We love our teachers, Hugh and Jena :)

Overheard on the streets of New York:

Girl on cell: I still don't get why you dumped him. Just 'cause you're a lesbian and he's got that thing for unicorns doesn't mean you wouldn't have been cute together.
-2nd & A

Hipster on cell: She thinks the entire world revolves around her. What is she, the sun?
-Union Square

Loud chick: So I was looking on the Internet to learn more about our planet and biodiversity and shit, and there's like five more extinctions supposed to happen! You know, like the dinosaurs and shit!
-Ray's Pizza, E Houston

Geeky Columbia freshman: Yeah, we held a Sexyback Party... You know, it was themed like Justin Timberlake. It was a pretty cool concept.
-Downtown 1 Train

Meathead on cell: We never get laid. We might as well be ninjas.
-Canal & Broadway

College chick: Any party that you have to lube up your hand to get into just isn't worth it.
-Christopher St

Professor: I don't understand these Taliban guys. 27 virgins! 27 virgins! Who wants to spend eternity with a bunch of beginners?
-Classroom, FIT

Drunk guy talking to cop about his drunk friend hiding behind a lightpost: Can you see him? Can you see my friend, fucker? Damn straight you can't, he's got his camouflage on bitch.
-1St & 1St

via

...my money’s on the big dude

12-year-old girl gets egged in eye? going blind?

A 12-year-old Mississauga girl will miss her season-opening hockey game Monday night, and the rest of the season, for that matter, because of a serious eye injury she suffered after being egged.
Olivia Ross-Fichtner walking with her mother and dog Saturday night near their home in the QEW and Hurontario Street area when she was hit in the right eye by an egg thrown from a passing vehicle.

"I haven't heard of an incident (this serious) before," Const. Craig Platt told The Toronto Star. It's going to require a number of months of medical attention. It's deemed to be quite serious."

Doctors intitially said Olivia, a Grade 8 student, may have permanent damage in her eye.

Ross-Fichtner is both furious and upset by the prank police beleive was the work of several young men. "This is one of the most cowardly things that anyone can do -- to throw an egg at a child walking down the street," she said.

Peel Region police have launched a criminal investigation. Investigators think the culprits are behind a second egging that took place about 15 minutes later in the Lakeshore Road West and Clarkson Road area. Article here.

Uh… nice Jack-o-lantern costume?

If your kid is happy, he does bad in math class

Countries whose kids are the least happy, least confident math students also do better on math tests.

A study by the Brookings Institution suggests countries that report higher levels of enjoyment and confidence among their math students don't score as well.

So how about the United States? Those results hover somewhere around the middle of the pack, both in terms of enjoyment and in actual test scores.

As a result, study author Tom Loveless says educators and parents might want to focus on what kids are learning -- and "just be a little less obsessed with the fact that they have to enjoy every minute of it." Article here.

happy birthday to me, happy birthday to me...

Dude puts hole in his 40 million dollar Picasso

“Le Rêve,” Picasso’s 1932 portrait of his mistress, is owned by Steve Wynn, the casino magnate and collector of masterpieces. He acquired it in a private sale in 2001 from an anonymous collector, who had bought it at auction in 1997 for $48.4 million. Recently, Wynn decided that he’d like to sell it, along with several other museum-quality paintings that he owns. A friend of his, agreed to pay a hundred and thirty-nine million dollars for it, the highest known price ever paid for a work of art.

A few weeks ago, on a Thursday, a representative of Cohen’s came from California to inspect the painting. She removed it from the wall, took it out of its frame, and confirmed that it was in excellent shape. On Friday, she wrote her condition report, and so, according to their contract, the deal was done. All that was left was the actual exchange of money and art.

