Sharp Increase in Cigarette Prices Bankrupts One New Hampshire Smoker

NH man charged 23 quadrillion dollars for smokes

Jul 16 2009


A New Hampshire man says he swiped his debit card at a gas station to buy a pack of cigarettes and was charged over 23 quadrillion dollars, forcing him to file for bankruptcy.

Josh Muszynski (Moo-SIN'-ski) checked his account online a few hours later and saw the 17-digit number _ a stunning $23,148,855,308,184,500 (twenty-three quadrillion, one hundred forty-eight trillion, eight hundred fifty-five billion, three hundred eight million, one hundred eighty-four thousand, five hundred dollars).

Mr. Muszynski said with the price of cigarettes going up that much he no longer could afford to smoke, so he was quitting but wanted to get that last pleasurable sensation from smoking. He then proceeded to chain smoke two packs of cigarettes, at a cost of more than 46 quadrillion dollars.

When asked by a reporter where he would get that much money, Muszynski said the tobacco industry had agreed to sponsor him as a publicity stunt to get more young people addicted to nicotine and thus ensure a future market for its deadly product. But he said he was given no indication that there would be such a large increase in cigarette prices. He said he was only paid $2,500 by the tobacco industry.

To make matters worse he also was struggling with his bank, Bank of America, for assessing him a $15 overdraft fee for insufficient funds to cover the charge. "They should have known there was something wrong because my average balance runs about $250," said Muszynski. "The bank should have realized there was no way I could ever make good on a charge of that size. What is there that could possibly cost 23 quadrillion dollars?" he said rhetorically.

The bank agreed not to charge him for the 2d pack of cigarettes.

Bank of America said only the card issuer, Visa, could answer questions. Visa referred all questions to the bank in a game of Blame the Other Merchant.

A designated spokeswoman for the BOA, Sylvia Scapegoat, who was unauthorized to say anything meaningful, said her only requests were to remain anonymous and not be tricked by reporters into revealing any details about the multiple fraudulent and illegal activities of her employer, because she wanted to keep her job, as she was a single mom and desperately needed the health insurance benefits for her two disabled children and elderly mother who suffers from emphysema.

Both requests were denied as the reporters grilled MS SCAPEGOAT mercilessly about the BOA's slimeball transactions with Timothy Gaithner, Secretary of the Treasury, which Scapegoat ultimately broke down and revealed, after which she suffered a violent epilepsy attack and had to be carried from the room on a stretcher.

On arrival at a local hospital, Ms. Scapegoat was informed her health insurance had been discontinued, as her employment with the BOA had terminated immediately after the press conference. A company henchman said Scapegoat was terminated for breach of her duty to say nothing of substance during the press conference.

When her seizures subsided somewhat in the emergency waiting room, she was escorted to the exit by a hospital security guard and told she needed to go to a charity hospital. She managed to reach a pay phone in a nearby strip shopping center where she used her last 50 cents to call her brother to come get her. She got his answering service which advised he was having an important all night meeting at home and would return all calls in the morning.

Still suffering the after effects of her earlier seizure, Scapegoat sat down momentarily, and slumped against a postal drop box, to rest and consider her options. After a few minutes she was arrested by local police and taken to the county jail where she was charged with loitering, vagrancy and public intoxication. Temporary bail was set at $2,500, pending a hearing before a magistrate the following morning.

Disclaimer: Some parts of this account may not be completely accurate because it was written by a rookie reporter who was alcohol impaired at the time. Any necessary retractions or corrections will appear in a subsequent issue of this publication.


___

How Would You Like To Look Up From Your Airplane Seat and Have an Open View of the Sky At 30,000 Feet?

Southwest checks planes after hole forces landing

Jul 14 2009

By DAVID KOENIG - AP Airlines Writer

A Southwest Airlines plane had to make an emergency landing in Charleston, W.V., Monday, July 13, 2009, because of a hole in the top of the aircraft. Southwest Airlines ordered inspections of nearly 200 aircraft after a football-sized hole opened up in the passenger cabin of a plane during flight, forcing an emergency landing. Travelers on the 737 aircraft could see outside through the 1-foot-by-1-foot hole that appeared during the flight Monday. The cabin lost pressure, but no one was injured on the Nashville to Baltimore flight with 126 passengers and five crew members on board.

The Boeing 737 jet lost pressure in the cabin, but no one was injured on Monday's Nashville-to-Baltimore flight.

The plane was built in 1994, and government records indicated that an inspection in January turned up eight cracks in the frame that required repairs.

Southwest said Tuesday that it inspected all 181 of its identical Boeing 737-300-series jets overnight before putting them back in the sky.

Passenger Michael Cunningham told NBC's "Today" show Tuesday that he had dozed off in his seat in mid-cabin when he was awakened by "the loudest roar I'd ever heard," and saw the hole above his seat.

Cunningham said people stayed calm and put on oxygen masks that dropped from the ceiling.

"After we landed in Charleston, the pilot came out and looked up through the hole, and everybody applauded, shook his hand, a couple of people gave him hugs," he said.

