Kidnapped Californian girl kept as a sex slave for 18 years

A CONVICTED rapist accused of kidnapping a girl and keeping her hidden in his backyard for 18 years has told US media he's turned his life around, and has pleaded for people to hear his "most powerful, heart-warming story"...
In an interview with local TV station KCRA 3, Garrido asked people to wait for his side of the story about what happened in the house.
"You are going to be completely impressed," he said.
"It's a disgusting thing that took place with me at the beginning. But I turned my life completely around and to be able to understand that, you have to start there."
People close to Garrido, who owns a business called God's Desire, said he became increasingly fanatical about religion, bursting into song on random occasions and claiming God spoke to him through a box.
"What's kept me busy the last several years is I've completely turned my life around," Garrido said.
"And you're going to find the most powerful story coming from the witness, the victim - you wait. If you take this a step at a time, you're going to fall over backwards and in the end, you're going to find the most powerful heart-warming story."

Full Story

If someone claims that "God spoke to him through a box", religion is undeniably a part of the story, although this is most likely a case of an insane person latching on to religion as part of his delusion. From what is quoted of his TV interview, "you're going to find the most powerful heart-warming story", he's probably a born-again Christian with a story to tell about Jesus becoming his personal saviour. If this led to the victim being freed, this might just be one of the very few examples of religion leading to a positive outcome. Do not, however, interpret this as me supporting religion, this story actually illustrates the sort of person who gets sucked in by it - unstable nutjobs.

Secret Gardens 3

Photographed by holding my phone camera at arms length to peek over peoples anoyingly high fences.

Organic food - fad or phenomenon?

"THE organics industry has been dealt a hefty blow by the United Kingdom's Food Standards Agency's declaration that organic food is no healthier than ordinary food.The ruling follows the world's largest study into the subject.It also backs up the view of other bodies, including the British Nutrition Foundation and numerous Australian organisations, that organic products are no better for us than other foods."

Full Article

What everyone seems to have failed to mention is the one factor that I, and many others, find to be the most important in our choice of produce. It's not about nutrition or health at all. It's about FLAVOUR! When was the last time you ate a cheap supermarket tomato that actually tasted of anything? I couldn't care less about the nutritional value of the slices of bacon and the egg that I put in a sandwich, I just want the result to taste great - and that's not going to be the case if I choose the vacuum sealed cheap bacon in slime from the racks and the cage eggs. I buy organic or free-range for items that have to stand up and be tasted, because where's the pleasure in eating textureless pale rubbish that tastes of nothing?

Secret Gardens 2

Yes I do realise that this could constitute a gross invasion of privacy, but it's fun!

If, by some random and very unlikely sequence of events, you happen to see your own Secret Garden posted here and would like me to remove it, just say so and I will.

Secret Gardens

In an older blog on another network I would sometimes post pictures of things I couldn't see on walks around my neighbourhood.

"How does that work?" I hear you ask in your eternal search for knowledge and understanding.

Simple really. Lots of people have really high fences and walls so their front or back gardens, yards or tips can't be seen from the outside. I found myself wondering what was over these fences and realised that a phone camera held aloft as far as my arm would reach could easily photograph the hidden scene. Then I could just look at the screen on my phone to see what was over there and, if it was interesting enough, I could post them on my blog!

So I've decided that I miss doing this and am starting again from today. First up is the view over the fences either side of my own back yard to those of my neighbours, and then a couple of others I shot on the walk down to the shoe shop at the end of my street and back. Then I'll repost all the ones from my now defunct old blog in another series of posts after that.

Enjoy!

Sporting groups cry foul over alcohol sponsorship ban

The Daily Telegraph

July 18, 2009 12:01am

No solution ... AFL boss Andrew Demetriou says a propsed ban on alcohol sponsorship would cripple football.
* Plan would devastate sport, say codes * Wouldn't make a dent on problem drinking * Government tight-lipped on proposal
BANNING alcohol sponsorship and advertising would devastate sport and not make a dent on problem drinking, major sporting groups said yesterday...

Full article

I'm sick to death of living in a nanny state where those in charge concentrate so much effort on trying to modify human behaviour with regard to products that are perfectly legal to produce, purchase and consume. The role of government is to administer the finances and laws of the land, not to tell us how to live our lives. They seem to think, naively, that if you keep information from the public as to what choices are available then they will cease to seek out the things that they want. This is obviously not the case. Everyone knows alcohol exists, everyone knows where it can be purchased and anyone who wants to avail themselves of it will continue to do so. All that will be changed by banning alcohol advertising is the amount of time people spend in bottle shops choosing what they want to buy. If you know what you want you ask for it, if you don't, you browse. By causing people to spend time browsing they will actually have the reverse effect of what they are trying to achieve. It's a retailers dream to have uninformed customers wandering about looking at their wares. The more time people spend looking, the more they buy. So sport suffers for no positive outcome. Stupid.

VIDEO: Hoon drag race

Look at this video:
VIDEO: Hoon drag race

Link to the story:
Hoon drivers post illegal street race videos on YouTube

HOON drivers are laughing in the face of authorities, posting an internet video showing an illegal street race in front of a southern suburbs police station.
A video posted on website YouTube just four days ago shows a young male driver street racing in front of the Christies Beach police station on a wet and slippery Dyson Rd at night.
The video creators and hoon driver reflect precisely the dangerous drivers Road Safety Minister Michael O'Brien describes as a "cohort of highly irresponsible, predominantly young, male drivers" who are responsible for causing a "bedrock" limit to reducing the state's road toll.
The video shows two high-powered cars at traffic lights directly outside the police station, revving engines in a bid to entice a drag race.
Cars and a truck pass in front of the ready-to-race vehicles, the red light holding them on their start line. The road ahead is wet from rain, is poorly lit and narrows to a single lane shortly beyond the intersection.
The camera records an expression on the face of the hoon driver before turning to the opponent's rear wheel – which spins madly as the lights go green and the race starts with a screech and roaring engines...

