A Seven-Year-Old Designated Driver

Meet Alfredo Martinez. While the Nevada man should be saluted for knowing that he was too drunk to get behind the wheel last night, he probably should not have tabbed his seven-year-old son as his designated driver.

Martinez, 37, was arrested after Reno cops spotted his car weaving across lanes and stopping suddenly. When officers pulled over the vehicle before it could enter a highway, they found a plastered Martinez in the passenger seat and his son behind the wheel. Martinez, pictured above in a mug shot snapped at the Washoe County lockup, directed the boy to drive him home because he was too drunk to do it himself, cops said.

Martinez is facing a felony child endangerment rap.

Happy Halloween 2006

A Memorabilia Collection That Rocks

It sounds more like something from the old West than modern day San Francisco.

It was dusty. It was musty. It didn’t smell real good.

This is a true story about buried treasure. Deep in the basement of a non-descript warehouse, down a maze of back alleys, Bill Sagan discovered what amounts to a goldmine.

“It was 25 feet high in height, below ground. Part of it was below ground,” said Sagan. “And there were, I thought, hundreds of thousands of items that were in there. And truly there were millions of items.”

It was a rock ‘n’ roll treasure trove — millions of original photographs, posters, documents and much more of forgotten artifacts from an unforgettable musical era.

“We’ve been told that there exists no other trove of rock ‘n’ roll history that is anywhere near the size of this anywhere else,” said Sagan.

To explain where this lost treasure came from we have to travel back more than 40 years to a time when San Francisco was at the vanguard of the rock ‘n’ roll revolution. And leading the charge was one man, Bill Graham.

From the first concert he staged at San Francisco’s legendary Fillmore auditorium in 1966, Bill Graham became one of the most influential figures in music history. Many say he literally invented the concept of the modern rock concert.

“Bill Graham did something that very few people do,” said Sagan. “He started an industry. Live performance music in music halls. Rock and roll. He broke these bands. If Bill Graham hadn’t been there, would Janis Joplin have been as big?”

In 1969, Joplin herself certainly appreciated him. In a 60 Minutes interview, Joplin said: “Graham really understands musicians, and that’s really important to musicians. Most promoters don’t care anything except ‘two 45-minute sets, $6,500 dollars.’ They refuse to relate in any other terms.”

From 1966 to 1991, Graham’s company, Bill Graham Presents, put on more than 20,000 concerts worldwide. Everyone who was anyone played for him — Jefferson Airplane, Jimi Hendrix, The Grateful Dead, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, The Rolling Stones, Santana, U-2. You name it. The list goes on forever.

And for nearly 30 years Graham saved everything he could get his hands on from every concert he ever put on.

“Bill Graham was a pack rat,” said Sagan. “I think Bill Graham just put everything down in that storage area and was going to keep it forever.”

For Graham, forever didn’t last long. In 1991, on his way back from a concert, he was killed in a helicopter crash. While his memory lived on, memory of his archive began to fade. During the next decade, ownership of Graham’s company changed hands several times. But no one took the time to sift through all that “junk” in the basement, until 2003, when the latest owners decided to sell yet again, and Bill Sagan bought it all.

He said: “And one day — I believe it was 25, 40-foot trucks — truckloads took the product from their building over to our building.”

Sagan and his staff kept their find a secret while they catalogued every item from what they now called Wolfgang’s Vault. Wolfgang Grajonca was Bill Graham’s given name. Now they’ve opened it up to the world and put most of it up for sale on their Web site, wolfgangsvault.com.

First there are the photographs. “I thought there was maybe a half million to a million slides and negatives,” said Sagan. “As it turned out, there’s probably is closer to a million and a half to two million slides and negatives.”

There are posters by the thousands, the psychedelic artwork that went up weekly in San Francisco in the ’60s. “We have more than 500 posters that are so rare that their retail price would be in excess of $15,000,” Sagan estimated. “There were drawers full of tickets from decades of concerts.”

Graham seems to have kept every contract he ever signed. But he had one more big surprise in store, and only after he bought the collection and started going through boxes did Sagan discover what may be the most valuable asset.

“There are nearly 7,000 tapes of 7,000 different performances,’ said Sagan. “And the reason I say nearly is because we haven’t counted them all and we haven’t looked at them all.”

