Don't feel sorry for him, his dad used to wash every python in the village with a toothbrush when he was his age.

Due to a huge increase in roadside shark attacks, this is how you have to travel in Romania now.

Here we have a young Michael Phelps and the man he would pull through the water while training.

This commemorates some of the great early baby fighters in history.

It may not have been able to tell you when to turn or give you live traffic updates, but the Plus Fours Routefinder was the state of the art navigation system of its day. Invented in the 1920s, the Routefinder relied on paper maps wound around wooden rollers, which the driver turned en route. It was intended to allow drivers to navigate around the UK, but with so few cars on the roads it never caught on.

Imagine how big you could get in a zero-g environment.

I am responsible for reading most of the help requests sent to Slashdot. Most of the mail I get in a day is what you would expect, comments and concerns about postings, user accounts and Slashdot itself. There are a very special group however that get passed around the office due to the inordinate level of anger, lack of understanding and just plain weirdness they possess. Through the years I've collected many and still get such gems on a regular basis. We thought it would be fun to share some of our favorite rants, ramblings and ruminations with the rest of you. I give to you the first of many installments of Slashdot's disagree mail. The names have been changed to protect the idiot — hit the link below to drink it in.

Here's what happens when you let the Marketing department have everything they want. The email address for more information about stopping is a nice touch.

41-year-old Garrison Spik, a communications director and writer, took the top prize in San Jose State University's 26th annual Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest with the following mental nightmare, "Theirs was a New York love, a checkered taxi ride burning rubber, and like the city their passion was open 24/7, steam rising from their bodies like slick streets exhaling warm, moist, white breath through manhole covers stamped 'Forged by DeLaney Bros., Piscataway, N.J.'" Sexy. Terrible writing hopefuls are asked to submit bad opening sentences to imaginary novels. The contest has many categories, with awards for "purple prose" and "vile puns." The top winner receives a $250 prize and is urged to throw away his pens and pencils.

He spends most of his day fighting Atari 2600 man.

It's common knowledge that the best things in life are to crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of the women. An Age of Conan GM decided to try and add cybering to the list and was fired for his trouble. Funcom, the company behind Age of Conan states, "If the guidelines are broken there are consequences." While I will concede that cybering with players when you're a GM is a breach of etiquette, it's not as serious as a charging Rhinoceros; it doesn't get any more serious than a Rhinoceros about to charge your ass. I put on my robe and wizard hat.

Fed up with his students inabillity to spel korrectly, Ken Smith, a criminology lecturer at Bucks New University, has purposed an inovative solution, not caring. "Instead of complaining about the state of the education system as we correct the same mistakes year after year, I've got a better idea. University teachers should simply accept as variant spelling those words our students most commonly misspell.", Ken wrote in the Times Higher Education Supplement. Some of the new wurds that Ken thinks we shood axxept include: "ignor," "occured," "thier," "truely," "speach", "twelth", "misspelt", and "varient".

Whiteox writes "A BSOD was projected onto the roof of the National Stadium during the grand finale to the four-hour spectacular at the Olympics. Lenovo chairman Yang Yuanqing chose to go with XP instead of Vista because of the complexity of the IT functions at the Games. His comment on Vista? 'If it's not stable, it could have some problems,' he said. Evidently Bill Gates attended the opening ceremony, so he must have witnessed it."

David Gerard points us to a story by Kim Komando, the CyberSpeak columnist for USA Today. Kim wants to alert parents to the growing menace of digital drugs. This imaginary terror uses binaural beats to simulate the effects of marijuana and heroin, and — some claim — to help develop telepathy and psychokinesis. Not to perpetuate a story that is clearly scare mongering, Kim is nice enough to add that, "many are skeptical about the effects of digital drugs. Few scientific studies have been conducted on binaural beats." I want a copy of mutant powers on tape and a whistle that will make women drunk when I blow it.

For the reasonable price of $1 visitors to New York's Coney Island amusement park can watch a man with a black hood pour water on the face of a prisoner in an orange jumpsuit strapped to a table. Unfortunately both men are actually robotic dolls created by artist Steve Powers to protest waterboarding. It's a shame that they couldn't find some college kids to get waterboarded. There are few things I like to do in the summer more than have some beers, get bloated with corn dogs and pour water over the face of someone tied down.

With the spokesdrone rolling off the line it can't be long before the Cheney quail hunting buddybot is unveiled.

Millie Kelly was born with a condition that required an immediate operation. During this operation her kidneys started to fail and since she was too small for dialysis machines, doctors told her parents that she was unlikely to live. Luckily for Millie, Dr. Malcolm Coulthard and a colleague tried to build a much smaller kidney machine on their own and they were successful. Her mother said, "It was a green metal box with a few paint marks on it with quite a few wires coming out of it into my daughter - it didn't look like a normal NHS one." The girl was hooked up to the machine over a seven day period to allow her kidneys to recover. Two years later, her mother Rebecca says she is "fit as a fiddle." You should see what Dr. Coulthard can build using a postage stamp, a tuning fork, a lawn chair and a jellyfish.

If you don't think teaching more science in the classroom is important, this lady will change your mind. I wonder what government program she blames for fog?

Manhattan's Gravity Fitness is charging customers $110 an hour for training session with the Nintendo Wii. Trainers incorporate Wii sports games, like boxing, with traditional exercise sessions. The gym's executive director Mark Natale says the Wii is just another workout tool, like treadmills and elliptical trainers with attached video screens. For $50 an hour, I will drink margaritas poolside and train you to do laps.

In an effort to save perfectly round, firm, heaving boobs from any undue harm, German police women will soon be issued bullet-proof bras. The bras were created to act as a second barrier of defense when it was found that normal bras would cause injuries to breasts by pushing plastic and metal parts into the majestic globes after being shot. The new bras are emblazoned with the word "police" and made from cotton, polyester, elastic and some other synthetic materials, thickly padded and with no metal or plastic studs or fasteners to cause irritation to the delicate flesh. It is theorized that the bras could actually protect the women attached to the breasts as well.