Miscellaneous.

Another stupid fool got too close to the edge of the Grand Canyon and paid for it with his life.

I've written about this stuff since I went to the national park last June. People fooling around the edge scared the living crap out of me.

It's a beautiful canyon, something somebody should see at least once in a lifetime, but people need to use some goddamned sense.
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Blue ribbons will be made available in Reno tomorrow in memory of murder victim Brianna Denison.

Women on or near the UNR campus are justifiably nervous the killer hasn't been caught.
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At my hometown, medical personnel prepare for the time when a monster of a flu epidemic finally hits.

If I ever again get the crap I have had coupled with the horrible sinus infection, I hope I am dead.
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Somebody had Georgia on his or her mind, and she was recovered after 25 days in a subway.
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There is very little doubt in my mind Vivi is still alive. Somebody took her in, and the person doesn't want to give her up.
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As the World Turns.

Chicago cafes may soon be going to the dogs.
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It would be nice if Britney Spears could stay out of the news:

Federline, 29, will present his case at Los Angeles Superior Court on September 17. In it he will claim:
# LESBIAN bed-hopping proves Britney is an unfit role model for their kids.
# BOOZING and relentless partying shows her life is still spiralling out of control, and that she's a....
# TERRIBLE mum who treats her boys like toys, according to former aides and security guards.

Key to the case will be the sexy dancer Britney disappeared with after a night out in Copenhagen in May 2004 on her Onyx Hotel tour.

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Has Vivi the whippet, missing since escaping from a NYC airport in February 2006, been sighted?

A man saw what he believes to be Vivi on Saturday, just off the west-bound Northern Boulevard exit off the Van Wyck Expressway. He is a limo driver and remembers seeing the flier around La Guardia airport (thanks to our airport team member for making sure the airport lots are always covered).

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A killer dog is now in custody.

This time it's a Rottweiler.
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As the World Turns.

Almost three months after he died, James Brown was finally laid to rest in a crypt.

Rev. Al Sharpton conducted the ceremony.
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The Forbes list of billionaires shows just how insane our world has become:

Forbes magazine released its annual list of billionaires Thursday. There are now nearly one thousand billionaires worldwide—946 to be exact, according to the magazine’s calculations—and their combined wealth in the past year grew by 35 percent to $3.5 trillion.

The latter figure is larger than the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of every nation in the world with the exception of the US, China, Japan and India. The combined GDP of all the countries in Africa, a continent of nearly one billion people, was some $2.3 trillion in 2005. More than a third of the African population lives on less than $1 a day. The combined GDP of South America’s largest trading bloc, Mercosur, whose full members are Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay and Venezuela, is $1.1 trillion.

The proposed US federal budget for 2007 amounts to $2.8 trillion. The sum devoted in that budget to Social Security, Medicare and education for a population of 300 million people is approximately one-third of the combined wealth of those 946 individuals. The European Union countries spend something more than half a trillion dollars annually on education. The Chinese government expended some $15 billion in 2005 on science and technology, education, health and culture for its population of more than one billion people.

This is simply insane. The world can't go on with a tiny number of filthy rich stealing from eveybody else.
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More and more married couples are doing what my parents did, and that's sleep in separate bedrooms.

There's nothing wrong with this. It is very difficult to share a bed with somebody else--hell's bells, it's hard with me sharing my bed with my Chihuahua! For couples, it has nothing to do with the lack of intimacy but the lack of sleep.

King-sized beds don't do much to alleviate the problem.
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Jeffrey Rosen examines how research into the brain will affect our legal system.
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Oregon edges toward paid parental leave.
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There is still no word of Vivi.

I suspect somebody found her and is keeping her.
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