My (Grumpy of Norwood) comment:
Rubbish! That video shows nothing more than a great demonstration of how to make something seem more exciting than it really is with the use of sound. At no stage did the other cars wheel "spin madly". It merely started to rotate as the car went forward and we hear a squealing noise that suggests a spinning wheel. The car in which the filming was done never appears to go particularly fast, it just makes a lot of noise - and I'm not convinced that sound wasn't added later either. Total beat up story based on absolutely no evidence of anything actually going on. Watch it again with the sound turned off and see how exciting it seems then.

Email scammers target taxpayers

A link

Email scammers target taxpayers
By Eoin Blackwell
AAP
June 26, 2009 02:03pm

* Emails promise $250 with tax return * ATO says it "never sends these emails" * Online scammers in stimulus grab
CYBER criminals purporting to be the Australian Taxation Office (ATO) are using a sophisticated email scam involving personal tax returns to fleece consumers, a computer security company says.
The scam ATO email, which promises a $250 bonus on top of a tax return, links the taxpayer to an online form that asks for personal details including ATM pin, credit card details and tax file number."

My (Grumpy of Norwood) comment:
Oh My God. This article cannot be serious! I got that email and it was the least sophisticated attemp at fraud I've ever seen. It was in Courier, badly centred, English was obviously not even the writer's 2nd language. I laughed. I called people in from other offices to show it to them so they could laugh as well. And the link didn't even work! Nobody is going to be fooled by this silly scam.

My job is now keeping me awake at night

It's after 1am and I can't sleep because I'm so frustrated, bewildered and angry about a ridiculous thing that's going on at work. It's entirely caused by ignorance, at least it's not malicious or intentional, but that doesn't change the fact that I'm stuck with it.

OK, so let's try to sort this out. I've been asked to do a logo design for a housing development. Great, I love designing logos. They are the most challenging and rewarding task for a designer. Get the logo right and everything else becomes easy. The logo sets the type, colour and style basics for everything that follows - stationery, advertising, website, brochures - they are all so much simpler to design if you nail the logo first. You get to create a consistent look for the client that becomes recognisable in the marketplace, which helps everybody. It makes it easier for the client to reach the target audience for their product, it makes it easier for the audience to recognise the client's brand, it makes it easier for the designer to produce everything required because the logo sets the style for it all.

When a client comes in and says "I've got this new product, I'm going to need a brochure", the correct response is, "OK, we'll first need to sort out the logo then so we can get started on your brochure". Not, "OK we won't bother the designer with that yet, instead we'll have our production guy knock up a brochure layout and worry about things like the logo later".

If the client has, say, $5000 to spend on a logo, brochure and website, you allocate at least a few days worth of solid time, perhaps $1000, to producing logo options, refining and editing down to the final result until it's perfect. It makes sense because then the brochure and website will only take half the time to design because you already half know how they should look.

What you don't do is, again, get the production guy to produce a single brochure visual, with no logo, present that to the client and get their approval, do nothing for a week and then tell the designer he has to design the logo and the website in a single working day. That would be nuts, right?

That would mean that the logo now has to be something that will fit into this already approved brochure design, which makes the job both far more restricted in scope and therefore infinitely more difficult. And it means that this riddle has to be solved within a few hours, so it's never going to be anything special, or going to work as well as something that was designed solely for the purpose of representing the product. It has to be a compromise before it's even begun.

I'm sure you've guessed which route they've taken at work. I have 1 day to not only design this logo and the website, but also the website layout for another job as well. Obviously we're just not a company that rates quality of design very highly, which is a shame because, as a designer, I do.

I want a ladder.

At any given moment, with absolutely no warning whatsoever, anything in my house has the capacity to amuse me. Tonight it was my step ladder. I was passing through to the back of the house in which I live and, sitting by the back door, there was MY stepladder. Mine. I own it. I went to a shop and I paid money and bought it for me to use on those occasions when something is marginally too high to reach by precariously balancing on a chair of dubious stability. Adults own things like that. Not children, they use their parent's stepladder. Ergo, I am an adult for owning a stepladder. Hoorah.

Among the plethora of things that I own, a proper grown up ladder, of more than 4 steps that you can reach the ceiling with, is not among them. I shouldn't own one because there are rules about such things and the rules say so.

I rent. That's it in a nutshell. Further among the things I do not own is a house. I was never inclined towards, or financially capable of, such a feat. The fact is that people who rent have no business owning proper grown up high ladders. If something needs doing in a house that is rented that requires the use of a grown up high ladder then it is the landlord's job. That's the rule, the line that needs to be crossed to get from "tenant's job" to "landlord's responsibility." The ladder is that line. I don't know if that's how it's worded in the tenancies agreement but in practice, that's how it works.

But I want one. I covet them. Years this has been going on. Honestly. I'm that crazy, really. I'm mad me. I don't own a house but by God I shall have my ladder. A ladder with a gimmick, obviously, because if a person who isn't strictly qualified to own something insists on having one anyway, there must be some other, less practical aspect to it's operation that opens its usability options up into hitherto unexplored vistas. Something a practical, house owning grown up with a need to maintain his or her ceiling wouldn't absolutely find essential to perform normal grown up ladder type tasks, in this particular case.

A bendy ladder, perhaps. Hmmmmm,...