stabilizing drogue chute will protect him from a deadly flat spin, and his special suit will protect him from the sudden decompression of being in a vacuum.

Only two others have successfully made the jump above 70,000 feet, and the current record is 102,800 feet.  We'll be following up once they give it a shot...either way it will turn out very interesting.

The Real Hot Wheels Double Loop

Never Come Between A Man And His Team

In the early morning of April 23, 2010, Robert Abrams was watching the Pittsburgh Penguins' triple-overtime playoff against the Ottawa Senators, when his wife, Jeannette, started arguing with him about finding time to watch hockey but not to find a job. The end result? Abrams killed her. The other result? The Penguins lost.

Abrams had confessed to police at the time to beating his wife in the head with a hammer and stabbing her, and then setting the house on fire with the intent of killing himself. He changed his mind and later escaped through a bathroom window. An Allegheny County, PA jury heard testimony on this case on Monday, and returned a verdict of guilty of first-degree murder, arson and recklessly endangering another person by the following day.  He faces a mandatory sentence of life in prison without parole when he is sentenced.

Damn, that's taking hockey too seriously.

Tron Mountain

Playoff Hockey, Suspension Edition (aka The Shanabans, so far...)

Raffi Torres - 25 games (check out his rap sheet of dirty hits and suspensions)

Aaron Asham - 4 games

Carl Hagelan - 3 games

Andrew Shaw - 3 games

Byron Bitz - 2 games

Matt Carkner - 1 game

James Neal - 1 game

Nicklas Backstrom - 1 game

BONUS:

WTF...no call?

  Damn right that's a clean hit!

Semper Badass

Marines from Camp Pendleton (by San Diego) are currently in Thailand for Cobra Gold, which is not a topless club, but a training exercise with military personnel from Thailand and five other regional countries.

The 1st Battalion, 4th Marine Regiment are taking part in the annual exercise with the Japan-based 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit. The training covers amphibious assault, humanitarian relief, evacuation of friendly forces and jungle survival, which includes learning to eat insects and to drink the blood from cobras.  Let me repeat that last part: Jungle survival, which includes learning to eat insects and to drink the blood from cobras.

These colors don't run because snake mana flows in our soldier's veins.  Damn.

We Must All Support Local Business

The Brinicle

Parallax, Or When Portals Become Monochromatic

How I Start All My Mondays

If Ned Stark Dying Was Too Much For You, This Will Really Set You Over The Edge

How About A Bit Of The Old Ultraviolence

It makes GTA look like a PDA (and minors can enjoy it too thanks to the Supreme Court!).

Attack Of The Bagelheads

So, the newest stupid thing on Planet Japan is making yourself look like you have a disfigured, tumor sodden face. Sorry if you thought the header was a Zionist reference or something...

In Tokyo, "freaks for the night" drip saline into their foreheads for two hours while they depress the center. Their bodies absorb it over time so by the next morning it goes back to normal. Extreme body modification photographer Ryoichi “Keroppy” Maeda said that "everyone I know who has done it, no matter how many times, their skin has gone back to exactly how it was before."

Wow, I guess it's finally come to this for the "trying too hard" crowd...

True Rapture

(here's background on the film , plus a clip of the sequel below)

Street Release

Snow Dogs II: Blood Reckoning

I was saddened to hear that 100 dogs were killed in a 48 hour-long slaughter after a post-Olympics boon in dogsledding business never materialized. Normally, when I hear "violence" and "snow dogs", I imagine Cuba Gooding Jr. getting severely beaten as karmic payback...this was a disappointment.

The gruesome event was chronicled in documents for a worker seeking compensation for post-traumatic stress disorder, after having to shoot the dogs, and in some cases, slit their throats with a knife and chase down wounded animals that were trying to flee. Bookings dropped sharply for the adventure tour operator following the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics. Both the British Columbia SPCA and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police are investigating the slaughter.

The name of the man who killed the dogs has not been released, but his lawyer said that it was "the worst experience (the man) could ever have imagined." He was awarded compensation in a ruling by WorkSafe BC, the provincial body that manages workers' compensation claims. Outdoor Adventures, his employer, did not contest the man's compensation claims, but also made the standard press statement: "While we were aware of the relocation and euthanization of dogs at Howling Dog Tours, we were completely unaware of the details of the incident until reading the document."

Outdoor Adventures took over control of Howling Dogs last May, and noted it is now company policy that animals needing to be euthanized are treated at a veterinarian's office. Rich Bittner, the operator of Howling Dogs in Alberta (that a different providence - it's like a state, you ignorant Americans), said he sold his 50% interest in the Whistler operation in 2004 to a man named Bob Fawcett. He said the Whistler tour operator was supposed to change the name because Howling Dogs was no longer involved. Adding a twist to the story is an online site offering support to people suffering post-traumatic stress disorder includes several postings made under the name of Bob Fawcett, though it could not be immediately determined if these postings are from the same person.

Outdoor Adventures said they had a financial stake in Howling Dogs, but operational control of Howling Dogs was with the worker referred to in the workers comp documents. When the company could not find homes for its animals, it ordered the cull. "He was essentially told to figure out a way to make (the business) more cost-effective. They just had to have less dogs. So he did everything he could finding homes for them, having them adopted, every which way that he could," the man's attorney said. Several operators said they routinely adopt dogs from other companies, but were not asked to take any from Whistler in early 2010.

Obviously, it's hard to tell who ordered the slaughter and where the mysterious Bob Fawcett fits in - as owner, worker, both, or neither. But if there's one thing we can take away from this, it's that Cuba Gooding Jr. is a crap actor and that Snow Dogs is garbage.