You Can't Make This Stuff Up

[lektrode]

Re: You Can't Make This Stuff Up

Utah Legalizes Gold, Silver Coins As Currency

Arizona Becomes Second State to Approve Gold and Silver as Legal Tender

....Arizona lawmakers passed a bill that makes precious metals legal tender. Arizona is the second state after Utah to allow gold coins created by the Fed and private mints to be used as currency. More than a dozen states have legislature underway to pass similar measures....

[GRG55]

Re: Fore!

If a custom Airbus, like the surviving Citi Prince just ordered, seems a tad ostentatious (yes Virginia, there is such a thing as TOO MUCH money) then maybe this might be an alternative that is less likely to prompt the relatives from coming around asking for a loan (the gates outta keep em out if they get any stupid ideas).

Don't miss the Bespoke Interiors section (:eek and the part about the Greg Norman Signature Range Rover Sport in the garage :cool:

http://www.fireside.ae/jge_home.asp?nav=5



...but before you send your deposit cheque, remember that the summer temperatures regularly exceed 50 deg C (120+ F.) and the humidity is normally in the 90's %. We have long summers. Very long summers. Fireside? Ya right.

Enjoy the golf.

Oh, did I mention we have very long, hot summers?

Was in Dubai earlier this month. First time there since before the bust. The craziness is back in all its glory. Construction everywhere. Arab money fleeing the Arab Spring and civil war threats (Tunisia, Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, Bahrain, Iraq,...) was the ignitor. Now the fuel is coming from the former Soviet Union. Got a report from an old friend who lives there that more than 150 private jets from Russia and the Central Asia republics landed at Dubai airport in the few days just before and just after Putin sent the troops into Crimea. They weren't smuggling vodka

For those not familiar, ten Billion UAE Dhirams is about US$ 2.7 Billion.

Marka’s initial public offering raises
 mammoth Dh10 billion

Abdul Basit / 26 April 2014

Marka, created by prominent businessmen in the UAE, offered for sale 55 per cent of its capital, or 275 million shares, at Dh1 a piece in a 12-day sale.

The first initial public offering (IPO) of Marka oversubscribed by more than 36 times as it raised Dh10 billion instead of the Dh275 million target on the Dubai Financial Market (DFM), the company said on Friday.

Marka does not have any current operations and it is still being incorporated, but the nature of the company underlined the return of confidence in Dubai. The company is planning to spend the proceeds on opening more than 100 fashion stores, restaurants and cafes across the Gulf region over the next five years.

It was the first IPO since 2009 on Dubai’s main bourse and also the first one in the retail sector on the DFM. It was open to all nationalities and all the applicants will be entitled to ownership of the company, Marka had said at the launch of the IPO.

Marka, created by prominent businessmen in the UAE, offered for sale 55 per cent of its capital, or 275 million shares, at Dh1 a piece in a 12-day sale, which began on April 13 and closed on April 24. The founders of the company notified that the allocation of shares would be 2.77 per cent. The company will start the refunds on May 8, they added.

The huge turnout reflects investors’ confidence in the high-growth potential of Marka and the company’s capabilities to rapidly establish itself as the first public shareholding company that will operate in the retail and F&B sectors, two of the fastest growing sectors in the UAE and the region.

The company got regulatory approval to list in Dubai as a ‘greenfield’ company, which means it did not have to file financial records for past years.

[GRG55]

Re: Fore!

The Safety Nazis are alive and well and living in a place near you.

Sign installed in a BP Petroleum office in the Middle East...explaining to adult professionals how to safely use the stairs.

What next? Instructions on how to pour coffee without getting scalded?

(Don't forget to stay to the right!)

IMG_20140515_083157.jpg

[Polish_Silver]

Safety causing Pathology

Parents are "hyper vigilant" about their children. Children are never left without adult supervision, never allowed to climb trees, scamper through culverts, explore dark alleys, and horizontal bars have rubber sheets below them.

Results:

Anxiety orders increasing, because children never learn to navigate risk. Nor do they learn to resolve conflict, create rules, etc.
I'd say this is a big part of why Occupy Wall Street accomplished so little.


Accidents and injuries have not decreased.

There is something called "risk compensation". My wife's playground had concrete below the bars. So the children avoided whacking thier heads against it. We had dirt. You could whack your head on that, but gently. Rubber sheets---why worry?

Almost all "child abduction" is by divorced fathers/mothers.

Child sexual predators are not strangers, but extended family.

