It’s a time-honored tradition at Navy homecomings – one lucky sailor is chosen to be first off the ship for the long-awaited kiss with a loved one.
Today, for the first time, the happily reunited couple was gay.
The dock landing ship Oak Hill has been gone for nearly three months, training with military allies in Central America.
As the homecoming drew near, the crew and ship’s family readiness group sold $1 raffle tickets for the first kiss. Petty Officer 2nd Class Marissa Gaeta bought 50 - which is actually fewer than many people buy, she said, so she was surprised Monday to find out she’d won.
Her girlfriend of two years, Petty Officer 3rd Class Citlalic Snell, was waiting when she crossed the brow.
They kissed. The crowd cheered. And with that, another vestige of the policy that forced gays to serve in secrecy vanished.
By Corinne Reilly
The Virginian-Pilot
© December 21, 2011 (via yayponies)
More photos and the full article here
(via loveamongthetiles)
Man caught drunk driving in toy Barbie car banned from driving
Paul Hutton, 40, was pulled over by police as he drove an electric Barbie car, which moves slower than a mobility scooter, near his home in Essex. Mr Hutton admitted being a ‘complete twit’.
He explained: “I’m in the third year of my electrical engineering course and it was a little project I was doing with my son who is doing a car mechanics course.
“When it was done I couldn’t resist the temptation to take it out.”
Mr Hutton, was found to be twice the drink-drive limit, he said.
Appearing before magistrates last week, he admitted driving the toy car while drunk.
He was given a mandatory three-year ban because he had received another drink-drive ban within the past ten years.
Magistrates also gave him a 12-month conditional discharge and ordered him to pay £85 court costs.
Chairman of the bench Neil Munson said: “This is most unusual.
“I have never seen the like of it in 15 years on the bench.
“The vehicle is not even capable of doing the speed of a mobility scooter and could be outrun by a pedestrian.
“Taking this into account, we feel we can impose a sentence of a conditional discharge for a period of 12 months.”
…more
The Boy Who Lived Before
Cameron says “if you die you come back again.”
Well dang if that don’t take the fun out of dying. Moop.
by Yvonne Bolouri
Little Cameron Macaulay was a typical six-year-old, always talking about his mum and family. He liked to draw pictures of his home too - a long single-storey, white house standing in a bay. But it sent shivers down his mum’s spine - because Cameron said it was somewhere they had never been, 160 miles away from where they lived. And he said the mother he was talking about was his “old mum.” Convinced he had lived a previous life Cameron worried his former family would be missing him.
Mum, Norma, contacted the film company and they followed Cameron’s journey to Barra. They had child psychologist Dr Jim Tucker, from Virginia, with them. He specialises in reincarnation and has researched other children like Cameron. When Cameron was told they were going to Barra he was jumping all over the place with excitement. The family flew from Glasgow last February and landed on Cockleshell Bay an hour later
When they got to the island and DID land on a beach, just as Cameron had described, he turned to his parents and said, “Now do you believe me?”
He got off the plane, threw his arms in the air and yelled “I’m back.”
Dwarves found 'theme park' commune to escape bullying
Everyone in the mountain commune in Kunming, southern China, must be under 4ft 3ins tall and they run their own police force and fire brigade from their 120 residents.
Now the group has turned itself into a tourist attraction by building mushroom houses and living and dressing like fairy tale characters.
“As small people we are used to being pushed around and exploited by big people. But here there aren’t any big people and everything we do is for us,” said spokesman Fu Tien.
The idea of housing dwarves in special compounds would be anathema in the West, and the village has sparked fierce debates among expats living in China.
“When I first heard this I pictured myself obscure freak shows from a hundred years back,” wrote one commenter on the GoKunming website. “Pay the entrance fee and you can watch these people perform.”
But others said that it was the dwarves’ best chance of employment given the surplus of labour in China.
“We might feel aghast at treating humans this way but this is the best way the Chinese government can deal with the situation right now,” wrote Tonyaod.
“Go back a hundred years or so in our culture and we will see that we did the same thing à la the freakshows and the circus.”
I Witnessed A Murder Today
Teenager wings it with a fake airline
A teenage boy from Yorkshire succeeded in persuading British aviation executives that he was a tycoon about to launch his own airline. Using the pseudonym Adam Tait, the smooth-talking 17-year-old told airport and airline executives that he had a fleet of jets.
