Elizabeth Halverson is a judge, but what she really wanted to be is a queen:

Her former bailiff, for example, says Halverson made him feel like a "houseboy." He says the judge -- who is obese and uses a motorized scooter to get around -- made him put her shoes on her feet, massage her back, cover her with a blanket for naps and make sure her oxygen tank was filled. He says she asked him, "Do you want to worship me from near or afar?"

Halverson also surrounded herself with her own hired guards, saying she did not trust the courthouse security force to protect her. Another time, she allegedly had her husband sworn in so that she could ask him under oath whether he had completed chores at home.

She has since been locked out of her Las Vegas (where else?) courtroom, and suspended from the bench. And though her case is now up at the Judicial Discipline Commission, she is still running for re-election: http://edition.cnn.com/2008/CRIME/05/09/queen.judge.ap/index.html | Halverson's website

In the Wingding Controversy, if you type out "NYC" in Microsoft's wingding font, a skull and bones, Star
of David, and a thumbs up glyphs appear.

Some people interpret this as an approving message of killing jews in New York City. Microsoft strongly denied that this was intentional. The company did, however, intentionally arrange the glyphs of an eye, a heart, and a city skyline as the "NYC" sequence in the later-released
webding font.

The Duggars, who already have 17 children, making them America's largest family, continues to embiggen. Michelle and Jim Bob have just announced that they're expecting a new baby on New Year's Day, January 1, 2009.

All of their children's names start with the letter "J," so Discovery Health is taking polls on what you think the name should be: Link

Meet Ho Eng Hui, the 56-year-old Kung Fu king/street performer in Malaysia that used his index finger to smash through the tough shells of coconuts.

After doing weekly performances for 8 years, Ho is retiring. If you're wondering why the finger is crooked, Ho broke it in 1993, but perservered to win an entry in the Malaysian Book of Records for breaking through 3 coconuts in just over a minute.

Paul Chapman of Reuters reports: Link [Reuters video]

Golfers who want to play on the Fort Brown Golf Course near the US-Mexico border in Brownsville, Texas will soon need a passport.

That's because the Department of Homeland Security, in an attempt to build a more or less straight fence, decided to put the US golf course
on the Mexican side of the border fence!

Imagine being a United States citizen having business ... a business in the United States and then finding out the Department of Homeland Security is building its Mexican border fence with you on the Mexican side!

Podcast by Dick Helton at KNX1070 Newsradio - via LA Times

"What a waste it is to lose one's mind- or not to have a mind. How true that is."

- Dan Quayle, 44th Vice President of the United States

"Charge it!" That seems to be how more and more people in the United States are surviving (and as you can guess, a poor long-term strategy):

Government and agency statistics illustrate this troubling trend. The Federal Reserve reported Wednesday that Americans' credit card debt jumped 6.7% in the first quarter of this year to $957.2 billion, This spike comes despite the fact that nearly one in three banks is tightening guidelines for credit cards.

In Atlanta, debtors calling the agency in the first quarter of this year had an average of $29,300 in unsecured debt, primarily on credit cards, up from $25,700 in 2007. They spent $335 on groceries and $242 on gas, on average, in April. A year earlier, those outlays averaged only $291 and $181, respectively.

For many people, racking up credit card debt is not a choice they want to make, experts say. Not too long ago, they could have tapped into the equity in their homes through loans or lines of credit or refinancing. But this debt, which usually carries lower interest rates, is no longer as widely available with the collapse of the housing market.

So, faced with soaring costs for food and fuel, people find they must charge more to make ends meet.

Link

Whoa - take a look at this custom "Freddy Krueger" Nike SB, featuring the famous red and green striped sweater pattern of Wes Craven's Nightmare on Elm Street's monster. The shoes also have blood stains and special soles that look like Freddy's undead skin.

Link

The number of genome copies in cells vary by species: most cells in the human body have two, whereas most bacteria have only one.

But not this particular bug: the Epulopiscium, a giant bacterium that lives in the intestines of unicorn fish, has up to 200,000 copies
of its genome!

