Saturday Morning Confusion #884

Ya see this house in Vancouver, bunky?
Well that house would sell for around $217,700 here in London, Ontario.
BUT, it sold for TEN TIMES that price in Vancouver!
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A Vancouver real estate agent who has just sold a home for $567,000 over its published listing price says that underlisting is an accepted selling strategy in the real estate market.
“If the product’s right, the timing’s right and the inventory is right, it’s the right strategy,” Paul Eviston told CBC News.
Nevertheless, Eviston said, he would hesitate from using the term “underlisted” in the case of the home at 65 E 26th Ave., originally listed at $1.6 million, which sold for $2,167,000.
“I wouldn’t call it underlisted,” he said. “I would call it strategically listed to garner the interest level that we wanted to get the result that we got.”
Sitting two blocks west of Main Street — both a physical and psychological divide — the home is in an area where prices often exceed $2 million, but the selling price was still a record high, Eviston said.
“It was the highest price per square foot ever achieved for an East Vancouver home,” he said.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/vancouver-house-sells-for-567k-over-listed-price-1.3012604?cmp=rss

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Hundreds of millions of homes and businesses around the world will go dark Saturday night as part of Earth Hour, an annual event meant to raise awareness about climate change and the environment.
Now in its ninth year, Earth Hour encourages individuals and organizations around the world to turn off all of their non-essential lights for one hour. This year, it’s scheduled to start at 8:30 p.m. local time on Saturday, March 28.
Organizers say Earth Hour has become the world’s largest grassroots movement in support of the environment, and it has continued to grow with each passing year. More than 7,000 cities and towns in 162 countries and territories took part in Earth Hour in 2014. This year, the group behind the campaign says 172 countries are expected to take part.
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Earlier this week, it was widely reported that the Islamic State had taken over the real-life version of Luke Skywalker’s home planet, Tatooine. This is not accurate. ISIS fighters have not torn down the Mos Eisley Cantina and are not currently stomping through the historic streets where a young Jedi’s destiny was born such a long time ago.

The story appears to have spun out from this CNN report, which explained that arms caches formerly belonging to Muammar Gaddafi’s Libyan regime had been found in Tunisia, the country where Star Wars’ desert scenes were filmed. Although the weapons weren’t directly linked to IS, Tunisian officials are reportedly anxious about the group’s operations in Libya.

The Tunisian city of Tataouine, which has allegedly become a waypoint for IS fighters coming and going from their Libyan bases, is the inspiration and namesake of George Lucas’s desert planet. But here are two important facts about Tataouine, reflected in a couple of corrections on The Guardian’s website:

This article was amended on Thursday 26 March to reflect that Star Wars was not filmed in Tataouine, but in desert locations in Tunisia.

This article was further amended on 27 March. Tunisian tourist officials have denied there is any danger and say that the area is patrolled by 1,500 troops.”

So, assuming the officials’ statement is accurate, it seems Tataouine isn’t actually the wretched hive of scum and villainy it was initially made out to be. And IS hasn’t taken over the actual Star Wars sets—located in Matmata, Tozeur, and on the island of Djerba—either.

You can go about your business, nerds who didn’t care about the Islamic State’s activities until they (reportedly) ruined your childhood. Move along. These are not the droids you’re looking for.

http://antiviral.gawker.com/isis-didnt-invade-star-wars-set-remains-committed-to-e-1694120495

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In a recent video (sadly not embeddable), self-proclaimed Christian “prophets” Rebecca Greenwood and traditional straight-married couple Cindy and Mike Jacobs compared notes on how exactly their God-given gifts of prophecy work. It was pretty impressive, and we had no idea how trying the work of prophecy could be!

Greenwood said one of the first manifestations of her prophetic gift was her childhood prediction that “killer bees” from Africa would someday invade the United States, which really is something, considering she appears to be in her 40s and that Africanized honeybees were introduced to South America in the late 1950s — there were several terrible “killer bee” movies in the mid 1970s. AMAZING! John Belushi was apparently a prophet, too!

image: http://img.wonkette.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/beelushi.jpg
In addition, God has given her the ability to see the plots of movies before they actually play out, which is certainly a nice gift and very useful:

And I’m really good at going to movies. And I didn’t know why. And lots of times, we could be sitting, watching a movie, and I’d look at Greg even before I understood I was a prophet, and I’m like, ‘This is gonna happen. This is gonna happen. This is gonna be the outcome,” she explained. “And lots of times, he would tell me, ‘Don’t tell me what’s gonna happen at the movie. If you understand before it’s happening, I don’t wanna know before it happens’.”

