MASON, Ohio — Kings Island amusement park has dropped a Halloween Haunt display showing skeletons of dead celebrities.

Don Helbig, Kings Island spokesman, spent a rainy Thursday helping to remove the scene of slain NFL quarterback Steve McNair and his dead mistress Sahel Kazemi, along with other skeletons made to look like dead celebrities, including Heath Ledger and Michael Jackson.

The skeletons were near The Beast rollercoaster and have been replaced with generic skeletons, Helbig said. “We weren’t intending for it to be distasteful and we do apologize if we offended anyone,” he said.

Reaction to the McNair display was negative, particularly in Nashville, where McNair played most of his career and was killed on July 4. Police said that Kazemi shot McNair to death before killing herself.

The McNair skeleton wore a jersey numbered 9 and sat on a couch with a dress-wearing skeleton sprawled in its lap. A gun was on the ground, and the jersey-clad skeleton held a Tennessee Titans snack bowl.

George Plaster, a sports radio talk show host at 104.5-FM “The Zone” in Nashville, talked about the McNair skeleton on his Wednesday program.

Plaster said Thursday he was shocked when he heard about the display.

“I can’t imagine how anybody would get in a room, in a planning session, in what is a pretty tasteful theme park, and decide that’s OK and classy,” he said. “Not one person said, ‘Wait a minute, that’s incredibly insensitive?’ I’m stunned at that.”

Helbig said the park received a handful of complaints on the display, which has not yet opened to the public, and decided to shut it down.

The celebrity skeleton scene included a Sonny Bono skeleton tied face first to a tree and geared in ski equipment. Bono, a singer, actor and U.S. Congressman, died in 1998 as a result of a skiing accident after he hit a tree. A skeleton of Boston Red Sox Hall of Famer Ted Williams was stuffed in a glass-door freezer. Williams was cryogenically frozen after his 2002 death.

Preview photographs showed skeletons representing Jackson, Ledger, “Charlie’s Angels” actress Farrah Fawcett, Wendy’s founder Dave Thomas and as-seen-on-TV product pitchman Billy Mays.

SOURCE: USAToday

COLUMBUS, Ohio – Call them the Knights of Knitting. One evening each month the Wonder Knit shop in Columbus, Ohio, holds a men’s only knitting night. Shop owner Libby Bruce said she has as many as 15 guys attending her knitting circles. She adds they range in age from college students to older men, both gay and straight.

Bruce told the Columbus Dispatch the guys appreciate the chance to socialize and practice their hobby. But Bruce said that men knitting are a like women knitting, except for a lot of swearing.

SOURCE: YAHOO!

STAMFORD, CT — Police arrested six women and charged them in the assault of a 25-year-old woman following an argument over her singing performance during karaoke night at a a downtown bar and restaurant.

Stamford police Lt. Sean Cooney said the six women ages 19 to 20 made derogatory comments about the woman’s singing ability — or lack thereof — and then repeatedly punched, kicked and pulled the hair of the victim before leaving Bobby Valentine’s Sports Gallery and Cafe on Main Street.

The victim suffered a chipped tooth and numerous bruises, Cooney said. She was treated and released from Stamford Hospital.

In an telephone interview Thursday, the alleged victim, Leidy Alcantara, said she had just sung “A Dios Le Pido” by Colombian pop superstar Juanes and then stood next to the karaoke disc jockey. As she sang along to another performer’s song, one of the women began exchanging words with her, she said.

Then it turned violent, she said.

“She came up to me and said I was annoying and punched me in the face,” Alcantara said.

Alcantara said others pulled her hair and began kicking her, though she said she doesn’t remember much of the assault. Her 24-year-old husband, Robby Alcantara, echoed his wife’s story, saying she just finished her song and was singing along to another karaoke performer when one of the women confronted and then punched her.

Bouncers kicked out the six women and then a restaurant manager called police. He and another patron also helped break up the fight.

The six — all of whom were under 21 — were charged with third-degree assault, conspiracy to commit third-degree assault and breach of peace.

SOURCE: Connecticut Post

Don’t read left to right on this address sign or you’ll never find the house you are looking for.

I’m a fan of expediency and efficiency, but this address sign in a rural Oregon town is the epitome of confusion.

I was so certain that I had not seen what I thought I saw, that it required a quick turn-around so I could snap a picture to look at later when I wasn’t so road-weary.

Yep. Seven addresses all plastered together.

I don’t see how this would speed up any emergency response to one of these homes.

SOURCE: WholeWeirdWorld original

An 11 mile hiking trail, specially designed for naked ramblers, is set to open in Germany next year.

The secluded route, which runs through the Harz Mountains will be Germany’s first official naked ramblers’ footpath.

While naked walking will be encouraged and bosses think there will be demand from naked tourists, normally attired walkers will be equally welcome.

Some naturists have apparently been unable to wait until the opening in May and have already walked the trail wearing nothing but their boots.

I am hopeful that the trail has been cleared of pesky brambles.