That weekend, Wynn had some friends visiting from New York—David and Mary Boies, Nora Ephron and Nick Pileggi, Louise Grunwald, and Barbara Walters. They were staying, as they often do, at his hotel and casino, the Wynn Las Vegas. As they had dinner together on Friday night, Wynn told them about the sale. “The girls said, ‘We’ve got to see it tomorrow,’ ” Wynn recalled last week. “So I said, ‘I’ll be working tomorrow. Just come on up to the office.’ ” (He had recently moved “Le Rêve” there from the hotel lobby.)
The guests came at five-thirty, and Wynn ushered them in. On the wall to his left and right were several paintings, including a Matisse, a Renoir, and “Le Rêve.” The other three walls were glass, looking out onto an enclosed garden. He began to tell the story of the Picasso’s provenance. As he talked, he had his back to the picture. He was wearing jeans and a golf shirt. Wynn suffers from an eye disease, retinitis pigmentosa, which affects his peripheral vision and therefore, occasionally, his interaction with proximate objects, and, without realizing it, he backed up a step or two as he talked. “So then I made a gesture with my right hand,” Wynn said, “and my right elbow hit the picture. It punctured the picture.” There was a distinct ripping sound. Wynn turned around and saw, on in the lower-right quadrant of the painting, “a slight puncture, a two-inch tear. We all just stopped. I said, ‘I can’t believe I just did that. Oh, shit. Oh, man.’”

Wynn turned around again. He put his pinkie in the hole and observed that a flap of canvas had been pushed back. He told his guests, “Well, I’m glad I did it and not you.” He said that he’d have to call Cohen and William Acquavella, his dealer in New York, to tell them that the deal was off. Then he resumed talking about his paintings, almost, but not quite, as though he hadn’t just delivered what one of the guests would later call, in an impromptu stab at actuarial math, a “forty-million-dollar elbow.”

A few hours later, they all met for dinner, and Wynn was in a cheerful mood. “My feeling was, It’s a picture, it’s my picture, we’ll fix it. Nobody got sick or died. It’s a picture. It took Picasso five hours to paint it.” Mary Boies ordered a six-litre bottle of Bordeaux, and when it was empty she had everyone sign the label, to commemorate the calamitous afternoon. Wynn signed it “Mary, it’s all about scale—Steve.” Everyone had agreed to take what one participant called a “vow of silence.” (The vow lasted a week, until someone leaked the rudiments of the story to the Post.)

The painting wound up in the hands of an art restorer, who has told Wynn that when he’s done with it, in six or eight weeks, you won’t be able to tell that Wynn’s elbow passed through Marie-Thérèse Walter’s left forearm. Article here.
thanks scott

Jumbo size beer pong game... sweet!

Dude gets stabbed in the chest by stingray

An 81-year-old man is undergoing surgery this afternoon after he was stabbed in the chest by a stingray that leaped onto his boat while he was sailing on the Intracoastal Waterway, according to Lighthouse Point police.

Bertakis and his family members told police that a spotted eagle ray leaped out of the water and onto their 18-foot boat. When Bertakis tried to lift the stingray out of the boat, it hit him in the chest with its poisonous barbed tail. When rescue workers reached the boat in the 3800 block of Northeast 30th Ave., Bertakis still had the barb lodged in his chest, police said.

The incident comes about 1-1/2 months after Steve Irwin, television's popular Crocodile Hunter, was stabbed in the chest with a poisonous stingray barb while diving with the animals in waters off Australia. He died from the wound after trying to rip the barb from his chest. Article here.

Thumbelina, world's smallest horse, 17 inches

Airliner 'steel bolt' falls through dude's roof?

A man who lives under a Australia flight path was shocked when a bolt from an airliner crashed through his roof.

Angelo Margiotta said he thought a bomb had exploded when the stainless steel bolt, which appeared to be about 6 inches long, struck his roof in the Sydney suburb of Five Dock on Wednesday morning, Ten Network television news reported.

Margiotta called the fire brigade and a firefighter found the bolt which had smashed two roof tiles and lodged in the ceiling. "I was too shocked to talk ... because of the noise," Margiotta told Ten. "It was very, very loud."

Australia's aviation watchdog, Civil Aviation Safety Authority, was attempting to track down the plane that lost the bolt. "Anything that comes off an aircraft has to be explained," CASA spokesman Peter Gibson told the network. The bolt most likely came from a Boeing 747 or 767, Ten reported.

Sydney Airport officials said no aircraft had reported mechanical problems, Ten said, which suggested the bolt wasn't in use at the time it fell from the plane, Ten said. Article here.