Target Centermass

Category: WTF?!!

  • Thatcher Pops into Lap-Dance Club

    The Iron Lady goes to a stripper club?

    Margaret Thatcher, the former British prime minister, has made a rare public appearance for her beloved Conservative Party — at a glitzy London lap-dancing club.

    Thatcher, 79, toting her trademark handbag, turned up Sunday at Stringfellow’s for a Tory fund-raising event ahead of the May 5 general election, the Daily Telegraph and the Sun newspapers reported Tuesday.

    “Margaret Thatcher has always been a heroine of mine, so I was genuinely humbled to welcome her to the club,” said mulleted clubowner Peter Stringfellow, 64, who is usually surrounded by buxom blonde twentysomethings.

    “I was just in awe of the woman.”

    Thatcher, known as the Iron Lady for her uncompromising right-wing politics when she was prime minister throughout the 1980s, rarely makes public appearances due to her failing health.

    Some 400 Conservative supporters turned up for Sunday’s function, but it was unclear what Stringfellow’s posse of dancers did.

    The Sun quoted the impresario as saying “all the girls kept their clothes on,” while the Daily Telegraph said he gave them the night off — although he added: “I got the distinct feeling she’d have loved to have seen them”.

    I have no idea what to make of this. However, as a longtime supporter of the glory that was the Reagan Revolution, I may have found it strangely erotic to watch Maggie tuck a bill into a grinding g-string.

    Shudder.

    Then again, probably not.

  • Michael Jackson’s Hospital?

    I had planned on signing off for the night, but stumbled onto this incredible graphic (hat tip to Joe Gandelman at Dean’s World).

    Did everybody involved really not see the problem?! Apparently, somebody finally saw the light, as it seems to have been yanked. Still, follow the link for a good chuckle.

  • Colombians Find Drug-Smuggling Sub

    You’ve got to hand it to the supply side of the drug trade — it certainly is resourceful.

    Authorities discovered a submarine-like vessel Friday still under construction by drug traffickers who planned to use it to smuggle cocaine, the head of Colombia’s secret police said.

    Eduardo Fernandez said the fiberglass submarine was nearly complete when police found it near the Pacific Ocean, in Tumaco, 370 miles southwest of Bogota.

    “The ingenuity of drug traffickers is amazing,” Fernandez told The Associated Press.

    He said the vessel would have been used to carry cocaine to speed boats offshore, which would then take the drugs to Central America or Mexico, for eventual delivery to the United States.

    The discovery came after authorities were tipped off to pieces of fiberglass and other construction material being transported to where the submarine was being built.

    Fernandez didn’t provide details of its size. But Colombian authorities have caught drug traffickers using subs on a few occasions. They have been small, fiberglass vessels that travel just below the surface. But in 2000, police on a raid of a warehouse near Bogota were stunned to find a 100-foot-long steel submarine being built to transport up to 150 tons of cocaine.

    Sure, the spice must flow, but I didn’t expect it to flow ‘neath the waves.

  • Rabin’s Killer Denied Conjugal Visits

    Sometimes, being an assassin is hard.

    The Israeli Supreme Court on Monday rejected a request by Yitzhak Rabin’s assassin to have conjugal visits with the woman he says he married by proxy.

    Yigal Amir, who is serving a life term for the Nov. 4, 1995, killing of the prime minister, had sought permission to have conjugal visits with Larisa Trimbobler.

    In its ruling, which upheld a lower court decision, the Supreme Court said that Amir has not abandoned his violent aims, has shown no remorse and has become a role model for extremists. It also said it would be difficult to supervise such visits.

    Trimbobler and Amir, both Orthodox Jews, insist they were married secretly over the phone by a rabbi last year. But rabbis and the Israel Prisons Service dispute the claim, saying the wedding was not valid under Jewish law because Amir was not joined by two witnesses.

    Prison officials have barred him from consummating the marriage with Trimbobler, a divorced mother of four who fell in love with Amir while he was in prison.

    “This entire affair is an example of sadistic maltreatment of us. They can kill us but they can’t separate us,” Trimbobler told Army Radio.