SOURCE: NewsLite.tv

In one of the first useful reasons for shooting paint out of a gun, a team of sure-shot paint-ballers and artists have created a portrait of Marilyn Monroe… in less than a minute.

Each armed with a different color paint, the members of the Colombian art collective Bon Yurt lined up on a stand opposite a giant canvas.

At a set time they all started shooting, creating the Andy Warhol inspired work in the process.

Though planning probably took muck longer, the entire shooting only lasted for around a minute.

When picking which dead celebrity to paint in this way the group had to be careful not to select someone who had been shot.

SOURCE: NewsLite.tv

Former circus performer Guy Laliberte, the founder of Cirque du Soleil, expects to have some fun when he launches to space this week, but also has serious side to his self-proclaimed “poetic social mission.”

Laliberte, a 50-year-old former acrobat and the first Canadian space tourist, is headed for the International Space Station and has dedicated his flight to publicizing global water issues through a creative performance to be broadcast from orbit.

“We’re doing a multimedia event – the first one from space to Earth – including artists from all over the world talking about the situation of water,” Laliberte said.

Though some air-borne acrobatics are certainly a possibility, Laliberte said that fire-eating, at least, will be off limits to him during his spaceflight. He also plans to wear his trademark red clown nose, and perhaps share some with his crewmates on the station.

“This [nose] is a symbol of my mission, but it is also what reminds me that I should never forget that once I was a kid,” Laliberte said. “I’m not a professional cosmonaut, an astronaut, so what I’m bringing up there is what I am. And what I am is an artist, a creative.”

Laliberte is chronicling his spaceflight via the One Drop Foundation Web site: Onedrop.org

SOURCE: SPACE.com

Park rangers cited and released Douglas Jones, 57, on Aug. 17 with abandoning property, littering and feeding wildlife.

“Since (some time in) 2007, he had been coming into the park and just throwing golf balls across the landscape just tossing them out of a vehicle,” park spokesman Joe Zarki said Wednesday. “Apparently, there’s some tennis balls involved, as well.”

Jones also left cans of fruit and vegetables along the side of park roads and scattered park literature and permit forms, Zarki said.

“It wasn’t daily, but frequent enough that rangers were aware of it and keying into looking for this individual,” he said. “It was a time-consuming and fairly expensive issue for us.”

Zarki said park rangers spent more than 370 hours looking for and cleaning up after Jones, who is believed to have scattered as many as 3,000 golf balls at different locations in the national park.

“We had $9,000 of staff time tied up into that,” Zarki said.

Eventually, rangers found Jones in the park, confronted him and he confessed to what he had been doing, Zarki said.

Zarki said Jones told rangers he threw the golf balls because he wanted to leave his mark and also to honor deceased golfers. He left the food for stranded hikers.

Jones is scheduled to face a magistrate from the U.S. District Court at the end of the month.

Zarki said judges have some latitude when assessing penalties for violations of park rules. If found guilty, Jones could face fines or jail time, be barred from entering the park or be assigned another form of restitution.

Attempts to contact Jones were unsuccessful Wednesday.

SOURCE: USA Today

Brain researchers have recently discovered that when we perform mental activities such as adding numbers, comparing shapes, or identifying faces these areas of our brains light up, other areas go dark. This “dark network,” according to Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert, comprises regions in the frontal, parietal and medial temporal lobes. Gilbert writes that “if you climbed into an MRI machine and lay there quietly, waiting for instructions from a technician, the dark network would be as active as a beehive. But the moment your instructions arrived and your task began, the bees would freeze and the network would fall silent. When we appear to be doing nothing, we are clearly doing something. But what?”

The answer, Gilbert says in his book Stumbling on Happiness, is time travel.

The human mind can move through time from past to present or present or past to future and in any gear. Our ability to imagine future events is a recent evolutionary development, and unparalleled in the animal kingdom. “We are a race of time travelers,” Gilbert says “unfettered by chronology and capable of visiting the future or revisiting the past whenever we wish. If our neural time machines are damaged by illness, age or accident, we may become trapped in the present. Alzheimer’s disease, for instance, specifically attacks the dark network, stranding many of its victims in an endless now, unable to remember their yesterdays or envision their tomorrows.”
Neuroscientists refer to the dark network it as the brain’s default mode, which is to say that we spend more of our time in other modes.
SOURCE: DailyGalaxy

Talking to an attractive woman really can make a man lose his mind, according to a new study.

The research shows men who spend even a few minutes in the company of an attractive woman perform less well in tests designed to measure brain function than those who chat to someone they do not find attractive.

Researchers who carried out the study, published in the Journal of Experimental and Social Psychology, think the reason may be that men use up so much of their brain function or ‘cognitive resources’ trying to impress beautiful women, they have little left for other tasks.

The findings have implications for the performance of men who flirt with women in the workplace, or even exam results in mixed-sex schools.

Women, however, were not affected by chatting to a handsome man.

SOURCE: The Telegraph