Serious playground injuries are "freak accidents" quite rare, and always have been.

[GRG55]

Re: You Can't Make This Stuff Up

Misunderstanding Orange Juice as a Health Drink

Juice is, nutritionally, not much better than soda. How did U.S. consumers come to believe that oranges, in any form, were an important part of a healthy diet?

A tall glass of orange juice is the very image of refreshment, packed with vitamins and radiating with sunshine freshness. It’s part of a balanced breakfast, after all. But America’s classic morning drink is in trouble: sales of commercial orange juice are down to their lowest levels in the last 15 seasons, according to the WSJ and the Florida Department of Citrus. The industry is facing growing competition from exotic fruit and energy drinks while its “all-natural” claims are being called into serious question.

Orange juice’s fresh and healthy reputation lies in the balance today, but it was once America’s healing elixir around which an entire industry staked its hopes. Orange juice’s fabled health benefits were promoted by nutritionists, fruit producers, marketers, and the government, who credited orange juice with curing everything from scurvy to listlessness, and even a rare blood condition called acidosis. But orange juice did not always have a place at the American breakfast table, mostly because for years it was either too expensive, or just didn’t taste very good...

...At the time, most people ate oranges rather than drinking their fruit. Coffee was the primary morning beverage. But consuming oranges in any form became an increasingly important part of a healthy diet largely because of the efforts of advertisers and an ambitious biochemist named Elmer McCollum. According to Harvey Levenstein’s book Fear of Food: A History of Why We Worry about What We Eat, McCollum became the unofficial nutritionist of the nation beginning in the early 1920’s when he heavily promoted the life-extending and healing capabilities of vitamins and warned against the deadly effects of a vitamin-deficient diet. This “Vitamania” gave producers the perfect marketing opportunity. The National Fruit Growers Exchange, under the Sunkist brand, created a national campaign promoting drinking daily doses of orange juice for its “health giving vitamins and rare salts and acids.” But McCollum soon cast aside vitamins in favor of acid.

McCollum ignited a panic over a nebulous condition called acidosis: an excess of acid in the bloodstream which supposedly caused fatigue and lassitude. He claimed the ailment was brought on by consuming meat, eggs and bread, which were acid producers. His advice: Eat lots of citrus fruit and lettuce. These foods rather counterintuitively were transformed from acid into alkaline in the stomach. Unsurprisingly, citrus producers seized upon this new health scare.

In this 1929 acidosis awareness booklet/Sunkist advertisement, the devastating effects of untreated acidosis are illustrated: “Estelle seemed to lack vitality; didn’t even make an effort to be entertaining; hence, she did not attract the men...‘Acidosis’ is the word on almost every modern physician’s tongue.” The cure was simple: Consume oranges in any form and at every possible opportunity. And Sunkist assured the acidosis-fearing reader that it was impossible to overindulge in oranges. By 1934, scientists began calling acidosis a fad and a rare ailment unaffected by drinking orange juice, and citrus producers redirected their marketing efforts back to vitamin C...

...Despite marketing campaigns promoting the consumption of oranges as a cure for everything from singlehood to the common cold, Florida’s fertile groves were producing too many oranges. The push for production during the war was now threatening the survival of the entire Florida orange industry. The arrival of frozen concentrated juice provided mass market potential for oranges for the first time. By 1949, Florida’s orange processing plants were churning out 10 million gallons of concentrated orange juice which was, rather deceptively, marketed as “fresh-frozen.” Consumers finally had an affordable, “tasty,” convenient and vitamin-C rich product, and they gulped it down.
The post-war American Dream was an image of domestic serenity in which the national talent for creating labor-saving technology was realized. Americans were eating better for less money and in less time. “Fresh-frozen” orange juice was concentrated health stuffed into a can and its only preparation requirements were thawing, adding water, and stirring. In Paradox of Plenty: A Social History of Eating in Modern America, Harvey Levenstein argues that such convenience foods became an essential part of the post-war housewife’s duty to build a healthy and happy American home. In 1952, the American Can Company advertised that frozen orange juice had saved housewives the equivalent of 14,000 years of “drudgery” that year.

Alissa Hamilton points out in Squeezed: What You Don’t Know About Orange Juice, that with the rapid growth of convenience foods a larger question emerged around the very notion of what normal food was: processed or untouched? People ate one alongside the other without thinking too much about it. In the 1950’s, chemists developed more than 400 new additives to aid in processing and preserving food (taste was an afterthought, at best). Canned meals, powdered foods, frozen seasonal and exotic produce were now readily available year-round.

