best lick @ 0:24
(via lulz-time)
Look! Hayden Panettiere in town supporting DC Statehood!
Meet Irena Sendler (1910-2008)
She was a 98 year-old Polish woman at her time of death. During World War II, Irena worked in the Warsaw Ghetto as a plumbing/sewer specialist. She dedicated herself to smuggle Jewish children out. Infants were carried in the bottom of the tool box she used and older children in a burlap sack she had in the back of her truck.
She also had a dog in the back that she trained to bark when the Nazi soldiers let her in and out of the ghetto. The soldiers wanted nothing to do with the dog and the barking covered the kids’ and infants’ noises. Irena managed to smuggle out and save 2500 children during this time
She eventually was caught and the Nazis broke both her legs, arms and beat her severely. Irena kept a record of the names of all the kids she smuggled out and in a glass jar buried under a tree in her backyard. After the war, she tried to locate any parents that may have survived and reunited some of the families but most had been killed. She then helped those children get placement into foster family homes or adopted.
In 2007, Irena was up for the Nobel Peace Prize. She was not selected.
Al Gore won for presenting a slide show on Global Warming.
Originally posted by ThoughtPool
The Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial
Sorry, the Department of Defense needed the money it took to run the entire program to keep the air conditioners going in the Middle East.
PS: Not joking. The DoD actually spends more on air conditioning in the Middle East than the US allocates for the entire budget for NASA.
UPDATE: Someone asked for a source. Straight from NPR.
Woot Now an *Official* Word According to the Concise OED
A new edition of the Concise Oxford English Dictionary arrives in stores today, and it contains some 400 new(ish) words, including woot, sexting, retweet, and cyberbullying.
To make room for the new, some words that have fallen out of use had to be excised from the edition’s pages, such as “brabble” (meaning “paltry noisy quarrel”) and “growlery” (a “place to growl in, private room, den”). The editor of the Concise Oxford English Dictionary notes that we might call a growlery a “man cave” nowadays, but growlery is so evocative I hope it makes a comeback.
WOOT!
Rutgers University forgave $100,000 of the football coach’s interest-free home loan last year. The women’s basketball coach got monthly golf and car allowances. Both collected bonuses without winning a championship.
Meanwhile, the history department took away professors’ desk phones to save money and shrank its doctoral program by 25 percent. After funding cuts by the deficit-strapped Legislature, New Jersey’s state university froze professors’ salaries, cut the use of photocopies for exams and jacked up student tuition, housing and other fees.
Rutgers also increased funding for sports. The 245-year-old school spent more money on athletics than any other public institution in the six biggest football conferences during the 2009-2010 fiscal year, based on data compiled by Bloomberg. More than 40 percent of sports revenue came from student fees and the university’s general fund.
» via Bloomberg
That’s because Rutgers is a sports company that also happens to run a college.
Photographer Katie Orlinsky traveled to Mexico to document the drug war’s effect on women and concludes that with an overall death toll of more than 30,000, the country faces a humanitarian crisis.
These photos are from the women’s prison in Ciudad Juarez where approximately 80 percent of the inmates are incarcerated for drug-related crimes. Throughout Mexico, the incarceration rate for women has risen 400 percent since 2007.
Katie Orlinsky, The New York Times. Mexico’s Drug War, Feminized.
Submitted by realitystolemyunicorn
THIS IS SO CUTE
Submitted by a-little-anarchy
