Sleepless!

Source: Bonkersworld

The Man who saw the Future!

Irrational Exuberance is a March 2000 book written by Yale University professor Robert Shiller, named after Alan Greenspan's "irrational exuberance" quote.

Published at the height of the dot-com boom, it put forth several arguments demonstrating how the stock markets were overvalued at the time. Shiller was soon proven right when the Nasdaq peaked on the very month of the book's publication, and the stock markets collapsed right after.

The second edition of Irrational Exuberance published in 2005 is updated to cover the housing bubble, especially in the United States. Shiller writes that the real estate bubble may soon burst, and he supports his claim by showing that median home prices are now six to nine times greater than median income in some areas of the country. He also shows that home prices, when adjusted for inflation, have produced very modest returns of less than 1%/year. Shiller proved right again as witnessed by the fall of the housing bubble which was in part responsible for the Worldwide recession of 2008-2009.

Source: Wikipedia

Hear! Hear!

SRK caused major sound bites at the airport while on the way to deliver his Yale speech.

ABCD


SRK's speech at Yale University

Actor Shah Rukh Khan, arrived in the US to visit the Yale University accompanied by Nita Ambani yesterday. Mr Khan, who has been named a Chubb Fellow, addressed the students at the university. Here's the full transcript of Mr Khan's speech.

Good evening everyone, I'd like to thank you all for giving me the opportunity to be here. I also want to thank Isha for following up with the most disorganised and incommunicative person in the world in order to fix today's meeting with all of you. Thanks I really am honoured and extremely happy to be here.

I have memories of being in Yale five years ago. It was December and so damn cold that while professing love to my leading lady and singing a Bollywood ditty, which went something like this - Kabhie Alvida Na Kehna - my mouth froze itself to death. I say death because as I inched closer to kiss her, mouthing the words Kabhi Alvida Na... my mouth and jaw just got locked.

So I am hoping my second outing to your wonderful university turns out differently because it would be highly embarrassing if I said "good evening Yaleites" or "Yalers" or whatever you guys are called, and got stuck at...yaaaaa....that wouldn't make for much of a speech.

I was told not to dwell too much on my movies when I speak to you, I am to give you an inspirational talk- tell you stuff you can think about when you leave this room.

That worries me, it gives me performance anxiety. Here you are, 1500 of you, hoping to hear words of wisdom from this sexy, desirable man, who couldn't kiss a girl, last time he was in Yale because it was too cold. But I'm not that guy, I mean, I'm sexy and desirable for sure but I'm not about to leave you anymore inspired than when you walked in here.

I read this lame joke on Google the other day (yes I pick everything up from Google, even the script of my next movie and I'm not ashamed of it - you can pick me up on Google too if you like!).

Anyway, the joke went like this - a dying man, gasping for breath, desperately gestured to the priest by his side for a piece of paper. With great effort, he then wrote a few words on it, handed it to the priest and passed away. The priest kept the paper in his pocket and forgot all about it until the final service. Here he suddenly recalled the dead man's last scribble. Unfolding the paper, he told the funereal congregation that he was about to read great words of inspiration to them. The piece of paper had these words on it - "You are standing on my oxygen tube...fool."

So I am not going to be the priest tonight. Instead, I will tell you simple experiences of my life's journey with simpler words, which may not leave you inspired, but will help you survive this life. And if you can do that - happiness, creativity and success will follow on its own - or maybe not but you will have to live this life nevertheless. Only I hope my words will give you enough insight so that you can tell the world, "hey guys you are standing on my oxygen tube...move over and let me breathe."

Journeys can be defined by age and time or even by destinations, as most often they are. But I feel it is hard for me to tell the story of my life in those terms because the concept of time has always eluded me. The day my father died seemed longer than my entire childhood.

The day I felt my first success seemed fleeting, hour-long, not long enough perhaps. I wondered where it went. Even the cycle of time confounds me. I work the dark until sunrise on most days and fall asleep as the world awakens to light. My friends call me an owl, I like to think of myself as a bat...Batman...the prince of darkness.

