Official News Thread - Page 13

**Diesel** · 07-09-2009, 08:21 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by H34DRU5H

Ahh, I might have seen your Dad, been following this on GMTV ..

Well it was the only guy they interviewed....So i would of thought you would of.
When i got back & heard he had his 5 minutes of fame, i was going to take the piss out of him. But he wasn't too bad.

Bash · 07-11-2009, 11:08 AM

Looking for love, 650-pound virgin loses 410
David Smith once contemplated suicide; now, ‘girls make googly eyes at me’
Before after

Today

Picture of him with old clothes

He was enormously obese — a lost soul with no friends and no life who had given up on himself and on life.

David Smith even hatched a plan to end it. He would get an inflatable swimming pool, and he would take it to a remote spot in the Arizona desert. He would fill it with gasoline, get in, and light a match. It would be a horrific and painful way to die, but that’s what Smith thought he deserved.

And the best thing about it would be that the fire would consume his 650-pound body. When it had done his work, there would be nothing left to make fun of anymore.

It is hard to believe that the David Smith who tells this story is the same hunky man who sat down with TODAY’s Matt Lauer Friday in New York. Smiling and confident, he’s cut and ripped, a certified personal trainer with a body that’s no longer to die in a blaze of glory for. He has a future that never seemed possible — and a past that seemed to have belonged to someone else.

“It’s a different person,” Smith told Lauer after watching a video that showed the gelatinous blob he used to be. “It’s not me anymore.”

‘Night and day’
The remarkable story of how Smith lost more than 400 pounds in just 26 months without gastric bypass surgery is the subject of a TLC documentary that premieres Sunday, July 12. It’s called “The 650-pound Virgin,” and it follows Smith’s journey from a suicidal and friendless loner who never left his house to a new life as an inspiration to everybody who has battled obesity.

The story’s not over. Smith, now 32, would not say directly if he is still a virgin, but he admitted that he is still fighting to get over his shyness around women and his fear of rejection.

“It’s like night and day. I’ve gone from being a laughingstock to having girls make googly eyes at me,” he said. But responding to those looks is still a challenge. “I still have to muster up the courage to talk to girls,” he said.

“Instead of being a dud, I want to be a stud,” he added.

Facing his fear
The remarkable transformation in Smith’s life began in 2003, when he was considering suicide. Somewhere deep down, he discovered that he still harbored a hope that he could transform himself. He decided to lose weight.

Smith rejected bypass surgery as too risky. He didn’t want to die on the operating table and have his obese remains mocked by the surgeons who had been trying to save his life.

The remaining alternative was to learn to eat properly and exercise the weight off. And, he decided, he would renounce his terror of being seen in public by making his journey the subject of a documentary.

“I decided that the best way to get over my fear was to destroy it … and the best way to be seen is on television,” he wrote. So he contacted KTVK, a local television station that had a feature hosted by fitness and nutrition guru Chris Powell. After some initial hesitation, Powell took Smith on.

Powell waited several weeks before contacting Smith. He had doubts about whether he could help, but the more he looked at the pictures Smith had sent, the more he felt he had to meet Smith.

“I couldn’t stop thinking about it,” Powell told Lauer. “I had no idea how the hell somebody was so large. I couldn’t stop thinking about him. It was curiosity.”

Baby steps to giant strides
Using a nutritional program and what he calls a transformational approach that he devised himself and now sells — the STAX System — Powell went to work. When they began, Smith couldn’t walk 500 feet and couldn’t fit in a car.

Powell told Lauer he alternated diet plans. Not wanting to tell Smith he couldn’t ever eat ice cream, pizza and the other calorie-laden foods he loved, Powell told his student he would diet strictly one day, then reward himself the next. “It was baby steps,” the trainer explained.

The baby steps became giant strides. The weight melted off — a phenomenal average of more than 15 pounds a month. By 2007, just 26 months after he decided to transform himself and his life, Smith had lost 410 pounds from a starting weight of 650.

The weight loss left behind great folds and bags of excess skin that had to be removed over the course of more than a year in a series of three operations. At last count, surgeons had removed some 30 pounds of excess skin, and, Smith said, he still needs one or two more operations.

Troubled childhood
In a biographical sketch Smith wrote, he says his problems began after his family moved to the Phoenix area when he was 7 and was sexually molested by his best friend. Unable to deal with the experience, he cut himself off from everyone and found solace in eating. A large child to begin with, he quickly became not just one of the tallest kids in his class, but also the fattest.

