Wednesday, March 31, 2010

Worlds tallest women

Yao Defen ( 7ft 8in - 233 cm)

Yao Defen claims to be the tallest woman in the world, with 7' 8" (233 cm). She weighs 200 kg (440 lbs) and has size 26 (UK) / 78 (EU) feet. Her gigantism is due to a tumor in her pituitary gland.


Sandy Allen (7ft 7¼in - 232 cm)
Sandy Allen appeared in the Guinness Book of World Records since 1976 --and until 2008, when she died-- as the tallest woman in the world. She was 7' 7¼ " (232 cm) in height.


Malgorzata Dydek (7ft 2in - 218 cm)

Malgorzata (aka Margo) Dydek, a basketball player in the US, is 7'2" (218 cm).


Zainab Bibi (7ft 2in - 218 cm)

Zainab Bibi, 7' 2" (218 cm) as well, was recently allowed to stay permanently in Britain because she claims her height has made her a target at home, Pakistan.

Uljana Semjonova (7ft - 213 cm)
Standing at 7'0" (213 cm), Latvian Uljana Semjonova was the leading women's basketball player in the world in the 1970s and 1980s.


Gitika Srivastava (6ft 11in - 211 cm)

Gitika Srivastava, former basketball player from India, is 6' 11" (211 cm).


Malee Duangdee (6ft 10in - 208 cm)

Malee Duangdee is Thailand's tallest woman, with 6' 10" (208cm).

Caroline Welz (6ft 9in - 206 cm)
Germany's tallest girl, Caroline Welz is 20 years old and 6' 9" (206 cm) tall.

Rita Miniva Besa (6ft 8in -203 cm)
Rita Miniva Besa is 6' 8" (203 cm)


Heather Greene (6ft 5½in - 196 cm)

Heather Greene is "only" 6' 5½" (196 cm) and lives in Las Vegas.

Tuesday, March 30, 2010

SHIT what an origin




An interesting fact?

Manure: In the 16th and 17th centuries, everything had to be transported by ship and it was also before commercial fertilizer's invention, so large shipments of manure were common.

It was shipped dry, because in dry form it weighed a lot less than when wet, but once water (at sea) hit it, it not only became heavier, but the process of fermentation began again, of which a by product is methane gas. As the stuff was stored below decks in bundles you can see what could (and did) happen.

Methane began to build up below decks and the first time someone came below at night with a lantern, BOOOOM!

Several ships were destroyed in this manner before it was determined just what was happening

After that, the bundles of manure were always stamped with the term 'Ship High In Transit' on them, which meant for the sailors to stow it high enough off the lower decks so that any water that came into the hold would not touch this volatile cargo and start the production of methane.

Thus evolved the term ' S.H.I.T ' , (Ship High In Transport) which has come down through the centuries and is in use to this very day.

You probably did not know the true history of this word.






Monday, March 29, 2010

Weird birth places

Born in a tree

It sounds like the birth story of an ancient goddess, but it's true. Ms Cheindza was near term in 2000 when flood waters raged through her town in Mozambique. She climbed a tree to escape the crocodile-infested waters and stayed there for four days with nothing to drink or eat. Finally on the fourth day, her baby came. Soon after, helicopters arrived to winch the mother and the baby, Rosita, to safety. Her umbilical cord was still attached when she winched to safety by a South African helicopter crew. Her 26-year-old mother, torn by labour pains as she clutched the branches where she had sought refuge, was exhausted and near the end when rescuers discovered her precarious perch.


Born in McDonald's (the mother didn't know she was pregnant)

A baby was born in a Washington State McDonald's restroom and the mother didn't know she was pregnant. Most mothers have months to prepare for a child, but Danille Miller had just minutes.

Miller was working the nightshift at the McDonald's in Vancouver, Washington when she suddenly ran into the restroom feeling ill. Her co-worker, Jaynae Herrera ran in after her. Herrera asked if Miller was okay but something was definitely not normal. Miller was in pain and shaking. And to her shock, she was giving birth to a baby, right over the toilet.

Jaynae called 9-1-1 and with the assistance of a dispatcher, helped deliver the baby. One of the first things the dispatcher said to do when the baby was delivered was to get the baby out of the toilet. Miller had a six-pound baby boy and named him Austin.