Women’s magazines extolled these “new” foods and their miraculous time-saving attributes. But the idea that something processed could also be “fresh,” was provoking questions. By 1960 the FDA was becoming concerned with the misrepresentative “fresh” labeling of commercial orange juice. Not only was it far from fresh, but sugar and water were being added. Federal standards and regulation ensued...

...squeezed was now the primary pursuit of marketers, like this Tropicana commercial with the enticing “squeeze me a glass” jingle. In the 1990’s “not from concentrate” orange juice hit the shelves and blew everything else away. Rather than vitamins in a can, we now had freshness and purity in a carton.

But as Hamilton details in her book, there is practically nothing fresh or pure about it. Most commercial orange juice is so heavily processed that it would be undrinkable if not for the addition of something called flavor packs. This is the latest technological innovation in the industry’s perpetual quest to mimic the simplicity of fresh juice. Oils and essences are extracted from the oranges and then sold to a flavor manufacturer who concocts a carefully composed flavor pack customized to the company’s flavor specifications. The juice, which has been patiently sitting in storage sometimes for more than a year, is then pumped with these packs to restore its aroma and taste, which by this point have been thoroughly annihilated...

"Remember, breakfast without orange juice is like a day without sunshine"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lgLviCRceP8

[charliebrown]

Re: You Can't Make This Stuff Up

oh if only this article was around 40 years ago. My mother bought thr rhetoric, hook line and sinker. she forced me to drink a glass every morning. Now and back then, I can't stand the smell of the stuff.

[Polish_Silver]

Juice

oh if only this article was around 40 years ago. My mother bought thr rhetoric, hook line and sinker. she forced me to drink a glass every morning. Now and back then, I can't stand the smell of the stuff.

When I saw your post, I thought it was milk you were talking about. I've always loved fruit juices, but the fructose is getting more and more bad rap. Apparently, the whole fruit is a lot better for you than the juice--it makes you feel full, the sugar gets processed more slowly, etc. A saw a study once that found that children who drank fruit juice daily were more likely to be overweight than children who drank none. Damn the Sugar!

[LazyBoy]

Re: You Can't Make This Stuff Up

oh if only this article was around 40 years ago. My mother bought thr rhetoric, hook line and sinker. she forced me to drink a glass every morning. Now and back then, I can't stand the smell of the stuff.

40 years ago I was limited to one glass a day after drinking too much of the expensive stuff.

[GRG55]

Re: You Can't Make This Stuff Up

Hard to believe this site needs yet another thread, but I came across the following, figured it would take the edge off the sometimes serious tone we get into around here, couldn't figure out where to put it, so I started this thread thinking others could just add anything similar - amusing, incredulous, revealing, impossible to be true, whatever...

What follows is dead serious. You can't make this stuff up...

Saudi divorces wife for watching male TV host:
Date: 9/29/2007 4:25:00 PM

A Saudi man divorced his wife for watching alone a television programme presented by a male, an act he deemed immoral, the Al Shams newspaper reported on Saturday.

The man, whom the paper did not identify, ended his marriage on the grounds his wife was effectively alone with an unrelated man, which is forbidden under the strict Islamic law enforced in the ultra-conservative kingdom, the paper said.

Men in Saudi Arabia have the authority to divorce their wives without resort to the courts.

Saudi Arabia will always be fodder for this thread.

First this announcement:

Saudi Arabia mulls women’s right to drive - but only for over-30s ‘without make-up’

Published time: November 08, 2014 12:27

The formal advisory body of Saudi Arabia, known as the Shura Council, has taken the rare step of recommending to the country’s absolute monarchy that it grant women the right to drive – but with some bizarre conditions...

...Following lengthy campaigning on the behalf of Saudi women’s groups, the 150-member Shura Council, which is permitted to propose legislation to the King, proposed that women over the age of 30 should be allowed behind the wheel, but only until 8pm each day, and without the application of make-up, a council member told AP...

...Driving hours for women would be restricted to between 7am and 8pm on Saturday through Wednesday, and from 12 noon to 8 pm on Thursday and Friday, the weekend in Saudi Arabia...

...Inside the boundaries of the cities, women would be able to drive a car without a male guardian accompanying them, but outside the city limits, a male would be required to be in the vehicle with them...