“I didn’t want to be hurt again,” he wrote. “I was full of shame.”

But his desire invited only more abuse. He became a target of bullies, who would gather gangs of kids to see if they could beat him up.

“I have been spit on; I have had dirt clots, rocks, bolts, basketballs, books, even feces among other things thrown at me,” he wrote. “I started to hate people. Nobody wanted to be my friend. I didn’t even want friends anymore, I just wanted to be left alone.”

The physical abuse ended in high school, but the emotional abuse continued. It got so bad, that Smith dropped out at the age of 17. He didn’t want to take it anymore.

And then he got hit with another emotional trauma. His mother, the only person he allowed himself to show any emotion to, was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. She fought the disease for five years, but in the end it took her life.

“It hit me hard,” he wrote. “The first month, I hardly ate anything, but after the first month I was an eating machine. I didn’t care about anything. I just wanted to get my fix and be left alone.”

That’s when he stopped leaving his family’s home, stopped interacting with others, and started to think of ways to end it all.

Fortunately, he made one giant effort to break out of his personal hell, and Powell responded. They’re best friends and roommates now, and fellow fitness trainers. Helping others to do the same thing he did is Smith’s way of paying back the gift he’s received.

Now, all that’s left is to meet a girl and have children who won’t grow up in the emotional desert he inhabited for most of his life.

Asked after the show when he thinks that could happen, he said, “I’m just putting the pieces together — and hopefully a girl will be one of the pieces.”

“The 650-pound Virgin” premieres Sunday, July 12, at 10 p.m. on TLC.
Looking for love, 650-pound virgin loses 410 - TODAY: Relationships

Video

Caael · 07-11-2009, 11:23 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by IllBashU

Looking for love, 650-pound virgin loses 410
David Smith once contemplated suicide; now, ‘girls make googly eyes at me’
Before after

Today

Picture of him with old clothes

He was enormously obese — a lost soul with no friends and no life who had given up on himself and on life.

David Smith even hatched a plan to end it. He would get an inflatable swimming pool, and he would take it to a remote spot in the Arizona desert. He would fill it with gasoline, get in, and light a match. It would be a horrific and painful way to die, but that’s what Smith thought he deserved.

And the best thing about it would be that the fire would consume his 650-pound body. When it had done his work, there would be nothing left to make fun of anymore.

It is hard to believe that the David Smith who tells this story is the same hunky man who sat down with TODAY’s Matt Lauer Friday in New York. Smiling and confident, he’s cut and ripped, a certified personal trainer with a body that’s no longer to die in a blaze of glory for. He has a future that never seemed possible — and a past that seemed to have belonged to someone else.

“It’s a different person,” Smith told Lauer after watching a video that showed the gelatinous blob he used to be. “It’s not me anymore.”

‘Night and day’
The remarkable story of how Smith lost more than 400 pounds in just 26 months without gastric bypass surgery is the subject of a TLC documentary that premieres Sunday, July 12. It’s called “The 650-pound Virgin,” and it follows Smith’s journey from a suicidal and friendless loner who never left his house to a new life as an inspiration to everybody who has battled obesity.

The story’s not over. Smith, now 32, would not say directly if he is still a virgin, but he admitted that he is still fighting to get over his shyness around women and his fear of rejection.

“It’s like night and day. I’ve gone from being a laughingstock to having girls make googly eyes at me,” he said. But responding to those looks is still a challenge. “I still have to muster up the courage to talk to girls,” he said.

“Instead of being a dud, I want to be a stud,” he added.

Facing his fear
The remarkable transformation in Smith’s life began in 2003, when he was considering suicide. Somewhere deep down, he discovered that he still harbored a hope that he could transform himself. He decided to lose weight.

Smith rejected bypass surgery as too risky. He didn’t want to die on the operating table and have his obese remains mocked by the surgeons who had been trying to save his life.

The remaining alternative was to learn to eat properly and exercise the weight off. And, he decided, he would renounce his terror of being seen in public by making his journey the subject of a documentary.

“I decided that the best way to get over my fear was to destroy it … and the best way to be seen is on television,” he wrote. So he contacted KTVK, a local television station that had a feature hosted by fitness and nutrition guru Chris Powell. After some initial hesitation, Powell took Smith on.

