HOA Rule Forbids Couple To Smoke In Their Own Home

A? judge has upheld a homeowners association’s order barring a couple from smoking in the town house they own.Colleen and Rodger Sauve, both smokers, filed a lawsuit in March after their condominium association amended its bylaws last December to prohibit smoking.”We argued that the HOA was not being reasonable in restricting smoking in our own unit, nowhere on the premises, not in the parking lot or on our patio,” Colleen Sauve said.

The Heritage Hills #1 Condominium Owners Association was responding to complaints from the Sauves’ neighbors who said cigarette smoke was seeping into their units, representing a nuisance to others in the building.

In a Nov. 7 ruling, Jefferson County District Judge Lily Oeffler ruled the association can keep the couple from smoking in their own home.Oeffler stated “smoke and/or smoke smell” is not contained to one area and that smoke smell “constitutes a nuisance.” She noted that under condo declarations, nuisances are not allowed.The couple now has to light up on the street in front of their condominium building. – denver

Israel developing anti-militant “bionic hornet”

Israel is using nanotechnology to try to create a robot no bigger than a hornet that would be able to chase, photograph and kill its targets, an Israeli newspaper reported on Friday.The flying robot, nicknamed the “bionic hornet”, would be able to navigate its way down narrow alleyways to target otherwise unreachable enemies such as rocket launchers, the daily Yedioth Ahronoth said.

It is one of several weapons being developed by scientists to combat militants, it said. Others include super gloves that would give the user the strength of a “bionic man” and miniature sensors to detect suicide bombers. -scots

‘Grape guy’ catches 116 grapes in mouth

SYDNEY, Australia (AP) – An American man caught 116 tossed grapes in his mouth in three minutes in what he hopes will become a new Guinness World Record, his publicity team said Thursday.

Steve “the Grape Guy” Spalding, 44, of Dallas, Texas also set a personal record for endurance grape catching, using his mouth to catch 1,203 grapes thrown from a distance of 4.5 metres over half an hour, according to publicist Deanna Brown. No Guinness World Records officials were present at Spalding’s grape-gobbling attempt, carried out Thursday in Australia overlooking Sydney’s iconic Opera House.

But Brown said observers had filmed Spalding’s attempt and would be submitting forms to Guinness officials in the hopes of creating a new record for speed grape-catching – the most grapes caught in the mouth over three minutes.

No current speed grape catching record exists, she said.

Guinness World Records has no offices in Australia, and the organization could not immediately be reached for comment.

Voodoo practitioner tries to jinx Bush

A renowned black magic practitioner performed a voodoo ritual Thursday to jinx President George W. Bush and his entourage while he was on a brief visit to Indonesia.Ki Gendeng Pamungkas slit the throat of a goat, a small snake and stabbed a black crow in the chest, stirred their blood with spice and broccoli before drank the “potion” and smeared some on his face.

“I don’t hate Americans, but I don’t like Bush,” said Pamungkas, who believed the ritual would succeed as, “the devil is with me today.”

He said the jinx would sent spirits to posses Secret Service personnel guarding Bush and left them in a trance, leading them into falsely thinking the President was under attack, thus eventually causing chaos in Bogor Presidential Palace, where the American leader was scheduled to meet President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono on Monday.

Indonesia the world’s most populous Muslim country, however many still practicing animist rituals, including black magic, that predate Islam’s arrival in the archipelago. – yahoo

Dude, the US Secret Service has an anti-Voodoo Beer program with protection levels that extend out beyond this planet.

Warm weather wrecks bears’ winter slumber

Insomniac bears are roaming the forests of southwestern Siberia scaring local people as the weather stays too warm for the animals to fall into their usual winter slumber.The furry mammals escape harsh winters by going to sleep in October-November for around six months, but in the snowless Kemerovo region where the weather is unseasonably warm, bears have no desire yet to hibernate.

“Due to weather conditions, bears didn’t go into the winter sleep in time,” said Tatiana Maslova, chief expert at a regional environmental agency in the city of Kemerovo, about 3,500 km (2,190 miles) southeast of Moscow.

“Our teams are making sure there is no damage to farming and to local residents,” she told Reuters on Wednesday, adding that every patch of land is watched by a specially assigned inspector.

To survive the prolonged winter rest, bears have to put on extra body fat — up to 180 kg (396 pounds) — and so spend the preceding months devouring as much food as they can find. – yahoo

Apparent Voice Of Dead Woman Heard On Audiotape

“A strange voice captured on audiotape during an investigation of a home in Sanford, Fla., is believed to be that of an elderly woman who died years ago, according to a Local 6 News report.” – local6

• Video: Dead Woman’s Voice Caught On Audiotape?

In other news, humming birds are believed to be angels.

Wanted: man to land on killer asteroid and gently nudge it from path to Earth

It is the stuff of nightmares and, until now, Hollywood thrillers. A huge asteroid is on a catastrophic collision course with Earth and mankind is poised to go the way of the dinosaurs.To save the day, Nasa now plans to go where only Bruce Willis has gone before. The US space agency is drawing up plans to land an astronaut on an asteroid hurtling through space at more than 30,000 mph. It wants to know whether humans could master techniques needed to deflect such a doomsday object when it is eventually identified. The proposals are at an early stage, and a spacecraft needed just to send an astronaut that far into space exists only on the drawing board, but they are deadly serious. A smallish asteroid called Apophis has already been identified as a possible threat to Earth in 2036. … A 1bn tonne asteroid just 1km across striking the Earth at a 45 degree angle could generate the equivalent of a 50,000 megatonne thermonuclear explosion. Attempting to break it up with an atomic warhead might only generate thousands of smaller objects on a similar course, which could have time to reform. Scientists agree the best approach, given enough warning, would be to gently nudge the object into a safer orbit. … Matt Genge, a space researcher at Imperial College, London, has calculated that something with the mass, acceleration and thrust of a small car could push an asteroid weighing a billion tonnes out of the path of Earth in just 75 days.

The Earth has a long history of asteroid strikes. Thirty five million years ago, a 5km-wide asteroid ploughed into what is now Chesapeake Bay, in the US, leaving an 80km crater. In 1908, an asteroid devastated swaths of Siberia when it exploded mid-air with the force of 1,000 Hiroshimas. The theory that the dinosaurs were wiped out by a huge asteroid striking Mexico 65m years ago is controversial since scientists uncovered rocks from the crater predating the extinction of the dinosaurs by 300,000 years.

…A near miss, when asteroid QW7 came within 4m km of Earth in September 2000, led Liberal Democrat MP Lembit Opik to declare: “It’s not a case of if we will be hit, it is a question of when. Each of us is 750 times more likely to be killed by an asteroid than to win this weekend’s lottery.” – guarduk