Free Republic

At the end of this past summer, I dropped my partner off for a year of dissertation work in Spain. On the flight back, I decided that if I was going to make it through this period of lame but ultimately necessary physical separation, I would need to get a handle on my emotions. (This became acutely apparent after an in-flight viewing of Pixar’s Inside/Out that left me sobbing over my complimentary plastic cup of vino rojo.) Because I am a Virgo or Type A or whatever, I tried to divide the unwieldy mass of sadness I was feeling into...

This isn’t about how long you sit in traffic. That's just one part of it. This is about the entire godawful experience that is commuting on the US interstate system, day in and day out, navigating around terrifying Final Destination-esque scenarios, jostled by relentless potholes that the bottleneck-inducing, 365-days-a-year construction never seems to fix. Here are the absolute worst freeways in America, as determined by a metric of suck that we’re calling the Total Horribleness Index. Basically, we combed through a ton of data from the Federal Highway Administration to find out just how awful a city's traffic really is....

Most women are either bisexual or gay but "never straight", a study suggests. Research has found that though lesbians are much more attracted to the female form, most women who say they are straight are in fact aroused by videos of both naked men and naked women.

Adidas announced an initiative Thursday to help high schools nationwide drop Native American mascots. The athletic shoe and apparel maker said it will offer free design resources to schools looking to shelve Native American mascots, nicknames, imagery or symbolism. The German company also pledged to provide financial support to ensure the cost of changing is not prohibitive.

A woman is fighting for her life in a German hospital after appearing to spontaneously combust while sitting on a park bench.Flames sprouted from her as a horrified passerby rushed to her and used his jacket to beat out the fire. But she was severely burned over most of her body.The incident occurred in Flensburg, in the north of Germany, on Monday evening. The victim is in her 40's and comes from Mauritius.After being rushed to the local hospital she was later flown by air ambulance to a specialist burns unit in Lubeck where she remains in a critical condition.'The...

An Illinois police officer whose shooting death in September led to a massive manhunt committed suicide due to personal and professional pressures, investigators announced during a Wednesday morning news conference.

It kills me to write this post. I have spent more time worshiping Beyoncé than just about any other pop star. I've spent countless hours dancing to "Grown Woman" alone in my apartment. I've been the only guy in a dance class aimed at teaching the "Single Ladies" dance, and I loved every second of it. Beyoncé has been queen in my life since the first time I watched the "Crazy In Love" video. But. Over the past few months, Beyoncé has repeatedly refused the opportunity to speak out against the legalization of discrimination against LGBT people in her hometown......

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBb9O-aW4zI Check this out.Manicured fire wood. Helps prove libs are nuts

ex. Spike Lee’s new movie “Chiraq”

WARNING STRONG LANGUAGE: Maria Wright, 23, bought a pair of the new PJs unaware of the unfortunate mistake on the waistband above her backside A mum of three had an embarrassing shock when she noticed her brand new pyjama were emblazoned with a rude word. Maria Wright, 23, bought a pair of leopard print PJs from the budget clothes chain Peacocks. The £11 pants were meant to say ' animal ' - but due to a factory error had the word 'anal' on them in large print, just above her bottom. The trousers offer wearers the chance to "unleash their...

THE curtain at the edge of the universe may be rippling, hinting that there's more backstage. Data from the European Space Agency's Planck telescope could be giving us our first glimpse of another universe, with different physics, bumping up against our own. That's the tentative conclusion of an analysis by Ranga-Ram Chary, a researcher at Planck's US data centre in California. Armed with Planck's painstaking map of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) - light lingering from the hot, soupy state of the early universe – Chary revealed an eerie glow that could be due to matter from a neighbouring universe...

The clitoris: a gastronomic delight typical of Galician cuisine, according to a town that promoted its local festival after using Google Translate. Rapini, the speciality of the Galician town of As Pontes. Photo: Laurel F/Flickr ========================================================================================================================= A town hall in northwestern Spain was left red-faced after a Google Translate error led to it advertising its local leaf vegetable celebration as a much more X-rated affair. One of the highlights of the year in the town of As Pontes in Galicia, northwestern Spain, is its annual rapini festival, when townsfolk celebrate the town's speciality, the leafy green vegetable similar to spinach....

A relative performed a lamb sacrifice to protect a 20-year-old man from harm and evil just days before his body landed on a 5 Freeway sign after being ejected in a fatal car crash in Glendale, according to a fundraising page set up for him. Richard Pananian died on Friday morning. He was allegedly driving his 2004 Ford Fiesta at a high rate of speed and passing vehicles on the freeway’s right shoulder when his car hit the rear of a truck and veered out of control, the California Highway Patrol said at the time. The Fiesta then overturned and...