Age is not my forte either, I still cannot fix my own - am I 45 or 15? If I could, would I be romancing girls one third my age, who normally would call me "uncle".

I had so much fun collecting the action figures of my last film (called RA.One) that none of the critical reviews tanking it mattered to me.

As for my destination, I don't think I ever knew one. I walk, I run, in the direction of my dreams. Things change along the way, people change, I change, the world changes, even my dreams change. I don't have a place to arrive, I just keep doing what I know how to do the best that I can do it. I'll probably end up a deluded geriatric in a wheelchair wearing a cape and tights, imagining my own flight out of this world, but of course with a young girl in my arms.

So I'll tell you the story of me but I'll tell it in my own way. In the language of my perceptions, in the things I think matter beyond fame and success and the dyeing of my hair. I have understood that the measure of my life lies in the expanse of my heart's experience and nothing else matters, if you take anything out of it, good, otherwise I can put on music and dance to my last big hit song, have a drink and try and practice my kissing in the cold of Yale one more time.

However, I look at it in its eventual analysis, my life has centred around my creativity. I have assimilated the world through creative expression and in return the world has experienced me. I have grown to understand that on one hand the world will always uphold creativity as the most honest feeling possible.

On the other hand, the portents of fame (the glitz, the glamour, the wealth) that arise from this very recognition of creativity will always be questioned. Why do we do that? Because sometimes it allows us to feel better than the creator and sometimes, it fills a void within us that comes about by being in awe of his creation. Either way, it enables us to quantify his engagement with the world around him.

I am an actor; my life is a testament to this duality.

George Burns said that "acting is all about honesty". If you can fake that, you've got it made. He couldn't have defined it better. Honest and fake, yes that's what I feel as a creative person all the time.

Let me tell you my schizophrenia.

Creative expression comes from the deepest experience of the artist himself. A good artist cannot be separate from his creation. Good art is honest art. A man may be an artist, a writer, a sculptor, an actor or a totem pole carver. Whatever he is, if what he creates is true to himself, it becomes a vivid testimonial to human creativity. If it lacks honesty, its entire premise is a waste.

At the same time, and quite paradoxically, a man becomes distinct from his creation from the moment it is placed in the public domain. It no longer even belongs to him. So it comes from your gut and it is put out there for others to accept it or throw it in the gutter.

Many a nights, I have gone back home after receiving an award - pumped up and all happy - just to read that what I really deserved was the Golden Banana for Worst Actor Of The Year. I become heartbroken, angry and completely convinced that bananas and critics, both should have their skins peeled and fed to the monkeys.

I momentarily lose my ability to give and close up. And here's where the trick is - when you are in this place of despair, where the world is staring you down into yourself - there's only one thing you can do to survive - hang on to who you are inside. The world will be unkind to you, it will not be able to see you. You must learn at such times, to be able to see yourself.

Life as a creative person is like being on a tight rope. I begin to lose myself, in my own melodrama. It's frustrating that I find myself living up to other people's interpretation of what I ought to be. And when faced with dissent, I start losing my love affair with my audience. It becomes a tight balance act, to keep doing what I do best and not be bothered by the reactions of people I do it for, in the first place.

I dance harder and cartwheel longer and pirouette on my rope - stretched, taut, beneath my feet.

And I try not to slip, I can slide but never fall off. All this while, I have a smile on my face and signing autographs. All I am is a funambulist trying to balance my action and exterior reaction to my naked show of who I am inside.

I start to feel like a street artist, who feels his audience is just a bunch of pausing passers-by's applauding out of a mixture of curiosity, pity or even disregard. Yet, when I am playing this real life illusion out, more often than not, my honest self is sitting in the audience, applauding my performance while laughing heartily at my own stupidity.

So my friends, learn to laugh at yourselves too. Never become cynical about yourself and your life. Becoming cynical about your life is the single most destructive thing you can do to it.

For you have to remember - creativity is your gift to the world. It was never meant to be barter for anything, not even appreciation. You have to dig deep, I do it while drinking vodka after vodka - listening to self-pitying, loser songs - you should find a less destructive way. However you do it, but you have to believe that you create only because this is the biggest gift you have to give to your world. Maybe that's why we even say "God is a creator".