Passengers in the front rows didn't know the full extent of the hole _ that it went right through to the sky, said Charles Overby, CEO of the Freedom Forum, a free-press foundation that runs the Newseum in Washington.

"I was just as happy not to know that," he told The Associated Press. "It was pretty harrowing, but I've been through worse landings during turbulence."

Southwest said it was unclear what caused the hole, which ripped open just in front of the vertical tail fin as the plane cruised at 30,000 feet. The jet flew on for nearly half an hour to Charleston.

Federal Aviation Administration records show that during the plane's 14-year checkup in January, eight cracks were found in the fuselage frame and repaired.

Damage from wear and tear is not unusual in planes of that age, and the FAA requires special inspections for cracks. In March, Southwest agreed to pay $7.5 million to settle charges that it operated planes that had missed those required inspections.

FAA spokesman Lynn Lunsford said an initial review indicated that inspection orders for the Boeing 737-300 didn't include inspecting the area of the body where the tear appeared on Monday's flight.

The FAA and the National Transportation Safety Board sent investigators to the scene to interview the crew and examine maintenance and inspection records, but could take months to find a cause, said agency spokesman Keith Holloway.

Southwest spokeswoman Marilee McInnis said workers conducted "a walk-around visual inspection" of the airline's other 737-300s and discovered no cracks. During periodic maintenance overhauls, workers use equipment designed to detect cracks that aren't visible.

The 137-seat 737-300 makes up about one-third of Southwest's fleet. All its 544 jets are various models of the Boeing 737.

Southwest operated a normal schedule of flights _ about 3,300 per day _ with no cancelations or delays through midday, McInnis said.

Experts said the tear could have been caused by damage from a dent or ding, or the plane's skin could have suffered from age-related fatigue. Jet cabins are pressurized and depressurized with every flight, which can cause tiny cracks over time. The Southwest jet was built in 1994.

Bill Voss, president of the Flight Safety Foundation in Alexandria, Va., said a finding of fatigue would be more frightening. If that were the cause, it could force the FAA to consider more rigorous inspections for older aircraft, he said.

Alten "Skip" Grandt, an aeronautics professor at Purdue University who specializes in structural analysis, said that the fuselage of the Boeing jet performed as designed by preventing a sudden and catastrophic loss of pressure, and stopping the hole from expanding.

The cabin depressurized, he said, "but whatever caused that hole, it didn't cause the whole airplane to blow up."

In 1988, cracks caused part of the roof of an Aloha Airlines Boeing 737 to peel open while the jet flew from Hilo to Honolulu. A flight attendant was blown out of the plane and plunged to her death, and dozens of passengers were injured. The incident led to tougher rules for inspecting fuselages.

In March, Southwest agreed to pay a $7.5 million civil penalty imposed by the Federal Aviation Administration for operating nearly 60,000 flights in 2007 on planes that had not undergone required inspections for cracks in the fuselage. About 1,450 flights took place after the FAA had notified Southwest of the missed inspections.

Dallas-based Southwest Airlines Co. carries more than 100 million U.S. passengers a year, more than any other airline.

___

Baring It All For a Record

Nudists Bare-ly Go for Guinness World Record Naturism to the public

By BRIAN THOMPSON

Jul 13, 2009

Would you dare to bare it all on a New Jersey beach?

From New York to California, nudists pranced in the surf and in lakes in an attempt to break a Guinness World Record.

Nudists Go for the Record
Watch Video

Naturists want to bring their love of baring it all to the mainstream. They're going for a record in the process.

"I was a little hesitant at first. As soon as I got here it was like 'I'm just gonna bare it all,'" said first-time nudist Lorray Bradbury of Marlton, New Jersey.

The young blond was a rarity as one of the few out of thousands at Gunnison Beach in Sandy Hook, New Jersey still sporting tan lines.

Throughout the United States and Canada, an estimated 10,000 nudists skinny dipped at the same time.

Friends of Gunnison (FoG), an advocacy group, was one of 127 chapters of the American Association for Nude Recreation that took part in the event. As the largest chapter, FoG put roughly 800 bare-buttocked members in the Atlantic Ocean.

FoG member Leo Falanga of Wrightstown, New Jersey exclaimed, "It's wonderful. It's the kind of event I think everybody should join."

Why do it?

"The whole point of this is to bring naturism out to the public to show them that we're normal people," said FoG President Dale Distasio.

Blab! Blab! Blab! Blab! Me, Me, Me, Me

This item had to be removed because another blog site claimed it held copyright to it because it was previously published there. While this editor did not obtain the story from the complaining blog, but from another source, our attorneys do not believe it constituted copyright violation. Nevertheless it was decided to remove the item to avoid all the hassle and wasted time arguing with the editor of another site who got his or her shorts or panties in a wad over a simple little story.

The facts in the story go something like this.

English is the second most spoken language in the world. It is a very rich language, with more than a million words. But its speakers are estimated to use no more than one per cent of these words.

About a third of English words are technical terms because English has become the most commonly used language among scientists and scholars of all types.

Some individuals talk a lot more than others, some speaking up to 50,000 words a day. But about 80% of that talk is called self-talk, which means people are talking to themselves.