Graham didn’t just save memorabilia from the concerts, he saved the concerts themselves — rare, high quality recordings of legendary concerts that haven’t been seen or heard, in some cases, for 40 years.

Just to give you an idea of what Sagan discovered: The Who’s last performance of their rock opera, “Tommy,” before drummer Keith Moon died at age 26, and the last concert ever from the British punk-rock pioneers The Sex Pistols.

Bill Graham’s cameras had captured most of all the big names through three decades of rock. The Allman Brothers, Chicago, Lenard Skynard, Peter Frampton, Bob Marley.

And more concerts were discovered on audio tapes. On the wolfgangsvault web site, fans can now listen to previously unreleased versions of some of their favorite songs.

“It’s tough to do your job because it’s so tempting to go down and just listen to audio or go look at video,” said Sagan about opening up all the boxes. “I could spend all day doing it every day.”

So remember the part about this being a goldmine? We weren’t kidding. Sagan reportedly paid $5 million to $6 million for all that stuff.

“In my opinion, it’s worth a significant amount more,” said Sagan. “It certainly is in excess of $50 million. It’s probably in excess of $100 million.”

Sagan grew wealthy running a couple of healthcare and insurance companies. Now he sees himself as part businessman, part guardian of a legacy. He says he’ll never sell many of the rarest, most valuable pieces, like Bill Graham’s personal poster collection. “It’s not for sale. It won’t be for sale.”

But most of the rest is up for sale, and Sagan has identified his market: people much like him, members of a nostalgic generation who have some money to spend on memories.

“Thank god for Baby Boomers who want to relive that good part of what they remember of their youth. And thank god for good music.”

Miami Zoo Hosts Poop Exhibit

Meadow muffins. Guano. Feces. Solid waste. Caca. The words for poop are endless, but the Miami Metrozoo has another term to add to the list: educational.

Now on display is a 5,000-square-foot exhibit on excrement titled “The Scoop on Poop,” which invites visitors to explore the science of scat. The exhibit is filled with photos of animals in some of their most indelicate moments. Stool sample models abound: haylike football-sized balls (elephant), kidney-bean-looking pellets (porcupine) and coallike lumps coated with fur (black bear).

Beyond the “ick” factor, however, zoo officials and the exhibit’s creators say there is a lot of information being imparted. Visitors can smell the stench of flowers that mimic dung to attract flies for pollination. Videos include one of a hippo spreading its droppings around to mark its territory. Simple games include “Who Dung It?”

“We didn’t want this to be a gross exhibit for shock value,” said Chad Peeling, who helped create the display. “Our goal with the exhibit was to make people think, kids especially, about the science in all aspects in life and this thing that adults don’t like to talk about.”

Miami is the exhibit’s second stop after opening at a Virginia museum in May. Created by Clyde Peeling’s Reptiland _ whose namesake is Chad Peeling’s father _ in Allenwood, Pa., it is based on a 2001 book of the same name. After the exhibit closes at the Metrozoo in January, it will make stops in Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and Redding, Calif.

The exhibit is not the first to feature feces, however. An exhibit called “All the Poop” toured Japan in 2001 and another in England showcased scat samples.

On a recent afternoon one woman cheered “go, go, go” as two children raced model dung beetles at a station in the Miami exhibit. Students on a class trip posed in a cutout of a person sitting in an outhouse. Others examined slides of parasites found in dung using a microscope, while classmates weighed themselves on a scale designed to tell them how long it takes an elephant to poop their weight.

“I don’t think it’s that disgusting,” said Bruno Cazarini, 13, of the exhibit’s topic. “I think plenty of people get the wrong impression.”

Cazarini, who was visiting the zoo with a school group, said he knew about dung beetles, some of which burrow inside dung to eat and rest. But he did not know about its uses as a type of waterproof plaster for the homes of Masai people in East Africa, which he learned from information at the exhibit.

Adults have had fun with material, too. Some volunteers and zoo employees have started wearing plastic poop pins that look like the real thing. Zoo personnel have also brought out a bowl of chocolate- covered candy, inviting visitors to take one if they dare.

Elephant keepers, meanwhile, were charged with weighing the amount of elephant poop one of the zoo’s Asian male elephants, Dahlip, produces in a 24-hour period. The total: 540 pounds. Meanwhile, a commercial for the exhibit, which will begin running shortly, has already shown up on YouTube.

