Dear Readers:
Guess who made the “Asshole of the day” list?
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…………………………………….now that wasn’t so hard, was it?
By Matthew Coutts | Daily Brew
That’s right, Toronto Mayor Rob Ford is again making headlines across the globe. And not for his fiscally-conservative approach to city management or his fact-finding missions to Chicago or Austin, Tex., but for his troubling personal life and his connection to an underground world of drug dealers and gun-running thugs.
Toronto police confirmed on Thursday the existence of a video previously reported to show Ford smoking what appears to be drugs in the company of unsavory characters. On top of that, hundreds of pages of police documents from an investigation that left his friend Sandro Lisi charged with drug trafficking tied back to Ford again and again.
And again.
http://ca.news.yahoo.com/blogs/dailybrew/toronto-mayor-rob-ford-scandal-spreads-globally-condemned-210927962.html
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Well, well, I guess there is not much else in the news today except Rob Ford, because the CBC ran this story to fill in an empty space.
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Well folks, we have our “Asshole of the Day” but this woman qualifies as our “Loser of the day!”
Border officials have stumbled upon a different kind of Halloween surprise inside some pumpkins this year.
The pumpkins were in a passenger’s luggage at the Montreal airport. And they were stuffed with approximately two kilograms of what is believed to be cocaine.
The Canada Border Services Agency says a woman was arrested today with three pumpkins in her luggage at Montreal’s Trudeau International Airport.
The pumpkins were in a passenger’s luggage at the Montreal airport. And they were stuffed with approximately two kilograms of what is believed to be cocaine.
The Canada Border Services Agency says a woman was arrested today with three pumpkins in her luggage at Montreal’s Trudeau International Airport.
Read more: http://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/cocaine-stuffed-pumpkins-found-at-montreal-airport-1.1522303#ixzz2jOVSslHM
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Oh, did I tell you that Toronto Mayor Rob Ford is in shit?
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An Ohio man got into the Halloween spirit by crafting a clever marriage proposal for his girlfriend.
Zach Stoddard of Dayton used five carved pumpkins strategically placed on the side of a hill to pop the question to his girlfriend of three years, Lauren Brenneman. When the illuminated pumpkins were uncovered, they showed the words “Will You Marry Me?”
Brenneman said “yes,” much to the delight of the hundreds of people
gathered Wednesday night for a popular neighborhood event called the
Stoddard Avenue Pumpkin Glow.
Organizers tell The Dayton Daily News
(http://bit.ly/1aFJhWp ) that the proposal was a first for the annual
event, which featured hundreds of carved pumpkins lighting up the night.
It ended Thursday.
http://news.yahoo.com/ohio-man-pops-pumpkins-112904426.html
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By Eliott C. McLaughlin, CNN
Before the transcontinental race in “Cannonball Run,” the starter tells the gathered racers, “You all are certainly the most distinguished group of highway scofflaws and degenerates ever gathered together in one place.”
Where the 1981 Burt
Reynolds classic was a comedic twist on a race inspired by real-life
rebellion over the mandated 55-mph speed limits of the 1970s, Bolian set
out on a serious mission to beat the record for driving from New York
to Los Angeles.
The mark? Alex Roy and
David Maher’s cross-country record of 31 hours and 4 minutes, which they
set in a modified BMW M5 in 2006.
Bolian, a 28-year-old
Atlanta native, had long dreamed of racing from East Coast to West. A
decade ago, for a high school assignment, Bolian interviewed Brock
Yates, who conceived the Cannonball Baker Sea-To-Shining-Sea Memorial
Trophy Dash, aka the Cannonball Run.
Yates, who played the
previously quoted organizer in the film he wrote himself, won the first
Cannonball in the early 1970s with a time of 35 hours and 53 minutes.
Ounce of prevention
It sounds like great
outlaw fun — and certainly, Hollywood added its embellishments, like the
supremely confident, infidel-cursing sheik with a Rolls Royce and Sammy
Davis Jr. in a priest getup — but Bolian said it took considerable
research and groundwork.
Beginning in 2009, about
the time he started working for Lamborghini Atlanta, Bolian researched
cars, routes, moon phases, traffic patterns, equipment, gas mileage and
modifications.
He went into preparation
mode about 18 months ago and chose a Mercedes CL55 AMG with 115,000
miles for the journey. The Benz’s gas tank was only 23 gallons, so he
added two 22-gallon tanks in the trunk, upping his range to about 800
miles. The spare tire had to go in the backseat with his spotter, Dan
Huang, a student at Georgia Tech, Bolian’s alma mater.
