AdamSmith

Boy Wanders Onto Stage To Hang Out With Pope Francis Pope doesn’t seem to mind the company. Thousands of Catholic families from around the world gathered at the Vatican over the weekend to celebrate the Year of Faith with Pope Francis. AP Photo/Alessandra Tarantino On Saturday evening, a small group of children was invited to sit on the pope’s platform to listen to speakers from across the world speak about their faith and families. Via youtube.com While representatives from more than 80 countries addressed the pope, a little boy walked onto the stage to say hello. Ellie Hall / BuzzFeed / Via youtube.com Ellie Hall / BuzzFeed / Via youtube.com Pope Francis was visibly amused when the child stayed on the stage instead of returning to his seat on the steps. Ellie Hall / BuzzFeed / Via youtube.com He refused to leave the pope’s side, even at the encouragement of several cardinals. Ellie Hall / BuzzFeed / Via youtube.com When the representatives came forward to greet the pope, the little boy was initially not amused. Ellie Hall / BuzzFeed / Via youtube.com But then he realized what was going on and decided to help out. Ellie Hall / BuzzFeed / Via youtube.com Ellie Hall / BuzzFeed / Via youtube.com When Pope Francis began his speech, an aide attempted once again to make the child return to his seat. AP Photo/Alessandra Tarantino The little boy refused, wrapping his arms around the pope in a tight hug. Osservatore Romano / Reuters Pope Francis didn’t seem to mind. Ellie Hall / BuzzFeed / Via youtube.com In fact, he seated the boy on his chair before resuming his speech. PEG @ pegobry Love. Kid runs on stage during @Pontifex speech, hugs him, Pope sits him on his chair to continue the speech. Osservatore Romano / Reuters Luke 18:16: “Let the children come to me and do not prevent them; for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these.” http://www.buzzfeed.com/ellievhall/boy-wanders-onto-stage-to-hang-out-with-pope-francis

Nice! Man buys $27 of bitcoin, forgets about them, finds they're now worth $886kBought in 2009, currency's rise in value saw small investment turn into enough to buy an apartment in a wealthy area of Oslo Bitcoin: what you need to know Samuel Gibbs theguardian.com, Tuesday 29 October 2013 10.07 EDT The meteoric rise in bitcoin has meant that within the space of four years, one Norwegian man’s $27 investment turned into a forgotten $886,000 windfall. Kristoffer Koch invested 150 kroner ($26.60) in 5,000 bitcoins in 2009, after discovering them during the course of writing a thesis on encryption. He promptly forgot about them until widespread media coverage of the anonymous, decentralised, peer-to-peer digital currency in April 2013 jogged his memory. Bitcoins are stored in encrypted wallets secured with a private key, something Koch had forgotten. After eventually working out what the password could be, Koch got a pleasant surprise: "It said I had 5,000 bitcoins in there. Measuring that in today's rates it's about NOK5m ($886,000)," Koch told NRK. Silk Road fluctuationsIn April 2013, the value of bitcoin peaked at $266 before crashing to a low of $50 soon after. Since then, bitcoin has seen large fluctuations in its value, most recently following the seizure of online drugs marketplace Silk Road, plummeting before jumping $30 in one day to a high of $197 in October. Koch exchanged one fifth of his 5,000 bitcoins, generating enough kroner to buy an apartment in Toyen, one of the Norwegian capital’s wealthier areas. Two ways to acquire bitcoinsTypically bitcoins are bought using traditional currency from a bitcoin "exchanger", although due to strict anti-money laundering controls, the process can can be tricky. A user can then withdraw those bitcoins by sending them back to an exchanger like Mt Gox, the best known bitcoin exchange, in return for cash. However, bitcoin is gaining more and more traction within the physical world too. It is now possible to actually spend bitcoins without exchanging them for traditional currency first in a few British pubs, including the Pembury Tavern in Hackney, London, for instance. On 29 October, the world's first bitcoin ATM also went online in Vancouver, Canada, which scans a user's palm before letting them buy or sell bitcoins for cash. A small group of hardcore users also generate extra bitcoins by "mining" for them – a process that requires computers to perform the calculations needed to make the digital currency work, in exchange for a share of the built-in inflation. Mining is a time-consuming and expensive endeavour due to the way the currency is designed. Each subsequent bitcoin mined is more complex than the previous one, requiring more computational time and therefore investment through the electricity and computer hardware required. • In August, Germany recognised bitcoin as a "unit of account", allowing the country to tax users or creators of the digital currency http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/oct/29/bitcoin-forgotten-currency-norway-oslo-home

Of course, could have been even worse... Avios mix-up sees woman fly to Grenada, not Granada http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-devon-24705723

Ditto all the above! Tomorrow we want to hear how many inches you celebrated with.

Cow tipping! Don't go giving away all our little regional secrets, now. ...Does the guy doing the belly flop look like somebody's Daddy?

Also pretty good...

No joke but not bad...

I don't know if you would call this a "loophole," or instead fidelity to the contract: In my marriage, I ultimately concluded that the phrase "til death do us part" had in fact come to apply -- our relationship had died. This was only after long application to repair and revive it -- more than half a decade of working together with a couples shrink, and other things. Was that decision exploiting a loophole, or something else?

Excellent debate between Glenn Greenwald and Bill Keller: http://www.theguardian.com/media/greenslade/2013/oct/29/new-york-times-newspapers http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/28/opinion/a-conversation-in-lieu-of-a-column.html?smid=tw-share&_r=2&

Thanks for both of these posts. Goes to show several things: conscienceless money-grubbingness of the book biz, as you note. Ditto for the bulk of the book-review biz -- grind through (most of) the book over a weekend, or at least enough of it to mine a few concrete comments on specific passages, bung them into the usual hackneyed faux-evaluative book-review phrases (exactly as some of which you quote), rush it in on deadline. There are exceptions of course -- the Times Literary Supplement (London) is a shining example -- but not many. The NYT Book Review e.g. has descended (some would say just level flight all along) to bird cage liner, more or less. And your mediamatters citation goes to show the Internet's profoundly good effect of giving voice to critical watchdog and outsider perspectives which no longer have to depend on the MSM or expensive self-funded physical means of publication/distribution.

Well, now I feel cheated. JK. So those were your modest shoes. Now I really want to see your edgy ones!

Yes. My father passed away when I was eight, and a number of times since then I have dreamed that he had come back and was with us alive again. In this dream, every time I had it, the very odd thing to me was how he and everyone else took it entirely for granted, and went right on with life as though nothing strange had happened. To answer the rest of your question, I have no belief in an afterlife, just in what Hr Dr Freud called wish fulfillment.

Their Wikipedia article details multiple cluster-fucks: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_India

This one was a challenge!