It's not about the cars or houses, it never was, those are peripherals. They never come about because of your talent or your creative outpourings. They come out of a business that people around you do. Those people are in the business of barter - not you. Yours is the business of giving and learning. Your work of art may never be complete in your lifetime. Your fulfilment will always lie in your creative expression not in its products.

So look beyond the brickbats, the critics and know within you that you always have a choice between barter and creation. Life as a creator will always be a tight rope.

Do not try to feed your stomach with creativity; it is food for your soul, not your stomach. Do not be afraid to defy conventions. Do not be afraid to destroy systems that kill art and your souls. Do not be afraid to be hungry. Do not be afraid to walk alone if necessary. Because on a tightrope we all walk alone. Remember, if you are a creator you are a funambulist and not very many people know that word, let alone be it.

Just as my life has centred around creativity, like every fellow human being's, it has also centred around the wish to find happiness. Your age is the age when we most confuse happiness with gratification so I will say quite plainly: if you are smart, if you want to survive life's relentless onslaught of challenges, you will sooner or later understand that the things that made you happy ten years ago will end up being the ones that make you happy when you hit the geriatric superhero stage. Kids, start collecting your action figures, now!

I have everything I could have aspired for at your age, I have success, I have fame, I have wealth and I have three play stations - one for the house - one for shootings and one just because I can have it. But none of these have any consequence to my happiness, the only thing that does is the love of my children.

You don't have children (I hope), but you have parents, you have people you love and nothing in this world of everything, means more than that. Happiness, in other words, lies in the things you will never be able to count.

To me, it is no more than cuddling up to my kids and watching I Carly or The Family Guy. Well most of the time anyway, the other day my son and I stumbled upon the Kamasutra on the net and I can tell you that experience was not very happy. He's 14 and he knew more about it than I did.

I want you to understand this business of happiness well because I know at one level, all parents are the actually the same. Some look sterner, some are less fun, some are embarrassingly weird but for each parent the bottom and the top line of their lives is this - you kids are their greatest source of happiness.

Parents want nothing in return, just that you respect that feeling, that's all.

Take my own children. I believe that girls really are from planet Venus - my girl comes from a place of gentleness, caring, love, intelligence and all things beautiful. My boy comes from 'I am too good to be your kid' planet. Guys are obnoxious. I am not being sexist but that's the truth.

I was in London shooting and missing my kids. Being from the boring school of people, who send writings to their kids in the hope of making them better human beings, I sent my daughter this verse from a poem by E E Cummings:

I do not know what it is about you that closes and opens,
only something in me understands
The voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses,
nobody, not even the rain,has such small hands

I instantly received this text message in return, "I love it papa. It is beautiful. I am going to write it in my secret diary with the secret lock and keep it in my secret hiding place, under the Katy Perry and Lady Gaga poster. I love you and miss you. I am too excited, watching The Hunger Games tonight."

Feeling bad that I hadn't texted something meaningful to my darling son I sent him something I had read too. "How are you my son," I wrote. "I miss you. Do you know, a boy is someone that a mother loves the most. Little girls hate him. He is truth with dirt on its face, beauty with a cut on its finger, wisdom with smell in its hair and hope of the future with a frog in its pocket. I love you."

He replied back with one letter of the alphabet. One measly "Y" to my emotional fatherly outpourings. That and an emoticon. I wanted to fly to Mumbai and hang him upside down till he looked liked a silly red faced emoticon himself. But I didn't, instead I just smiled.

Both replies made me feel love for my kids. Whatever they do, as long as they are happy it makes me happy.

So I speak to you as a parent of two very weird kids. Whatever you do, whichever mistake you make, however you react to them, your parents are your best friends.

They might be boring, silly or stern at times. Maybe some of you are embarrassed of yours, I know my kids are of me, but if ever any of you are in trouble of any kind - the best friends you can always trust to watch your backs are your parents. They will always come good.