We’ve had the same experience ourselves, usually with some asshole a couple rows back. It almost makes you wonder why she even bothers going to see movies at all, since God has already gifted her with knowing how they end, doesn’t it?
Ms. Jacobs, who believes she saved Ronald Reagan’s life by preventing an assassination attempt through prayer — not the actual time Reagan was shot, mind you, but a time that we’ve never heard of because, duh, it was prevented by her prayer — was a bit disappointed that her gift of prophecy doesn’t help her with Dollar Movie Night, but her husband Mike is pretty good at it:

“You know, my gift doesn’t work like that at movies, and I don’t go to that many, but Mike’s does. And I hate that! I go, ‘Now, I do not wanna know the outcome,’ you know, I deal with nations…”
“And that’s not prophetic with me,” Mike Jacobs said over her.
Cindy Jacobs then replied, “Oh, he doesn’t know. He’s very prophetic.”

Read more at http://wonkette.com/581036/god-gives-lady-gift-of-prophecy-to-save-the-world-predict-how-movies-end#TqhUKzgZqbOmHXQZ.99

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In this age of $30 shampoo, $50 sunscreen, and $200 face cream, would you pay $20 for a small tube of toothpaste?A Silicon Valley startup hopes you will.
The company, started by Berkeley and Stanford graduates, says it has invested 12 years into research and development of a product called Livionex.
One 1.7 ounce tube of this dental gel retails for $20.
The company’s CEO, Amit Goswamy, said of the thinking behind their product, “Traditional toothpaste was invented in 1873. There hasn’t been a lot innovation in plaque reduction since then.”
The problem, according to Goswamy, is that traditional toothpaste is primarily an abrasive to rub plaque off your teeth; think of those grainy counter cleaners that scour stains off of surfaces.
Livionex, which does not contain fluoride, is described by Goswamy as more like nail polish remover that detaches plaque from the teeth.
“We actually look at it from a chemical perspective because it aids the brushing and removes plaque much better,” Goswamy said. “Because the plaque is actually repelled from the teeth, we break the molecular bonds beyond between plaque and your teeth so the plaque basically falls off.”
The company has funded a few small studies, most notably one conducted by the University of California at Irvine on 25 subjects, some of whom used Livionex for three weeks.
Goswamy says the Livionex users showed more than a two-fold reduction in plaque, gingivitis and gum bleeding as compared to those who used a traditional toothpaste.
I’ve been trying Livionex for a few days and the first thing you notice is how a dental gel differs from toothpaste. It doesn’t foam. It is minty and your mouth feels fresh afterwards.
I noticed that my teeth felt smooth and clean afterwards like when I brush with regular toothpaste. But what has impressed me is that for the rest of the day my teeth felt cleaner for longer. They even felt smoother in the morning when I woke up after brushing them eight hours prior.
The American Dental Association commented on the new dental gel in a statement provided to ABC News.
“The American Dental Association welcomes research that can lead to innovations in dental products intended to improve the dental health of the public. The American Dental Association (ADA) is aware of the limited data that has been published about Livionex dental gel.” The statement continued, “Livionex may hold promise, but the publicly reported data was drawn from sample sizes of 25 or less people. Initial research results on any sort of product be it oral care, pharmaceutical, etc., may or may not be replicated when further studies are conducted and published in peer-reviewed journals. Product claims regarding effectiveness at preventing disease should be evaluated by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the regulatory agency responsible for protecting the public’s health.”
When I asked Goswamy about the ADA’s statement, the Livionex CEO says the company and the ADA share a common goal.
“We would like to work with the ADA because both of us have the same goal: better oral health in America,” Goswamy said.
http://abcnews.go.com/Business/silicon-valley-startup-creates-20-toothpaste/story?id=29949822