Followed a few hours later by this apparent correction in Al Jazeera:

Saudi denies it may ease ban on women drivers

Local media quotes head of king's advisory council as saying claim it was to ease ban for women over 30 is misinformed. Last updated: 08 Nov 2014 16:26 Local media in Saudi Arabia have said a story published by the Associated Press news agency stating that the advisory council to Saudi Arabia's king had recommended easing a ban on women driving in the country is a "fabrication". Media quoted Mohammed Abdullah Al-Muhanna, the head of the Shura council, as calling the report "misinformed" and clearly showing a "lack of authenticity". Earlier on Saturday, AP reported that the council, whose recommendations are not obligatory on the government, had reportedly endorsed that women over the age of 30 would be allowed to drive with numerous restrictions, including a curfew... ...The driving ban has long forced families to hire live-in drivers for women. Women who can not afford a driver must rely on male relatives to drive them to work, school, shopping or the doctor. Female activists launched their latest campaign to defy the driving ban on October 26, when dozens of women drove around their neighbourhoods and posted video clips of themselves driving on social networking sites. The campaign prompted authorities to issue a statement warning violators would be dealt with firmly. Saudi Arabia has no written law barring women from driving, only fatwas, or religious edicts, by senior clerics.

[jk]

Re: You Can't Make This Stuff Up

how about female impersonators? ;-)

[metalman]

Re: You Can't Make This Stuff Up

how about female impersonators? ;-)

Female impersonator robs liquor store wearing burqa

BEL AIR, Md. -

A burqa-wearing man pretending to be a woman is in police custody after an armed robbery and dramatic police chase Friday afternoon.

Police say around 3 p.m. Harford County Sheriff's deputies were called to Third Base Liquors on South Fountain Green Road in Bel Air for a report of a robbery. When officers arrived witnesses told them a man wearing a burqa covering his entire face except for his eyes entered the store and asked the clerk about beer.

Police say the man altered his voice to sound like a woman and chose a case of beer. As the clerk leaned over to pick up the beer the fake lady flashed a gun and announced a hold up.

The clerk gave the burqa-wearing female impersonator an undisclosed amount of cash and the robber left the store and jumped into a white SUV.

Police say an alert passerby noticed something strange, copied down the tag number and reported it to authorities.

A short time later police saw the SUV on Rt. 40 at Rt. 755 in Edgewood and attempted to stop it. As the Divine wannabe fled west on Rt. 40, he clipped a car and lost control. The man was critically injured and taken to Shock Trauma for treatment.

The investigation is continuing.
dammit 'alert passerby'! almost got away with it!

[GRG55]

Re: You Can't Make This Stuff Up

Female impersonator robs liquor store wearing burqa

BEL AIR, Md. -

A burqa-wearing man pretending to be a woman is in police custody after an armed robbery and dramatic police chase Friday afternoon.

Police say around 3 p.m. Harford County Sheriff's deputies were called to Third Base Liquors on South Fountain Green Road in Bel Air for a report of a robbery. When officers arrived witnesses told them a man wearing a burqa covering his entire face except for his eyes entered the store and asked the clerk about beer.

Police say the man altered his voice to sound like a woman and chose a case of beer. As the clerk leaned over to pick up the beer the fake lady flashed a gun and announced a hold up.

The clerk gave the burqa-wearing female impersonator an undisclosed amount of cash and the robber left the store and jumped into a white SUV.

Police say an alert passerby noticed something strange, copied down the tag number and reported it to authorities.

A short time later police saw the SUV on Rt. 40 at Rt. 755 in Edgewood and attempted to stop it. As the Divine wannabe fled west on Rt. 40, he clipped a car and lost control. The man was critically injured and taken to Shock Trauma for treatment.

The investigation is continuing.
dammit 'alert passerby'! almost got away with it!

Apparently Allah works in strange ways

[GRG55]

Re: You Can't Make This Stuff Up

how about female impersonators? ;-)

Can you find the impersonator? :-)

[jk]

Re: You Can't Make This Stuff Up

the liquor store owner should have been suspicious from the beginning: a woman devout enough to wear a burqa wouldn't be going into a LIQUOR store.

[metalman]

Re: You Can't Make This Stuff Up

the liquor store owner should have been suspicious from the beginning: a woman devout enough to wear a burqa wouldn't be going into a LIQUOR store.

'a woman devout enough to wear a burqa wouldn't be going into a LIQUOR store' thought the attentive bystander as he wrote down the license plate number :-)