Powell waited several weeks before contacting Smith. He had doubts about whether he could help, but the more he looked at the pictures Smith had sent, the more he felt he had to meet Smith.

“I couldn’t stop thinking about it,” Powell told Lauer. “I had no idea how the hell somebody was so large. I couldn’t stop thinking about him. It was curiosity.”

Baby steps to giant strides
Using a nutritional program and what he calls a transformational approach that he devised himself and now sells — the STAX System — Powell went to work. When they began, Smith couldn’t walk 500 feet and couldn’t fit in a car.

Powell told Lauer he alternated diet plans. Not wanting to tell Smith he couldn’t ever eat ice cream, pizza and the other calorie-laden foods he loved, Powell told his student he would diet strictly one day, then reward himself the next. “It was baby steps,” the trainer explained.

The baby steps became giant strides. The weight melted off — a phenomenal average of more than 15 pounds a month. By 2007, just 26 months after he decided to transform himself and his life, Smith had lost 410 pounds from a starting weight of 650.

The weight loss left behind great folds and bags of excess skin that had to be removed over the course of more than a year in a series of three operations. At last count, surgeons had removed some 30 pounds of excess skin, and, Smith said, he still needs one or two more operations.

Troubled childhood
In a biographical sketch Smith wrote, he says his problems began after his family moved to the Phoenix area when he was 7 and was sexually molested by his best friend. Unable to deal with the experience, he cut himself off from everyone and found solace in eating. A large child to begin with, he quickly became not just one of the tallest kids in his class, but also the fattest.

“I didn’t want to be hurt again,” he wrote. “I was full of shame.”

But his desire invited only more abuse. He became a target of bullies, who would gather gangs of kids to see if they could beat him up.

“I have been spit on; I have had dirt clots, rocks, bolts, basketballs, books, even feces among other things thrown at me,” he wrote. “I started to hate people. Nobody wanted to be my friend. I didn’t even want friends anymore, I just wanted to be left alone.”

The physical abuse ended in high school, but the emotional abuse continued. It got so bad, that Smith dropped out at the age of 17. He didn’t want to take it anymore.

And then he got hit with another emotional trauma. His mother, the only person he allowed himself to show any emotion to, was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. She fought the disease for five years, but in the end it took her life.

“It hit me hard,” he wrote. “The first month, I hardly ate anything, but after the first month I was an eating machine. I didn’t care about anything. I just wanted to get my fix and be left alone.”

That’s when he stopped leaving his family’s home, stopped interacting with others, and started to think of ways to end it all.

Fortunately, he made one giant effort to break out of his personal hell, and Powell responded. They’re best friends and roommates now, and fellow fitness trainers. Helping others to do the same thing he did is Smith’s way of paying back the gift he’s received.

Now, all that’s left is to meet a girl and have children who won’t grow up in the emotional desert he inhabited for most of his life.

Asked after the show when he thinks that could happen, he said, “I’m just putting the pieces together — and hopefully a girl will be one of the pieces.”

“The 650-pound Virgin” premieres Sunday, July 12, at 10 p.m. on TLC.
Looking for love, 650-pound virgin loses 410 - TODAY: Relationships

Video

Thats fucking incredible! I have loads of respect for that guy, most fat people just bitch and whine but wow, seriously, wow

Bash · 07-11-2009, 11:26 AM

How to Alienate Your Female Fan Base in 10 Days or Less | The Rap Up

Bash · 07-14-2009, 06:41 AM

Cats 'exploit' humans by purring
By Victoria Gill
Science reporter, BBC News

See Pepo the cat employing his 'soliciting purr'

Cat owners may have suspected as much, but it seems our feline friends have found a way to manipulate us humans.

Researchers at the University of Sussex have discovered that cats use a "soliciting purr" to overpower their owners and garner attention and food.

Unlike regular purring, this sound incorporates a "cry", with a similar frequency to a human baby's.

The team said cats have "tapped into" a human bias - producing a sound that humans find very difficult to ignore.

Dr Karen McComb, the lead author of the study that was published in the journal Current Biology, said the research was inspired by her own cat, Pepo.

"He would wake me up in the morning with this insistent purr that was really rather annoying," Dr McComb told BBC News.

"After a little bit of investigation, I discovered that there are other cat owners who are similarly bombarded early in the morning."