The original story points out that English also is the most popular Internet language. We also learn that the longest word in the world is a scientific term that consists of 207,000 letters, which is why no one ever uses it in conversation, plus it requires about 80 regular letter sized pages to type it.

Now, wasn't that a big deal to get all exercised about and make threats, which is what the other blog editor or spokesperson did. Nothing on this blog is copyrighted, which is the way it ought to be. Copyright is just another legalized form of censorship.

Oh, by the way, the two illustrations were placed there by me and were not part of the original story, which was sort of drab.

The Editor.

At Least She Wasn't Sending a Naked Photo of Herself - Can You Imagine Getting a Nude Pic of Your Woman Covered in S#%T?

Texting Teen Falls Down Open Sewer Manhole

By Victoria Cavaliere
NBCNewYork.com7/13/09

We all know that walking and texting is a tough combination -- but a Staten Island teen learned the hard way when she fell into an uncovered sewer manhole while trying to send a message.

Now, the family of Alexa Longueira, 15, intends to sue.

The girl suffered a fright and some scrapes on her arms and back after she dropped into the hole on Victory Boulevard.

"It was four or five feet, it was very painful. I kind of crawled out and the DEP guys came running and helped me," Longueria told the Staten Island Advance.. "They were just, like, 'I'm sorry! I'm sorry!"

For its part, the Department of Environmental Protection said its workers had turned away briefly to grab some cones when the incident occurred.

"We regret that this happened and wish the young woman a speedy recovery," DEP spokeswoman Mercedes Padilla said in a statement. She added that crews were flushing a high-pressure sewer line at the time.

The girl was checked out at Staten Island University Hospital and released.

Sewer line workers are supposed to cut off pedestrian access to work sites or at least mark them with warning signs.

The family said they will file a lawsuit -- for what, though, is not immediately clear. Her mother, Kim Longueira, said it doesn't matter that her daughter was walking and texting, and also, the 'gross' factor that can't be ignored.

"Oh my God, it was putrid," she said. "One of her sneakers is still down there"

(Thanks to Larry Nordell, of Helena, Montana, for sending in this post, on condition of synonymity. Larry is a non-contributing editor to BizarreStuff.)

Ball Crazed Brit Sets Meaningless World Record - No One Cares

Man with one ball sets world record

May 3, 2009

Football freestyler Dan M. Photo: Reuters

A Man smashed the world record for keeping a football in the air after tapping it up and down for a marathon 24 hours.

Dan M, 25, unemployed for 10 months and not seeking new employment, played keepy-uppy using his feet, legs and head in London's popular tourist spot, Covent Garden. Dozens of tourists passed by, paused briefly, shook their heads quietly and kept walking. Undeterred, Dan sailed past the previous record of 19 hours and 30 minutes on Friday and just kept going. He had hoped to earn enough in tips to keep his family in their home, from which they were being evicted even as Dan tapped his ball.

But after 24 hours Dan had only collected 4 shillings and 6 pence, not enough for a small bag of fish and chips.

At 20 hours, well past the previous record, Dan's wife and 3 children, the oldest only 7, begged him to stop and help find the family a place to spend the night. Dan told them not to worry, that as soon as the Guiness people certified his new record, a process that can take anywhere from six months to a year, he would be swamped with lucrative offers from advertising executives who wanted to use his story to advertise everything from ball bearings to cricket wickets. He expected to receive large advances on the income to be earned from these appearances and sponsorships.

Dan almost lost it all, when seconds away from the 24-hour mark, Dan M, from Milton Keynes in southern England, almost lost control of the ball but managed to regain his composure to complete the final seconds of his quest.

The End

No Looking Up Permitted! Up-Lookers Will Be Prosecuted

July 12, 2009
Bismarck, N.D.

A woman was detained near Bismarck yesterday for looking up. The woman was sighted by a North Dakota state highway patrolman, sitting on a rock in a sparsely populated area about 50 miles from Bismarck, looking up. (See photo)

The patrolman stopped and observed the woman looking up for several minutes before approaching her with his taser gun. He asked the woman if she was aware she was breaking the law by looking up.

According to the trooper's written report of the incident, the woman said, "Are you telling me the state of North Dakota has a law that makes it illegal for anyone to look up?" When the patrolman assured her there was such a law, the woman began laughing hysterically and jumping back and forth from one foot to another, while still looking up continuously. "She just kept saying over and over, look at me, I'm looking up," according to the trooper.

"I concluded she was either having a conniption fit or was engaged in an act of civil disobedience," said the trooper, "and felt I had a duty to take her in. But because of how she was acting, I needed to taser her to calm her down. It worked; she was out like a light and I had to drag her into the back seat of the cruiser. I was careful not to touch any part of her body except her arms and legs and a little push on her butt so I could close the door to the car."

When the officer and the woman arrived at the county jail, the duty officer at the station explained to the patrolman that he had misunderstood the law, which was enacted to prevent men from looking up women's dresses without their permission. The trooper said, "Oh, gosh. I'm sorry....I can take her back there if you want."

On regaining consciousness from the taser blast the woman indicated she preferred to remain at the station and contact her attorney.