Radio Free Kirkopolis

I suppose I'm glad I never ordered that "Free Floyd" shirt huh? After two years, a lot of oddities, and on the heals of this year's tour (July 5th) Floyd Landis is finally solidified as a dirty cheater-

CAS delivers final blow to Landis legal challenge
Nearly two years after he stood triumphantly atop the Tour de France podium in Paris, Floyd Landis has seen his last hopes of regaining the 2006 title dashed when the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) upheld his two-year suspension on Monday. The world's highest sporting authority also ruled that the American pay $100,000 costs to the US Anti-Doping Agency (USADA), in a case that has already cost both Landis and his opponents several million dollars.

Um, this just might be the coolest thing EVER!
I will be very interested to see how many people will wigg out thinking that this actually could end the world, and how many of them also don’t use their cell phones at gas pumps and are scared to death of the bird flu.
As a general rule of thumb, any article that begins with "The most powerful atom smasher ever built" is gonna force me to get my nerd on in a big way. None the less, the coolness of it all can’t be done any justice by me, so I’ll just blockquote the whole article (thus begging the question, why did you link it in the opening paragraph?).

MEYRIN, Switzerland - The most powerful atom-smasher ever built could make some bizarre discoveries, such as invisible matter or extra dimensions in space, after it is switched on in August.
But some critics fear the Large Hadron Collider could exceed physicists' wildest conjectures: Will it spawn a black hole that could swallow Earth? Or spit out particles that could turn the planet into a hot dead clump?
Ridiculous, say scientists at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, known by its French initials CERN — some of whom have been working for a generation on the $5.8 billion collider, or LHC.
"Obviously, the world will not end when the LHC switches on," said project leader Lyn Evans.
David Francis, a physicist on the collider's huge ATLAS particle detector, smiled when asked whether he worried about black holes and hypothetical killer particles known as strangelets.
"If I thought that this was going to happen, I would be well away from here," he said.
The collider basically consists of a ring of supercooled magnets 17 miles in circumference attached to huge barrel-shaped detectors. The ring, which straddles the French and Swiss border, is buried 330 feet underground.
The machine, which has been called the largest scientific experiment in history, isn't expected to begin test runs until August, and ramping up to full power could take months. But once it is working, it is expected to produce some startling findings.
Scientists plan to hunt for signs of the invisible "dark matter" and "dark energy" that make up more than 96 percent of the universe, and hope to glimpse the elusive Higgs boson, a so-far undiscovered particle thought to give matter its mass.
The collider could find evidence of extra dimensions, a boon for superstring theory, which holds that quarks, the particles that make up atoms, are infinitesimal vibrating strings.
The theory could resolve many of physics' unanswered questions, but requires about 10 dimensions — far more than the three spatial dimensions our senses experience.
The safety of the collider, which will generate energies seven times higher than its most powerful rival, at Fermilab near Chicago, has been debated for years. The physicist Martin Rees has estimated the chance of an accelerator producing a global catastrophe at one in 50 million — long odds, to be sure, but about the same as winning some lotteries.
By contrast, a CERN team this month issued a report concluding that there is "no conceivable danger" of a cataclysmic event. The report essentially confirmed the findings of a 2003 CERN safety report, and a panel of five prominent scientists not affiliated with CERN, including one Nobel laureate, endorsed its conclusions.
Critics of the LHC filed a lawsuit in a Hawaiian court in March seeking to block its startup, alleging that there was "a significant risk that ... operation of the Collider may have unintended consequences which could ultimately result in the destruction of our planet."
One of the plaintiffs, Walter L. Wagner, a physicist and lawyer, said Wednesday CERN's safety report, released June 20, "has several major flaws," and his views on the risks of using the particle accelerator had not changed.
On Tuesday, U.S. Justice Department lawyers representing the Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation filed a motion to dismiss the case.
The two agencies have contributed $531 million to building the collider, and the NSF has agreed to pay $87 million of its annual operating costs. Hundreds of American scientists will participate in the research.
The lawyers called the plaintiffs' allegations "extraordinarily speculative," and said "there is no basis for any conceivable threat" from black holes or other objects the LHC might produce. A hearing on the motion is expected in late July or August.
In rebutting doomsday scenarios, CERN scientists point out that cosmic rays have been bombarding the earth, and triggering collisions similar to those planned for the collider, since the solar system formed 4.5 billion years ago.
And so far, Earth has survived.
"The LHC is only going to reproduce what nature does every second, what it has been doing for billions of years," said John Ellis, a British theoretical physicist at CERN.
Critics like Wagner have said the collisions caused by accelerators could be more hazardous than those of cosmic rays.
Both may produce micro black holes, subatomic versions of cosmic black holes — collapsed stars whose gravity fields are so powerful that they can suck in planets and other stars.
But micro black holes produced by cosmic ray collisions would likely be traveling so fast they would pass harmlessly through the earth.
Micro black holes produced by a collider, the skeptics theorize, would move more slowly and might be trapped inside the earth's gravitational field — and eventually threaten the planet.
Ellis said doomsayers assume that the collider will create micro black holes in the first place, which he called unlikely. And even if they appeared, he said, they would instantly evaporate, as predicted by the British physicist Stephen Hawking.
As for strangelets, CERN scientists point out that they have never been proven to exist. They said that even if these particles formed inside the Collider they would quickly break down.
When the LHC is finally at full power, two beams of protons will race around the huge ring 11,000 times a second in opposite directions. They will travel in two tubes about the width of fire hoses, speeding through a vacuum that is colder and emptier than outer space.
Their trajectory will be curved by supercooled magnets — to guide the beams around the rings and prevent the packets of protons from cutting through the surrounding magnets like a blowtorch.
The paths of these beams will cross, and a few of the protons in them will collide, at a series of cylindrical detectors along the ring. The two largest detectors are essentially huge digital cameras, each weighing thousands of tons, capable of taking millions of snapshots a second.
Each year the detectors will generate 15 petabytes of data, the equivalent of a stack of CDs 12 miles tall. The data will require a high speed global network of computers for analysis.
Wagner and others filed a lawsuit to halt operation of the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, or RHIC, at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York state in 1999. The courts dismissed the suit.
The leafy campus of CERN, a short drive from the shores of Lake Geneva, hardly seems like ground zero for doomsday. And locals don't seem overly concerned. Thousands attended an open house here this spring.
"There is a huge army of scientists who know what they are talking about and are sleeping quite soundly as far as concerns the LHC," said project leader Evans.

