Personal & Culture
Homeless man wins $50,000 from lotto
Dennis Mahurin. (CINewsNow) Dennis Mahurin has been homeless since 1978, living in a tent and happy about it. He recently won $50,000 from an instant win scratch off lottery but says he doesn’t want to change his lifestyle. Instead of “hording” all the money for himself, he wants to continue being homeless and share his good fortune with other homeless friends. He wants to spread most of his winnings ($35,000 after taxes) in chunks of $100 with his friends.
Piracy is good for Game of Thrones
The media has been vehemently against piracy claiming it is the biggest evil to afflict humanity in the last 100 years. Imagine my surprise when industry heavyweight HBO comes out and says that piracy isn’t as bad as others are making it out. HBO’s biggest money maker is Game of Thrones and estimates peg that each show is downloaded (illegally) 4 million times. Michael Lombardo, HBO’s programming president, says piracy “compliments” the show. Season 2 was a record setting release selling 241,000 units (44% more than season 1).
Tweeting from the grave will soon be possible
Twitter is one of those services that users love and the general public just doesn’t understand. Now a startup will enable you to tweet from the grave. The LivesOn service is being developed by a British ad agency called Lean Mean Fighting Machine. They setup a new twitter account with your existing twitter handle and add a “_liveson” at the end. For my twitter handle is ekiledjian and my LivesOn ID would be ekiledjian_livesone. The system is in closed limited beta and is still in active development but the company claims it will learn about the user (while alive of course) by studying tweet patterns, writing style, preferred content, re-tweet strategy ,etc.
Does Daylight Saving Time reduce energy consumption
We switched to Daylight Saving Time (Summer Time in Europe) this past weekend and most of us are still groggy and missing that 1 extra hour of sleep. DST was first proposed by George Vernon Hudson and implemented during WWI. It was thought that by shifting people’s awake time by one hour, there would be more light in the evening this reducing the need for artificial light (aka reduce usage of electricity in the evening). Many have wondered if there is really any benefit to this sleep-reducing tradition and recent information says no.
Lonely people get more virus'
There are lots of reasons why being lonely is bad for you. Now we can also add weakened imune system to the list of effects. the interesting study was presented January 19 at the Society for Personality and Social Psychology. It shouls what people who are lonely seem to be more impacted by viruses and are more likely to produce inflammatory componds when stressed.
She drove 900 extra miles because the GPS told her to
The internet is littered with horror stories about people doing wacky things because of a GPS. Why not add another story to the mix? A 90 mile journey turned into a multi-day 900 mile excursion. How can this happen you ask? Because the GPS told her to do it. A 67 year old woman wanted to pick up a friend from a train station 90 miles away (both starting and ending point are in Belgium). Instead of taking her to Brussels, the GPS directed her to Zagreb (Croatia).
One Pound Fish - The newest internet music sensation
We all know Gangdman Style but have you heard about the newest sensation, the One Pound Fish song? The singer is a 31 year old Pakistani fishmonger from London's Upton Park area. Before this became a famous music video and itunes downloadable song, it was a catch song Nazir use to sing to attract customers for his fish. The 1 pound refers to British money not the weight. Nazir left Pakistan about a year ago (for the UK) and became an unusual music sensation.
Happy holidays
I wanted to take a minute and wish you all a merry christmas and a happy new year. More posts coming soon. Ed
Gangdam Style + MC Hammer = good entertainment
I saw this and wanted to share a new spin on Gangdam style