To foil the police, he
installed a switch to kill the rear lights and bought two laser jammers
and three radar detectors. He commissioned a radar jammer, but it wasn’t
finished in time for the trek. There was also a police scanner, two GPS
units and various chargers for smartphones and tablets — not to mention
snacks, iced coffee and a bedpan.
By the time he tricked
out the Benz, which included a $9,000 tuneup, “it was a real space
station of a thing,” he said, describing the lights and screens strewn
through the car’s cockpit.
“The hardest thing, quite honestly, was finding people crazy enough to do it with me,” he said.
Co-driver Dave Black,
one of the Atlanta Lamborghini dealership’s customers, didn’t sign on
until three days before they left, and “support passenger” Huang didn’t
get involved until about 18 hours before the team left Atlanta for
Manhattan.
If his difficulty
finding a copilot wasn’t an omen, Manhattan would deliver one. While
scouting routes out of the city, a GPS unit told Bolian to take a right
on red, in the wrong direction down a one-way road. He was quickly
pulled over.
Bolian got a warning —
and a healthy dose of relief that the officer didn’t question the thick
odor of fuel as he stood over the vents pumping fumes from the trunk.
Record run begins
The trio ignored what
some might have considered a harbinger and the left the Red Ball Garage
on East 31st Street, the starting point for Yates’ Cannonball, a few
hours later. To be exact, they left October 19 at 9:55 p.m., according
to a tracking company whose officials asked not be identified because
they were unaware that Bolian would be driving so illegally when he
hired them.
It really isn’t something we need a whole band of lunatics doing.
Ed Bolian
Ed Bolian
They hit a patch of
traffic in New York that held them up for 15 minutes but soon had an
average speed of about 90 mph. In Pennsylvania, they tapped the first of
many scouts, one of Bolian’s acquaintances who drove the speed limit
150 to 200 miles ahead of the CL55 and warned them of any police,
construction or other problems.
They blew through Ohio, Indiana and Illinois, hitting St. Louis before dawn.
“Everything possible
went perfect,” Bolian said, explaining they never got lost and rarely
encountered traffic or construction delays.
By the time they hit
southern Missouri, near the Oklahoma border, they learned they were “on
track to break the existing record if they averaged the speed limit for
the rest of the trip,” he said.
They kept humming west,
and as they neared the Texas-New Mexico border, they calculated they
might beat the 30-hour mark, a sort of Holy Grail in transcontinental
racing that Bolian likened to the 4-minute mile.
Never one to settle, “we decided to break 29,” Bolian said.
The unnamed tracking
company says the Benz pulled into the Portofino Hotel and Marina in
Redondo Beach, California, at 11:46 p.m. on October 20 after driving
2,803 miles. The total time: 28 hours, 50 minutes and about 30 seconds.
“Most of the time, we
weren’t going insanely fast,” Bolian said, not realizing his definition
of “insanely” is a little different from most folks’.
When they were moving,
which, impressively, was all but 46 minutes of the trip, they were
averaging around 100 mph. Their total average was 98 mph, and their top
speed was 158 mph, according to an onboard tracking device.
“Apart from a FedEx
truck not checking his mirrors before he tried to merge on top of me, we
didn’t really have any issues,” Bolian said.
Do not try this at home
He concedes his endeavor
was a dangerous one, especially when you consider Bolian slept only 40
minutes of the trip, and co-driver Black slept an hour. But Bolian went
out of his way to make it as safe as possible, choosing a weekend day
with clear weather and a full moon — and routes, when possible, with
little traffic or construction.
Asked if the
technological advances since the previous record holders made their run
gave him an advantage, Bolian replied, “Absolutely.” Because two teams
broke the 32-hour mark in 2006 and 2007, he had a detailed “guide book”
on how to do it, where they had to rely on word-of-mouth tales from the
1980s.
“I thank Alex for that.
We’re all adding chapters to the same story of American car culture,”
Bolian said. Alex Roy did not respond to an e-mail seeking comment.
Bolian had hoped to
revisit that high school interview and tell Yates he’d followed through
on that promise to break his record, but Yates now suffers from
Alzheimer’s.
“I’ll pay him a visit just for the sake of it,” Bolian said, “but I can’t tell him.”
Where the Cannonball
scofflaws aimed to make a statement about personal freedom, Bolian said
he has the utmost respect for law enforcement. His goal was merely to
“add myself and pay tribute to this chapter of automotive history,” he
said.
Bolian also hopes that
he shattered Roy’s record by such a stark margin that it discourages
would-be Cannonballers from attempting to break his record, and it’s not
just a matter of his own legacy, he said.
“It really isn’t something we need a whole band of lunatics doing,” he said.
http://www.cnn.com/2013/10/31/us/new-york-los-angeles-cannonball-speed-record/index.html?eref=rss_mostpopular
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