One couple, who are zoo donors, even called to offer to loan the zoo a scat sample of their own. The pair has a lump of excrement from 1973 Triple Crown winner Secretariat enclosed in a glass globe, which the zoo plans to put on exhibit within a few weeks.

___

"Love witch" loses court battle

A German woman won a lawsuit against a “love witch” who failed to induce her ex-boyfriend to come back with rituals under the full moon designed to cast a spell over him, a Munich court said Monday.

“The witch lost,” said Munich district court spokeswoman Ingrid Kaps. The ‘love witch’ was ordered to return her 1,000 euro ($1,300) fee and pay “several hundred euros” in costs.

“The plaintiff was in despair after her boyfriend left and tried to get him to return with help from a woman who calls herself a ‘love witch’,” she added. “The court has ruled it was a service that was ‘objectively impossible’ to render.”

The witch disputed the plaintiff’s claim of a money-back guarantee, Kaps said. The witch, described as an elderly woman, also lost an appeal. The spokeswoman declined to give the names or ages of those involved.

“A love ritual is not suited to influence a person from long distance,” the court said. “As the promised service could not be rendered, the plaintiff is not obligated to pay.”

Scottish DUI Test

TSA MORONS OVERREACTING YET AGAIN….DUH!!!

Web Site Automates Fake Boarding Passes

A computer security student says terrorists would have no trouble getting around the government’s no-fly list, and to prove it he set up a Web site that prints fake boarding passes.

The passenger name on the fake boarding pass is “Bin Laden/Osama,” although travelers can put in their own name — or a fake one — and change the flight information, too.

Christopher Soghoian, a 24-year-old doctoral student at Indiana University, said he set up the site to prove that the Transportation Security Administration isn’t taking airline security seriously.

Others have pointed out before that savvy computer users could modify an airline Web page to print fake boarding passes, but Soghoian took it a step further and automated it.

“Before, any 12-year-old could have done it,” Soghoian said on Friday. “Now any 30- or 40-year-old could do it as well.”

Soghoian said terrorists on the no-fly list could use a fake boarding pass to avoid the no-fly list because IDs are only checked when the passenger passes through TSA screening. So someone could use a fake boarding pass with an ID that matches and get through the screening.

They’d then need a real boarding pass — presumably bought under a fake name — to get on the plane.

There also have been reports of travelers flying without an ID at all. That “essentially means the no-fly list does not work,” Soghoian said.

TSA spokesman Christopher White said other security measures are in place, including metal detectors, even if someone boards under a fake name. He condemned the Web site.

“The Web site really has the potential to promote illegal activity,” he said. “Showing fraudulent documents to get through security is against the law.”

Soghoian said he built his Web site to mimic Northwest Airlines boarding passes because he had one handy after flying Northwest earlier this week. He said he has nothing against the airline.

Soghoian said the fake boarding pass couldn’t get anyone onto a flight — as long as the airline’s computers were working — because the bar code wouldn’t match the other information on the pass.

Northwest spokesman Roman Blahoski said the airline immediately notifies the TSA and law enforcement agencies if it discovers a fraudulent boarding pass.

Soghoian said taking nail clippers and liquids away from travelers is just giving them a false sense of security, and that he’s trying to show where the real threats are.

“When they say ‘For security reasons,’ everyone shuts up, everyone follows the rules, and no one questions authority. And I don’t think that’s right,” he said.

He said no one from the government had complained to him about the site, yet.

“If I get a letter from the government telling me to take it down, then I’ll take it down straightaway,” Soghoian said.

You can see it all right HERE.

It’s amazing the fine folks at TSA, what been through multiple people in charge, hired a bunch of convicts before they realized they all had criminal records and don’t even offer employee’s DENTAL coverage have gotten as far as they have. Protecting the flying public?, ask anyone who fly’s today if they feel safer with TSA than the previous organization run by BILL APINO…

America: Protected BY MORONS 365 days a year…

AC/DC 1978 (1st US TV )

This is a clip of AC/DC playing live from the 1970’s “Midnight Special” – Wolfman Jack’s network live concert program. This particular episode was hosted by Ted Nugent, and the band is introduced for the first time to an American TV audience by Ted Nugent and Steven Tyler of Aerosmith. Bon Scott is AC/DC’s lead singer at this time, and he puts in an incredible performance along with lead guitarist Angus Young.

TWO WORDS: CAMEL TOE

He’s Blind Not Gay