Angert suspects that Epulopiscium ’s extravagant collection of genomes may be a way for it to reap the benefits of size without the drawbacks of starvation. She hypothesizes that the genomes are arrayed just beneath Epulopiscium ’s cell membrane. This arrangement means that the cell could respond to nutrients and other environmental molecules without waiting for them to diffuse throughout the cell. “If you waited for an environmental signal to get to you, relying solely on diffusion, it would take forever,” says Anger. “It would be really unreliable. This opens up that door of allowing the cell to get big and not allowing diffusion to limit its volume.”

http://www.nature.com/news/2008/080508/full/news.2008.806.html

We've posted about how a person's beauty "advertises" good genes and fertility. Well, here's new study in the same vein: Nathan Pipitone and Gordon Gallup of the State University of New York found that a woman's voice becomes more attractive when she is most fertile:

The pair recorded women counting from 1 to 10 at four occasions during their menstrual cycle. They then replayed the recordings at random to male and female students and asked them to rate the attractiveness of the voices. Both males and females judged the women's voices to be most attractive if they were recorded during the peak fertility period of the menstrual cycle, and less attractive if they were recorded during
non-fertile periods ...

The results are in line with evidence that the female voice box, or larynx, is under the influence of sex hormones, says Gallup. He says the changes in the female voice during peak fertility support the view that women are "different" at that point in the menstrual cycle - in other words, that they experience oestrus.

Link

Here's a real life Edward Scissorhands: Israeli hairstylist Danny Bargil wanted to break the world record for multi-scissors haircut (who knew there's such a record?) by cutting a woman's hair with 10 pairs of scissors.

Link [Reuters video]

Just in time for Mother's Day, TIME magazine has the list of the Best and Worst (Fictional) Moms Ever. Of course, the "Best Mom" list is filled with all sort of wonderful (booring!) mothers, so let's focus on the 10 Worst Moms Ever. For example, take the Mom from Futurama:

She's the richest person on earth, so really, how nice could she be? At the dawn of the 31st century, Mom is the head of Momcorp — the massive industrial corporation that includes such highly successful subsidiaries as Mom's Friendly Robot Co., Mom's Friendly Drug Factories
and Mom's Friendly Advanced Weapon & Munition Co. She maintains a friendly, nurturing public persona — she even does charity work for (in her words) "knocked-up teenage sluts" — but don't be fooled. She's not even really pleasantly plump! Under her fat suit she's whippet-thin.

Mom's business tactics are ruthless — she holds trademarks on the words "Mom," "Love," and "Screen Door" — and her private life isn't much better. She constantly abuses her three sons, Walt, Larry and Ignar, verbally and physically, who respond with fanatical adoration. And if you accept the Futurama comic books as part of the official Futurama canon, she even dated The Simpsons' Mr. Burns. Ugh.

Link

Rhett Lamb is often cranky like any other 3-year-old toddler, but there's one thing that makes him completely different: he has a rare medical condition in which he can't sleep a wink.

Rhett is awake nearly 24 hours a day, and his condition has baffled his parents and doctors for years. They took clock shifts watching his every sleep-deprived mood to determine what ailed the young boy.

After a number of conflicting opinions, Shannon and David Lamb finally learned what was wrong with their child: Doctors diagnosed Rhett with an extremely rare condition called chiari malformation.

"The brain literally is squeezed into the spinal column. What happens is you get compression, squeezing, strangulating of the brain stem, which has all the vital functions that control sleep, speech, our cranial nerves, our circulatory system, even our breathing system," Savard said.

Link

We go from the boy who can't sleep to the woman who can't forget. Here's the story of AJ, an extraordinary 40-year-old married woman who remembers everything (and not just all the bad things her husband did!):

McGaugh and fellow UCI researchers Larry Cahill and Elizabeth Parker have been studying the extraordinary case of a person who has "nonstop, uncontrollable and automatic" memory of her personal history and countless public events.

If you randomly pick a date from the past 25 years and ask her about it, she'll usually provide elaborate, verifiable details about what happened to her that day and if there were any significant news events on topics that interested her. She usually also recalls what day of the week it was and what the weather was like.

The 40-year-old woman, who was given the code name AJ to protect her privacy, is so unusual that UCI coined a name for her condition in a recent issue of the journal Neurocase: hyperthymestic syndrome.

Gary Robbins of The OC Register has the interview with Dr. Jim McGaugh, who has been studying AJ for the past 6 years: Link

Illustration: Robert Zavala / The Orange County Register

Image: Geoeye/CRISP-Singapore, Caption by Holli Riebeek.

The two images, taken by the Ikonos satellite, showed how a village in Burma (Myanmar) was completely wiped out by the Cyclone Nargis:

This tiny village was located about 27 kilometers (16 miles) south of Yangon, the country’s largest city. In the lower image, taken on May 3, 2002, trees and buildings line a single street, which is surrounded by fields of crops, probably rice. After the disaster, the trees and buildings are completely gone, replaced by messy piles of rubble.

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/NaturalHazards/natural_hazards_v2.php3?img_id=14826