You Missed It: Enough, Charlie Sheen edition

I am sure all of you already know this, but today is National Grammar Day. In that respect, I will endeavor not to butcher the English language any more than usual in this week’s post. I will try to improve the grammar for the usual brand, but my enthusiasm may wain. If you were busy coming off medical leave to do a presentation, odds are you missed it.

The week in craziness
Looking at this week’s headlines, you wouldn’t know anything happened other than Charlie Sheen and Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi. One said he had tiger blood in his veins, the other said his people were protesting because someone slipped hallucinogens into their drinks. Not trying to draw any comparisons between the two; I mean, killing your own people and having cocaine-and-hooker-fueled benders are not quite the same thing. But doesn’t it feel like they’re trying to out-crazy each other?

Houston, we have a problem
If you’ve ever launched a model rocket, you know how cool it is to see something you made shoot up in the air, but then come down again, often by parachute. Sometimes the parachute doesn’t come out, and the rocket crashes into the ground again. NASA kind of did that early this morning when they launched an unmanned rocket carrying the Glory satellite, which was supposed to study climate change. The nose cone didn’t separate when it was supposed to, and the satellite did not make it into orbit, crashing somewhere in the Pacific Ocean. Are we ready to blame climate change-deniers for this?

Firefox bad!
Internet Explorer 6: odds are your parents still use it. In its time, it was the undeniable standard in Internet browsers, but that time was nearly a decade ago. People are still using it for some reason. It annoys tech-savvy people, but IE6 is still, for some reason, relatively popular. Now, even Microsoft is trying to get you off of it. It has a site, IE6 Countdown, tracking where it is most used and why people need to stop using its outdated product. IE6 has become the Frankenstein of browsers: even its maker doesn’t want it.

A heartless take on a heartwarming tale

A Minnesota man has set a new bar for good Samaritans after it took 96 minutes of CPR to restart his heart. Normally, paramedics and doctors will move on after 15 minutes, tops, when brain damage sets in. But, now it looks like everyone in the waiting room will have to peruse further back issues of Highlights for nearly another hour and a half.

It took 20 people to sustain CPR on the victim, Howard Snitzer — pulling, prodding and pounding on his chest to bring him back from the Great Sizzler Buffet in the Sky. And, while he may be alive and thankful, he now has two types of herpes, a chest cold and a staph infection from the ministrations of 40 strange hands and lips on his body.

Additionally, Snitzer contracted athlete’s foot from one stander-by who does not know what CPR is.

Spider-fuel

It seems like there are a lot of recalls going on these days, especially with cars (they announced one just this week!), well here’s something a bit more exciting than your run-of-the-mill stuck accelerator recall: If you drive a Mazda6, you could have spiders living in your fuel system.

Yeah, think about that, as you drive down the highway, reading this post on your cell phone. Kind of makes you want to pull over and scream, doesn’t it?

No one is really sure why the yellow sac (teehee) spider loves to live in the fuel system of that particular Mazda model, but it does, they have had 20 reported cases of it. It’s a fire hazard, which, as I understand it, is a bad thing. It seems that animals are tired of us killing them with our cars, so now they’re trying to kill us with them.