Tait, who said he was in his twenties, even flew to Jersey to attend a 1½-hour long meeting with the director of its airport. Their talks were considered promising enough for a further meeting to be arranged, which was due to be held next week.
Other air industry bosses found themselves dealing by telephone or e-mail with Tait’s fellow executives, David Rich and Anita Dash, who proposed to launch a cut-price Channel Islands-based airline servicing most of Europe.
What no one realised was that Tait, Rich and Dash were all the same person: an aircraft buff with the gift of the gab and an overactive imagination.
School Kids Learn Their Rights to an Orgasm a Day
There are certain unalienable rights every kid should know about. And if your kid is going to school in a certain sector of England, they’re learning about their right to a daily orgasm.
The pamphlets drawn up by the National Health System are titled “Pleasure,” and promise “an orgasm a day keeps the doctor away”. According to the Daily Telegraph, it also says: “Health promotion experts advocate five portions of fruit and veg a day and 30 minutes’ physical activity three times a week. What about sex or masturbation twice a week?”
In some round-about so rubbishy it almost makes sense logic, the NHS folks say this is the way to discourage teens from having sex … by encouraging them to hold out for REALLY GOOD sex or doing it themselves.
6 Valuable (And Disgusting) Ways They're Reusing Human Waste
We live in an era of recycling, where hippies scream in horror if they spot a soda can in the garbage and go into convulsions at the thought of a landfill full of paper. But if you think glass bottles, milk jugs and CSI are the only things that can be recycled, read on. The next dump you take could be used to build a school in Japan.
"Web 2.0" crowned as millionth English word
A US-based language monitoring group crowned Web 2.0 as the one millionth word or phrase in the English language, although other linguists slammed it as nonsense and a stunt.
The Global Language Monitor, which uses a math formula to track the frequency of words and phrases in print and electronic media, said Web 2.0 appeared over 25 000 times in searches and was widely accepted, making it the legitimate, one millionth word.
It said Web 2.0 started out as a technical term meaning the next generation of World Wide Web products and services but had crossed into far wider circulation in the last six months.
Other linguists, however, denounced the list as pure publicity and unscientific, saying it was impossible to count English words in use or to agree on how many times a word must be used before it is officially accepted.
There are no set rules for such a count as there is no certified arbiter of what constitutes a legitimate English word and classifying the language is complicated by the number of compound words, verbs and obsolete terms.
“I think it’s pure fraud … It’s not bad science. It’s nonsense,” Geoffrey Nunberg, a linguistics professor at the University of California at Berkeley, told reporters.
17-Year-Old Thinks She's Getting Into Photography
After wasting an afternoon taking pictures of a broken tricycle, moss on trees, and the shadow of a wrought-iron fence, Churchill Alternative High School senior Jessica Ivers falsely informed family and friends Saturday that she was getting into photography. “I love the way real film looks,” said Ivers, who has owned the old single-lens reflex 35 millimeter camera for exactly one week, and named as her favorite photographers “probably Diane Arbus” and the French guy who took the picture of the boy with the wine bottle. “I’m really fascinated by textures, and I think I’ll be able to get some good shots of my grandma’s hands this weekend.” Sources close to Ivers expect the camera to join her clarinet and yoga mat under her bed once she pays $14.85 to develop the roll of clumsy, overexposed images.
Why our "amazing" science fiction future fizzled
At the 1964 New York World’s Fair, people stood in line for hours to look at a strange sight.
They wanted to see the “Futurama,” a miniaturized replica of a typical 21st century American city that featured moving sidewalks, computer-guided cars zipping along congestion-free highways and resort hotels beneath the sea.
Forty years later, we’re still waiting for those congestion-free highways — along with the jet pack, the paperless office and all those “Star Trek”-like gadgets that were supposed to make 21st-century life so easy.
Daniel Wilson has been waiting as well. He’s looked at the future we imagined for ourselves in pulp comic books, old science magazines and cheesy sci-fi movies from the 1950s, and came up with one question.
Why isn’t the future what it used to be?
French ‘Spiderman’ Alain Robert climbing Sydney skyscaper
Around 200 people gathered to watch as Robert, known for scaling some of the world’s tallest and best-known buildings without ropes or other equipment, climbed to the top of the Royal Bank of Scotland Tower
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