Family Dresses Up Baby As Kim Jong-un & Dennis Rodman For Halloween October 31, 2015 3:26 PM By Garret Heinrich An American family decided that there was no better costume for their eight-month old’s first Halloween than North Korean Dictator Kim Jong-un and his friend Dennis Rodman. The little girl does look amazingly like the baby-faced supreme leader as she totes around a stuffed Dennis Rodman Chicago Bulls doll.

Shaun King: I’ve been called the N-word since I was 14, but now those same people want me to be white EDITOR'S NOTE: Our policy at the Daily News is to censor most racial pejoratives. We have made an exception in the following column because of the personal and historic context of the subject matter: For the last 22 years of my life, I've been called a n****r. And now they want me to be white. In 1993, I was a freshman at Woodford County High School in rural Versailles, Ky. On a dozen different occasions, white students brazenly used...

We’ve seen some fishy looks served up on RuPaul’s Drag Race, but the students at an all-boys school in Japan are giving our queens a run for their money. The boys of Komaba High School in Tokyo’s Setagaya Ward participate in an annual drag contest complete with dresses, makeup and wigs. The students are then judged on who is best able to pull off the “kawaii girl” look and attitude. “They’re all a bunch of teenage boys with raging hormones and no real contact with girls on a daily basis,” reports Oddity Central. “So they use the annual Culture Festival...

SALEM — Witchcraft and jurisprudence are not exactly strangers in Salem. But even in a city that wears its ties to the 17th-century witch trials like an amulet, a courtroom duel between two self-proclaimed representatives of the occult is an unusual sight. But that’s what happened Wednesday in Salem District Court when a 75-year-old witch priestess and psychic asked a judge to stop a man who calls himself the “world’s best-known warlock” from placing vulgar phone calls to her in the middle of the night. “I can see into my own future. That’s why I’m here today,” said Lori Bruno-Sforza,...

Just in time for its 50th anniversary, Star Trek is returning to the small screen. Prolific producer Alex Kurtzman is developing a new take on the beloved sci-fi classic for TV, The Hollywood Reporter has learned. The new Star Trek has been picked up straight to series at CBS, with the premiere slated for the network in January 2017. Subsequent episodes will air on its digital and VOD platform, CBS All Access. The premiere and all subsequent episodes will then be available in the U.S. on CBS All Access, the network’s digital subscription video on demand and live streaming service....

How do we use the XML file that the Secretary of State office provides? http://sos.la.gov10/24/2015 Election Results - Parish Results <table border="2"><tr style="font-weight: bold;"><td align="center">Parish</td> <td colspan="2" align="center">Scott A. Angelle (R)</td><td colspan="2" align="center">Beryl Billiot (N)</td><td colspan="2" align="center">"Jay" Dardenne (R)</td><td colspan="2" align="center">Cary Deaton (D)</td><td colspan="2" align="center">John Bel Edwards (D)</td><td colspan="2" align="center">Jeremy "JW" Odom (N)</td><td colspan="2" align="center">Eric Paul Orgeron (O)</td><td colspan="2" align="center">S L Simpson (D)</td><td colspan="2" align="center">David Vitter (R)</td><td align="center">Total Votes Cast</td><td align="center">Precincts Reporting</td></tr><tr><td nowrap="nowrap">Acadia</td><td align="right"> 5884</td><td align="right">34%</td><td align="right"> 67</td><td align="right">0%</td><td align="right"> 2176</td><td align="right">13%</td><td align="right"> 115</td><td align="right">1%</td><td align="right"> 5220</td><td align="right">30%</td><td align="right"> 78</td><td align="right">0%</td><td align="right"> 35</td><td align="right">0%</td><td align="right"> 78</td><td align="right">0%</td><td align="right"> 3729</td><td align="right">21%</td>&‪#‎x0D‬;...

Astronomers initially thought the object was an asteroid when they spotted it in early October, and named it Asteroid 2015 TB145. But using the US space agency's Infrared Telescope Facility (IRTF) on Mauna Kea, Hawaii, experts "have determined that the celestial object is more than likely a dead comet that has shed its volatiles after numerous passes around the sun," NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory said in a statement late Friday. ... The space rock has already grabbed attention with its unusually high speed and big size, about as large as a football stadium at 2,000 feet (600 meters) in diameter....