    Amir, an ultranationalist Jew, said he killed Rabin to stop the handover of land in Israeli-Palestinian peace deals and has shown no regret. The assassination was a major blow to peace efforts.

    Israeli authorities have grown increasingly concerned about extremists as the government prepares to pull out of the Gaza Strip and four West Bank settlements this summer.

    Although a rare occurrence, killers who experience an erection for more than four hours should seek immediate medical attention.

  • Court: Man Can Sue Over Surprise Pregnancy

    Okay, one more quickie post, rather appropriate for this story.

    A man who says his former lover deceived him by getting pregnant using semen obtained through oral sex can sue for emotional distress but not theft, an appeals court has ruled.

    Dr. Richard O. Phillips accuses Dr. Sharon Irons of a “calculated, profound personal betrayal” six years ago, but she says they had the baby through sexual intercourse.

    The Illinois Appeals Court said Wednesday that Phillips can press a claim for emotional distress after learning Irons had used his sperm to have a baby, but agreed that however the baby was conceived, Irons didn’t steal the sperm.

    “She asserts that when plaintiff ‘delivered’ his sperm, it was a gift,” the decision said. “There was no agreement that the original deposit would be returned upon request.”

    […]

    Phillips, a Chicago family doctor, alleges that he and Irons never had intercourse during their four-month tryst, although they had oral sex three times. His suit contends that Irons without his knowledge kept some of his semen.

    The relationship ended, the suit said, when Phillips learned Irons had lied to him about being recently divorced and was still married to another doctor.

    Quite an interesting case of he said, she said. I’m keeping my mouth shut on this one, which is again appropriate to this story.

  • Speaker Tells Students Stripping Can Be Lucrative

    Astoundingly dumb move.

    School officials in Palo Alto are reconsidering their use of a popular speaker for an annual career day after he advised middle school students that they could earn a good living as strip dancers.

    William Fried told eighth-graders at Jane Lathrop Stanford Middle School that stripping and exotic dancing could be lucrative career moves for girls, offering as much as $250,000 or more per year, depending on their bust size.

    “It’s sick, but it’s true,” Fried, president of Foster City’s Precision Selling, a management consulting firm, told The Associated Press. “The truth of the matter is you can earn a tremendous amount of money as an exotic dancer, if that’s your desire.”

    Well, Mr. Fried, you’ve gone that far. Anything you want to add that can make it worse?

    Fried spent about a minute answering questions, defining strippers and exotic dancers synonymously. He told students, “For every two inches up there, you should get another $50,000 on your salary,” student Jason Garcia, 14, said.

    Well, yes, I guess there was something.

  • Taxi Driver Shoots Man in bin Laden Mask

    People just freaking amaze me.

    Osama bin Laden take note: You wouldn’t be safe in Costa Rica. A startled taxi driver shot and wounded a jokester wearing a plastic mask of the al-Qaida leader, police said Tuesday.

    Leonel Arias, 47, told police he was playing a practical joke by donning the bin Laden mask, toting his pellet rifle and jumping out to scare drivers on a narrow street in his hometown, Carrizal de Alajuela, about 20 miles north of San Jose.

    Arias had startled several drivers that way on Monday afternoon. But when he jumped out in front of taxi driver Juan Pablo Sandoval, the motorist reached for a gun and shot him twice in the stomach. He was hospitalized in stable condition.

    “For me and I think for anybody else at a time like that one thinks the worst and so I fired my gun,” Sandoval told Channel 7 television.

    Police declined to detain Sandoval, saying he had believed he was acting in self-defense.

    Arias is lucky to be alive after this stupidity. Unfortunately, the human gene pool is not so lucky.

  • Supreme Court: No Protection For Officer’s Sex Video

    My shock at this is that the damned thing ever reached the highest echelon of our legal system.

    The Supreme Court is backing a decision to fire a San Diego police officer who sold sexually explicit videotapes of himself, in and out of uniform.

    The unanimous opinion reversed an appeals court ruling in favor of the officer, who claimed his free speech rights had been violated.

    The officer was fired three years ago after a supervisor discovered the sex videos on eBay. The tapes showed the uniformed officer stripping off his clothes and performing a sex act.

