Brother sues brother over Packer tickets

Green Bay - Two brothers’ feud over a treasured family possession - 13 season tickets to see the Green Bay Packers in prime seats at Lambeau Field - has landed in court.

Peter Christman of Los Angeles has sued his brother, Michael Christman, of Van Buren, Ark., accusing him of failing to share the profits after selling the tickets for up to $295 per game, according to Brown County Circuit Court records.

Their father, Walter Christman, died in April 2008 and passed the midfield tickets to Michael in a trust agreement directing him to split the proceeds from any sale, court records said. The agreement said 55% of the profits should go to Michael and 45% to Peter.

Ouch dad!!  So, if you are Peter, you’ve gotta wonder what you did to make dad cut you by 10%!

The wind blew over on the the teleprompters that Biden was using… then he said this:

Not wise Joe… not wise.

We had to put our dog, Alex, to sleep about 6 or 7 years ago and it ranks up there with one of the worst days of my life.

The logical part of the brain says that it’s “just a dog”.  However, any pet person will tell you that he/she was a member of the family and you grieve as such… and that’s the way it should be.  You just can’t help but think of how many times you walked in the house and the puppy was the happiest thing in the world to see you.  Doesn’t matter what kind of day you had… puppy was happy… and that made you happy.

The Tonight Show had some of the best TV moments in history, and this is near the top of the list.  It doesn’t matter how rich and/or famous you are.  A dog lover is a dog lover.  (Oh, and the dog doesn’t give a rip about your money or fame, either!)  I can’t watch this without crying just a little bit.  This is Jimmy Stewart from a 1981 appearance on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, reading a poem he wrote about his dog, Beau.

Girl, 3, Wakes Up From Coma Singing ‘Mamma Mia’

A 3-year-old girl who fell into a coma after getting meningitis stunned her mother when she woke up singing the Abba hit “Mamma Mia.”

Little Layla Towsey was so sick after getting the brain infection that she suffered a heart attack had to be put on a life support machine. Her mother even kissed her goodbye.

But five days later, Layla slowly started to regain consciousness.

“We had been preparing for bad news as the life support machine was keeping her alive,” her mother said.

“But on Sunday I could hear her singing ‘Mamma Mia’ quietly. I couldn’t believe it I knew then she would be OK.”

Layla, from Gidea Park, East London, had learned the song after seeing the “Mamma Mia!” movie. She is now on her way to a full recovery.

It’s official! W & M breaks ‘Thriller’ world dance record

WILLIAMSBURG - — College of William and Mary senior Kevin Dua has a lot to celebrate this weekend — graduation and, oh yeah, leading his university to becoming a world-record holder.

William and Mary officials received word Friday that the university — known for its history and academics — had broken the Guinness World Record for the most people simultaneously doing Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” dance in one location.

Dua organized last month’s event that helped the university dance its way into history.

“It’s a really great feeling,” said Dua, who checked the Guinness Web site Friday morning to find that the official ruling was the university had broken the previous world record of 147 people. “I got up this morning and randomly check it without thinking anything, and there right in my face was ‘Congratulations.’ I’m pretty sure I read it like five times.”

And of course, there is video.  Lots of video.  As much as I make fun of this, it IS pretty funny to watch.

Cubs’ Bradley: Umpires retaliating

Chicago Cubs right fielder Milton Bradley lashed out at Major League Baseball’s umpires Sunday, saying they are forcing him to swing at bad pitches by widening his strike zone.

Bradley, suspended one game last month after an argument with umpire Larry Vanover, said he thought other umps were getting back at him for the incident.

“Unfortunately, I just think it’s a lot of ‘Oh, you did this to my colleague,’ or ‘We’re going to get him any time we can,’” Bradley said, according to the Chicago Tribune. “‘As soon as he gets two strikes, we’re going to call whatever and see what he does. Let’s try to ruin Milton Bradley.’

“It’s just unfortunate. But I’m going to come out on top. I always do.”

Quenneville fined for postgame remarks

TORONTO — The NHL has fined Chicago Blackhawks coach Joel Quenneville $10,000 for harsh criticism of officiating in his team’s loss to Detroit in Game 4 of the Western Conference finals.