While meowing might get a cat expelled from the bedroom, Dr McComb said that this pestering purr often convinced beleaguered pet lovers to get up and fill their cat's bowl.

To find out why, her team had to train cat owners to make recordings of their own cats' vocal tactics - recording both their "soliciting purrs" and regular, "non-soliciting" purrs.

"When we played the recordings to human volunteers, even those people with no experience of cats found the soliciting purrs more urgent and less pleasant," said Dr McComb.

How annoying?

She and her team also asked the volunteers to rate the different purrs - giving them a score based on how urgent and pleasant they perceived them to be.

"We could then relate the scores back to the specific purrs," explained Dr McComb. "The key thing (that made the purrs more unpleasant and difficult to ignore) was the relative level of this embedded high-frequency sound."

"When an animal vocalises, the vocal folds (or cords) held across the stream of air snap shut at a particular frequency," explained Dr McComb. The perceived pitch of that sound depends on the size, length and tension of the vocal folds.

Impossible to resist: Cats use sounds that humans are "highly sensitive" to

"But cats are able to produce a low frequency purr by activating the muscles of their vocal folds - stimulating them to vibrate," explained Dr McComb.

Since each of these sounds is produced by a different mechanism, cats are able to embed a high-pitched cry in an otherwise relaxing purr.

"How urgent and unpleasant the purr is seems to depend on how much energy the cat puts into producing that cry," said Dr McComb.

Previous studies have found similarities between a domestic cat's cry and the cry of a human baby - a sound that humans are highly sensitive to.

Dr McComb said that the cry occurs at a low level in cats' normal purring. "But we think that (they) learn to dramatically exaggerate it when it proves effective in generating a response from humans."

She added that the trait seemed to most often develop in cats that have a one-on-one relationship with their owners.

"Obviously we don't know what's going on inside their minds," said Dr McComb. "But they learn how to do this, and then they do it quite deliberately."

So how does Dr McComb feel about Pepo now she knows he has been manipulating her all these years?

"He's been the inspiration for this whole study, so I'll forgive him - credit where credit's due."
BBC NEWS | Science & Environment | Cats 'exploit' humans by purring

Dam smart ass cats.

Citky · 07-14-2009, 12:41 PM

Ah yes,I read that today in my local news site

Bash · 07-18-2009, 04:28 PM

Thrown Cigarette Butt Ignites Smoker's Car - Denver News Story - KMGH Denver

Stupid smoker

SteezyVillain · 07-18-2009, 11:28 PM

Oh shit you know what this means, nuke the cats!

Bash · 07-19-2009, 01:09 PM

WTF!

911 Won’t Help Because Girl Swears|Served And Protected - Police Brutality Videos | Police Corruption | Abuse Of Power

Bash · 07-21-2009, 10:25 PM

Cops bust man for ringing doorbells naked in San Mateo County

Associated Press
Posted: 07/17/2009 12:11:07 PM PDT

A man was arrested early Saturday after allegedly ringing residents' doorbells naked then leading deputies on a chase in a pickup truck, a San Mateo County sheriff's lieutenant said Thursday.
Two residents of the 2000 block of El Prado Street in unincorporated Redwood City reported around 3 a.m. that a naked man was ringing their doorbells, sheriff's Lt. Ray Lunny said.
A deputy who responded to the calls spotted a blue Dodge pickup truck driving away from the area, Lunny said.
The deputy attempted to stop the truck but the driver refused to yield.
Deputies pursued the man as he allegedly drove recklessly for nearly seven miles before stopping truck on the Sand Hill Road on-ramp to northbound Interstate Highway 280.
He then exited the car and ran, entering an occupied house in the 500 block of Sand Hill Circle by kicking in a door, Lunny said.
The man then left the house and tried to hide behind nearby trees and shrubs, Lunny said. Deputies attempted to subdue him with an electronic control device but were unsuccessful.
Deputies then shot two "bean bags" at the man and were finally able to take him into custody, Lunny said. He was transported to Stanford Hospital for an evaluation and was then booked into San Mateo County jail.
The man was identified as 38-year-old Peter Allen Steele. He was arrested on suspicion of driving under the influence, evading a peace officer, driving with a suspended licenseindecent exposure, entering a house without permission, vandalism and resisting arrest.
Cops bust man for ringing doorbells naked in San Mateo County - San Jose Mercury News

I think he got a little too much to drink then went