    The supervisor charged the officer with violating department policies on unbecoming conduct and ordered a halt to the video sales.

    The officer complied but was fired after police officials found that his Internet profile on eBay still mentioned the striptease videos.

    The officer argued that the sex videos were made while he was off-duty and that they made no mention of his employment.

    Not even the libertarian side of me can find any support for this jackhole. As a silver lining for this idiot, he can now get back into the home entertainment business.

  • Paper Birds of Peace Fly to Appease Thai Muslims

    Origami? Ori-freaking-gami?!!

    Suffice it to say, “paper for peace” will not surpass “land for peace” in effectiveness.

    More than 50 military aircraft dropped 120 million origami birds over southern Thailand yesterday in a gesture of peace towards three largely Muslim provinces where 540 people have died in violent clashes this year.

    The extraordinary idea was proposed by Thaksin Shinawatra, the Prime Minister of Thailand, who has been criticised for using force rather than negotiation to counter Islamic unrest in the south of his predominantly Buddhist country.

    It was the biggest paper drop in the region since the Allies had to convince thousands of Japanese troops that the Second World War had ended.

    But the paper-bird exercise failed to quell the unrest. A retired prosecutor was shot dead at his shrimp farm in one of the rebellious provinces. The Pattani United Liberation Organisation, an outlawed group, said: “Even if you used 500 baht (£7) banknotes to fold 100 million birds . . . it would not stop the suffering of those who have been severely oppressed.”

    Air force planes trailing coloured smoke started dropping the origami cranes at 9.09am yesterday: nine is regarded as a lucky number in Thailand.

    The birds had been folded by volunteers including cabinet ministers and convicts during the past two weeks, and were dropped on the 77th birthday of Thailand’s revered King Bumiphol Adulyadej, the world’s longest-serving monarch. One signed by the Prime Minister offered an educational scholarship or job to whoever found it. Others offered rewards in an apparent attempt to prevent a problem with litter — 50,000 birds secured a bicycle, 10,000 a table fan, and 250 a bag of sugar.

    Children in the provinces of Narathiwat, Yala and Pattani rushed out eagerly to greet the falling birds, but the air drop was regarded by many Islamic leaders as propaganda and received a lukewarm reception. Moreover, many of the birds carried the inscription “No separatism for south Thailand.”

    “The majority of people in the south do not see any significance in origami cranes,” Abdulraman Abdulsamad, chairman of the Islamic Council of Narathiwat, said. “The idea is not totally bad. At least we could remind ourselves that violence is not a good thing. But the people need more than paper gestures.”

    The birds also came with a warning from Mr Thaksin. At a press conference the day before the drop he said that he would try to win back the south with “love and warmth,” but added: “If they don’t stop we’re justified to do what’s required to sustain unity.”

    The three restive provinces have been part of Thailand for just over 100 years. An insurgency that has rumbled on there for decades flared in January.

    The idea of using an origami crane as a peace symbol originated in Japan after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima.

    In what is obviously a clash of vastly different cultures, any hope vested in this maneuver shows a lack of understanding of the Islamic opposition that would make Neville Chamberlain cringe.

  • Dad’s Drinking Crackdown Backfires

    Oh, I just love these sweet Thanksgiving-with-the-family type stories.

    A father’s attempt to teach his daughter a lesson about drinking backfired when the teen led officers to a stash of drugs and weapons inside their New Jersey home, US police said.

    Kevin Winston, 46, called police in the early hours after his 16-year-old daughter came home drunk and unruly.

    When police arrived, however, the girl allegedly told them she feared for her safety because her father stored drugs and weapons in the home.

    The girl led officers to a crawl space above the ceiling where they found four semi-automatic guns and more than 600 vials of cocaine, a spokesman said.

    Mr Winston was charged with numerous weapons and drug charges. His five daughters were placed in the custody of a relative.

    “He called us on her and ended up getting locked up himself,” said Newark Police Director Anthony Ambrose.

    If one is in possession of illegal weapons and drugs, I think a generally good rule of thumb is don’t ever call the cops, even when one’s little brat is three sheets to the wind. Ah, Turkey Day, Jersey-style.