I lost my parents very early in my life and I miss them dearly. So, all of you who still have yours don't listen to them, fool them if you must, a bit of lying is also welcome, but make sure you cherish what you have because when you don't have them. Like me, you really miss someone to be rude to - someone to you can take for granted, someone to say and do whatever you wish with. You miss the comfort of being loved unconditionally. I call parents unconditional and forgiving punching bags, who feel happiest when they get bashed up by their kids.

If you want to survive life, it's best to begin to respect the gift of love right now.

As children, your first teachers of this acceptance are your parents. If you are unable to accept the love they give you, in whatever form it arrives (even if it is a tight slap across your face), then when you become a parent, you will end up having to learn this lesson somewhat more harshly from teachers you give birth to - and learning Kamasutra from my son is a not a great idea - you would agree.

Incidentally he studies in a school that Isha's mom runs in India. I have to say - ma'm your syllabus is quite different from the one I had when I was in school.

Whether I like it or not, my life has also been in constant play with what the world calls "Success".

Success is a wonderful thing, but it tends not to be the sort of experience that we learn from. We enjoy it, perhaps we even deserve it. But we don't acquire wisdom from it. And maybe that's why it cannot be passed on either - me being successful does not mean my children will also be. No matter how much ever I teach them what I did in my life and even if they follow it to the letter.

So I feel that talking about how to become successful is a waste of time. Instead, let me tell you very honestly whatever happened to me happened because I have always been terrified of failure. I don't want as much to succeed as much as I don't want to fail.

I come from a very normal lower middle class family. I saw a lot of failure. My father was a beautiful man and the most successful failure in the world. My mother also failed to stay with me long enough for her to see me become a movie star. We were quite poor actually and let me tell you, poverty is not an ennobling experience at all. Poverty entails fear and stress and sometimes depression. I watched my parents go through this several times.

At an early age after my parents died, I equated poverty with failure. I just didn't want to be poor. So when I got a chance to act in films it wasn't out of any creative desire that I did so. It was purely out of the fear of failure and poverty. Most of the films I signed were discards of better known actors and the producers could not find anyone else to do them. I did them all to make sure that I was working to avoid unemployment. The timing or something was right, and that made them happen. I became a big star, which means sometimes our success is not the direct result of our actions. Success just happens. Really. It is accidental and we take credit for it, I know I have done this even out of embarrassment sometimes.

So I believe the true path to success is through the fear of failure. If you aren't scared enough of failing, you are unlikely to succeed. It's not pleasant to fail, it's tough. All of us experience it. You will too if you haven't already. Use it to succeed.

Here's how I have done so:

1. Firstly, its not the absence of failure that makes you a success - it is your response to failure that actually helps to buffer the reverses that you experience. I personally have one response to failure - pragmatism - a recognition and belief that if one approach does not work, then the other will or might.

2. Failure also gives me an incentive to greater exertion - harder work, which invariably leads to later success in most cases.

3. Repeated failure has taught me to stop pretending I am someone else. It has given me the clarity to stick to the things that really matter to me instead of distracting me from my core.

4. Failure also gets you to find, who your real friends are. The true strength of your relationships only gets tested in the face of strong adversity.

5. Overcoming some of my failures has made me discover that I have a strong will and more discipline than I suspected. It has helped me have confidence in my ability to survive.

Failure is an amazing teacher. There is a well-known story of a bank president, who was asked the secret of his success. "Right decisions," he replied. "How do you get to know how to make right decisions?" came the follow-up question. "Experience," was the answer. "Well, how do you get experience?" asked his interrogator. "Wrong decisions," he replied.

You have to know and learn that life is a not just a check list of acquisitions, attainments and fulfilments, your qualifications and CVs don't really matter. Instead, life is difficult and complicated, and beyond anyone's control. The humility to know this will help you survive its vicissitudes.

But I don't want to sound dark. My hope for all of you is that you retain a lifelong love of learning, that you never cease to dream exciting and inspiring dreams, and when you fail, you fail well enough to succeed the next time. Don't be afraid of being afraid, be afraid of not facing your fears and failures.