Born on a train and slipped through the toilet
As if birth wasn't a hard enough way to enter the world, try surviving, then falling through a toilet and onto moving train tracks. That's the tale mother Bhuri Kalbi of Rajasthan, India, will have to tell her daughter. Kalbi was only seven months pregnant and on a train's toilet when she gave birth early. She fainted before she realized what had happened. "My delivery was so sudden," Bhuri Kalbi told Reuters. "I did not even realize that my child had slipped from the hole in the toilet." According to Reuters, many trains in India have toilets that are just chutes which empty directly on the tracks below.

Once she awoke from her fainting spell, Kalbi told her relatives what happened. The train stopped and staff at a nearby station found the baby girl on the tracks, alive.


Born at 5th Avenue

A woman successfully delivered a baby girl on Fifth Avenue, New York. The baby was greeted by onlookers from Central Park applauding the doctors who delivered the child in the parents SUV. One lady who heard the commotion, Lucille Nassery, said she could hear the pregnant lady screaming from her office. Mother, Elizabeth Brew, 39, was less than a block away from the hospital with her husband when the baby began to crown. She was 33-weeks pregnant. Hospital staff and Physicians rushed to the scene with equipment to help Dr. Anya Kogan deliver the newborn. After delivering a 4 pound and 13 ounce girl, Brew was rushed away to a delivery room at the hospital, where she then delivered a 5 pound, 5 ounce twin boy.



Born in a post office

A healthy baby girl was delivered at a post office in Wisbech, Cambridgeshire, before paramedics arrived. Mother Sonia Marina Nascimento (which means birth in Portuguese), who is Portuguese, had visited the shop to buy mobile phone credit when she gave birth to baby Dulce. The baby was weighed on parcel scales. Post master Paul Childs, 58, said: "We put the baby on the scales and she weighed 5lb 15oz (2.34kg)." He added: "We worked out that's the equivalent of an £8.22 first class parcel."



Born at 30,000ft

Nicola Delemere started struggling through the pain of contractions, when she and her husband were 30,000ft in the air on a plane to Crete, she was 25 weeks into her pregnancy - and there were no doctors on board. The jet had been diverted when her waters broke but Mrs Delemere knew that Alfie couldn't wait for landing. Thankfully, flight supervisor Carol Miller was there. The woman used a drinking straw to clear the boy's lungs, before carrying out mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and heart massage for half an hour. She relied on her basic medical training, and a retired nurse and ambulance driver were also there to help. The baby was born somewhere above Dusseldorf in Germany. The plane soon arrived at Gatwick Airport and Alfie was taken straight to hospital. First Choice Airways gave the new family a free trip to Cuba once Alfie could fly.


Born at the London Subway Station

A pregnant British woman got off her London Underground subway train at Kingsbury Station, north west London, and all of a sudden, her water broke and she went into labor on the platform. Paramedics were called, who decided that there wasn't enough time to get her to hospital. And 35 minutes later Julia Kowalska gave birth to a healthy baby girl in the station supervisor's office.

Even though millions of people use the London subways every day, she's only the second baby to be born in the London Underground's 125 year history. The only other baby was born way back in 1924 in a south London station.


Born in a shrimp boat

Shrimp boat captain Ed Kiesel had to think fast and put his creativity to the test when the boat's cook went into labor 30 miles at sea. Kiesel did what he could with a brand new package of paper towels, a first aid handbook and some net twine.

The baby boy came out breach (feet first) and had the umbilical cord wrapped around his neck, but Kiesel managed to deliver him. The only problem was the baby wasn't breathing. Kiesel tried to clear the baby's nose, rub its back and after 25 minutes of CPR, the baby boy breathed on his own.


Born on his mother's front lawn

A Fullerton, Calif., woman gave birth in a very unlikely place: her front lawn. Thirty six year old Jessica Higgins was reportedly on her way home from the shopping mall when she went into labor and gave birth to her daughter Mary Claire, six weeks prior to her due date. Her two-year-old son was sleeping in the backseat of the car.

Higgins dialed 911 when she got home, but when police arrived she had already given birth and was standing in the driveway holding the newborn. Mary Claire was 5 lbs. 11 oz.


