Odds and ends

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2013/apr/28/michael-jackson-trial-family-aeg-live

Michael Jackson's family are suing AEG concert promoters for $40 BILLION dollars?  How, why?  He wasn't worth that much if the concerts had gone ahead!  IF the family won all that money, would they share it with the people who would have worked on that tour, produced and sold the merchandise, arranged the tickets, did the sound, lighting, stage, etc....  Could Michael Jackson even have earned half of $40 billion if he'd lived until 90 and assuming a gross rate of inflation over the next 35 years?  I think not.

Frivolous does not begin to describe this lawsuit.

Further reading tells me that the lawsuit is because AEG hired Dr. Conrad Murray to be Jackson's personal physician.

This is the most ridiculous thing I've heard in a good long while. Michael Jackson wouldn't've been worth a fraction of that if he'd lived til 2049. How do you pay off $40 billion? 'I'll just write a cheque.' 'I'll just give you Lebanon or Ghana (which have GDPs of roughly $40 billion). Or, would you like both Nepal and Paraguay?' The only people who are going to make any money out of this are the lawyers.
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The George W. Bush Presidential Library is due to open in Texas soon? The word 'oxymoron' was coined to be applied to the 'George W. Bush Library'.

Jajaja, Frankie Boyle on Twitter

'I'll give dem Grime MCs a burn so bad Simon Weston will throw himself on top of it for old time sake'

'If Rolf Harris goes on trial at least the courtroom artists won't feel under any pressure to do a good job.'

'Why are we asked to #pray after a disaster? Hasn't God just made it perfectly clear that he doesn't give a fuck?'

[On Thatcher's funeral]: 'That bell ringing symbolises each of the strokes that finished her' [On Thatcher's funeral]:'This guest list is a damning inditement [sic] of the inefficiency of the IRA'

I don't do Twitter much, it's boring, but gotta love Noam Chomsky. Like me, he doesn't give a shit about the 160-character word limit, and if he needs four Twitters to finish a sentence, he'll use them!

Jokes

When I realised Margaret Thatcher was dead, I did a double fist pump and shouted, "Fucking brilliant!"

Everyone around me was disgusted, and looking back, I suppose it was out of order.

Especially as I was the first paramedic at the scene.
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Who says Jesus couldn't perform miracles?

He managed to find mates named Matthew, Mark, Luke and John hanging around in the Middle East.
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My wife developed breast cancer and told me her doctor had suggested a double mastectomy, so I went online to see if there was any alternative.

Tracy, 36, from Newcastle looks a good one.
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I just bought the brand new Indian version of Cluedo.

They all did it, in the bus, with a teenage girl.
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Lots of confusion with the hashtag #nowthatchersdead.

Cher isn't dead.
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You know when you get that urge to eat something just because it's there?

That's why I'm no longer a gynaecologist....
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Margaret Thatcher's final wish was to be cremated.

Unfortunately, we've no coal left.
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I can't help being lazy.

It walks in the family.
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Horrifying sights at the Boston marathon tonight.

Americans in shorts.
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The earth is rotating at over 1000 miles per hour, however humans don't feel the effect of it.

Until the ninth or tenth pint.
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After my wife died of a heart attack I didn't want to settle down again straight away. I wanted to have some fun first. So I went online to find a young girl with big tits that I could have casual sex with.

Needless to say, my in laws weren't impressed. They thought I should have called an ambulance first.
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Even though he's only 11, the Jewish kid in my class turned in a fantastic essay about the Holocaust.

I gave him a gold star.

Bye Bye Beyer

I spent weeks (well at least a couple) wondering what Harald Beyer had done, why had he been suspended and now 'destituido', what had he done that was unconstitutional, and I never got a satisfactory answer, neither from the newspapers nor the people I'd asked.

Now I know.  (Though I fear that the foreign press sticking its nose in to judge a national issue is not going to go down well.)

http://www.economist.com/blogs/americasview/2013/04/education-chile

Drugs that cause most harm

A gem from The Economist:

http://www.economist.com/blogs/dailychart/2010/11/drugs_cause_most_harm?

I'm surprised that cannabis is as high on the list as it actually is, but other than that this doesn't surprise me.  Nice to see that LSD and magic mushrooms do no harm to anyone else (statistically).

I wonder if this is also based on availability, in which case the availability of cannabis should be much higher than the availability of everything else but alcohol and tobacco.

It's more difficult to see, but if you can work out the proportions, that's also interesting. As I commented, the ratio of harm to others compared to the harm done to users of LSD and magic mushrooms is statistically insignificant.  The harm to others from alcohol is greater than the harm to done to drinkers of alcohol.  I'm not sure why the harm to others to others from methamphetamines is so low compared to the harm done to users... loads of meth users lose their kids and trailer parks, don't they?  But they're very, very interesting statistics, no matter how you take them.  (And yeah, I think a different study would yield different results.)