In the end I will read out a text message I got today from my kid - "Papa, Chuck Norris has trained his dog to pick up its own poop because Chuck Norris will not take shit from anyone."

So remember, you are fortunate enough to be a funambulist - who has an amazing set of punching bags - cherish them. And failure is your fiendish friend, keep him close, and don't take no shit from anybody.

Bless you all and thanks for listening.

Source:NDTV

L is the B M

30 Very Funny Books--Seriously

Gina Barreca, Ph.D., is Professor of English at the University of Connecticut, author of It's Not That I'm Bitter: How I Learned to Stop Worrying About Visible Panty Lines and Conquered the World (St. Martin's Press), and has appeared on 20/20, The Today Show, CNN, Joy Behar, Dr. Phil, and Oprah to discuss gender, power, politics, popular culture, and humor.

1. Cold Comfort Farm
by Stella Gibbons

2. Three Men in a Boat and Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow
by Jerome K. Jerome

3. But Enough About You and If You Can't Live Without Me, Why Aren't You Dead Yet?
by Cynthia Heimel

4. The Sylvia Chronicles
by Nicole Hollander

5. When Do They Serve the Wine?
by Liza Donnelly

6. In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash and Wanda Hickey's Night of Golden Memories
by Jean Shepard

7. How I Got To Be Perfect
by Jean Kerr

8. The World According to Dave Barry or anything else written
by Dave Barry

9. Heartburn
by Nora Ephron

10. Without Feathers
by Woody Allen

11. The Life and Loves of a She-Devil
by Fay Weldon

12. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
by Anita Loos

13. The Complete Stories of Dorothy Parker
by Dorothy Parker

14. With Malice Towards Some
by Margaret Halsey

15. Molly Ivins Can't Say That, Can She?
by Molly Ivins

16. The Best of Robert Benchley or anything else written
by Robert Benchley

17. How to Raise Your I.Q. By Eating Gifted Children
by Lewis Burke Frumkes

18. Social Studies and Metropolitan Life
by Fran Lebowitz

19. A Marriage Made in Heaven--or Too Tired for an Affair and
I Lost Everything in the Post-Natal Depression
by Erma Bombeck

20. City Boy
by Herman Wouk

21. The Loved One
by Evelyn Waugh

22. Catcher in the Rye
by J.D. Salinger

23. Brain Droppings
by George Carlin

24. Help! I'm a Prisoner in a Chinese Bakery! and
Whoever Owns His Own Home, Deserves It
by Alan King

25. The Hypochondriac's Guide To Life. And Death.
By Gene Weingarten

26. The Queen and I
by Sue Townshend

27. Not Waving, But Drowning and
A Good Time Was Had by All
by Stevie Smith

28. Small World
by David Lodge

29. The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe
by Jane Wagner

30. Is Sex Necessary?
by James Thurber and E.B. White

Source: Psychology Today

Maybe..

"Maybe this world is another planet's hell."
ALDOUS HUXLEY
1894 - 1963

Some Respect Please!!

Source: Planetmut

A HOWLING FROM ROWLING

Some would say that to entertain the young is a much tougher task than to engage adults while there are those who would argue the other way. JK Rowling will know the truth by the end of this year!

ABCD

JK Rowling new book for adults is 'blackly comic'

It may lack wizards and witches, but JK Rowling and her publisher are hoping her first novel for adults, "The Casual Vacancy," will have the magic touch.

The book's title was announced Thursday by Little, Brown & Co. along with a brief plot synopsis and publication date.

The publisher said the "blackly comic" tale of rivalry and duplicity in a small English town would be available worldwide on Sept. 27.

he new book, aimed at a grown-up audience, will be set in a seemingly idyllic English town called Pagford which is described as far more menacing than its pretty facade would indicate.

It opens with the sudden death of a popular man whose unexpected demise shocks the town. The battle for his seat on the local council sets off "the biggest war the town has yet seen," with rich people fighting poor, parents battling their teenagers, and wives in conflict with their husbands.

The publisher said the 480-page novel will be sold as an e-book and audio download as well as in traditional hardback form.

