Get Cynical

An insurance expert crunches the numbers and discovers your star sign might account for your dismal driving record. It seems Leos are the best drivers and Libras are the worst.

Watch the insurance number crunchers looking for ways to charge more : Link

I’m #3 down the list of best drivers. What number are you?

From SFGate.com:

Keith Richards has acknowledged consuming a raft of illegal substances in his time, but this may top them all. In comments published Tuesday, the 63-year-old Rolling Stones guitarist said he had snorted his father’s ashes mixed with cocaine.

“The strangest thing I’ve tried to snort? My father. I snorted my father,” Richards was quoted as saying by British music magazine NME.

“He was cremated and I couldn’t resist grinding him up with a little bit of blow. My dad wouldn’t have cared,” he said. “… It went down pretty well, and I’m still alive.”

Richards’ father, Bert, died in 2002, at 84.

Update:

Keith’s manager says he was only joking:

In a buzz-killing mood, though, we decided to check with Richards’ longtime manager, Jane Rose. We asked her about the dad-snorting quotes in the NME interview. She responded with an e-mail:

“Said in jest,” she explained. “Can’t believe anyone took [it] seriously.”

Nah, I still believe he did it.

(Thanks Schmoo)

Thank you Akismet. (Oh, I installed it about 5 months ago.)

From PostiveAtheism:

Here there comes a practical question which has often troubled me. Whenever I go into a foreign country or a prison or any similar place they always ask me what is my religion.

I never know whether I should say “Agnostic” or whether I should say “Atheist”. It is a very difficult question and I daresay that some of you have been troubled by it. As a philosopher, if I were speaking to a purely philosophic audience I should say that I ought to describe myself as an Agnostic, because I do not think that there is a conclusive argument by which one prove that there is not a God.

On the other hand, if I am to convey the right impression to the ordinary man in the street I think I ought to say that I am an Atheist, because when I say that I cannot prove that there is not a God, I ought to add equally that I cannot prove that there are not the Homeric gods.

None of us would seriously consider the possibility that all the gods of homer really exist, and yet if you were to set to work to give a logical demonstration that Zeus, Hera, Poseidon, and the rest of them did not exist you would find it an awful job. You could not get such proof.

Therefore, in regard to the Olympic gods, speaking to a purely philosophical audience, I would say that I am an Agnostic. But speaking popularly, I think that all of us would say in regard to those gods that we were Atheists. In regard to the Christian God, I should, I think, take exactly the same line.

Related:
Bertrand Russell, ‘Why I Am Not a Christian‘

From the Chronicle.com:

Type “college prank” into YouTube and you will be greeted with hundreds of videos. Most will be really, really dumb. Many won’t even be pranks at all. Some will make you furrow your brow, shake your head, and fear for the future of our country.

But a few of them push the art of the prank to new heights. Being able to share videos online has encouraged the best college pranksters to make their stunts more elaborate. It also allows us to share in their glorious inanity.

A Chronicle employee — OK, fine, it was me — spent hours sifting the semi-funny from the truly idiotic in order to bring you five of the best college prank videos. While none of these pranks involve duct tape or shaving cream, they are all pretty juvenile.

Here’s one of them. Skip to about 2 minutes in.

Related:
The MIT Hack Gallery

Yikes.

(via PoeTV)

This person’s life viewed in pie charts.

(via Kottke)