I first fell hopelessly in love with Keith Olberman way back when he anchored Sportscenter with Dan Patrick (remember, when Sportscenter was actual sports journalism, not sports tabloid journalism?- but I digress). Oh.... he was sooo witty and I've never seen anyone make so much out of Jose Canseco.
But then time rode out and now he's had his own gig on MSNBC for some time. He's not a liberal, no far from it, he just calls out ultra-conservatives (and the ultra-liberals as weel). You see, that's where the ultra-right is so knee jerk to react, if you point out the idiocy of say Bill O'Reilly (who's big break was "Inside Edition" by the way) or, God forbid, Ann Coutlter, well then you must be a bleeding heart liberal. Yet Keith will also aim at at the ultra-liberal as well, take for instance, any of about 98% of Hollywood who just LOVES to go on 'fact finding' missions. Boneheads.
Its obvious really. Structural conservatives are for the most part, just like structural liberals- they're sheep and just can't seem to realize it. This is why I shout "I'm a centralist" because I proudly have the ability to think for myself.
Anyhoo, this is where Keith is (and some others). He's had an ongoing feud with Bill O'Reilly for some time, not due to a ratings war as Fox would have you believe, but because Bill is such an amazing idiot.
This one is kinda long, but worth it. Keith does some openly opinionated commentary at the get-go, but when he gets to the facts it's kinda staggering. Bill's narcissism and ignorance stands clear for everyone to see and must lead to only one conclusion- if you're a fan of O'Reilly's then you are a big fat dummy.
Enjoy-

My old friend Ernie has come a seriously long way- not a household name yet, but he's patient... and if there is any justice in this world- it'll happen.
We were roommates for a year at SIU and of the endless volumes of people that have lived with me at one time or another, he may have been the most passive with all my drunken idiocy- and at SIU, there was A LOT of that. Funny, at that time he was really into a "Boyz 2 Men" kinda thing.
My how for we go....



Anyway you can also see more HERE and HERE.

The amazing Jack Klugman won an important court battle recently regarding a decade's old contract for "Quincy M.E"

LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) - All Jack Klugman wanted was access to his decades-old "Quincy M.E." contract, which had been misplaced over the years. And on Wednesday, that's exactly what a Los Angeles judge gave him.

In a one-page tentative order, Judge Gregory Alarcon ruled that the show's producer, NBC Universal, should provide Klugman access to the papers, the same ones NBC offered to him six months ago.

The veteran actor sued NBC in March, seeking a court order allowing access to the contracts.

This really raises a staggeringly important legal question- "Didn't Jack Klugman die like 5 years ago?"

I thought this was kinda cool. Seems Tim McGraw saw a guy assaulting a woman and when security didn't respond quick enough he took it upon himself to step in. Even better is that he just kept on performing like nothing happened- and since has been pretty humble about the whole thing. As much as I want to hate Tim, its stuff like this that makes it pretty difficult.

*Ironically this is one of the Seven Words You Can't Say On Television.
But with that, his take on "stuff" is my favorite. Enjoy-


God, I LOVE this guy!

How does one who makes their living as a paparazzi sleep at night? Why does it not shock me that most of these guys are French? Granted, most of the "surfers" in these videos are just beered up pre-pubed punks, but none the less I LOVE watching this. I only wish I'd been there, a totaly worthwhile misdemeanor if you ask me.
As a side note, although Matthew McConaughey was in no way involved in this, I'm just guessing he had something to do with getting these guys some "massively wicked bud yo."
Enjoy-

I kinda feel like writing again, yet this time with better spelling.