The synopsis came as a surprise and suggested similarities to the work of popular mystery writer Alexander McCall Smith and Mark Haddon, a children's writer who had a huge adult hit with "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time."

Source: NDTV

Pak wife makes korma using husband

No Comments!!

ABCD

Karachi: In a stomach-wrenching incident, a Pakistani woman chopped her husband to death and then cooked korma with his flesh.

The incident came to light after her landlord, Behzad, who lived on the ground floor of their two-storey Green Town house here, went upstairs to her house.

The scene that met his eyes have left him scarred for life, The Express Tribune reported today.

"The 40-year-old Zainab was cooking korma with flesh chopped from her husband's arm and leg as she figured this was the only way to practically dispose of the body," the daily said.

Zainab says that she murdered her husband after he had tried to molest her daughter. She claims she had stopped him from doing so on several occasions in the past. However, she later contradicted herself by saying, "He never laid a hand on her but he used to say dirty things whenever he came home drunk."

For three months, Zainab has been living here with her 17-year-old daughter Sonia from an ex-husband, and her new husband Ahmed Abbas, whom she had married five years ago.

At around 9:30am yesterday, she prepared a routine breakfast for Abbas but the only difference was the inclusion of five sedatives in his cup of tea.

The drugs took effect within half an hour and Abbas was sedated. Zainab brought a rope and strangled him to death.

Speaking to the daily from behind the bars, she said, "When he finally died, I felt shudders of fear for the first time...I didn't have the courage to approach his body for the next half an hour".

However, she finally mustered courage and came up with the inhuman idea of cooking her husband to dispose off the body.

"It occurred to me that if I cooked the body in parts with spices and aromatic ingredients that would curb the stench," she revealed, adding that, "Later I had a plan to do away with the cooked stuff by throwing it in a gutter. I would say to people that it had spoiled."

Source: NDTV

Dismay with Ismay

2012 marks the centennial of the sinking of the Titanic - once again giving rise to a lot of interesting speculation about the fateful ship and its owner.

ABCD

Timed to coincide with centennial of the sinking of the Titanic, a number of books have been lined up to shed new light on the enduring disaster and how it continues to haunt those who escaped the shipwreck. Besides several new books hitting the newsstands in the past couple of months, many earlier works on the compelling tragedy of 1912 are being re-issued. Leading the pack is "Titanic, First Accounts", a fascinating firsthand account of the Titanic in a deluxe package with graphic cover art. The book, published by Penguin and edited by Tim Maltin and Nicholas Wade, has historic accounts and testimonies by survivors and eye-witnesses including Lawrence Beesley, Margaret Brown, Archibald Gracie, Carlos F Hurd and many more

"How to Survive the Titanic: The Sinking of J Bruce Ismay" by award-winning historian Frances Wilson delivers a gripping new account of the sinking of the RMS Titanic, looking at the collision and its aftermath through the prism of the demolished life and lost honour of the ship’s owner, J Bruce Ismay. In a unique work of history evocative of Joseph Conrad's classic novel "Lord Jim", Wilson raises provocative moral questions about cowardice and heroism, memory and identity, survival and guilt - questions that revolve around Ismay's loss of honour and identity as his monolithic venture - a ship called "The Last Word in Luxury" and "The Unsinkable" - was swallowed by the sea and subsumed in infamy forever. The book, published by HarperCollins, spins a new epic: when the ship hit the iceberg on April 14, 1912, and one thousand men, lighting their last cigarettes, prepared to die, Ismay jumped into a lifeboat filled with women and children and rowed away to safety.

Source: IBN Live

More about Ismay on Wikipedia

Buying and Selling

They did warn us that the advent of consumer culture was well upon us but organ swaps for apps and a Own - a - Town schemes?? 2012 .. end of the world??

ABCD

Chinese Teen Sells Kidney for iPad, iPhone

Experiencing renal failure? We're not sure if there's an app for that yet.