Born in an elevator

Ashton Lee Simola's arrival in this world began in a hospital elevator with his mother shouting at his father, "He's here! Catch him!" The 6 pound, 1 ounce baby was delivered in the B Elevator at Carson Tahoe Regional Medical Center. Heather, two weeks shy of her due date for their second child, had stopped at her husband's job at United Rentals to bring him lunch. As they sat eating in the car together, Heather started having contractions. Rob raced to the hospital down Arrowhead Drive with Heather wailing next to him. Traffic at Arrowhead and Highway 395 was thick. Rob drove into the right turn lane next to a JAC bus going straight. He pantomimed to the driver that his wife was pregnant and he wanted to get in front. The bus driver got the picture and let him in.

Rob didn't slow down on Medical Parkway, nor did he bother with parking. The elevator to the obstetrics department was some 100 yards down the hall. When the doors to the elevator slid open, there sat Heather screaming in pain and a crazed Rob behind her. Somewhere between floors two and three, Heather screamed. Ashton could wait no longer. "She said catch him so I caught him," said Rob. The umbilical cord was wrapped around the baby's neck. Rob said he tried to unravel it but couldn't and the elevator was coming to a stop.

Rob handed the baby off to Heather, and with the child only partly born, she held the cord off his throat as Rob shoved her off the elevator and into the lobby. Three nurses were waiting for him. They'd gotten three phone calls in the time the couple had raced against fate. Even before they made it into a room, the tiny baby with the coal black hair was nearly all the way out. Nurses quickly cut the umbilical chord, and Ashton let out a wail.

Sunday, March 28, 2010

Accidental fortunes

The man who bought an official copy of the Declaration of Independence for $4

A man, who was not identified, bought a torn painting for $4 in a flea market in Adamstown, Pa., because he was interested in its frame. When he got home he removed the painting -- a dismal country scene -- and concluded the frame could not be salvaged, but found one of the 500 official copies from the Declaration of Independence, folded and hidden in the backing. The copy is a crisp, clean broadside, creased along lines where it had been folded. It was printed by John Dunlap on July 4, 1776, to carry news of America's independence to the citizens of the 13 colonies. It is one of 24 known copies of the Declaration, and one of only three remaining in private hands.

The $4 bargain was auctioned for $2,420,000 at Sotheby's. The buyer was Donald J. Scheer of Atlanta, president of Visual Equities Inc.


The old lady who found a 140 year-old baseball card in her basement

Bernice Gallego, a 72-year-old California woman found a rare baseball card of the first professional team in the United States in her home. And if it weren't for the intervention of a friend, she would have sold the 1869 Cincinnati Red Stockings card on eBay for $10. The front of the card features a sepia-toned, gelatin-silver photographic print of the entire team. The reverse, a red-and-white advertisement for Peck & Snyder, a New York sports equipment manufacturer. The card has since been authenticated by PSA. The team photo is relatively unscathed.

The 19th century baseball card was sold on the auction block for $75,285.


The contractor who found $182,000 in a bathroom

Apparently, bathrooms can be pretty useful spots to hide your money, as contractor Bob Kitts from Cleveland, Ohio discovered. Kitts found $182,000 of Depression-era money hidden in a bathroom wall. Kitts was tearing the bathroom walls out of an 83-year-old home near Lake Erie in 2006 when he discovered two green metal lockboxes suspended inside a wall below the medicine chest, hanging from a wire. Inside were white envelopes with the return address for "P. Dunne News Agency." He told the homeowner about the money; arguments broke out quickly on how to repartition the findings. This led to a legal battle between the homeowner and the contractor, and eventually between the found money's family descendants who had been traced back from the return address on the envelope the money was found in. The contractor would have done well to keep his mouth shut.


The woman who found a Pollock worth millions, paid $5 for it

If you're not an art connoisseur, it looks a lot like a bunch of squiggly lines on a page. But to an expert, it's a stunning find - an original Jackson Pollock, an American painter and an artist considered a master of abstract expressionism.

How this painting came to be on display and up for sale in a local Toronto gallery is the stuff of legend. You may remember the unbelievable story surrounding a woman named Teri Horton, a retired truck driver who loved to frequent thrift shops around North America. When she entered one of them in California in the 1990s, she spotted a picture lying unused in a corner, a piece of artwork that no one seemed to want.

She hated it but thought it was funny. And she was going to buy it for her depressed friend. And she brought it to the counter and the lady said it was $8 and Teri said she's willing to pay $5, she doesn't love her friend that much. They were planning on drinking some beers and throwing darts at it. But a friend of hers was dating an art teacher and he looked at it and said 'you very well may have a Jackson Pollock on your hands.'