“I think we witnessed probably the worst call in the history of sports there,” Quenneville said after the game. “Nothing play.

“They scored, it’s 3-0. They ruined a good hockey game and absolutely destroyed what was going on the ice. … Never seen anything like it.”

Using only his brain, UW-Madison assistant professor Justin Williams is sending a tweet

For the life of me, I can’t understand how this wasn’t the top of every hour news story over the last week.  This is simply stunning!

Twitter on the brain

It was the tweet read ’round the world.

Last month — using only his mind — UW-Madison graduate student Adam Wilson composed and posted a message to the social networking Web site Twitter.

The telepathic tweet caused quite a stir. Within a few weeks, Wilson had more than 130,000 followers on Twitter, the most followers of anyone located in Madison.

But after the interview requests from the likes of CNN and NPR dwindled, Wilson and his adviser, Justin Williams, were still left wondering how to make the system work for those who really need it: patients with paralyzing conditions such as Lou Gehrig’s disease, brain-stem stroke or certain spinal-cord injuries. For them, short messages via Twitter could be a way to communicate with friends and family.

“They would like to be able to reach out to people, but not necessarily with long conversations,” Williams said. “Either to say, ‘I’m doing good today.’ Or, more importantly, ‘I’m not doing so great, come and see me.’ ”

…

Wilson said he was reading a blog by movie critic Roger Ebert, who speculated that one day people would be updating their Twitter accounts just by thinking about it.

Wilson, 28, knew the technology was available now.

About 3 p.m. one day he told Williams, an assistant professor of biomedical engineering, about the idea to tweet a thought.
The Twitter interface was more tempting to them than e-mail, because of its brief, billboard-style. For someone who is almost entirely paralyzed, having to choose contacts from an e-mail address book could take just as long as composing a message. But with Twitter, one need simply hit a button to broadcast a message to all of his or her subscribers.

By 6 p.m., Wilson had devised a practice post. And the next day, he posted the first straight-from-brain-to-twitter message: “using EEG to send tweet.”

The Rolling Stones?

Inxs?

Kiss?

Moody Blues?

Poison?

Then you read the article and say to yourself… “duh”.

F. Thomas Ament is declaring himself “vindicated” now that Mercer Inc. has settled a malpractice suit by the county.

Simply amazing.

While Mercer might not have done it’s job correctly, neither did Ament or the Supervisors.  In fact, the settlement was for $45m.  How much have these backdrop payments cost Milwaukee County?  Let’s also not forget that while he may be out of office, he’s STILL collecting about $95,000 a year of your money.

I know that in his own mind, he has to say things to be able to justify to himself the insane way he governed during the run-up to the pension scandal.  We all have to justify our own actions.  Perhaps however, he shouldn’t say these things out loud to other people.  (Then again, we ARE in a time where high level politicians can just flat out lie and nobody in the media calls them on it.  Perhaps Ament thinks that this point in time is his best shot.)

Still, Ament acknowledged that he learned the “backdrop” payouts were not cost-neutral, as advertised, after Mercer produced its first cost estimate in January 2001.

The Mercer memo was generated before the pension deal was approved for the labor union representing a majority of county employees. Ament said he might have heard about its conclusion before he and the board gave their approval for the union workers in February 2001. The deal had been approved for elected officials, managers and other non-union workers in 2000.

So you knew it was a bad deal BEFORE you gave it to the unions… yet you did it anyway?  That reason alone is enough to keep you out of politics for good.

Ament said he felt bad that what he called unexpected pension costs have harmed county government, but he takes responsibility only in the general sense that it happened on his watch.

“I’ll tell you this, I can sleep at night,” Ament said of his actions in approving the deal that gave employees a raft of pension and sick-leave benefits.

I’m sure you can you big-government hack.

As for his future, he said he probably would not re-enter the political arena, but he can’t give up the possibility.

“I was as good a county executive as this county’s ever had,” Ament said. “I want to show that I was.”

If that is not the most vomit-inducing sentence you will read today, then you need to find something else to read.

Depends on who you mean you were “good” for.  I’m sure that many county employees would agree.  I’m sure the rest of Milwaukee County, the citizens still paying for your mess, will disagree.

Read the entire article from JS Online.