Remember those "What would you do?" ads for Klondike Bars? Well, it looks as though Apple could have an ad campaign in the works after five Chinese people were charged for taking out a teenager's kidney and selling it so the 17-year-old could buy both an iPhone and an iPad. The teen, identified only by his surname, Wang, came from Anhui province, one of China's poorest. The teenager pocketed about 22,000 yuan, or about $3,500, from the operation, which was more than enough needed to buy both the phone and tablet last year. Reports say that the man who arranged the transfer received at least 220,000 yuan for the operation, which he split with his medical team and the patient. After some investigating, police charged five people last week with causing an intentional injury to the youth. Wang has since developed serious kidney problems, but for some, we suppose that's worth the fleeting glory that comes with owning expensive pieces of gadgetry that are obsolete within six months.

Source:http://www.themarknews.com/news/?open=8386

Wyoming town—population 1—sells for $900,000 to Vietnamese buyer

The town of Buford, Wyoming—population 1—was sold for $900,000 to an unidentified buyer from Vietnam on Thursday after an 11-minute Internet auction that attracted worldwide interest.

The tiny Western town garnered online viewers and bidders from 46 countries for the sale of 10-plus acres with a convenience store, gas station and modular home located in southeastern Wyoming between Cheyenne and Laramie.

The buyer, who wished to remain anonymous, flew to Wyoming from Vietnam for a purchase he likened to "the American dream," according to a statement released by Williams & Williams, the Oklahoma auction house handling the sale.

"Owning a piece of property in the US has been my dream," the buyer said in the statement.

Don Sammons, long the town's sole resident, moved with his wife, Terry, from Los Angeles to the Buford area in 1980. In 1992, six years after his wife died, Sammons purchased the town.

Sammons decided to auction off the Interstate 80 hamlet, billed as "the nation's smallest town" and named after Civil War Union Army General John Buford, to move to Colorado to be near his adult son.

"My family is gone. Our purpose for moving here has kind of been completed, and now I want to find out what other adventures I have in store," Sammons, 61, told Reuters in an interview.

Speaking before the sale, which was broadcast online, an executive with Williams & Williams said the firm had never seen the level of buzz that attended the Buford auction.

"Auctions always bring a lot of attention, but even we were amazed at the amount of attention to Buford worldwide," said Amy Bates, chief marketing officer for Williams & Williams. "It's the Wild West in the US. It's owning your town and getting away from it all

Source: http://www.gmanetwork.com/news/story/254113/news/weirdandwacky/wyoming-town-mdash-population-1-mdash-sells-for-900-000-to-vietnamese-buyer

MYQ Kaplan

MYQ Kaplan Jokes

If you haven't seen 'Snakes on a Plane,' I recommend it. I would just recommend, don't spoil it for yourself like I did. Before I went, I read the title.

A lot of people these days are getting into religious fiction. They're reading things like 'The Da Vinci Code' and 'The Bible.' I know, 'The Da Vinci Code' might be real -- fair enough.


People always assume I'm into other kinds of activism. They're like, 'Oh, you're a vegetarian. Do you care about the environment?' No, I eat the environment. That's what we do. It's made of vegetables.

I like science fiction, and I always wonder what it was like before science was so advanced. Back in ancient Greek times, what was sci-fi like? Was it like, 'Beware the pulley and the lever and the inclined plane: they're gaining awareness. It's "Terminator: Part 0 - Rise of the Simple Machines"'?


For more Jokes - Jokes.com

Falak Afreen

Just two months after being shocked by the horrendous visuals showing a battered baby Falak - India must now come face to face with another nightmare ....

ABCD

Baby Afreen on ventilator in Bangalore after father's abuse

She is named Afreen, meaning "special" or "unique." The three-month-old has been bestowed so far with vindictive extra-ordinariness. She lies hooked up to a ventilator at a government hospital, the third that she has been to since Thursday. Her father, Umar Farooq, has been arrested for abusing her.

Because of an assault last week, she has swelling and bleeding in her brain. She sometimes has convulsions.

The doctors attending to her say they don't know yet what caused the marks all over her body. But they believe she has been battered regularly, and that an attempt was made recently to smother her.They cannot tell if her injuries will result in permanent damage.

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