(no subject)

Well, the Pistons tortured the Lakers a little bit. But then they let them go.

(no subject)

I watched Monster last night. I have to say that I rarely (if ever) saw the main character as Theron; she was very convincing. In fact, her performance made Ricci's pale by comparison. They didn't even feel like they were in the same movie.

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koyaanisqatsi in wordoftheday says, "A word that is its own antonym is called an antagonym or a contranym. q.v. http://rec-puzzles.org/new/sol.pl/language/english/meaning/synonyms/contranym ."

Neat.

(no subject)

So there's a tornado coming our way, within the next ten minutes.

It's relatively calm right now. The sun is still out and shining. It's very muggy out. One side of the sky is peachy. The other is becoming rather ominous.

Okay, now the clouds are coming in.

Edit: Well, that was a disappointment. C'mon, Michigan! Is this the best you can throw at us?

No cover-up here

California Guardsman Alleges Abuse in Iraq

A California National Guardsman says three fellow soldiers brazenly abused detainees during interrogation sessions in an Iraqi police station, threatening them with guns, sticking lit cigarettes in their ears and choking them until they collapsed.

Sgt. Greg Ford said he repeatedly had to revive prisoners who had passed out, and once saw a soldier stand on the back of a handcuffed detainee's neck and pull his arms until they popped out of their sockets.

"I had to intervene because they couldn't keep their hands off of them," said Ford, part of a four-member team from the 223rd Military Intelligence Battalion that questioned detainees last year in Samarra, north of Baghdad.

Ford's commanding officers deny any abuse occurred, and say investigations within their battalion and by the Army's Criminal Investigation Division determined they had done nothing wrong.

"All the allegations were found to be untrue, totally unfounded and in a number of cases completely fabricated," said the battalion commander, Lt. Col. Drew Ryan.

Ford's allegations are being further investigated by the CID, which would not comment on the probe.

Ford told The Associated Press that when he reported the problems last June to his commanding officers, they pressured him to drop his claims.

"Immediately, within the same conversation, the command said, `Nope, you're delusional, you're crazy, it never happened.' They gave me 30 seconds to withdraw my request for an investigation," Ford said. "I stood my ground."

( Read more... )

(no subject)

Yes, it's fine to have one flag-draped coffin on television. Just not a group of them.

(no subject)

Hoarders Show Unique Brain Pattern, Study Finds

New research into the brain patterns of compulsive hoarders shows the disorder may have been misclassified and victims could be getting the wrong treatment, U.S. scientists reported on Tuesday.

Brain scans show the biology of America's estimated 1 million compulsive hoarders is significantly different to that of other people diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder, the team at the University of California Los Angeles found.

( Read more... )

They used positron emission tomography or PET scans to image brain activity in the volunteers.

The hoarders had unique activity, including less activity in brain regions known as the posterior cingulate gyrus and cuneus, they reported.