And she came back with the statement 'Who the F is Jackson Pollock?' And it all began from there. That statement became the name of a 2006 documentary featuring her story, including her struggles to prove her five buck painting was really the masterpiece many claimed it was. It was finally authenticated and now there's no doubt about its value.The painting has since been assessed as being worth a stunning $50 million, surely the greatest flea market bargain in history.



The collector who found $200,000 in coins after cleaning out an abandoned house

Jeff Bidelman, a Johnstown Rare Collectibles owner, was helping a family clean out the house their relative had abandoned over twenty years ago. As he was dragging a bag of old coins downstairs, he noticed a hole in an upstairs wall. When the first floor got torn down, a mounting pile of gold coins was found. In total, Bidelman found at least $8,500 of coins at face value. He estimates the actual value of the coins could be as high as $200,000. Apparently, they had been thrown down the hole Bidelman had noticed earlier.


The student who found a painting worth over $27,000 in a thrift store couch

A German student bought a pullout couch for $215 at a Berlin flea market and found a painting worth 100 times that amount hidden inside when she unfolded the sofa at home. According to Auction House Kunst Kettler, the tiny 10- by 15-inch oil painting was sold for $27,630 at a Hamburg art auction. The work, "Preparation to Escape to Egypt," was painted by an unknown artist close to Venetian painter Carlo Saraceni between 1605 and 1620.The student's identity was not revealed.


The man who bought a $30 painting worth 1.2 million dollars

One day, an employee at a tool-and-die company in Indiana spent $30 for a few pieces of used furniture and an old painting of some flowers and decided to strategically hang the picture to cover up a hole in the wall that had been bugging him.

Some years later he was playing a board game called Masterpiece in which players attempt to outbid one another for artwork at an auction. Much to his surprise, one of the cards in the game featured a painting of flowers that looked a lot like the one he had on his wall. He found that his painting was similar in style to the work of Martin Johnson Heade, an American still-life artist best known for landscapes and flower arrangements.

He asked the Kennedy Galleries in Manhattan, which handles many of Heade's works, to take a look at his painting. They verified that the piece of artwork covering the hole in his wall was a previously unknown Heade painting, since named Magnolias on Gold Velvet Cloth. In 1999, The Museum of Fine Arts in Houston purchased the painting for $1.2 million dollars.


The woman who found rare movie poster worthy many thousands in a print

Laura Stouffer was browsing in a thrift shop in Summerville, looking for whatever might catch her fancy, when she spotted a framed print of "Shepherd's Call," a painting depicting a border collie finding a lost lamb in a snowbank. Also known as "Found," the original had been produced sometime between 1850 and the late 1870s, attributed to no less than three different artists.

Stouffer, a former antiques dealer, recognized it immediately, snaring the 14x22-inch copy for a song. "Found" was a prophetic title, for beneath the lithograph, sandwiched between the print and its cardboard backing, was a much rarer find: an original "window card" poster from the 1930 film.

Saturday, March 27, 2010

Sexist Vintage Ads - 2











































Sexist Vintage Ads - 1



That's her place. 



She's got a big mouth, you'll notice it. A 1988 Mickey's Big Mouth malt liquor ad. 



That's what girls are for. A 1967 ad for Drummond. 



Obvious reaction for a woman. A 1971 ad for d-CON's mouse killer.





"Should you offer? After all, if she likes the offer, she might start to play. No strings attached"
A 1967 Tiparello ad. 



"Even rain can't hide that Microsheen shine!"
A 1957 Griffin Microsheen ad using women to sell shoe polish. 



Don't leave boy, she just doesn't know!
This ad for Zonite, a feminine hygiene solution, impresses on good wives the humiliation and loathing they'll experience if hubbies have to deal with their natural aromas. But that's okay - the text considerately reads, "Is a wife to blame if she doesn't know these intimate physical facts?" 



Don't you dare get fat and start slacking on your household chores!
Found on a 1970 Family Circle Mag. 



"Demure deodorizes. Deodorizes so thoroughly, so pleasantly, you know you're the woman your husband wants you to be."
A 1969 Demure douche ad. 



This 1971 Kenmore stove was "Designed for you, but built for your husband." He's more important of course. 



We all know women ruin the evenings. A 1942 Ivory Soap ad, published on the Saturday Evening Post



A 1966 ad for Parker. You see, girls can't even hold a pen.